DYNAMO is a feature-length documentary following the experiences of F/Lt. Sydney Dowse as a Prisoner of War (POW) during the Second World War. Sydney was third in the tunnel during the escape from Stalag Luft 3. This was later made into the iconic classic film, The Great Escape (1963). Given the moniker ‘Dynamo’ by none other than the leader of the escape, ‘Big X’ Roger Bushell himself (played by Richard Attenborough). Sydney warns Roger of his impending doom if he escaped thanks to his friend, a Luftwaffe guard at the camp named ‘Nicky’ Hesse (played by Robert Graf). 

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Nicky goes above and beyond providing Sydney with vital intelligence, not only for the escape but the war effort as a whole. This includes information that contributed to Operation Hydra, the bombing of Hitler’s vengeance weapons facility at Peenemünde. Nicky provides Sydney with his ID, a camera, and money for the escape. After weeks on the run, Sydney and his escape partner, Stanisław ‘Danny’ Król (played by Charles Bronson), are captured just a few kilometres short of the Polish border. After they are separated, Danny is one of the fifty escaped Allied airmen executed by the Gestapo. Sydney was one of five survivors hand-picked to be sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp on Hitler’s orders.

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After learning of the murders of his fifty friends, including Danny, Sydney resolved to escape again in their memory. Even going as far as to inscribe the number ‘18’ above the new tunnel in memory of Danny. As Danny inscribed the number of each tunnel with which he attempted escape, as is shown in the 1963 classic, when Charles Bronson inscribes the number ‘17’. 

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Sydney forms a new escape committee with Jimmy James, Wings Day, and John Dodge. All veterans of the escape from Żagań. Plus a new addition to the team, Commando ‘Mad Jack’ Churchill, whose unit was completely wiped out after a failed raid in Yugoslavia. Sachsenhausen’s Sonderlager A, was specifically for Hitler’s personal political prisoners. So, an attempt to escape was not only dangerous, but rebuke towards Hitler himself. 

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Upon their successful escape Sachsenhausen, all five were recaptured and sent back, but this time to Sachsenhausen’s Zellenbau. Where their new jailor, SS-man Kurt Eccarius tortures prisoners to death in whatever way he pleases once their sentence is passed. Using Sydney’s seemingly imminent death to coerce him, the Nazis (possibly Hitler’s personal translator, Paul-Otto Schmidt himself) offer Sydney his freedom in exchange for delivering a peace message to Prime Minister Churchill. He refuses.

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John Dodge, on the other hand, accepts. This is the premise of the made-for-TV movie The Great Escape II (1988) starring Superman Christopher Reeve as John Dodge. After the war, Sydney’s testimony is entered into evidence at the Nuremberg Tribunal and aids in the conviction of Kaltenbrunner, Keitel, and Göring for the murders of the fifty. After the war, Sydney finds his friend Nicky Hesse in a MI-19 detention facility called the London Cage. Determined to save his friend, Sydney writes Nicky a letter which he knows will have to be read by British SIS, giving Nicky credit for everything, including Peenemünde.

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The War Office releases Nicky and gives him a pat on the back, recognizing his work resisting fascism in writing. A parliamentary inquiry later finds the conditions suffered by the witnesses and war criminals in the London Cage to be tantamount to torture. Sydney served as equerry at Buckingham Palace and later had to fight the Foreign Office to be recognized as a victim of Nazi persecution.

In 1994, when Sydney found out that Her Majesty’s government wasn’t going to lift a finger in remembrance of the worst atrocity committed against Allied airmen in the Second World War, which coincidentally inspired one of the most iconic films in British pop culture, Sydney plans and pays out of his own pocket for the fiftieth anniversary ceremony of the escape.

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The film ends as Dame Vera Lynn sings “We'll Meet Again” at the ceremony. Bookended with some family home footage.