True story of a bid for freedom

Ilkley-based writer Neil Hanson specialises in narrative histories, especially those involving the First World War.

For example, in 2005, The Unknown Soldier was published – a story based on the diaries of three soldiers: a Briton, a German and an American.

Three years later, Priestley’s Wars came out, a book about the experiences of Bradford-born writer J B Priestley in both World Wars, based on the contents of a box of letters in the possession of Priestley’s son, Tom.

Now, just in time for Christmas, comes Escape From Germany, another true story augmented by photographs and illustrations. Fantastic wartime escape stories such as The Wooden Horse, Colditz and The Great Escape remain popular because they remind us that ordinary people are capable of acts of selfless courage in extremes.

As the author says in his introduction, he read Eric Williams’s The Wooden Horse in one go as a schoolboy because he was “gripped by the ingenuity and bravery of those prisoners in their sealed world behind the wire...

“Years later, when I began to carry out research on the First World War, I soon discovered that there were many escape stories of equal, and even greater, resourcefulness and daring than those I’d read in my youth.”

Escape From Germany is one of them. It tells how in July, 1918, Allied prisoners-of-war escaped from Holzminden, the most heavily-guarded POW camp in the world, having spent nine months using knives and spoons to dig a 150-ft tunnel under the barracks and the barbed-wire perimeter.

You almost feel like shouting ‘Hooray!’ and going bug-eyed like Michael Palin in one of his Ripping Yarns, especially when you see the photograph of the story’s arch villain, the walrus-moustached camp commandant, Hauptman Karl – Milwaukee Bill – Niemeyer. During the bitterly-cold winter of 1917-18, this bounder actually charged prisoners for firewood.

Lest I do Neil Hanson a dis-service, let me hasten to explain that his book is not recounted in the manner of a Ripping Yarn, although the cartoons which front most of the chapters may give that impression.

But it seems to be the case that one by-product of the class system was that English officers did have stiff upper lips and cheerful contempt for the camp commandant’s Americanised malapropisms – “You tink I know notinks, but I know damn all!”

Hanson writes: “So powerful was the Englishman’s belief in the natural order of things that, even when he was subjected to deprivation, near-starvation and random or systematic brutality, it remained inconceivable that an officer would clean his room or make his bed. An orderly – a working-class prisoner – was incarcerated alongside him purely to do the manual work for him.

“So entrenched were such attitudes that it was a wonder the officers didn’t make the orderlies dig their escape tunnels for them as well. It was one task they performed for themselves, even though the orderlies were much more accustomed to such work...”

Officers were kept in one barrack block, orderlies in another. It was from the orderlies’ quarters that the tunnel – about 16in wide and a foot high – was painstakingly dug out. Obstacles included the concrete foundations supporting the barrack block and the outer wall and the solid rock below.

“...it rose and fell by several feet in places as the tunnellers struggled to maintain a level while trying to avoid large rocks or difficult strata. It also wound from side to side like a snake since the diggers had no means of maintaining a dead-straight course with compasses...”

The narrow, sloping ‘rat hole’ was so off-putting that a German guard refused to crawl into it, in spite of Milwaukee Bill’s fury. Twenty-nine men had got out; a further 50 had been ready to go, but the deteriorating state of the tunnel prevented that. Nineteen escapees were eventually recaptured.