Colin Burgess - Australias Greatest Escapes: Gripping tales of wartime bravery

Also by Colin Burgess:

Aircraft

Pioneers of Flight

Prisoners of War (with Hugh Clarke and Russell Braddon)

Laughter in the Air: Tales from the Qantas Era (with Max Harris)

More Laughter in the Air: Tales from the Qantas Era

Barbed Wire and Bamboo: Australian POW Stories (with Hugh Clarke)

Freedom or Death: Australias Greatest Escape Stories from Two World Wars

Destination: Buchenwald

Australias Dambusters: The Men and Missions of 617 Squadron

Bush Parker: An Australian Battle of Britain Pilot in Colditz

Space, the New Frontier

Oceans to Orbit: The Story of Australias First Man in Space, Paul Scully-Power

Australias Astronauts: Three Men and a Spaceflight Dream

Teacher in Space: Christa McAuliffe and the Challenger Legacy

Fallen Astronauts: Heroes Who Died Reaching for the Moon

(with Kate Doolan)

NASAs Scientist-Astronauts (with David Shayler)

Animals in Space: From Research Rockets to the Space Shuttle

(with Chris Dubbs)

Into That Silent Sea: Trailblazers of the Space Era, 19611965

(with Francis French)

In the Shadow of the Moon: A Challenging Journey to Tranquility, 19651969 (with Francis French)

The First Soviet Cosmonaut Team: Their Lives and Legacies

(with Rex Hall)

Australias Astronauts: Countdown to a Spaceflight Dream

Selecting the Mercury Seven: The Search for Americas First Astronauts

Moon Bound: Choosing and Training the Lunar Astronauts

Freedom 7: The Historic Flight of Alan B Shepard Jr

Liberty Bell 7: The Suborbital Mercury Flight of Virgil I Grissom

Friendship 7: The Epic Orbital Flight of John H Glenn Jr

Aurora 7: The Mercury Space Flight of M Scott Carpenter

Interkosmos: The Eastern Blocs Early Space Program

Sigma 7: The Six Mercury Orbits of Walter M Schirra, Jr

Faith 7: L Gordon Cooper, Jr and the Final Mercury Mission

The Last of NASAs Original Pilot Astronauts: Expanding the Space Frontier in the Late Sixties (with David J. Shayler)

Shattered Dreams: The Lost or Canceled Space Missions

AUSTRALIAS GREATEST ESCAPES: GRIPPING TALES OF WARTIME BRAVERY

First published in Australia in 1994 as FREEDOM OR DEATH: AUSTRALIAS GREATEST ESCAPE STORIES FROM TWO WORLD WARS

This revised edition published in 2020 by Simon & Schuster (Australia) Pty Limited

Suite 19A, Level 1, Building C, 450 Miller Street, Cammeray, NSW 2062

A CBS Company

Sydney New York London Toronto New Delhi

Visit our website at www.simonandschuster.com.au

Colin Burgess 2020

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher.

Cover design: Luke Causby

Cover image: POWs at Stalag 11B at Fallingbostel welcome their liberators, 16 April 1945, used by permission of the Imperial War Museum, London (front); Panther Media GmbH/Alamy Stock Photo (back)

Map design: Xou

Index: Puddingburn Publishing Services

Typeset by Midland Typesetters, Australia

The Escapers Prayer

Endeavour more with death before,

Wheneer once captive soul,

May spur the will to freedoms hill,

And soon a steadfast goal.

Behold a gleam of homeland dream,

Soon drink of freedoms wine.

May boldness be a friend to me,

Endurance pray be mine.

C.E.B.

I N MY FIRST YEAR OF high school and like so many of my similarly eager friends I was a regular visitor to our school library, seeking to borrow such immensely popular war books as Reach for the Sky, The Dam Busters, The Wooden Horse, The Great Escape, Escape or Die and the one that remains my firm favourite in the POW genre, Major Pat Reids seminal story of escape from captivity, The Colditz Story. It irked me even back then that stories of the Australian POW experience and escapes were unfairly few and far between, so I vowed that one day I would write a book entirely on that subject. This is that book.

I first set out to determine which stories to tell, and which people to contact. The response to my messages was truly overwhelming, and I was privileged to not only receive lengthy responses through the mail from all over Australia, but also conduct interviews with some extraordinary former prisoners of war from both global conflicts. These men had tunnelled to freedom, crawled by night through stinking drains, rappelled down stone walls using knotted bedsheets or clawed a passage beneath barbed wire in a desperate bid to flee their captors.

I found myself increasingly entrusted with their stories of combat and tales of life in captivity. Some were painstakingly written in longhand, others carefully compiled on typewriters or word processors (much has changed since then), but each was imbued with something very special.

These were stories of men who had left their homes and loved ones to fight for their country, who unexpectedly found themselves a captive of their enemy. They knew as they left Australia that there was a chance they might be wounded in action, perhaps even killed, but the thought of surrender was not one they seriously considered. Now at the mercy of the very same men they had come to fight, they unexpectedly found themselves in often frightening circumstances, facing an indeterminate future in a strange and chaotic environment.

For those taken in the European theatre, endless, dreary days were spent in crowded barracks buildings within bug-infested prison camps dominated by barbed wire and stony-faced guards, sharing with other desperate prisoners the sparse and unnourishing rations that had to be meted out carefully. Behind the barbed wire, unfamiliar laws of survival and cooperation had to be quickly learned and observed. Survival depended on solidarity, and solidarity on mutual trust. These young men had to learn to be tolerant of their fellow humans in a totally alien world filled with filth, hunger, humiliation, disease, uncertainty and death. At times their spirits were bolstered by the irregular arrival of Red Cross parcels, or whispered words about the progress of the war from secret radios, and the slim possibility of escape. While any POW could, and did, attempt to escape and make it back to safety as related in this book it was an officers duty to try to do so, and to make life as difficult as possible for the enemy whilst they were held captive.

My admiration for these amazing Australian warriors increased as my research continued. How could one not be thrilled at their courage, ingenuity and audacity, or be moved by meeting such awe-inspiring people as a bold and successful escaper from a German prison camp during the Great War of 19141918; or someone who took part in a mass tunnel escape from a notorious Italian POW camp; or an airman who fled German captivity and after many hazardous exploits including an attempt to steal a Messerschmitt fighter and fly it back to England finally crossed the Pyrenees to Spain under brutally freezing conditions in which other escapers and guides perished from the extreme cold.