Captain Roberts

Group Captain James Roberts is a fictional character who appeared in the Hogan's Heroes episode, Funny Thing Happened on the Way to London. He was played by Lloyd Bochner.

Group Captain Roberts is a distinguished Royal Air Force pilot. He is also a good friend of Colonel Hogan, whom he met when the American was assigned to help the RAF. After being shot down over Germany while leading a reconnaissance mission, Roberts is incarcerated at Stalag 9. The Germans soon learn that he has frequently been in company with Winston Churchill, and plan to use him in a plot to assassinate Great Britain's Prime Minister. During their interrogation sessions with them, they take pictures of him and record his voice, much to his puzzlement, and then unknown to him, they turn a German agent into an exact duplicate of him using plastic surgery.

Later, they move Roberts under the charge of Major Hochstetter to Stalag 13, where the Group Captain is briefly reunited with his old friend Hogan, to whom he relates his strange interrogation sessions with the photographs and recordings. Afterwards, Roberts is taken into Colonel Klink's office, where the Kommandant and Hochstetter introduce him to his double, explaining the reason for the photographs and recordings. They reveal their plan to switch Roberts with the agent, who is then to stage an escape and get to back to England to kill Churchill using a rigged arm brace with a gun hidden underneath his blazer. Hogan and his men, however, have learned about the Germans' plans to kill Churchill through their bugging device in Klink's office, and secretly replace the agent with Roberts when the agent is about to be transported to England. The real Roberts then proceeds to use the agent's route to escape with his captors none the wiser until too late.

Major Hochstetter tells Klink that the agent (not realizing that he is actually Roberts) was escorted by the Luftwaffe, safely to England.