Hey it's a great flick - have picked it up on DVD - with an excellent cast and Steve McQueen, whether his character was one-hundred percent fictional or not, was fantastic in it and very quintessentially American. Screenplay by James Clavell BTW, who wrote
KING RAT and
TAI PAN among other novels and who was himself a prisoner in a Japanese POW camp....
But Garner and McQueen were added for the benefit of American audiences...