Captain Michael Clive Burn, MC (11 December 1912 – 3 September 2010) was an English journalist, commando, writer and poet.

[4] As he himself put it, he was not sent down: having done none of the work expected of him, he simply did not go back, choosing instead to initiate a writing career by ghosting the autobiography of "Bentley Boy" Sir Henry Birkin.

An unquestioning tour of Dachau crowned a period of which he later wrote that he was for a time duped by a combination of his own blindness and the "intensely organized falsehood" that would later be exposed as the engine of the 'New' Germany.

In 1937, with Hitler's intentions becoming ever more clear, Burn enlisted in the Queen's Westminsters, a Territorial battalion of the King's Royal Rifle Corps.

Having served in Norway in 1940, as part of the failed Allied campaign to counter the German invasion, Burn joined a new elite force known as the Commandos.

As leader of the starboard column of troop carried in several Motor Launches (MLs), Burn's ML192 was one of the first vessels to come under fire, crashing ablaze into the Old Mole.

Of the 609 soldiers and sailors who entered the Loire estuary that night, five were awarded the Victoria Cross – the greatest number for any single action during the war.

Following his capture Burn was first sent to Marlag und Milag Nord, a naval POW camp that was the destination of all Charioteers prior to the separation of Commando and Royal Navy personnel.

There, using shorthand learnt for his previous employment in journalism, Burn acted as scribe to Colditz's secret radio operator, Lieutenant-Colonel Jimmy Yule.

Van Heemstra sold the cigarettes for penicillin on the black market to treat the seriously ill Hepburn, perhaps saving her life.

After several months of waiting in vain for the Moscow visa, he suggested to the editor of The Times that he instead go behind the Iron Curtain to Hungary to observe the government takeover by the Hungarian Communist Party supported by the Red Army.

Although Burn left Colditz believing that he was entirely homosexual, he almost immediately met and fell in love with a woman, despite continuing to have affairs with men.