The Art of Manliness - #451： The Daring Escape Artists of WWI

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00:01:14.440 Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:01:18.200 When you think of wartime prison escapes, what comes to mind?

00:01:20.800 Well, probably the breakouts attempted by prisoners of war during World War II,

00:01:24.180 thanks to the movie The Great Escape.

00:01:26.160 But the escapees of World War II learned many of the tricks of the trade from their pioneering predecessors

00:01:30.080 who honed their courageous craft during the First World War.

00:01:33.180 My guest today has written a book about their audacious exploits.

00:01:35.720 His name is Neil Bascom, and his book is The Escape Artist,

00:01:38.280 a band of daredevil pilots and the greatest prison break of the Great War.

00:01:41.760 Today on the show, Neil describes what conditions were like for British POWs during World War I

00:01:45.960 and why prisoners wanted to escape the German camps even when they were relatively comfortable.

00:01:49.700 We also discussed Germany's most infamous POW camp, which was essentially a landlocked Alcatraz

00:01:54.340 designed to hold the most escape-prone prisoners.

00:01:56.720 While it was believed to be impossible to escape,

00:01:58.600 Neil describes how the prisoners hatched an elaborate breakout plan anyway

00:02:01.560 and made a 175-yard tunnel towards freedom.

00:02:04.480 We entered a discussion with what Neil took away from the heroic exploits of these men.

00:02:08.000 You're really going to enjoy this look at a fascinating slice of history.

00:02:10.440 After the show's over, check out the show notes at awim.is slash escapeartist.

00:02:15.000 Neil Bascom, welcome back to the show.

00:02:26.720 Oh, it's great to be back. Thank you for having me.

00:02:28.740 So we had you on about a year ago to talk about your book, The Perfect Mile,

00:02:32.560 which is about Roger Bannister and John Lindy and Wes Santee racing to be the first man to run a sub four-minute mile.

00:02:41.340 It was kind of, we timed it just right. I mean, this is not, like, Roger Bannister died a few months after.

00:02:47.580 I don't want to say, like, we timed it, but it was a great time.

00:02:49.860 Like, people got to learn about Bannister. It was kind of synced up, which was nice.

00:02:54.640 People learned more about his legacy.

00:02:55.940 Exactly.

00:02:56.540 You got a new book out, though, called The Escape Artist,

00:03:00.540 A Band of Daredevil Pilots and the Greatest Prison Break of the Great War.

00:03:04.740 And for those of you who don't know, The Great War is World War I.

00:03:09.080 This book was a fun read. It was an action-adventure story. There was comedy, suspense. It had it all.

00:03:16.540 Before we get into the details of it, how did you find out about this ginormous prison break

00:03:21.960 that happened from this POW camp in Germany that was pretty much impossible to escape from?

00:03:27.960 Because I never heard of this story.

00:03:29.080 Well, I've always wanted to write an escape story. The Escape from Alcatraz was one of my favorite movies growing up.

00:03:38.380 And the sort of, you know, escapades that go into it and the planning and the disguises and everything was just fascinating to me as a teenage boy.

00:03:49.360 And so I always wanted to write one of these stories, but I was searching for the right one.

00:03:54.120 And an editor of mine wanted me to write about the Stalag Luft escape, the Great Escape of World War II,

00:04:01.360 but that ground had been fairly well-tread.

00:04:05.280 And so I was looking for something else, and I finally ended up reading this book about MI9,

00:04:11.020 which was the World War II escape and invasion service of the British.

00:04:15.600 And in that book, they note this escape that happened in the previous war, in World War I, at a place called Holtzminden.

00:04:24.860 And it turns out that those people who executed that escape became the teachers and the professors of MI9.

00:04:33.560 And that was the sort of hook that grabbed me.

00:04:36.780 I wanted to learn about this original escape.

00:04:39.160 And the further I plumbed into it, it just turned out to be an amazing story.

00:04:45.600 Yeah, so you mentioned The Great Escape.

00:04:47.340 I'm sure a lot of people have seen the movie with Steve McQueen jumping over the fence on the motorcycle, looking cool.

00:04:53.860 Very cool.

00:04:54.560 Right.

00:04:54.900 And as I was reading this book, I mean, I was like, I'm reading the prequel of The Great Escape.

00:04:59.600 Like, it almost, the way they did it, and we'll talk about how they did it, like, it basically set the standard of how these guys in World War II were planning prison escapes.

00:05:09.600 Yeah, I mean, the escape at Holtzminden was really the roadmap for The Great Escape that we all know of.

00:05:16.180 All right.

00:05:16.540 And so what's great about this story, too, is that not only is the escape itself just fun, and there's so many interesting things about it,

00:05:23.160 but you use it as a backdrop to explore other facets of World War I that a lot of people aren't familiar with.

00:05:30.240 For example, I mean, the subtitle, it's, you know, The Daredevil Pilots in The Greatest Prison Break.

00:05:35.440 World War I was the first war where aviation played a role.

00:05:40.340 I mean, what, I mean, by this time, planes weren't that old, 10 years, maybe.

00:05:45.340 What were militaries doing with planes that they had during the first war?

00:05:50.100 Yeah, I mean, the planes at this point in time were essentially made up of wood, wire, and some canvas.

00:05:56.280 They were not terribly safe.

00:05:58.600 They were constantly plummeting from the sky.

00:06:00.640 Engines were seizing up.

00:06:02.400 And the generals in charge really didn't think that they would be terribly useful.

00:06:06.580 I mean, they called them a, one general called it a useless and expensive fad.

00:06:10.680 Another thought that they'd maybe need one or two planes, but that was about it.

00:06:15.220 But it quickly, they began to find that they were very useful in reconnaissance and artillery observation, not to mention bombing German targets deep behind the lines.

00:06:25.960 How did they do the bombing?

00:06:27.120 Because I guess they had to develop the technology for, you know, how do you drop a bomb from the air?

00:06:32.220 Yeah, I mean, originally, again, just to show you how antiquated these were, you know, air-to-air combat was done with rifles initially.

00:06:42.640 Bombs were dropped straight from the cockpit.

00:06:44.920 And it wasn't for a while during the war that they began using, you know, dropping them out of the fuselage.

00:06:50.400 It took a while.

00:06:51.300 Yeah, I mean, I think you talk about too, like they'd have grenades and just...

00:06:54.760 Exactly.

00:06:55.860 And hurl them over the side of the cockpit. 0.93

00:06:58.300 Right. 0.93

00:06:58.700 It was rather ridiculous.

00:06:59.440 And so the British Air Force, I mean, what was the state of the British Air Force at this time compared to the German?

00:07:05.120 Did one have superior air power over the other?

00:07:08.400 I mean, generally, the Royal Flying Corps, the British end of things, and then the German Air Force, they were trading places throughout the course of the war.

00:07:15.580 They were constantly adapting technology.

00:07:18.120 They were building faster planes with more firepower and also training their pilots better.

00:07:22.820 So you find that at the beginning of the war, the Germans were stronger.

00:07:26.480 But, you know, as 1950 came along, the British started to sort of gain momentum.

00:07:33.080 And then back again, the Germans sort of taking over things in late 1916, where a lot of these pilots that I feature in the story really come to be captured by the expense of the German flying squadrons that just overwhelmed them.

00:07:48.040 Well, so yeah, as soon as they found out that these airplanes have a role, they had to start ramping up production of the airplanes.

00:07:54.960 But they had to put pilots in there.

00:07:56.800 And there weren't a lot of pilots at the time.

00:07:59.740 So how did they man these airplanes they were building?

00:08:03.400 Did they just kind of like, hey, you want to be a pilot?

00:08:05.740 Here's two hours in the air.

00:08:07.040 Okay, you're a pilot.

00:08:08.020 What was that like?

00:08:08.840 Well, the original pilots of the Royal Air Force were essentially amateurs, people who owned their own planes, who, you know, showed up with them and said, you know, I'm willing to fight for my country.

00:08:19.660 But, of course, they need more and more pilots as more and more of them are shot down.

00:08:23.180 And so they initially started to recruit them mostly from the sort of Harrow, Eaton, Oxford, Cambridge sort of elite people who, as my subtitle says, were daredevils, but people who, you know, rode motorcycles fast.

00:08:38.800 It was rather a ridiculous sort of training recruitment process.

00:08:42.500 You know, they would ask potential pilots who their favorite poet was.

00:08:46.180 Do they like solitude?

00:08:47.640 Was Kipling or Stevenson a better poet?

00:08:49.980 What was the right answer to that question?

00:08:53.640 Yes, it was Kipling, actually, and Shelly, just so you know, over Merida.

00:08:59.340 They liked football players over pianists.

00:09:02.740 Again, it was rather ridiculous recruitment process, but over time they found who exactly were the best pilots.

00:09:09.360 And their training methods were both extremely dangerous.

00:09:13.400 Half of the pilots were dying over the course of, you know, the short training that they received before they were finally sent into mainland Europe to fight.

00:09:23.020 So, yeah, this was a dangerous job.

00:09:24.860 It attracted a certain type of person.

00:09:27.480 And the other issue with these things is that you're behind enemy lines, typically, because you're doing reconnaissance, you're doing bombing runs.

00:09:34.580 So, you're more likely, probably, to be taken prisoner.

00:09:38.000 Is that correct?

00:09:38.960 Absolutely.

00:09:39.480 I mean, you know, in 1916, where many of these pilots were captured, the lifespan in the air was 17 minutes long over enemy lines.

00:09:51.060 So, you were liable to be shot down in less than a quarter of an hour.

00:09:55.940 And many people died, and many of the pilots were actually captured.

00:09:59.600 And just to give you an idea of sort of how things were at the time, some of the pilots asked for parachutes because that seemed like a good idea.

00:10:09.020 And their bosses in the Air Force said, well, we want you to be able to be motivated to die, to fight to the very last.

00:10:16.880 And so, they were not given them.

00:10:18.240 Yeah.

00:10:18.380 And the other thing they had to do, too, you talk about, is they would, as soon as they crash landed, if that's what they could do,

00:10:24.100 they were ordered to destroy the planes as quickly as possible so the Germans couldn't learn about their technology. 0.65

00:10:30.840 Exactly.

00:10:31.560 And so, you know, their initial instinct, of course, was to run for the hills, but they had to destroy these planes.

00:10:39.660 And by the time that happened, they were generally surrounded.

00:10:42.100 And the fact of the matter was, is that they were given absolutely no training in what to do if they were shot down behind enemy lines,

00:10:49.920 nor were they provisioned in a way that they could escape and evade.

00:10:54.340 So, during World War I, these guys were learning on the fly, and this would later serve soldiers in subsequent wars.

00:11:01.720 Absolutely.

00:11:02.160 Right. Well, I mean, this is another interesting concept that a lot of people don't realize,

00:11:06.020 is this idea of being a prisoner of war, taking prisoners of war, was a relatively new concept.

00:11:12.980 You know, for most of human history, the rule of, the law of war was, you know, if you conquered an army,

00:11:18.140 you either killed them or enslaved them.

00:11:20.580 Now, I think the first time they actually started using prisoners of war on a mass scale was during the Boer War.

00:11:25.520 Correct.

00:11:25.840 You saw Winston Churchill was, you know, we did a podcast with Candace Millard about Winston Churchill's experience

00:11:31.400 and was a prisoner of war, but now we see at even more mass scale during World War I.

00:11:38.380 I mean, what caused the nations to decide, we're not just going to kill people when we take them capture,

00:11:47.160 we're not going to enslave them, but we're just going to put them up in a camp. 0.98

00:11:50.420 How did the nations agree on that?

00:11:52.360 Well, it was a long time coming, and there was a lot of brutality and a lot of death prior to that.

00:11:58.000 I think probably one of the sort of more grisly stories that you find is this Byzantine emperor

00:12:04.740 who captured about 14,000 prisoners.

00:12:07.900 He had all but a hundred of them blinded, and he left the last hundred blind in only one eye

00:12:14.520 so they could march back to their hometown.

00:12:16.440 You find that, you know, over the course of time, in the 17th century, some Dutch legal theorists

00:12:23.740 came up with this idea that maybe we should have rules and laws about killing an enemy on the field,

00:12:30.500 and then you find in the Age of Reason that prisoners were considered, okay, these are just men.

00:12:37.600 We don't have the right to take their lives.

00:12:40.140 And so, again, over time, Abraham Lincoln codified in the Army Field Manual what to do with prisoners' war.

00:12:47.380 There were the Hog Conventions in 1899 and 1907 that also tried to, quote-unquote, civilize war,

00:12:54.320 and that really led you to World War I where there were rules in place and obligations for countries

00:13:01.980 to humanely treat the prisoners that they took, but they had no idea what they were going to face in World War I.

00:13:09.420 This industrial warfare where you have millions of soldiers pitted against each other.

00:13:14.880 And so the consequence of that is, of course, you have millions of prisoners.

00:13:18.560 And so you find that Germany and the Allies were overwhelmed with the vast populations of people

00:13:24.920 that they were taking in and having to house and feed and control.

00:13:31.500 And this led to a lot of problems, both in terms of disease, but also in terms of just ill treatment.

00:13:40.500 Yeah.

00:13:40.600 What was a typical prisoner of war camp like, let's say, in Germany?

00:13:45.200 Because I think when most people think POW, they think, I don't know, I always imagine the Vietnam War,

00:13:50.960 you know, John McCain or, you know, Stockdale, you know, in solitary confinement and iron shackles.

00:13:58.780 I mean, the way you describe it in the book, it was bad.

00:14:01.760 I'm not going to, like, downplay how it's not great to be a prisoner of war,

00:14:04.680 but it wasn't like, it wasn't like the, what was that, the prisoner of war in Vietnam?

00:14:10.320 The Hanoi Hilton.

00:14:11.040 The Hanoi Hilton, right?

00:14:12.580 I mean, it's a great question.

00:14:15.460 It was largely a question of who you were more than anything else.

00:14:19.660 If you were an enlisted soldier, you were essentially put into what was a tent city in Germany,

00:14:28.160 where there could be 30,000, 40,000 prisoners held within a certain confinement.

00:14:35.300 And these prisoners were largely used as workers, put in Arbeitskommandos to dig mines,

00:14:45.340 to haul equipment, and do all other kinds of works that the Germans couldn't do themselves 0.92

00:14:51.860 because most of their people were up on the front.

00:14:54.920 And then you sort of separate that, of course, from the officers, which was a very different world.

00:15:00.420 In some ways, I was, in many ways, I was surprised at how, quote-unquote,

00:15:05.380 cushy life could be for an officer who was imprisoned.

00:15:09.040 I mean, they were put in largely into barracks of former officers of the German army.

00:15:15.640 They were given orderlies to attend to their meals.

00:15:20.780 They were allowed even what was called to walk on parole, which was they could sign a card saying,

00:15:26.820 I vow not to escape, and they could walk outside the prison walls and, on their gentlemanly code, not escape.

00:15:34.840 That is not to say, again, that life was cushy.

00:15:38.040 And it largely, again, depended on who the commandant was and what district they were in in Germany.

00:15:44.860 Some were in places where they were well-treated, and in others, particularly in the case of this story of Holtzman,

00:15:52.720 and they were put into place and commanded by a man named Karl Niemeyer, who was just an absolute tyrant.

00:15:59.320 They made their lives a hell.

00:16:01.040 Yeah, we'll get to Niemeyer here because he was a character.

00:16:03.820 But this distinction between officers and just regular enlisted soldiers

00:16:07.420 also played a role in who tried to escape from these prisons.

00:16:13.240 What would happen if, say, just a regular enlisted soldier tried to escape from one of these German prisoner camps

00:16:22.040 compared to, say, if an officer escaped?

00:16:24.900 Well, if an enlisted soldier tried to escape, he was either shot while trying to escape,

00:16:30.340 or he was placed back into an Arbeitskommando that was particularly grueling.

00:16:37.700 So a salt mine or some other sort of heavy labor place where the chances of dying from that were very high.

00:16:49.160 So it was World War II, and the Nazis, they were obviously very brutal to their prisoners.

00:16:57.500 But there was some predecessor to that in Germany during World War I.

00:17:02.380 All right, so enlisted soldiers shot or put back in worse conditions.

00:17:06.880 They got recaptured.

00:17:08.060 What would happen if, say, an officer escaped and got recaptured?

00:17:12.700 Same fate, or was he treated better?

00:17:14.940 No, very, very different fate.

00:17:16.540 I mean, some of them were, of course, shot while trying to escape.

00:17:19.880 But the large preponderance of them were placed back and often into the same camps that they escaped from,

00:17:26.760 put into isolation.

00:17:27.980 And there were even rules between Germany and Britain about how long you could put these officers into isolation.

00:17:34.840 Was it two weeks at a certain point in time?

00:17:37.180 It was a couple months at another point in time.

00:17:40.080 So, again, the threat of death was not nearly as high as if you were an enlisted soldier,

00:17:46.660 which, of course, if you look at the percentages, many more officers tried to escape than enlisted soldiers.

00:17:53.000 Right, and a lot of these officers you talk about in the book, they were – they had made several escape attempts.

00:17:58.940 It reminded me, again, of the Steve McQueen character in The Great Escape.

00:18:02.660 Keeps on trying to escape, gets thrown back in the clinker, gets out, tries to make another escape.

00:18:07.900 I mean, these guys were doing – I mean, why were they?

00:18:10.200 Was it because they wanted their personal freedom, or did they feel like it was their duty as an officer

00:18:15.620 to sort of muck things up for the Germans? 0.88

00:18:17.500 So, you know, their escaping contributed to the war effort.

00:18:21.460 Yeah, I think, you know, you find over the course of reading these letters that these prisoners wrote

00:18:27.820 and their memoirs subsequent to their escape, the motivations were pretty much all over the place.

00:18:34.360 Many of them, of course, just wanted to get back into the fight.

00:18:37.980 They wanted to get back to England or their country and get back into the fray.

00:18:43.780 Others of them considered, okay, they might not be able to escape, but every man, every expense that the Germans have to expend on keeping prisoners 0.50

00:18:54.000 was one less resource that they had to put into the war.

00:18:59.640 And a lot of it was just this sheer sense of shame that they had, which was unwarranted these prisoners had of being captured.

00:19:09.540 I mean, the ethos at the time was that you shouldn't be captured.

00:19:12.720 And so there was a sense that they had somehow not done the proper thing.

00:19:17.760 And so they wanted to sort of right there that wrong by escaping.

00:19:21.900 Right. That sense of British gentlemanly honor was driving.

00:19:25.240 Exactly.

00:19:26.260 What was the most common?

00:19:27.800 We'll talk about the tunneling.

00:19:29.660 Tunneling was a popular approach.

00:19:31.140 But besides tunneling, what was the most common way to escape from these POW camps during World War I?

00:19:36.900 Well, they tried everything under the sun.

00:19:39.120 I mean, the level of hijinks that went into some of these escapes is absolutely comic.

00:19:46.660 I mean, some tried to build an airplane at the top of their barracks.

00:19:50.520 Others tried to erect a balloon to carry them over the walls.

00:19:56.260 Many tried to do the sort of standard cutting through the fence or jumping the fences.

00:20:01.240 Others tried to disguise themselves as German officers and just walk right through the front gate.

00:20:06.920 Others tried to hide themselves in the garbage bins that were hauled out beyond the walls.

00:20:13.760 I mean, if it could be thought of, these prisoners thought of it and attempted it.

00:20:19.440 Some buried themselves under the ground with a little reed to breathe in, waiting for the guards to go to sleep.

00:20:25.520 And then trying to escape that way.

00:20:28.140 I mean, it was comic many times, heartbreaking in others.

00:20:32.240 Yeah, you mentioned a few cases where they got like just within just a few miles of the – I guess it's Holland, right?

00:20:39.620 Was where they were often trying to go.

00:20:41.240 A few miles and right there they got captured.

00:20:43.820 And they go all the way back and it's just like, oh, man, I can't imagine how that felt.

00:20:49.820 Well, that was the thing.

00:20:50.740 I mean, you're exactly right.

00:20:51.760 I mean, the thing was it was one part to escape the camp, to get beyond the wall.

00:20:58.340 It was quite another – most of these places were hundreds of miles from the Dutch border where they could find freedom.

00:21:06.640 So not only did they have to escape the prison, but then they had to make their way through enemy-occupied territory to reach the border.

00:21:14.540 And again, like you said, I mean, quite a few of them got within a stone's throw to the border and were napped.

00:21:22.420 Yeah, that's the thing I noticed as I was reading this, that they got really good at escaping.

00:21:26.640 They could get out.

00:21:27.520 They were masters at that.

00:21:28.820 But it was evading was the hard – and like you said, they received no training on how to evade the enemy behind enemy lines.

00:21:37.240 So they were just making this stuff up as they went.

00:21:40.260 No, they were.

00:21:40.800 I mean, they had to make their own compasses.

00:21:43.220 They had no maps about where they needed to go, how to avoid particular military installations.

00:21:51.680 And the fact of the matter was that the Germans employed almost the whole population to be on the lookout for escaped prisoners.

00:21:58.980 So you find that many instances POWs who had escaped are nabbed or spotted by schoolchildren and rounded up.

00:22:08.400 So there's these officers always trying to escape for different reasons.

00:22:14.840 The really brazen ones and the bold ones and the ones that got really good at it seem to all end up in this one POW camp called Holzminden.

00:22:22.300 Is that how you pronounce it?

00:22:23.480 Holzminden.

00:22:24.160 Holzminden.

00:22:24.880 Tell us about this camp and why was it so hard to escape from?

00:22:29.080 Okay, so you have all these prisoners, right?

00:22:31.940 And, you know, the large majority of prisoners, of course, didn't try to escape.

00:22:37.200 You only had this sort of select few who were trying again and again and again to break out.

00:22:42.520 And as you said, many of them were successful and then nabbed at the border.

00:22:46.160 So at a certain point, the Germans decide we need to do something about these escape fiends, as they call them, these people who keep trying and trying and trying. 0.87

00:22:56.260 We need to put them all into one place.

00:22:58.420 We need to make sure that that place is heavily fortified, heavily overseen by security, and make sure that they never escape.

00:23:04.920 And so they come up with this place called Holzminden, which was south of Hanover and was formerly an infantry barracks that they then surrounded by this, almost like a Russian nesting bau with a stone wall.

00:23:19.580 And then inside that, a high fence.

00:23:21.860 And inside that, a no man's land.

00:23:23.480 And inside that, another fence.

00:23:25.760 And so it was seemingly, as I call it, a kind of landlocked Alcatraz.

00:23:30.820 And they decided in the fall of 1916 that all these troublemakers should all be placed in this single prison and that they should be overseen by a particularly cruel commandant.

00:23:44.540 Yeah, so tell us about this guy.

00:23:45.620 Because he's interesting.

00:23:46.260 He's German, but he has an American connection.

00:23:49.120 Yeah, his name is Karl Niemeyer. 0.89

00:23:51.080 And, I mean, he was, I guess the best way I describe it, I mean, he was a bully of the First Order.

00:23:57.240 I mean, he had this terribly rash temper. 0.75

00:23:59.920 He was thin-skinned.

00:24:01.780 The prisoners called him everything from a cad to a bloated, pompous-crawling individual to a cheat to the personification of hate.

00:24:10.860 And his background was sort of very foggy.

00:24:14.040 He served in the military, a Prussian soldier.

00:24:17.760 He then moved, in one story, to Milwaukee, served as a bartender.

00:24:23.600 In another story, he lived in New York and made billiard tables.

00:24:27.420 People weren't quite sure what his background was, but he did speak English.

00:24:31.880 He spoke it to a certain extent, although he mauled the language continuously, which was both an object of derision by the prisoners as also hilarity.

00:24:42.080 And he found himself in World War I back in Germany with his twin brother, Heinrich, overseeing camps, prisoner of war camps in Germany.

00:24:54.680 And how did he treat these guys?

00:24:57.780 I mean, obviously, these guys were put in a camp that was very hard to escape from.

00:25:01.700 And what would he do to officers once they got recaptured?

00:25:04.500 Would he do the typical two weeks of solitary confinement, or would he punish them even more harsh?

00:25:10.020 He would harangue them.

00:25:11.500 He would strip them of their clothes. 0.85

00:25:13.600 He would put them in isolation.

00:25:14.680 And isolation, by the way, was not something that you necessarily wanted to be placed in.

00:25:20.800 I mean, you could be put in a sort of underground, small cell with no exercise, without seeing anybody for weeks and months on end, and go mad.

00:25:31.880 And many of the prisoners went absolutely delirious in isolation.

00:25:35.820 So, for the most part, he just abused and put these prisoners in isolation.

00:25:42.500 And on some rare instances, like the man that I called the British Houdini, who was eventually escaped from 12 camps before he got into the hands of Neymar, and was eventually shot in the back and stabbed by bayonets.

00:25:58.600 So, Neymar was not against violence by any means.

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00:28:06.520 And he'd often punish the entire camp whenever there was an escape made, you know, preventing them from exercising, stopping mail, things like that.

00:28:16.340 Locking them in the barracks.

00:28:17.660 And then that kind of camp-wide punishment, that wholesale punishment, was against the Haag Conventions that purportedly the Germans subscribed to.

00:28:26.820 Yeah.

00:28:27.080 I mean, and these officers, these British officers, they would complain about it, but nothing happened.

00:28:31.180 Yeah, I mean, letters were snuck out.

00:28:34.380 Prisoners who made it to Holland and back to England and reported about what was happening at Holtzminden to the war office.

00:28:42.440 They knew about it, but there was really nothing they could do.

00:28:45.360 They could, you know, do the same to German prisoners, but that really wasn't going to happen.

00:28:50.020 All right, so what's kind of funny is they put these escape fiends all in the same prison thinking, oh, you know, this is a really hard prison to escape from.

00:28:58.760 But actually, they kind of backfired on them because you got all these guys who are really good at escaping together in the same camp where they could mastermind together to come up with the ultimate escape.

00:29:11.080 So tell us about some of the men, or these escape artists, as you call them, that got placed in Holtzminden.

00:29:18.440 So you're exactly right.

00:29:20.300 I mean, Holtzminden became what I called an escape university.

00:29:23.640 So you have all these prisoners who escaped in various different ways, who had learned different methods, and you put them all into one place, and they just feed off each other and learn from each other.

00:29:33.280 So if you want to know how to make a secret hiding spot, you've got someone who's an expert in that.

00:29:39.080 If you want to make a makeshift compass, there's someone to do that.

00:29:42.140 If you want to know how to smuggle in supplies or tailor a German uniform or pick a lock or engineer some elaborate construction, there is someone at hand at Holtzminden who had done it before, who had been trained in this way.

00:29:56.200 And so you have this just collective of people.

00:29:59.560 Most of them were pilots.

00:30:01.460 They were all officers.

00:30:03.760 One of my favorites was a Canadian lieutenant named William Kokuhan, who was six feet, six inches tall, and went by the nickname Shorty, because when he was captured by the Germans, they asked, are all you Canadians so tall?

00:30:19.580 And he said, well, they call me Shorty.

00:30:22.140 And this was just the sort of nature of these guys.

00:30:24.300 Another of them was a man named David Gray, who was an army sapper, who was this sort of stiff military guy who didn't like to get his uniform dirty, but became a very good, aggressive pilot and was one of the sort of leaders of this new plot to escape from Holtzminden.

00:30:43.860 And you also had the guy that I was really intrigued by, Bennett, I think.

00:30:47.540 He was the poet?

00:30:48.760 Well, you have Harvey, who was a poet and one of the sort of great war poets.

00:30:53.920 And then you also have William Bennett, who was actually a naval observer who was an expert in hiding catches and all the like.

00:31:04.360 So there was, I mean, there were just an absolute range of people, officers who like to dress up in drag and escape.

00:31:11.160 I mean, you just have the gamut.

00:31:14.680 Well, and they also have the Pink Toes, who were this group of officers who were expert tunnelers.

00:31:19.500 And they were called Pink Toes because their feet were constantly soaked in water.

00:31:25.120 And so they became known as the Pink Toes. 0.67

00:31:27.840 So all these guys get together, they've made different escape attempts while they were there, but then they decided to do this tunnel, which was, it was a long, long tunnel.

00:31:39.940 How did, how did they, how did they all get together and agree that this was going to be the thing that would allow them to escape?

00:31:46.180 What was, what was better about this escape plan than the other plans?

00:31:49.840 So I think, you know, the, the, the first reason they needed to, you know, as soon as these guys get into a camp, David Gray or, or Shorty or, uh, Bennett, they, they survey it.

00:32:00.720 They, they look around and try to figure out what are the, what are the weak spots in the security of this place.

00:32:07.520 And Holtzminden, after weeks of, of such surveillance, they couldn't figure out any way to get out of there.

00:32:15.000 And so the idea of, of a tunnel of actually going underneath the ground seemed like really the only way that they could, they could manage it.

00:32:25.480 The other part that the other reason that, that a tunnel was so attractive was the reason that so many of these men were there is because their typical escape, whether cutting through a fence or going through the front gate, uh, in a rush or picking a lock is the people, the commandant and the officers overseeing them know immediately that they've escaped.

00:32:47.780 And so a manhunt is immediately dispatched and, and typically they're rounded up within less than a few hours.

00:32:55.040 But if you build a tunnel and you escape at night, you have a headstart, 12 hours, potentially even six hours where you can get away into the countryside and, and, and at least have a fighting chance of reaching the border.

00:33:09.420 And so the fact that Holtzminden was otherwise impossible to escape from and be the fact that a tunnel allowed them to give a headstart was just sort of combining factors that, that made it so attractive.

00:33:21.300 And how, how long of a tunnel do they have to dig?

00:33:24.420 Well, it seemed like a great idea at the beginning because they thought that it only needed to be 15 yards long.

00:33:29.060 They thought that all they needed to do was go from the basement of one of the barracks underneath the wall, which was quite close and then up out of the, out of the hole and then off they go.

00:33:42.440 But the problem was just about the same time they finished that 15 yards, the, the commandant Niemeyer put a, put a guard almost on the exact spot that they planned on emerging from.

00:33:52.520 And so it then became a situation where the only way to use that tunnel was to go 150 yards to a field where they could emerge unseen and, and get away.

00:34:06.060 All right. So 165 yard tunnel, basically.

00:34:09.440 Correct.

00:34:09.980 That's okay. That's, that's crazy. I played football in high school. A hundred yards is really long. I've crawled, you know, on my hands and feet, bear crawled a hundred yards and that was terrible.

00:34:19.420 I can't imagine picking your way. Like, what did they, I mean, how did they do this without getting detected? Like, how did they not make any noise? What did they use for tools? How did they keep the thing supported? Like, how do they know how to build a tunnel?

00:34:31.700 I mean, it was, it was, it was absolutely horrifying. The situation that, that they faced while building this tunnel. And I remember even writing it and thinking to myself, God, I could never have done this.

00:34:43.520 I mean, essentially you have them going into this tunnel, digging through the dirt with spoons, the end of a bed stand. And again, they're not building this tunnel as you imagine, probably imagine a tunnel where you can stand up and walk through it or even crawl on your hands and knees.

00:35:01.420 I mean, you literally, it was so small that you could, you could barely lie flat without your back touching the top of the tunnel and your elbows touching the sides.

00:35:10.900 So they were essentially just creating this small burrow as they could, because the amount of excavations of dirt and stone, they couldn't hide. Plus it would just take longer.

00:35:23.960 So you have these, these, these, these men, they, they go in, they're digging away. They haul supply, haul dirt out with a sack and they continue onward. And the deeper they get the, the, the staler and the less oxygen the air has. So then they have to create a bellows or, or feeding air into the system. And it could collapse at any moment.

00:35:47.360 There was dirt constantly falling in your face and down your neck. And at any moment you could basically be interred and killed. And it was for, particularly for one of the men, Casper Kennard, who was the pilot, you know, he was a claustrophobia. He hated confined spaces. And yet he's down there. He wants to escape so badly. He's down in this dark, dank tunnel, illuminated by a single candle, uh, hacking away at the ground ahead of him. 0.99

00:36:11.940 Yeah. I got claustrophobia just reading it.

00:36:14.580 Yeah. That wouldn't be good.

00:36:15.360 It wouldn't be good. I, and did besides the officers, did other people in the camp know that there was a tunnel? Like, was it an open secret?

00:36:23.120 It was, I wouldn't call it quite an open secret as much as it was, it was something that, you know, the officers, there was this small cabal of, of men. So there was this core group of 12 officers and the head of the tunnel, David Gray, who was called the father of the tunnel, wanted to keep it small.

00:36:41.460 But, but, but the fact was, is that he needed some of the orderlies, some of the enlisted men to help them, not only because they needed supplies, but because the entrance to the tunnel was actually in their orderlies quarters underneath their quarters in the basement.

00:36:55.380 So they needed uniforms from them. So a few of them knew. And then as you get further along the story and, and months past, more and more people are brought in because more and more supplies and information and, and people were needed to be in and on the know.

00:37:12.700 So at the end of the day, you had like 50 people who actually knew about the tunnel out of a group of about 600 officers.

00:37:18.780 Yeah. And even German guards knew about it.

00:37:20.600 Even some of the German guards were, uh, at least knew something was in the works. They had bribed some of the officers. In fact, one to provide them with acid to, to, to melt the iron rod foundation.

00:37:34.160 So as we mentioned earlier, escaping was the easy part. What I think was different from previous escape attempts that these guys really thought hard about evading this time.

00:37:45.700 So what were their plans to evade their captors being recaptured again after they escaped?

00:37:53.460 Yeah. I mean, I think this is what made this, what I, you know, the greatest escape of the great war is, is not only the sort of cleverness of the tunnel, but the, the amount of forethought and planning, uh, an effort that went into how they're going to make this 150 mile run to the border.

00:38:09.540 One of them was planned on dressing up as a businessman and taking a train the whole distance.

00:38:15.560 Others had mapped out a particular route that they could travel by night and, and hunker down by day.

00:38:21.220 And I think probably my favorite, my favorite story in the sort of the heroes of these stories, uh, David Gray and his partners, Cecil Blaine and Casper Kennard decide the most ingenious plan, which was, you know, to every time I think about it, I, I kind of chuckle at myself, but Gray and Blaine.

00:38:39.220 Blaine would be disguised as orderlies from an insane asylum and Kennard would be acting like an escaped lunatic.

00:38:46.720 And if they were stopped by, you know, a local policeman or a German officer as Kennard would go into sort of apoplectic fit and Gray and who spoke German fluently along with five other languages would tell the officers what the deal was.

00:39:03.580 And, uh, typically they found that people wanted to usher them out of town as quickly as possible.

00:39:09.340 Right, right.

00:39:10.420 I mean, what was, I thought it was really fascinating.

00:39:13.200 Not only they had like a workshop, uh, and they had like this system for the tunnel, but they created workshops for tailoring clothes, disguising.

00:39:20.620 They had workshops to make forged documents, photos, et cetera.

00:39:25.560 And they did this again, not knowing exactly what they were doing.

00:39:29.700 And they did this without getting caught.

00:39:31.720 Yeah, I mean, they had, again, this escape university.

00:39:35.580 So you have experts in, in all these different fields.

00:39:38.920 And one of the sort of most important ones was a man named Dick Cash, who is this Australian enlisted soldier.

00:39:45.540 He was in his mid forties.

00:39:48.000 He had all his teeth had been knocked out when he'd been blown sky high, uh, on the front.

00:39:53.960 Uh, but he was a photographer and he smuggled in supplies to provide not only, uh, photos of officers who were forged documents, but most importantly, um, duplicates of maps that they needed to, to make the run to the border.

00:40:09.640 And so all these, these players were essential and this couldn't have happened if the Germans hadn't placed all these sort of experts into one place. 0.89

00:40:18.400 Right.

00:40:18.580 Like I said, it backfired on them.

00:40:20.420 It did.

00:40:20.860 I mean, so how long did the, the, the whole plan take from, okay, we're going to dig this tunnel to where escape will tell they escaped.

00:40:29.980 How, what was the timeframe there?

00:40:31.860 About six months, six months.

00:40:33.840 That's a long time.

00:40:34.840 They thought that's a long time to keep a secret.

00:40:37.080 It's a long time.

00:40:38.200 Uh, they thought they'd be out by Christmas.

00:40:39.960 They started in basically, uh, you know, November.

00:40:42.940 They thought they'd be out by Christmas, but the fact was they put the extra guard there and then they ran into trouble along the way.

00:40:50.000 They, the tunnel reached a sort of wall of stones that they couldn't get through for a long time.

00:40:55.980 And then there were times when their entrance that they used to, to reach the tunnel was shut down.

00:41:02.500 They couldn't use it anymore.

00:41:03.520 So they needed to find another way to actually reach the tunnel that then they didn't dig from.

00:41:08.020 So there was lots of back and forth, lots of near moments where it was, the tunnel was discovered, but they eventually in July of 1918 made the break.

00:41:18.760 And how many officers escaped that night?

00:41:21.240 So you had the, you, you had 29 men actually made it out of the tunnel over that night before it collapsed on some of the officers while they were trying to make their ways through the, those officers were eventually pulled by their heels out of the tunnel.

00:41:36.780 But Niemeyer discovered it that morning of the 29, 10 made it to Holland and freedom.

00:41:43.180 And they were created as heroes in, in, in England.

00:41:46.720 The King visited them, honored them and their escapades were splashed across the news because it was, you know, it was kind of a triumph against very great odds that played very well.

00:41:58.520 And in a moment that was very dark in the war.

00:42:01.180 Yeah. I liked the, one of the guys, he's the one that disguised himself as a businessman and took the trains all the way to Holland.

00:42:07.920 He, he, as soon as he got there, he wrote a telegram, sent a telegram to Niemeyer was like, Hey, I'm in Holland.

00:42:13.060 If I ever see you, I'm going to break your neck. 0.94

00:42:16.560 Yes. And that was Colonel Rathborn. 0.99

00:42:19.200 I mean, he was, he was quite a, quite a character as there were many of these people.

00:42:24.460 Right. And the assailant asylum guys, that, that ruse worked for them. 1.00

00:42:27.860 That absolutely worked.

00:42:28.980 I mean, they, you know, they were almost captured in one town and, and Kennard went into a fit and they fed him a, a, a fake, a fake drug, which was basically aspirin.

00:42:39.880 Uh, and he calmed down and they just wanted to get them out of there as quickly as possible.

00:42:44.220 They barely measured across the border and were shot at as they ran off, but, uh, they made it.

00:42:50.280 Did, uh, all these guys go back to the battle after they escaped?

00:42:54.180 Yes. They all, um, they were, they were essentially brought back to England and said, you know, take a little time off.

00:43:00.100 And the majority of them, uh, went back and, and rejoined.

00:43:05.980 The majority of them went back and rejoined the RFC or, or their units, but the war was almost in its, in its last lengths at that point.

00:43:13.360 Yeah. And shortly after that, it was, you talk about like these guys was like, they set the example of how to do a POW escape.

00:43:21.740 Like, like how did, how did the British military, and you can also say, I mean, I imagine the German military learned from this experience.

00:43:30.760 Americans learned from this. How did they codify what these guys did on the fly?

00:43:35.540 So once these, once these, even during the war, these prisoners would, would, you know, if they escaped, if they were brought back, they, they wrote testimonies of, of what life was like.

00:43:46.800 And if they escaped, they wrote testimonies of how they escaped. And many of them, them wrote sort of memoirs that they never published.

00:43:54.240 And then you find that the world war two comes along and the British start the service called MI nine, which I mentioned before the escape and evasion service.

00:44:03.400 They decide that, you know, a lot of people were taken prisoner in world war one.

00:44:08.100 Few of them escaped. Uh, what can we do about it?

00:44:11.040 And the officers who were put in charge of, of, of starting MI nine said, well, we need to talk to the experts.

00:44:18.680 And then the experts were the people from world war one.

00:44:22.380 And, and many of them were the Holtzman escapees.

00:44:25.900 And so they went to them and, and these men, particularly William Bennett, the Naval observer became a professor, you know, a sort of secret professor going from air base to air base,

00:44:38.160 giving a slide lecture, teaching pilots and, and soldiers and, and naval, uh, officers and, and, and men what to do if they were found themselves captured.

00:44:50.800 And it ended up helping quite a few of them escape some famously in the great escape and in cold, it's, but, uh, thousands of others who you've never heard of who got back to their families because of Holtzman and what these men did.

00:45:05.180 I'm curious, as you were researching and writing about these escape artists, did you take away any life lessons?

00:45:13.960 Like, was there something about these guys that inspired you?

00:45:16.000 And you're like, I, I should have, I should try to develop that sort of attribute that they, these guys manifested with this experience.

00:45:22.760 Well, I think, you know, I mean, my takeaways were, were first this idea of like, you know, what is, what is freedom?

00:45:33.100 I mean, these, these officers were in a place where, okay, they were in some ways had it pretty, pretty nice.

00:45:40.860 They had people making them tea in the morning and polishing their boots.

00:45:44.660 But the fact that they had no control of their lives, no control of their schedule, what they ate, who they slept, where they slept, called, sort of caused what Harvey, the poet said, was a kind of moldiness, which was ruining their soul.

00:45:58.640 And this idea of, of, of what is freedom, what is essential to, inhumanity, was something that has sort of carried away, particularly Harvey's insights into that.

00:46:09.120 And I think the other one that, that was key to this story and, and sort of one that I took away was the idea of camaraderie.

00:46:16.760 David Gray, David Gray, the father of the tunnel, tried to escape multiple times and essentially given up until he found himself at Holtzman and, and decided that he needed to depend on other people.

00:46:27.140 He needed to depend on his friends to make it out and to make it through.

00:46:31.360 And those are the ones that got him through the darkest hours and, and he never would have escaped, nor would the others if they hadn't done it together.

00:46:40.140 I love that.

00:46:40.520 Well, Neil, is there someplace people can go to learn more about the book?

00:46:43.020 I think there is.

00:46:43.740 They could go to the Amazon, their local bookstore.

00:46:47.260 They could go to my website, nealbascomb, N-E-A-L-B-A-S-C-O-M-B.com.

00:46:52.320 Well, Neil Bascom, thank you so much for your time.

00:46:54.140 It's been a pleasure.

00:46:55.000 Awesome.

00:46:55.480 Great to be back.

00:46:56.600 My guest today was Neil Bascom.

00:46:57.680 He's the author of the book, The Escape Artist.

00:46:59.820 It's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.

00:47:01.980 You can find out more information about Neil's work at nealbascomb.com.

00:47:05.460 Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash escape artist, where you can find links to resources, where you can delve deeper into this topic.

00:47:13.740 Well, that wraps up another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:47:27.700 For more manly tips and advice, make sure to check out the Art of Manliness website at artofmanliness.com.

00:47:32.060 And if you enjoy the show, you've gotten something out of it.

00:47:34.000 I'd appreciate it if you give us a review on iTunes or Stitcher.

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00:47:48.040 Until next time, this is Brett McKay telling you to stay manly.

The Art of Manliness - October 22, 2018

#451： The Daring Escape Artists of WWI

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