Australia's Greatest Escapes

Gripping tales of wartime bravery

Colin Burgess

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Australia
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781760854294
• eBook ISBN: 9781760854300
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Australian & Oceanian History
• Index: History

Australia's greatest escape stories from two world wars Australia's Greatest Escapes is a collection of stories about the most hazardous aspect of the prisoner of war experience – escape. Here is all the adventure, suspense and courage of ordinary Australians who defied their captors; men who tunnelled to freedom, crawled through stinking drains, or clawed a passage beneath barbed wire in a desperate attempt to flee captivity. They were willing to risk the odds and even death in the loneliest war of all – the fight to be free. Each possessed in spades the noble qualities of boldness, resourcefulness, cunning, determination and mateship we have come to admire about our Australian service men and women under adversity. Featuring stories of Australian POWs from all theatres of war, including one who fled a German work camp during World War I, another involved in a mass tunnel escape from a notorious Italian camp, and an airman who brazenly attempted to steal a German fighter and fly it back to England. We also re-live the tragic saga of the Sandakan death marches in which six Australian escapers became the only survivors from 2000 POWs, and follow the perilous journeys to freedom undertaken by Australian infantrymen following the appalling massacre of their fellow soldiers
on the Japanese-held island of Ambon.

1 ESCAPE FEVER

AUSTRALIANS HAVE OFTEN BEEN RECOGNISED for their audacity, sardonic humour and improvisation in the face of adversity. Their brief history is festooned with romantic, craggy heroes such as Clancy of the Overflow, whose silhouette against the cloudless blue skies of the outback is as Australian as the frontiersman Daniel Boone to America. So too our fighting men bring to mind an indelible image of valorous audacity.

Allied officers were continually frustrated by their perception of the Australian units under their command as indisputably courageous and determined, but undisciplined when it came to taking orders. They could not easily understand that these men saw beyond the braid on a man’s sleeve – it was leadership by example and plain guts that they respected. The Australian soldier did not, and does not, suffer fools gladly.

At Anzac Cove the tenacity and daring of the Australian soldier gave this country its national identity and brought about a whole new treasury of folklore and tradition. The gallantry of our fighting men stamped our country and Australians with pride, touching and moulding future generations through the spirit of our countrymen at war. This same essence of boldness, resourcefulness and grim determination was the key to survival when Australians found themselves prisoners of their enemies during the dark years of two world wars.

In the First World War, the Geneva Convention of 1906 and the Hague Convention of 1907 bound all major European countries to comprehensive rules regarding prisoners of war. Humane treatment of prisoners was the principal consideration of these agreements. Limited punishment only could be administered to prisoners for ‘acts of insubordination’, including an officer’s sworn duty – to escape.

Unforeseen complications resulted in several bilateral agreements being reached during the course of the war, specifically on the use of other-rank (OR) prisoners as labourers. Both the Allied and Central Power armies were so huge and demanding on manpower that home labour forces were greatly depleted. By mutual agreement, these ORs could only be used in agriculture, specified industries, transport and public utilities. As well, the repatriation of sick or wounded prisoners was written into the bilateral undertakings, while a limited exchange of prisoners by internment in neutral countries was permitted.

Despite strict guidelines, the treatment of captives and prisoners depended to a great degree on the humanity of the captors or the camp commandants. Delegations of neutral observers visited camps of the major belligerents periodically to check on conditions demanded by the Hague Convention. However, breaches of the Convention rules soon occurred. The Germans, supremely confident of ultimate and rapid victory, largely ignored all such agreements, although attitudes began to change when an Allied victory became a real possibility.

As related by a repatriated prisoner of war, front-line soldiers sometimes lost all sense of humanity and regulation. On 5 April 1918, Corporal C.H. Campbell was part of an Allied force holding a railway embankment between Albert and Dernancourt. The Germans launched an attack, overrunning and capturing the embankment. ‘After we had given ourselves up, and just as we climbed out of the trench, a German officer came up and asked who we were. A private answered him and told him we were Australians. This officer drew his revolver and deliberately shot the Australian private through the stomach.’

‘We were called the “Somme murderers”,’ reported Private J.D. Andrews, another Australian held in a POW camp at Dülmen, ‘because the Germans insisted we had killed all the prisoners we captured on the Somme’. Many POWs were used as reluctant front-line labourers. ‘I was captured at Hangard Wood, near Villers-Bretoneux on the 7th or 8th of April [1918],’ related Corporal D.L. Patterson, who was forced to carry and stack heavy calibre shells. ‘We were kept on this job for about two weeks. During this period we were well within our own artillery fire zone, close up to the German batteries.’

In some instances, medical treatment was given with reluctance and even open hostility. One infantry diarist, whose name is not recorded but who was later repatriated from Germany, was captured at Fleurbaix on 19 July 1916 after being badly wounded in the left calf by shrapnel

The hospital at Valenciennes was a venereal hospital, and we had to bathe at the same time as venereal patients. On Sunday, the 23rd, they amputated my left leg. There was no comfort in the hospital. The orderlies did not try to make the bed comfortable or air it, and the food was bad. The meat served to us was blue and was, I believe, horse flesh.

The orderlies would not bring me water to wash. The only way I was able to wash was by getting comrades who could move about to bring some water. We had only one towel to ten men. A corporal was dressing my wound, and I called out in pain. On this a doctor came and hit me hard on the ribs…

At Valenciennes the doctor expressed the view that Australians ought not to have fought against the Germans, with whom (as he said) they had no quarrel. I attribute the rough treatment of the Australians to the unpopularity of the Australians on this account.

The inadequacy of enemy rations caused near-starvation, and it was only the vital lifeline of food parcels from home that saved many lives. Officer prisoners were able to rely on a relatively constant supply of these parcels, almost to the exclusion of the low-nutrition, unpalatable German rations. The ORs, who suffered a more irregular supply of these parcels, were able to supplement the German starvation ration from time to time. Lieutenant I.N. Archer gave this contemporary account of a life of hunger in one German prisoner-of-war camp:

On about 17th June, I was sent from the Strohen Camp Hospital into the camp itself. This was what is known as a ‘strafe’ [punishment] camp, and the conditions are very bad indeed. The camp itself is situated on a miserable moor, with nothing else in view and in a very bleak sort of place. We had iron-framed beds and mattresses stuffed with straw. The sanitary arrangements were anything but nice or adequate. The water for washing and drinking was taken from wells in the yard, right against which were cesspools, and about a month ago – August – there was an outbreak of dysentery. The barracks were divided by passageways, on one side of which were rooms to accommodate two senior officers and on the other rooms to hold about eight junior officers. We had to cook our own meals, as the British orderlies had too much to do.

After we had been at Ströhen a short while, our parcels started to come through. They arrived regularly, and in good condition… but I know of one case where a package, coming through the American Express Company, was filled with bricks instead of food.

The rations issued to us by the Germans here were very bad. They consisted of: breakfast – a cup of cocoa substitute without milk or sugar; midday – soup made from a kind of cockle and water, or potatoes and fish (which smelt very much and was very hard), or meat occasionally – evidently horses which had been badly blown about at the front. In the afternoon, tea made from leaves and grass; in the evening, some kind of thin soup and perhaps a cup of coffee substitute (burnt barley). The food was totally inadequate, and if it had not been for the parcels we received from home, we should undoubtedly have starved.

In addition to those held captive by the Germans, a further 255 Australians were held captive by the Turks – 33 officers and 222 other ranks.

Though it may have been an officer’s duty to attempt to escape from the enemy, one obstacle – the resentment of fellow prisoners – was the hardest to overcome. In his First World War autobiography, The Escaping Club (Jonathan Cape, 1921), RAF Major A.J. Evans recorded the difficulty he and other newly taken prisoners of war had in comprehending the attitude of those in a Turkish POW camp who had already suffered under more protracted captivity:

When I first came to the camp, escaping was looked upon almost as a crime against your fellow prisoners. One officer stated openly that he would go to considerable lengths to prevent an escape, and there were many who held he was right. There is much to be said on the side of those who took this view. Though it was childishly simple to escape from the camp, to get out of the country was considered next to impossible. An attempt to escape brought great hardships and even dangers to the rest of the camp, for the Turks had made a habit of strafing with horrible severity the officers of the camp from which the prisoner had escaped.

Breaching the barbed wire from a newly formed German POW camp was also relatively easy for determined escapers. Escape techniques and knowledge accumulated with each attempt, so much so that escaping from prison camps increased quite dramatically.

In the later war years, when communication was established with relatives and friends at home, the possibilities of escape multiplied. One of the great difficulties experienced by early escapers was that of clothing. The Germans issued a dark uniform to some, with bright yellow banding around the sleeves and down the trouser legs. The ribbon was easy to remove, and with a little needlework the uniforms were converted into passable civilian attire. An escape for those in khaki uniforms demanded that special precautions be taken. But once those at home realised what was wanted, a quantity of civilian clothing disguised as uniform parts was sent to the various camps. The Germans, noting the gold braid and metal buttons, would allow the parcel to go to the prisoner who quickly tore off the finery and replaced the buttons with those of a civilian type.

Another problem to be overcome before escaping was that of false papers. Every man in Germany – other than a soldier in uniform – was required to be in possession of a pass on which was stated his name, address, business and so on. As in the Second World War, the Germans seemed to love rubber stamps and never lost an opportunity of adding one to any document which came their way. Thus the average document was covered in a mass of violet Prussian eagles in varying sizes, shapes and attitudes. The result was imposing and, as was probably intended, increased the difficulties of forgery. However, skilled forgeries were soon being produced, and the more stamps the better.

Thus escaping from prison camps in the later war years had become an organised and scientific operation. Once out of the German camps prisoners generally headed for neutral Holland, Switzerland or Denmark, or in some cases travelled by boat to Sweden. A few even made their way across the battle front into Allied territory, but crossing into northern Holland bypassed the more formidable water crossing over the Rhine or Maas rivers.

One of the classic examples of wartime escapes was provided by a group of British officers who, in 1918, tunnelled their way out of the German prison camp at Holzminden, a small town on the Weser near Hanover, about 160 kilometres east of Holland. The camp was commanded by Hauptmann Karl Niemeyer, a veteran of the Prussian wars who had lived in the United States for seventeen years before World War I. Despite this, he had a heinous reputation as a bully and for his harsh mistreatment of the British and British Empire prisoners held at the camp. One British officer later described Niemeyer as, ‘A thickset man with a big stomach, who spent his time either posing straddle-legged with a stick in his hand or walking about bullying and threatening to shoot us; he did everything possible to make life unbearable.’

Transformed in September 1917 from a former cavalry training facility, the fortress camp at Holzminden was surrounded by a stone wall two metres high, on top of which was another high barbed-wire fence. The inside of the wall was regularly patrolled by sentries, while outside there were more sentries, as well as a number of savage dogs. Around 550 officer prisoners and 100 orderlies were sent to occupy the camp, managing to register seventeen unsuccessful escape attempts in the first month alone.

Work on the tunnel began in November 1917. Three of those who assisted through to its completion were Australians: Lieutenant Peter W. Lyon from the sixth reinforcement of the 11th Battalion, AIF; Captain Lionel C. Lee, 19 Squadron, RFC; and Captain George G. Gardiner of the 13th Battalion, AIF.

Lieutenant Lyon, from Perth, was captured during a counter-attack at Bullecourt on 17 April 1917. He had been transferred to Holzminden from the camp at Ströhen after an unsuccessful attempt in which he and some other prisoners tried to escape by the crude method of cutting the barbed wire during a thunderstorm and making a mad dash away from the camp. The sentries opened fire and Lyon was captured after falling down in a field near the camp. Having spent six weeks in solitary confinement at Holzminden he became one of the principals behind the plan to tunnel out of the camp from beneath a four-storey stone barracks. ‘The escape was the result of months of preparation,’ Lyon told a Western Mail reporter in 1938. ‘There were about twelve of us in the party at the start and we used to take it in turns to tunnel under the outer wall of the prison. We started under a wooden floor and tunnelled below some stone steps, digging out a little earth whenever the opportunity occurred. The big problem was to dispose of the dirt, but we overcame that by flushing it away in the latrines.’

While the tunnel was being dug, Lyon’s friends in England were doing all they could to assist the prisoners in their escape attempt. ‘I had received many useful and unauthorised presents including a compass, which arrived in the heel of a second-hand boot; a road map of Germany, which came in a big hunk of bacon; 10,000 marks in the handle of a tennis racquet, and a pair of wire cutters.’

As Captain Gardiner described in the H.G. Durnford book, The Tunnellers of Holzminden, the tubular tunnel was ‘70 yards long, 24 inches wide, and 18 inches high. Every inch of it was hacked out using a broken table knife.’ It would take nearly nine months to complete. The man at the face of the tunnel would crawl there with the knife and a wash basin dragging behind him on a rope. He would then light a small candle so he could see what he was doing. A rope was tied to the other side of the basin, held by another man occupying a small station cut out at the foot of the entrance slope. He also had to pump a set of bellows, made from an old football, providing the man up front with air issuing through a pipe made from a series of tin cans. When the basin was full the second man would haul it back, while still keeping up work on the bellows, and empty the spoil into a sack, which he would pass back to a third man for disposal out in the camp. This procedure was repeated endlessly, with shifts of three hours at a time. After his time at the face, the exhausted tunneller, dripping with perspiration, would drag himself backwards.

Night after night the digging continued, with each of the twelve diggers taking their turn in rotation at the face. Another eight prisoners would later become part of the tunnelling team. Meanwhile the Germans never suspected what was going on beneath them. Even Hauptmann Niemeyer felt there was no way anyone could escape from his prisoner fortress, boastfully telling some: ‘Gentlemen, if you want to escape you must give me two days’ notice first’.

One night prior to the planned escape a group of officers gathered at a fourth floor window, anxiously surveying a row of beans in a field beyond the wall. Suddenly a piece of paper on the end of a stick nosed up through the ground, remaining in sight for a few seconds before being withdrawn. They determined that the tunnel was too short, and so digging resumed for another week, and this time all was in readiness.

On the night of the escape, 23–24 July 1918, the twenty tunnellers drew lots to determine the order in which they would escape. They had already nominated ten friends each to follow them down the tunnel. Beyond that, anyone else who wanted to join in could go, so long as there was still time before dawn.

Starting at around midnight, the first men began to crawl through the tunnel in twos and threes. All went well for a while, although some nearly fainted with suffocation in the confines of the tunnel, most taking nearly an hour to reach the exit hole. Eventually, however, twenty-eight men managed to crawl out of the far end of the tunnel and flee on foot. Then word was passed down the tunnel that part of the roof had collapsed and it would need to be cleared. The twenty-ninth escaper had been covered in collapsing dirt, but he managed to make it to the exit hole and pull himself through; however the tunnel was blocked behind him.

‘The man in front of me stopped moving,’ George Gardiner recalled, ‘and he guardedly called back that there was a blockage somewhere. I was black and blue about both legs, the result of the pinches the man behind me gave me as he whispered for me to move along. By this time the atmosphere in the tunnel was so stifling that it was difficult to breathe. There was only one thing to do. The luminous dial of my watch showed 6 a.m., broad daylight, so back we crawled, this time feet first.’ Some of the men, half-unconscious with the lack of oxygen, had to be dragged back by their heels.

‘Back in the camp, Niemeyer nearly went mad. We chipped him, and in a fit of rage he marched into the yard about sixty soldiers, and lined them up with fixed bayonets in front of us. Then he gave the order to advance, but he then thought better of it, and ordered us back to our quarters.’

Of the twenty-nine men who safely made it through the tunnel, ten managed to cross the Dutch border. The other nineteen were eventually recaptured, either singly or in pairs, and returned to Holzminden. The most senior British officer held in the camp, Lieutenant Colonel Charles E.H. Rathbone, was one of those who made it through the tunnel and managed to avoid capture, reaching neutral Holland and freedom just twenty-four hours later. He was more fortunate than most in having a forged passport, knowing the German language, and being able to jump onto a train soon after ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Epigraph
• Foreword
• Chapter 1: Escape fever
• Chapter 2: From the clutches of the Kaiser
• Chapter 3: Tunnelling out of Gruppignano
• Chapter 4: Patience, persistence and guts
• Chapter 5: In the footsteps of the dead
• Chapter 6: Airmen on the run
• Chapter 7: Defiant odyssey
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Index
• Copyright