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

By Ronald H. Bailey | World War II  | 11 comments  |  Print This Post  |  Email This Post

Late in 1944, authorities at Security Unit No. 84—one of five hundred camps on American soil housing German prisoners of war—began to feel a sense of relief. Here at Papago Park in Arizona, a difficult lot of more than three thousand officers and sailors from the German navy and merchant marine finally appeared to be adjusting to camp life. This seemed especially true over in Compound 1A, which housed the troublesome Nazi U-boat commanders and their crews.

Guards marveled at the sudden changes in 1A. The compound was much neater. The prisoners appeared in high spirits. They spent hours creating large and well-tended flower beds. With permission of the camp authorities they had even begun to build an outdoor court for faustball, or “fist ball”—volleyball. Several times a day the prisoners carefully groomed the court’s surface with rakes provided by the guards. The Americans attributed all this activity to typical German organization and efficiency.

Nearly 400,000 German POWs were brought to the United States during World War II, and officials recorded precisely 2,222 individual attempts by the Germans to flee their camps. POWs scaled fences, smuggled themselves out in or under trucks or jeeps, passed through the gate in makeshift GI uniforms, cut the barbed wire or tunneled under it, or went out with work details and simply walked away. Their motives ranged from trying to find their way back to Germany (which none ever did) to merely enjoying a few hours, days, or weeks of freedom.

But none of these assorted breakouts could match in audacity, scale, or drama the plan under way at Compound 1A at Papago Park. It would trigger the largest manhunt in Arizona history, bringing in local law enforcement, the FBI, and even Papago Indian scouts.

The Christmas Eve breakout would end largely in a farce, with no one shot, hurt, or even seriously punished, but that in no way diminished the seriousness of the attempt—or the panic it spread at the time.

The first Germans arrived at Papago Park, six miles east of Phoenix, in January 1944. They were placed in a half-dozen compounds in the rough-hewn camp, which had previously housed National Guardsmen, the Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps, and segregated black infantry units.

As John Hammond Moore notes in his account of the escape, The Faustball Tunnel, camp officials invited trouble by concentrating the least cooperative POWs in the two sections of Compound 1. These were the troublemakers, previous escapees, and other problem prisoners: officers and seamen in section 1A, noncommissioned officers in 1B.

Only Capt. Cecil Parshall, the provost marshal, saw a problem with this arrangement. Parshall was an ex-police detective and decorated World War I veteran who, among other colorful exploits, had pulled off a bank heist while serving as a general in the Mexican army. Parshall pointed out that there was a spot in Compound 1 that could not be seen from the guard towers. “Those Germans were a fine bunch of men, smart as hell,” he said later. “And it made no sense to put the smartest of them in Compound 1. I knew they would discover that blind spot.”

Idleness made it worse in Compound 1. Only about one in four prisoners in the camp were gainfully employed, earning eighty cents a day in canteen credits picking cotton and doing other chores. The Geneva Convention exempted officers and noncoms from work detail, allowing them to sleep late and spend their days plotting ways to get beyond the wire. Lt. Wolfgang Clarus, who had been captured in North Africa where he commanded a coast artillery unit, recalled: “You stare at that fence for hours on end, try to think of everything and anything that can be done, and finally realize there are only three possibilities: go through it, fly over it, or dig under it.”

German POWs had attempted to “dig under” without much success at a camp in Colorado and at Fort Ord, California. In Compound 1A, digging evidently began sometime in September 1944 under the direction of a team of four U-boat captains who plotted strategy while playing bridge in the barracks. “It was a challenge and an adventure,” recalled one of them, Capt. Fritz Guggenberger, who had been personally decorated by Hitler for the exploits of his U-513. “The tunnel became a kind of all-consuming sport. We lived, ate, slept, talked, whispered, dreamed ‘tunnel’ and thought of little else for weeks on end.”

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to

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

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.