The Not-So-Great Escape: German POWs in the U.S. during WWII
By Ronald H. Bailey

World War II  | 7 comments  |  Print This Post  |  Email This Post

The site selected for the beginning of the tunnel was in the blind spot between the nearest guard towers that Parshall had warned about. The entrance shaft was three and a half feet from a bathhouse, which was the structure closest to the outer fence surrounding Papago Park. Diggers loosened a board on the side of the bathhouse to create a passageway and positioned a large coal box nearby to conceal the shaft. They would walk into the bathhouse, ostensibly to shower or wash clothes, then exit and slip down into the tunnel’s six-foot-deep vertical entrance shaft. Three groups of three men worked ninety-minute shifts during the night, one man digging with a coal shovel and small pick, the second lifting soil in a bucket to the third man topside, who also served as the lookout.

A fourth group of men distributed the excavated soil the next day. They flushed it down toilets, stored it in attics, or let it slip through holes in their pockets onto the new flower beds. As the tunnel progressed, a small cart was fashioned out of a shower stall base to haul the dirt back to the entrance.

Soil piled up at such an alarming rate that a new means for getting rid of it had to be found. Capt. Jürgen Quaet-Faslem, a cocky Prussian who had commanded U-595, came up with an idea. “Shouldn’t we have a sports area in this compound?” he asked. “I think they are supposed to ‘encourage’ sports.” Thus was born the notion of a volleyball court—on rough ground that would need to be leveled. This the prisoners proceeded to do daily, spreading soil taken from the tunnel with the help of shovels and rakes provided by the Americans. Guards got used to seeing a mound of dirt there; they assumed it was the same old pile and not a fresh supply unearthed from the tunnel.

The tunnel moved forward at up to three feet on a good night. In late November a colonel from a visiting team of inspectors declared that the camp need never worry about prisoners digging out: the soil, he proclaimed, was hard as a rock. He was standing right atop the concealed tunnel entrance at that moment; prisoners who heard him smiled as if in agreement.

The diggers intended to tunnel under two fences and a patrol road that encircled the camp. Just beyond the road stood an electric light pole in a clump of bushes. By triangulating on paper they calculated that the tunnel needed to be 178 feet long from the bathhouse to the pole. But someone wanted to double-check the distance. So he attached a small weight to a string and late one night hurled it into the undergrowth near the pole. Suddenly, a jeep with two American soldiers came along the patrol road. Capt. Hans Werner Kraus, skipper of U-199, watched in horror. “That string caught one of them right across the neck,” he said. “Fortunately they were moving very slowly. He simply brushed it aside, said nothing, and the vehicle disappeared into the night. But the line broke and was still hanging on the far fence weeks later. Several times the Americans walked by, stared at the string, wondered how it got there and why.”

Back in February, Quaet-Faslem had escaped by hiding on a truck loaded with plywood. He crossed the border and made it more than thirty miles into Mexico before being recaptured. From that experience he knew that stocking enough food was vital. Though German prisoners disliked commercial American white bread—“nothing but air,” someone remarked, “you can squeeze it into nothing”—they decided the basic item in the getaway packs should be bread toasted and pulverized into crumbs. It was packed tightly in waxed paper envelopes saved from individual breakfast cereal boxes. Mixing the crumbs with milk or water “would make sort of a mush that might be monotonous but it would be nourishing and easy to carry,” said Kraus.

Escapees also needed some kind of credentials. American photographers had taken snapshots for the prisoners to ship home to Germany in order to show how well POWs were treated in the United States, and the pictures proved useful for fake passports and other papers. The forged papers were imprinted with official-looking stamps, fashioned from scraps of leather and rubber, which would allow the escapees to pose as foreign sailors trying to get to California or the Gulf Coast.

Tags: 20th - 21st Century, Historical Conflicts, World War II

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