Col. Robert Barr Smith - Greatest Escapes of World War II

The Greatest Escapes of World War II

The Greatest Escapes of World War II

Robert Barr Smith and Laurence J. Yadon

An imprint of Rowman & Littlefield

Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK

Copyright 2017 by Robert Barr Smith and Laurence J. Yadon

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

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ISBN 978-1-4930-2502-2 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-4930-2663-0 (e-book)

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Foreword

Its no shame to be taken prisoner in time of war, although soldiers often think it is. War has always been the province of uncertainty and confusion. When something goes wrong in a major way, as Americans used to say, Theres hell to pay and no pitch hot. The price of uncertainty and confusion is often enemy success and your own captivity.

A lot of very good soldiers in the American Revolution looked around and asked their comrades, Why, the Massachusetts boys were supposed to be up on that ridge behind us; who are those fellers in the red coats?

Although the pace of war is much faster than it used to be, a few things remain the same. The first rule of being captured is to escape if you can. That duty is recognized by the Geneva Conventions. In World War II, captured Allied soldiers found vast differences in treatment depending on whose flag flew over prison headquarters: If your camp was run by one of the German armed forcesas it generally wasyour treatment would be relatively humane. But if the camp command was Gestapo, you were in for a very bad time. And if the Japanese flag flew over the Komandantur , you were almost surely in a suburb of Hell.

Conditions in the Japanese camps were brutal and primitive. Many men died in them, from deliberate brutality, illness, or a combination of those two killers. Many other prisoners died on the freightersthe hellshipsthat took prisoners to Japan or other places close to the center of the empire. They were not marked as carrying prisoners as they should have been, so many of the prisoners died miserably when the ships were unwittingly sunk by Allied submarines or aircraft.

Escape was a constant subject of conversation, no matter where a man was confined, and planning went on incessantly in most camps. There was no lack of courage and determination, but there were some very formidable obstacles.

The greatest of these barriers were in Asia. First off, there was the simple fact that most Allied prisoners were Caucasian, who had no chance of blending into the local population. Likewise, there was the matter of language: In Europe, many of the POWs spoke some German or French, or could masquerade as a citizen of an area of which little was generally known by the occupiers. They could, for instance, pretend to be a Bulgarian or Serbian. There was no such chance in Asia.

In both Europe and Asia, there was also the simple obstacle of distance. Asian escapes were particularly frustrating; if you managed to break out of a camp in Formosa, for example, where was there to go? Escapers and evadersthose never caughthad an immense distance to travel through a maze of restrictions, replete with endless checking and questioning and a plethora of forms and passes and permits. Prison camp forgers had to become masters of such things, including their frequent changes.

Then there was the matter of clothing. Uniforms wouldnt work, of course, and that was all most men had. And so amateur prison tailors became quite expert at transmogrifying uniforms into grubby civilian attire or even business suits, and sprucing up found or purloined civilian clothing. Civilian buttons were collected and hoarded, and civilian shoes were a jewel beyond price.

In addition to your identification documents, labor permit, travel papers, and the like, much of it requiring photos, you also needed maps and border-crossing information to chart your course to safety, and the information needed to be as detailed as possible. For example, about half the small towns in Germany have a name ending in stadt , dorf , feld , or heim , and in many cases there are several towns of the same name. As an escaper, it was critical to know which Schweinsdorf pig villageyou had to get to: There was one in Silesia, another in Saxony, and one in Franconia at least, maybe more. If your timetable puts you in Obersdorf at 0900, is it the village down the road or the identically named town 150 kilometers away?

It was critical to haveor at least have access tosuch mundane items as railroad timetables. If you were going to run into curfews or other travel restrictions you needed to know what, where, and when they were. You needed money.

Once the break was made, assuming it was successful, it was only a matter of time until the escape was discovered. That was generally a short time, since at least one formation was held dailyin German camps, it was appell musterat which everybody was supposed to be accounted for. There were some ingenious ways of delaying that, such as the British custom of using ghost prisoners to stand in formation for the escapers, but discovery in time was inevitable. Since the European camps were generally deep in Germany, even getting to France or Belgium, where there were active undergrounds to help, was a chancy, time-consuming effort.

Both Britain and America helped with organizations specifically designed to assist escapers: For Britain it was MI9; for the United States, MIS-X. Once Allied prisoners got to friendly ground, like France, there were also thousands of ordinary citizens willing to lay their lives on the line to help, if only with a hot meal, some fresh clothing, a safe place to get some badly needed sleep, or precious information about the doings of the detested Boche (Germans).

Our book does not purport to deal with all the escapes of WWII. There were thousands of attempts; more than a few were successful. We have dealt exclusively with escapes by Allied prisoners. There were some by Axis prisoners, virtually all with a signal lack of success. A brief mention of a few of them, however, is difficult to omit.

Take, for example, the break from the American camp at Papago, a part of Phoenix, Arizona. By early 1944, the camp was inhabited by some three thousand Germans, mostly Kriegsmarine (German sailors), including a contingent of U-boat officers. Unterseeboat officers tended to be hard-nosed folks, and that was particularly true of the most senior of them, Captain Juergen Wattenberg, nicknamed super Nazi. He was a two-time loser, having been part of the Graf Spee disaster at the River Plate, and the sinking of his own U-162 , sent to the bottom by the Royal Navy in the Caribbean in late 1942.

The camp command made it easy for Wattenberg, who chose a blind spot inside the camp to start his tunnel. The dirt was spread out inside attics, flushed down toilets, added to small gardens, and spread over the volleyball field. Nobody noticed, although the alert camp provost marshal vainly called attention to the blind spot.