PoW dogs and secret tunnels feature in Kew exhibition of great escapes

Steve McQueen in The Great Escape, a film inspired by a real-life mass breakout during the second world war. Photograph: United Artists/Sportsphoto/Allstar

Of all the daring wartime escape attempts, the great escape, fictionalised in the classic film starring Steve McQueen, is among the most famous.

Eighty years after that audacious breakout from Stalag Luft III on 24 March 1944, means of escape – physical and mental – by prisoners of war and interned civilians in the UK, Europe and east Asia during the second world war, are being told in an exhibition.