The Grand Escape Read online

  Text copyright © 2018 by Neal Bascomb

  All rights reserved. Published by Arthur A. Levine Books, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920, in association with Scholastic Focus. SCHOLASTIC, the LANTERN LOGO, and the SCHOLASTIC FOCUS LOGO are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Bascomb, Neal, author.

  Title: The grand escape : the greatest prison breakout of the 20th century / by Neal Bascomb.

  Other titles: Greatest prison breakout of the 20th century

  Description: First edition. | New York : Arthur A. Levine Books, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Audience: Grades 9-12. | Audience: Ages 12-18.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018016857| ISBN 9781338140347 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 1338140345 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781338140354 (ebook) | ISBN 1338140353 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: World War, 1914-1918—Prisoners and prisons, German—Juvenile literature. | Prisoner-of-war escapes—Germany—Holzminden—Juvenile literature. | Prisoners of war—Germany—Holzminden—Biography—Juvenile literature. | Prisoners of war—Great Britain—Biography—Juvenile literature.

  Classification: LCC D627.G3 B29 2018 | DDC 940.4/72430943597—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018016857

  First edition, October 2018

  Cover design by Maeve Norton / Author photo by Jillian McAlley

  Cover photos ’ Shutterstock: soldier (Kozlik), fence (lafoto)

  e-ISBN 978-1-338-14035-4

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.

  To Liz, these pages would not sing without you.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  List of Participants

  Foreword

  Map of World War I Europe

  A Bit of History

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Epilogue

  The Holzminden Escape List

  Sources & Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Photo Credits

  Index

  Neal Bascomb ad

  Sabotage teaser

  BREAKOUT ARTISTS:

  Cecil Blain, Royal Flying Corps (RFC) pilot

  David “Munshi” Gray, RFC captain

  Caspar Kennard, RFC lieutenant

  William “Shorty” Colquhoun, Canadian lieutenant

  Charles Rathborne, senior British officer at Holzminden after Wyndham

  Dick Cash, private in the Australian Imperial Force

  William Baxter Ellis, RFC pilot

  Joseph Rogers, infantry captain, member of the Pink Toes

  Frank Moysey, infantry captain, member of the Pink Toes

  Harold Medlicott, Royal Air Force (RAF) lieutenant

  Captain Joseph Walter, 7/Royal West Surrey Regiment

  Peter Lyon, Australian infantry officer

  Captain William Leefe Robinson, RFC pilot

  Captain Hugh Durnford, Royal Field Artillery officer

  Jim Bennett, RNAS observer

  Peter Campbell-Martin, RNAS pilot

  Walter “Basil” Butler, infantry lieutenant

  “Livewire,” unnamed ringleader of the Block A escape plot

  Jack Morrogh, Royal Irish Regiment major

  Lieutenant Edgar Garland, pilot from New Zealand

  OTHER ALLIES:

  Captain Allouche, French pilot

  Major John Wyndham, senior British officer at Holzminden

  Lord Newton, head of the British Prisoner of War Department

  GERMANS AT HOLZMINDEN:

  Captain Karl Niemeyer, commandant of Holzminden after Habrecht

  General von Hänisch, head of the 10th Army Corp Division, including Holzminden

  Colonel Habrecht, commandant of Holzminden

  Kurt Grau, camp interpreter

  Mandelbrat, lieutenant to Niemeyer

  OTHER GERMANS:

  Kaiser Wilhelm II, German Emperor and King of Prussia

  Oswald Böelcke, German ace

  Baron Manfred von Richthofen, German ace, aka the “Red Baron”

  Commandant Blankenstein, commandant of Osnabrück

  Commandant Courth, commandant of Crefeld

  Commandant Wolfe, commandant of Clausthal

  Commandant Kröner, commandant of Bad Colberg

  Dr. Rudolf Römer, Dutch attaché assigned to inspect German POW camps for compliance with the Hague Convention

  “Stone walls do not a prison make, / nor iron bars a cage.”

  —“To Althea, from Prison”

  Richard Lovelace, inscribed on a Holzminden cell wall

  “It seems to me that we owed it to our self-respect and to our position as British officers to attempt to escape, and to go on attempting to escape, in spite of all the hardships.”

  —A. J. Evans

  Trench warfare in World War I.

  At its outset, the march into World War I looked often like a celebration. In capital cities throughout Europe, crowds poured into the streets, waving flags and singing their national anthems. Swept into this patriotic tide, soldiers mustered in their millions and prepared for war by sharpening swords, cleaning pistols, polishing boots, and readying saddlebags for their cavalry horses. Flowers garlanded their paths to trains and ships, and words such as “honor” and “glory” were spoken with reverence.

  On June 28, 1914, Serbian nationalists had assassinated Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Although the murder lit the fuse of war, any number of acts could have stamped out the spark before the explosion, but hapless diplomats, and the leaders they served, failed to do so. Indeed, many never tried, giving in to the suggestions of battle-hungry generals. Hastening the disaster was an assembly of ossified empires, tangled alliances, inflexible war plans, massive standing armies, and the views of Germany, most prominently those of Kaiser Wilhelm II, that their country must choose “world power or downfall.”

  Germany intended a swift march of its armies west through Belgium, followed by a broad sweep south to envelop Paris. This decisive thrust would allow them to focus their attention on defeating Russia in the east. They made quick early progress; their huge artillery took but hours to level Belgian forts that had stood for centuries. To forestall future local resistance, they torched villages and executed their inhabitants. It was a first shiver of the horrors to follow.

  The British and French slowed the German advance on Paris, then pushed it back. A series of flanking offensives an
d counteroffensives ensued. In the east, the Russians threw themselves against German and Austro-Hungarian troops with force. As armies of a scale never seen before engaged one another—marshaling the new technologies of rifles, machine guns, high-explosive shells, and even poison gas—deaths mounted at an alarming rate.

  Many believed it would be over by Christmas. But by winter any hope of a swift victory was lost. Hundreds of thousands were already dead, on both sides, and the murder mill of the trenches had begun. Now the struggle became what some predicted it always would be—a war of attrition and annihilation that enveloped countries around the globe.

  Those captured by the enemy suffered their own brand of hell.

  “Those vanquished in war are held to belong to the victor,” stated Aristotle, and, indeed, for most of the history of warfare, death or enslavement awaited anyone captured on the battlefield. Often their families suffered the same, their towns razed too. Brutality was strength, mercy weakness.

  With the rise of professional armies in the eighteenth century, though, internment and POW (prisoner of war) exchanges became more standard. In the Seven Years’ War, the French king Louis XV instructed his officers to treat the vanquished British “like your own.” Nonetheless, the British and French, particularly during the Napoleonic age, ran a race to the bottom in their handling of the captured, many of whom were interned in the dark, sodden underbellies of moored ships, or “hulks.” Many American soldiers in the Revolutionary War died in hulks outside New York City, “sinkholes of filth, vermin, infectious disease and despair,” after being taken prisoner by the British.

  Abraham Lincoln made a marked leap forward by codifying some principles of prisoner treatment in an army field manual, not the least of which stated that POWs should be given the basic needs of shelter, food, clothing, and medical attention. Then in 1899, and again in 1907, delegations from across the globe gathered in The Hague, the Netherlands, to “civilize war.” Beyond stipulations on diplomacy, naval warfare, and restrictions over the use of poisonous gases and hollow-point bullets, the two international conferences set out clear rules about the treatment of prisoners.

  It was forbidden to kill or wound an enemy combatant who had surrendered his arms or who could not defend himself. Prisoners must be “humanely treated” on the “same footing as the troops of the Government who captured them.” Enlisted soldiers (but not officers) could be used for labor, but the tasks were not to be excessive, nor related to the war. Relief societies should be allowed to channel aid to prisoners. Germany, Britain, France, Russia, Italy, the United States, and Austria-Hungary, among many other nations, agreed to these conventions. The laundry list of dos and don’ts was so long and so comprehensive that a British international lawyer stated in 1911 that the future POW could expect “a halcyon time to be nursed fondly in memory, a kind of inexpensive rest-cure after the wearisome turmoil of fighting.”

  None of the diplomats gathered in The Hague in 1899 or 1907 could have anticipated the vast populations of prisoners that would come out of industrialized total war—nor the challenges this would involve. In the first six months of World War I, 1.3 million soldiers became POWs across Europe. Combatant nations struggled to confine and maintain this tide of men, and there was no sign that it would ebb any time soon. As a result, treatment of prisoners often fell short of the agreed-upon ideal. Early in the war, Britain imprisoned POWs and interned civilians in overcrowded ships, akin to conditions in the Revolutionary War almost a century and a half before. Yet despite accusations of wide-scale abuse from Germany, the majority held in Britain were maintained in decent conditions. In comparison, Russia was cruel toward POWs. Their prisoners died in vast numbers from neglect, exposure, and hard labor, many in Siberia.

  Germany was also one of the worst offenders as caretakers of POWs. By mid-1916, they held 1.65 million men in a vast network of prison camps. Their treatment of the British, French, and Russians was far from the high standard of “civilized war” promised by the Hague Conventions. In the act of surrender on the Western Front, one in five British soldiers was shot or bayoneted. The moans of the wounded in no-man’s-land were often silenced the same way, or men were left to die on stretchers behind the lines. Those who reached field hospitals often perished from neglect, as German doctors would frequently carry through on their Hippocratic oath only after attending to their own countrymen. Soldiers were relieved of their watches, money, cigarettes, their wedding rings, and even their boots. Individual acts of kindness occurred in these first hours of captivity, but they were far from the general rule.

  Roughly 80 percent of nonofficers taken prisoner were forced to work for the Germans. Small numbers of fortunate ones, often the recovering wounded, served as orderlies in officer prison camps, cooking meals and cleaning rooms. Volunteers for these positions were easy to find. The majority suffered hard labor in Arbeitskommandos (working parties). They dug in the salt and coal mines, plowed fields, cut peat, split rocks in quarries, laid railroads, emptied barges, and worked in factories. They were treated little better than slaves—and flogged and abused the same. For a period, their death rates were greater than those on the front lines. According to one historian, some 50,000 Allied troops and civilians perished under such conditions.

  In comparison, officers experienced better conditions. They inhabited less crowded, more solidly built prisons. They did not have to work and were even afforded orderlies to perform basic manual duties. If an officer swore not to escape, he was also allowed to take parole, or temporary leave—typically for walks outside the camp. Such was the currency of a gentleman’s word being his bond and the vestiges of the old class system that once dominated all of Europe.

  Still, imprisoned officers and rank-and-file men alike were subject to a German high command that connived against the Hague Conventions. The German army issued a handbook to its troops that called attention to the Hague pledges but included amendments about how prisoners could be put to death for insubordination, for attempting to escape, in reprisal for similar measures by the enemy, and the very broad “in case of overwhelming necessity.” Their rights under the Hague Conventions ignored or abused, prisoners in Germany were abandoned to fend for themselves against commandants who had a largely free hand in how they treated prisoners, regardless of their rank.

  The cruelest commandants sentenced prisoners to months of solitary confinement in small, vermin-infested cells. They inflicted beatings and innumerable petty humiliations. They allowed men to starve and their wounds to fester. They dispersed prisoners with bayonet charges. They shot at the defenseless, at times in cold-blooded murder.

  Most prisoners endured these abuses—and their despair at being unable to rejoin the fight against the enemy—without ambitions to escape. Some, a small minority, decided that breaking out of these terrible prisons was a necessity worth any risk. A rare few succeeded.

  HOLZMINDEN, 1918.

  Twenty-seven-year-old Lieutenant Caspar Kennard was the number-one man, the digger, this afternoon. He wriggled through the eighteen-inch-diameter tunnel, a hundred feet from its entrance. In one hand he held a flickering candle, its light casting a devilish dance of shadows about him. With the other hand, he clawed at the dirt to drag himself forward. Roped to his leg was a shallow bin to bring out the excavated earth. Finally, after almost thirty minutes of crawling, he reached the end of the burrow. He scooped out a shelf in the mud wall, set down the candle, and briefly watched the flame struggle to survive in the oxygen-starved air. He took a breath, calmed himself best as he could, then started digging into the firm mix of stone and yellow clay.

  Far behind him, at the mouth of the tunnel underneath a narrow paneled staircase, David Gray, the number-two man, muscled the bellows and pumped air down to Kennard. Behind Gray, the number-three man, Cecil Blain, waited to haul out the bin and pack the earth into the steadily shrinking space under the stairs. Each shift they rotated the jobs. Nobody liked to be the digger.

  Tunneling was a nasty busines
s. Kennard barely had space to shift his body. The burrow reeked of stale air, mildew, sweat, and rot. There were rats, worms, and other creepy-crawlies, and never enough air to breathe. He was always banging his head against stones, and earth pressed on him in every direction, threatening to collapse and snuff out his life. Given his lifelong fear of confined spaces, Kennard had to force himself not to panic.

  Inch by inch, he carved out a small stretch of tunnel, then he contorted his body to fill the bin with dirt and rocks. There was months more of this mole work ahead, months more of digging what was either a very long tomb or a path to freedom from Holzminden, the notorious German prison camp in which they were all incarcerated. Once beyond the walls of this landlocked Alcatraz—if they made it that far—he and his fellow prisoners would have to make a 150-mile journey by foot through enemy territory to the border. The Germans would assuredly launch a manhunt, and they could face recapture—or a bullet—at any turn.

  When not risking their own death tunneling underground, the men forged documents, smuggled in supplies, bribed guards for intelligence, and developed their cover stories for their flight to free Holland. To succeed would defy every odd against them.

  The sky lightened from gray to pink as the 70th Squadron of the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) prepared to take off from their base. Already the din of shelling sounded in the distance. It was August 7, 1916, at Fienvillers, France, 20 miles from the Somme battlefront. “Contact, sir!” called the mechanic, his hand on the black walnut propeller of a Sopwith 1½ Strutter biplane. “Contact!” answered its pilot, Cecil Blain, from the open fore cockpit.

  Blain pushed the throttle halfway, allowing fuel to rush into the nine-cylinder rotary engine. The mechanic jerked the propeller downward, counterclockwise. With a belch of blue smoke, the Sopwith sputtered to life. The rush of air from the spinning propeller flattened the airfield’s grass behind the tailplane. Seated in the aft cockpit behind Blain was Charles Griffiths, the observer, whose various tasks included radio communication, aerial reconnaissance, and manning the guns. Once they finished their flight checks, Blain waved his arm fore and aft, and the mechanic yanked out the wooden chocks securing the biplane’s wheels in place.