MAYBE I'M DEAD (408 pp.)Joe Klaas Macmillan ($4.50).
On the polar-cold morning of Jan. 28, 1945, 2nd Lieut. Jim Weis of the U.S. Army Air Forces scowled bleakly at his barbed-wire confines and remarked to some fellow P.W.s: "Maybe I'm dead and don't know it." For some 10,000 captured Allied airmen in Stalag Luft III. a German prisoner-of-war camp in East Prussia, hell began that night.
The German armies were in full retreat from their disastrous Russian campaign. On half an hour's notice, the prisoners were ordered to march west, through 40°-below-zero cold, across the...