User Reviews

This one begins with London radioing our heroes about the need to put in "The Crittendon Plan" created by a Colonel Crittendon, who's currently in a German POW camp. The plan is to blow up a tunnel used for rocket fuel and a convoy of trucks about to enter it. They are to be helped by 3 underground members who are very suspicious but who have valuable information to help them.

Hogan figures the best way to accomplish his mission is to have Carter escape camp and convince Klink to let him and Schultz take a truck to hunt him down. Once they are underway, Hogan has Schultz stop several times as they pick up dynamite and some German uniforms and then find Carter on the road hitchhiking. Then they go to Stalag 16 to "pick up a prisoner." To do this, Hogan and Carter don the German uniforms and get the authorities there to hand over Crittendon. They are cautious enough to ask the bumbling Englishman who has foiled them twice in the past if he indeed submitted something to London called "The Crittendon Plan." He assures them he did and they start to leave with him.

Now before they got there, we cut back to our camp and hear Kinch telling the others that London has informed him that London fouled up and have directed our guys to the wrong Crittendon. The mistake came because the bumbler we know did submit something called the same thing, but it was all about planting geraniums alongside airport runways to help the morale of the boys when they return from missions.

Hogan and Carter learn from their Crittendon before they actually leave Stalag 16 what his plan entails. No time to do anything else, he will come with them and do as Hogan wishes. They drive to a beer hall and enter, including Schultz who sits away from them, and the trio meets the underground agents-an old man and woman. The man is quite panicky, especially on seeing Schultz, but is going along with them. He puzzles the good guys by saying that at all times tonight or tomorrow, "No one touches the girl." They ask, "What girl?" And we all see for the first time that there is a third underground person, a beautiful young woman with hair and makeup straight from the late-60s, smiling from across the room.

They get Schultz to stay at the beer hall for a day or few, and the others go off. They are taken to where they can see the entrance to the tunnel, and are told by Marko, the mistrusting older man, that there will be a sentry posted tomorrow morning and the convoy will arrive two hours after the sentry is posted.

Hogan outlines his plan, which includes radioing for a bombing mission at the right time tomorrow. But Crittendon reveals that he doesn't have a plan for this operation and the suspicious old man smashes the radio, declaring "Now they can't call to have them arrested." So Hogan comes up with a plan to have the girl (whose name seems to never be of importance) stand on the road when the first convoy truck comes by, getting them to stop with her looks and while the driver is being harassed by the fake Colonel (Carter) Crittendon is to slide under the truck and tape the dynamite bomb with a timer to the gas tank of the truck.

Despite this operation taking about 3-4 minutes, it is accomplished without the second convoy truck coming into sight. The group heads back to their observation post and hears the explosion, happy that the whole tunnel has collapsed and destroying the fuel in the convoy trucks.

Now I cannot give this a good rating for two main reasons: The drama parts were totally unrealistic, even for Hogan's Heroes, and the comedy was almost totally lacking. Hogan didn't need 3 minutes to come up with his plan for placing a bomb on a convoy truck and letting it go off when they could destroy the fuel, the trucks and collapse the tunnel. What could the real Crittendon Plan have involved that would have been better?

On this series, and in a couple of hundred war movies, trucks in a convoy travel fairly close together. If one stopped for about 5 minutes as was portrayed here, there would have been at least 4-5 others pulling up behind in that time. For that matter, given the spread out distance, and the time before the bomb was to go off as shown, the other trucks would not have had a chance to get to the tunnel before the bomb went off.

The contributions of the underground characters were minimal: show them the tunnel (could have handed them a map); tell them what time the convoy was expected (that could have been written on that map); and get the truck to stop for the pretty girl (that could have been accomplished with a German colonel standing in the road with his arm up (they had Carter in the uniform for that). The other two played no role in the actual stopping of the truck or anything else.

Now this tunnel seemed to be at the bottom of a small mountain (or large hill) and it would seem the plan to have Allied bombers destroy it would have been doomed to failure since they couldn't exactly drop their bombs at the entrance.

I also am troubled whenever Schultz sees too much. It's one thing for him to overlook small things, but he asked about stopping to pick up dynamite and German uniforms, and knew they were meeting with suspicious people in that beer hall. It is too much for him to ignore unless he wants to be a traitor to Germany-which he did not.

We had a couple of chuckles from Crittendon telling about his silly geranium plan, but that's about it. I guess we were supposed to laugh every time the old man reminded the trio, "No one touches the girl," but it just wasn't funny. We had no idea what his interest was in this young woman-or why he never called her by name. The one time she referred to him she coldly called him a "pig," so I don't guess it's her father or her much-older boyfriend.

For drama that largely made no sense and for very few laughs, I have to give this one a 3. Terrible way to begin Season 3.