Choosing July 4 as the opening date for Werner Herzog’s Rescue Dawn was a strange move on MGM’s part. It’s a clever choice, in that Independence Day was the date that Navy pilot Dieter Dengler ...

A dark-horse contender for Best Actor, Christian Bale brilliantly plays Vietnam POW Dieter Dengler as the strange optimist found in director Werner Herzog’s 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly ...

Christian Bale in "Rescue Dawn." Dieter Dengler's plan was simple: run. A captured American pilot during the Vietnam War, Dengler was determined to break for the fences of the Laotian camp in which he ...

Now in its second season, “History’s Great Escapes With Morgan Freeman” (9 p.m., History, TV-14) recalls a legendary break that inspired two memorable films. Shot down over Laos in 1966, German-born ...

Only a handful of Vietnam War POWs escaped captivity. One of those was Dieter Dengler, a German-born navy Skyraider pilot shot down on his first mission over Laos in 1966 and taken prisoner by the ...