Read the Book? Now . . .

VON RYAN'S EXPRESS by David Wesfheimer. 327 pages. Doubleday. $4.95.

The British and American officers interned in Campo Concentramento Prigionieri di Guerra 202 went about filthy and half-naked, and one chap kept a glass eye stuck in his navel so he could stare unblinkingly at the guards. Life was desperately droll, but then Colonel Joseph Ryan arrives and the fun departs. As senior-officer-in-captivity, Ryan sets about shaping the men up for the day of their great escape. "I do expect military haircuts," he begins, and the troops get restless. "Von Ryan," one agile wit calls from the ranks, "you're in the wrong army!"

True, Ryan is a hopeless martinet--like Alec Guinness in Bridge on the River Kwai. He even establishes a gentlemanly rapport with the camp's commandant, who at heart is as decent as Erich von Stroheim in Grand Illusion. His troubles are with his own men--tough guys like William Holden in Stalag 17, wise guys like Steve McQueen in The Great Escape, irrepressible Englishmen like Dirk Bogarde in The Password Is Courage. But Ryan is in this-man's-army, and in the end he proves it by freeing singlehanded all 964 prisoners after joining in the silent murder of their 28 guards.

To achieve this "novel of agonizing suspense," says the jacket blurb, Author Westheimer "drew heavily" on his own years as a P.W. in both Italy and Germany, but the only sign of his insight is that all his characters can say "prisoner-of-war camp" in Italian. The cast, as in all prison-camp stories, includes a good-guy priest, a psychopath, a bragging coward and a German spy, and Westheimer makes a bad job worse by being one of those fantastically clever writers who tell everyone's age by saying how old his face looks younger than. Despite such tricks, or perhaps because of them, the book reads like a script for that inevitable movie.

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