Keith Warren Lloyd - The Great Desert Escape: How the Flight of 25 German Prisoners of War Sparked One of the Largest Manhunts in American History

The Great Desert Escape

The Great Desert Escape

How the Flight of 25 German Prisoners of War Sparked One of the Largest Manhunts in American History

Keith Warren Lloyd

Guilford, Connecticut

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Copyright 2019 Keith Warren Lloyd

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ISBN 978-1-4930-3890-9 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-4930-3891-6 (e-book)

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Printed in the United States of America

Preface: Papago Park

There are few places on the face of the earth that a seafaring man would find more forbidding.

Papago Park sits atop a sunbaked height on the eastern edge of Phoenix, Arizona. The park, a thousand acres of rock-strewn desert, rolls through the deep cuts of sandy arroyos that carry away what little rainfall drains from the nearby foothills. The jagged crest of Camelback Mountain, so named because of its uncanny resemblance to an Arabian camel bedded down in the desert sand, dominates the sky to the north. Directly to the east is affluent Scottsdale and the dusty cotton fields of the Pima Indian Reservation. The teeming streets of the university town of Tempe are to the south. In the parks center, shimmering in the desert heat like dried lumps of discarded childrens clay, lie the red sandstone formations of the Papago Buttes.

Not the type of landscape one normally associates with the word park , the area is nearly devoid of vegetation; only the more stubborn varieties of desert plants will attempt to grow and thrive there. There is no shade to speak of, as the meager creosote bushes are too short to offer any relief from the blazing sun. On occasion one might spot a painfully gaunt urban version of a coyote trotting purposefully through the brush along one of the wash beds, eyes squinting against the bright sunlight.

Summer temperatures often approach and sometimes exceed 120F. Late summer monsoons will push ahead of them clouds of choking, powdery dust, then pelt the buttes with sparse, fat raindrops that the impossibly hard ground cannot absorb. In the wintertime the heat collected by the rocks during the day will radiate to the stars after sundown, resulting in a bone-chilling cold.

The soil consists of mostly coarse sand and decomposed granite. The casual hiker must be especially careful when climbing or descending the many undulations in the park, for it is easy to lose ones footing and enter an uncontrolled skid toward certain injury, as if the hillside were made up of millions of tiny marbles. Beneath the surface, deposits of calcium carbonate accumulated over several millennia have turned the clay into a pickaxe-bending concrete known locally as caliche .

The caliche of Papago Park is so hard, in fact, that in 1943 when the US Army decided to establish a prisoner of war camp on the site, the Corps of Engineers discarded their jackhammers in favor of dynamite to create the post holes of the stockade fence. Because of this, officials believed that a scenario in which prisoners of war might tunnel their way to freedom was not only unlikely but impossible. Yet on the night of December 23, 1944, to the utter amazement of their captors, a determined group of twenty-five German sailors did just that.

This is but one of the many incongruities in the saga of the Papago Park POW camp and the great escape for which it is best known. The story of the escape itself is rife with deception, epic blunders, miscalculations, and cruel ironies. It is then perhaps fitting that it should begin not on this windswept expanse of Sonoran Desert as one might expect, but amid the cold gray waves of the North Atlantic.

Chapter Two

Die U-bootwaffe

The Navy represents the cream of the armed forces, claimed Admiral Karl Dnitz. And the U-boat arm represents the cream of the Navy.

The selection and training process for German naval officers was quite rigorous. Applicants had to possess an Abiturzeugnis , a certificate of general qualification for university entrance, and were usually drawn from prominent German families with a history of distinguished naval service. After passing an extensive battery of written, physical, and oral exams, those selected would form a crew, or officer candidate class.

The crews were numbered by the year of their indoctrination and would be part of an officers identity for the rest of his life. When introducing himself, the officer would say, for example, Guggenberger, Crew 34. Out of thousands of German youths that applied for a commission in the Navy every year, only around two hundred were accepted to form a crew.

The first phase of training for the crew was a basic infantry course, where military customs and courtesies, close order drill, weapons, marksmanship, and tactics were taught along with a healthy measure of Prussian discipline. The crew then attended sail training, learning the principles of general seamanship, watch standing, small-craft handling, meteorology, and celestial navigation while serving for three months aboard a tall three-masted sailing barque in the Baltic Sea. Those who gave a satisfactory account of themselves were given the rank of Fhnrich , or midshipman, and were allowed to continue on to the next phase of training.

The Fhnrichen were then sent to the fleet, serving for ten months as apprentices aboard a surface warship, then faced further examinations before returning to the Marineschule Mrwik , the German Naval Academy on the Baltic coast, for two more years of schooling. All throughout their training, the midshipmen were expected to adhere to rigid standards of conduct and performance. They could count on harsh discipline, exhaustive written and practical examinations, and frequent opportunities to wash out into the lower ranks. Those who survived this process could apply for selection to the elite submarine force, or U-bootwaffe . Except for those who possessed badly needed technical skills and were assigned to fill essential billets, almost all U-boat officers were volunteers.

At U-boat training flotillas stationed on the Baltic coast, the prospective U-boat officers, petty officers, and able seamen underwent intense technical instruction in the handling of submarines with regard to underwater steering, diving, trim, and navigation. There were more courses in repairing machinery, operating hydroplanes, maintaining diesel and electric motors, submarine tactics, gunnery, and torpedoes in both simulators and training submarines. Those who were successful were assigned to outbound U-boat crews, while those who failed the submarine training course found themselves reassigned to the surface fleet, to other branches of the armed forces, or dismissed altogether.