Narrator Clarence Harvey "Cookie" Cook recalls life in Barracks 4 in a Luftwaffe prisoner-of-war camp compound holding 630 sergeants from American flight crews. On the longest night of the year, in December 1944, Manfredi and Johnson are shot trying to escape. The men believe they were betrayed. Security chief Price is stumped. Suspicion falls on J. J. Sefton, an enterprising cynic who barters openly with the German guards for cigarettes, eggs, silk stockings, blankets and other luxuries. He also organizes rat races, a distillery, a telescope to spy on the Russian women from a neighboring POW camp, and various other profitable ventures. Cookie is his sidekick. Commandant Oberst [Colonel] von Scherbach displays the bodies in the mud and announces punishments. When a rock splashes mud on his boots, everyone confesses. He decrees delousing with ice water. The men of Barracks 4 do their best to keep sane, defying the conditions in which they live. Their guard, Feldwebel Schulz, professes sympathy with his charges. Comic relief comes from teasing Schulz, the byplay between Animal Kuzawa and Harry Shapiro, and black humor such as a soldier washing his socks in the watery breakfast soup and a wife writing to say she has adopted an abandoned baby. A clandestine radio, smuggled in the trouser leg of an amputee, picks up the war news over an antenna hidden in a volleyball net.... Directed by Billy Wilder Screenplay by Edwin Blum Billy Wilder Based on Stalag 17 by Donald Bevan Edmund Trzcinski Produced by Billy Wilder Starring William Holden Don Taylor Otto Preminger Narrated by Gil Stratton Cinematography Ernest Laszlo Edited by George Tomasini Music by Franz Waxman William Holden as J.J. Sefton Don Taylor as Lieutenant James Dunbar Otto Preminger as Colonel von Scherbach Robert Strauss as Stanislas "Animal" Kuzawa Harvey Lembeck as Harry Shapiro Peter Graves as Frank Price Sig Ruman as Sergeant Johann Sebastian Schulz Neville Brand as Duke Richard Erdman as "Hoffy" Hoffman Michael Moore as Manfredi Peter Baldwin as Johnson Robinson Stone as Joey Robert Shawley as "Blondie" Peterson William Pierson as Marko the Mailman Gil Stratton as Clarence Harvey "Cookie" Cook (Narrator) Jay Lawrence as Bagradian Erwin Kalser as Geneva Man Edmund Trzcinski as himself/"Triz" Paul Salata as Prisoner with Beard (uncredited)