When you think of wartime prison escapes, what comes to mind? Well, probably the breakouts attempted by prisoners of war during World War II thanks to the movie The Great Escape. But the escapees of World War I learned many of the tricks of the trade from their pioneering predecessors who honed their craft during the First World War. My guest today has written a book about their audacious exploits. His name is Neil Bascom, and his book is The Escape Artist: A Band of Daredevil Pilots and the Greatest Prison Break of the Great War.
00:03:29.080Well, I've always wanted to write an escape story. The Escape from Alcatraz was one of my favorite movies growing up.
00:03:38.380And 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.
00:03:49.360And so I always wanted to write one of these stories, but I was searching for the right one.
00:03:54.120And an editor of mine wanted me to write about the Stalag Luft escape, the Great Escape of World War II,
00:04:01.360but that ground had been fairly well-tread.
00:04:05.280And so I was looking for something else, and I finally ended up reading this book about MI9,
00:04:11.020which was the World War II escape and invasion service of the British.
00:04:15.600And in that book, they note this escape that happened in the previous war, in World War I, at a place called Holtzminden.
00:04:24.860And it turns out that those people who executed that escape became the teachers and the professors of MI9.
00:04:33.560And that was the sort of hook that grabbed me.
00:04:36.780I wanted to learn about this original escape.
00:04:39.160And the further I plumbed into it, it just turned out to be an amazing story.
00:04:45.600Yeah, so you mentioned The Great Escape.
00:04:47.340I'm sure a lot of people have seen the movie with Steve McQueen jumping over the fence on the motorcycle, looking cool.
00:04:54.900And as I was reading this book, I mean, I was like, I'm reading the prequel of The Great Escape.
00:04:59.600Like, 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.
00:05:09.600Yeah, I mean, the escape at Holtzminden was really the roadmap for The Great Escape that we all know of.
00:05:16.540And 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,
00:05:23.160but you use it as a backdrop to explore other facets of World War I that a lot of people aren't familiar with.
00:05:30.240For example, I mean, the subtitle, it's, you know, The Daredevil Pilots in The Greatest Prison Break.
00:05:35.440World War I was the first war where aviation played a role.
00:05:40.340I mean, what, I mean, by this time, planes weren't that old, 10 years, maybe.
00:05:45.340What were militaries doing with planes that they had during the first war?
00:05:50.100Yeah, I mean, the planes at this point in time were essentially made up of wood, wire, and some canvas.
00:06:02.400And the generals in charge really didn't think that they would be terribly useful.
00:06:06.580I mean, they called them a, one general called it a useless and expensive fad.
00:06:10.680Another thought that they'd maybe need one or two planes, but that was about it.
00:06:15.220But 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.
00:06:59.440And so the British Air Force, I mean, what was the state of the British Air Force at this time compared to the German?
00:07:05.120Did one have superior air power over the other?
00:07:08.400I 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.
00:07:15.580They were constantly adapting technology.
00:07:18.120They were building faster planes with more firepower and also training their pilots better.
00:07:22.820So you find that at the beginning of the war, the Germans were stronger.
00:07:26.480But, you know, as 1950 came along, the British started to sort of gain momentum.
00:07:33.080And 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.
00:07:48.040Well, so yeah, as soon as they found out that these airplanes have a role, they had to start ramping up production of the airplanes.
00:08:08.840Well, 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.
00:08:19.660But, of course, they need more and more pilots as more and more of them are shot down.
00:08:23.180And 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.
00:08:38.800It was rather a ridiculous sort of training recruitment process.
00:08:42.500You know, they would ask potential pilots who their favorite poet was.
00:08:47.640Was Kipling or Stevenson a better poet?
00:08:49.980What was the right answer to that question?
00:08:53.640Yes, it was Kipling, actually, and Shelly, just so you know, over Merida.
00:08:59.340They liked football players over pianists.
00:09:02.740Again, it was rather ridiculous recruitment process, but over time they found who exactly were the best pilots.
00:09:09.360And their training methods were both extremely dangerous.
00:09:13.400Half 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.
00:09:24.860It attracted a certain type of person.
00:09:27.480And the other issue with these things is that you're behind enemy lines, typically, because you're doing reconnaissance, you're doing bombing runs.
00:09:34.580So, you're more likely, probably, to be taken prisoner.
00:09:39.480I mean, you know, in 1916, where many of these pilots were captured, the lifespan in the air was 17 minutes long over enemy lines.
00:09:51.060So, you were liable to be shot down in less than a quarter of an hour.
00:09:55.940And many people died, and many of the pilots were actually captured.
00:09:59.600And 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.
00:10:09.020And 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.
00:17:27.980And there were even rules between Germany and Britain about how long you could put these officers into isolation.
00:17:34.840Was it two weeks at a certain point in time?
00:17:37.180It was a couple months at another point in time.
00:17:40.080So, again, the threat of death was not nearly as high as if you were an enlisted soldier,
00:17:46.660which, of course, if you look at the percentages, many more officers tried to escape than enlisted soldiers.
00:17:53.000Right, and a lot of these officers you talk about in the book, they were – they had made several escape attempts.
00:17:58.940It reminded me, again, of the Steve McQueen character in The Great Escape.
00:18:02.660Keeps on trying to escape, gets thrown back in the clinker, gets out, tries to make another escape.
00:18:07.900I mean, these guys were doing – I mean, why were they?
00:18:10.200Was it because they wanted their personal freedom, or did they feel like it was their duty as an officer
00:18:15.620to sort of muck things up for the Germans?
00:18:17.500So, you know, their escaping contributed to the war effort.
00:18:21.460Yeah, I think, you know, you find over the course of reading these letters that these prisoners wrote
00:18:27.820and their memoirs subsequent to their escape, the motivations were pretty much all over the place.
00:18:34.360Many of them, of course, just wanted to get back into the fight.
00:18:37.980They wanted to get back to England or their country and get back into the fray.
00:18:43.780Others 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
00:18:54.000was one less resource that they had to put into the war.
00:18:59.640And a lot of it was just this sheer sense of shame that they had, which was unwarranted these prisoners had of being captured.
00:19:09.540I mean, the ethos at the time was that you shouldn't be captured.
00:19:12.720And so there was a sense that they had somehow not done the proper thing.
00:19:17.760And so they wanted to sort of right there that wrong by escaping.
00:19:21.900Right. That sense of British gentlemanly honor was driving.
00:21:40.800I mean, they had to make their own compasses.
00:21:43.220They had no maps about where they needed to go, how to avoid particular military installations.
00:21:51.680And the fact of the matter was that the Germans employed almost the whole population to be on the lookout for escaped prisoners.
00:21:58.980So you find that many instances POWs who had escaped are nabbed or spotted by schoolchildren and rounded up.
00:22:08.400So there's these officers always trying to escape for different reasons.
00:22:14.840The 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.
00:22:24.880Tell us about this camp and why was it so hard to escape from?
00:22:29.080Okay, so you have all these prisoners, right?
00:22:31.940And, you know, the large majority of prisoners, of course, didn't try to escape.
00:22:37.200You only had this sort of select few who were trying again and again and again to break out.
00:22:42.520And as you said, many of them were successful and then nabbed at the border.
00:22:46.160So 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.
00:22:56.260We need to put them all into one place.
00:22:58.420We need to make sure that that place is heavily fortified, heavily overseen by security, and make sure that they never escape.
00:23:04.920And 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.
00:23:25.760And so it was seemingly, as I call it, a kind of landlocked Alcatraz.
00:23:30.820And 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.
00:24:01.780The prisoners called him everything from a cad to a bloated, pompous-crawling individual to a cheat to the personification of hate.
00:24:10.860And his background was sort of very foggy.
00:24:14.040He served in the military, a Prussian soldier.
00:24:17.760He then moved, in one story, to Milwaukee, served as a bartender.
00:24:23.600In another story, he lived in New York and made billiard tables.
00:24:27.420People weren't quite sure what his background was, but he did speak English.
00:24:31.880He 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.
00:24:42.080And he found himself in World War I back in Germany with his twin brother, Heinrich, overseeing camps, prisoner of war camps in Germany.
00:25:14.680And isolation, by the way, was not something that you necessarily wanted to be placed in.
00:25:20.800I 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.
00:25:31.880And many of the prisoners went absolutely delirious in isolation.
00:25:35.820So, for the most part, he just abused and put these prisoners in isolation.
00:25:42.500And 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.
00:25:58.600So, Neymar was not against violence by any means.
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00:28:06.520And he'd often punish the entire camp whenever there was an escape made, you know, preventing them from exercising, stopping mail, things like that.
00:28:17.660And then that kind of camp-wide punishment, that wholesale punishment, was against the Haag Conventions that purportedly the Germans subscribed to.
00:28:34.380Prisoners who made it to Holland and back to England and reported about what was happening at Holtzminden to the war office.
00:28:42.440They knew about it, but there was really nothing they could do.
00:28:45.360They could, you know, do the same to German prisoners, but that really wasn't going to happen.
00:28:50.020All 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.
00:28:58.760But 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.
00:29:11.080So tell us about some of the men, or these escape artists, as you call them, that got placed in Holtzminden.
00:29:20.300I mean, Holtzminden became what I called an escape university.
00:29:23.640So 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.
00:29:33.280So if you want to know how to make a secret hiding spot, you've got someone who's an expert in that.
00:29:39.080If you want to make a makeshift compass, there's someone to do that.
00:29:42.140If 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.
00:29:56.200And so you have this just collective of people.
00:30:03.760One 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?
00:30:19.580And he said, well, they call me Shorty.
00:30:22.140And this was just the sort of nature of these guys.
00:30:24.300Another 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.
00:30:43.860And you also had the guy that I was really intrigued by, Bennett, I think.
00:31:14.680Well, and they also have the Pink Toes, who were this group of officers who were expert tunnelers.
00:31:19.500And they were called Pink Toes because their feet were constantly soaked in water.
00:31:25.120And so they became known as the Pink Toes.
00:31:27.840So 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.
00:31:39.940How 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?
00:31:46.180What was, what was better about this escape plan than the other plans?
00:31:49.840So 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.
00:32:00.720They, they look around and try to figure out what are the, what are the weak spots in the security of this place.
00:32:07.520And Holtzminden, after weeks of, of such surveillance, they couldn't figure out any way to get out of there.
00:32:15.000And 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.
00:32:25.480The 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.
00:32:47.780And so a manhunt is immediately dispatched and, and typically they're rounded up within less than a few hours.
00:32:55.040But 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.
00:33:09.420And 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.
00:33:21.300And how, how long of a tunnel do they have to dig?
00:33:24.420Well, it seemed like a great idea at the beginning because they thought that it only needed to be 15 yards long.
00:33:29.060They 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.
00:33:42.440But 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.
00:33:52.520And 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.
00:34:06.060All right. So 165 yard tunnel, basically.
00:34:09.980That'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.
00:34:19.420I 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?
00:34:31.700I 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.
00:34:43.520I 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.
00:35:01.420I 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.
00:35:10.900So 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.
00:35:23.960So 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.
00:35:47.360There 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.
00:36:11.940Yeah. I got claustrophobia just reading it.
00:36:15.360It 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?
00:36:23.120It 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.
00:36:41.460But, 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.
00:36:55.380So 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.
00:37:12.700So 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.
00:37:18.780Yeah. And even German guards knew about it.
00:37:20.600Even 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.
00:37:34.160So 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.
00:37:45.700So what were their plans to evade their captors being recaptured again after they escaped?
00:37:53.460Yeah. 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.
00:38:09.540One of them was planned on dressing up as a businessman and taking a train the whole distance.
00:38:15.560Others had mapped out a particular route that they could travel by night and, and hunker down by day.
00:38:21.220And 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.
00:38:39.220Blaine would be disguised as orderlies from an insane asylum and Kennard would be acting like an escaped lunatic.
00:38:46.720And 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.
00:39:03.580And, uh, typically they found that people wanted to usher them out of town as quickly as possible.
00:39:10.420I mean, what was, I thought it was really fascinating.
00:39:13.200Not only they had like a workshop, uh, and they had like this system for the tunnel, but they created workshops for tailoring clothes, disguising.
00:39:20.620They had workshops to make forged documents, photos, et cetera.
00:39:25.560And they did this again, not knowing exactly what they were doing.
00:39:29.700And they did this without getting caught.
00:39:31.720Yeah, I mean, they had, again, this escape university.
00:39:35.580So you have experts in, in all these different fields.
00:39:38.920And one of the sort of most important ones was a man named Dick Cash, who is this Australian enlisted soldier.
00:39:48.000He had all his teeth had been knocked out when he'd been blown sky high, uh, on the front.
00:39:53.960Uh, 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.
00:40:09.640And 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.
00:41:03.520So they needed to find another way to actually reach the tunnel that then they didn't dig from.
00:41:08.020So 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.
00:41:18.760And how many officers escaped that night?
00:41:21.240So 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.
00:41:36.780But Niemeyer discovered it that morning of the 29, 10 made it to Holland and freedom.
00:41:43.180And they were created as heroes in, in, in England.
00:41:46.720The 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.
00:41:58.520And in a moment that was very dark in the war.
00:42:01.180Yeah. 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.
00:42:07.920He, he, as soon as he got there, he wrote a telegram, sent a telegram to Niemeyer was like, Hey, I'm in Holland.
00:42:13.060If I ever see you, I'm going to break your neck.
00:42:28.980I 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.
00:42:39.880Uh, and he calmed down and they just wanted to get them out of there as quickly as possible.
00:42:44.220They barely measured across the border and were shot at as they ran off, but, uh, they made it.
00:42:50.280Did, uh, all these guys go back to the battle after they escaped?
00:42:54.180Yes. They all, um, they were, they were essentially brought back to England and said, you know, take a little time off.
00:43:00.100And the majority of them, uh, went back and, and rejoined.
00:43:05.980The 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.
00:43:13.360Yeah. 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.
00:43:21.740Like, like how did, how did the British military, and you can also say, I mean, I imagine the German military learned from this experience.
00:43:30.760Americans learned from this. How did they codify what these guys did on the fly?
00:43:35.540So 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.
00:43:46.800And if they escaped, they wrote testimonies of how they escaped. And many of them, them wrote sort of memoirs that they never published.
00:43:54.240And 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.
00:44:03.400They decide that, you know, a lot of people were taken prisoner in world war one.
00:44:08.100Few of them escaped. Uh, what can we do about it?
00:44:11.040And the officers who were put in charge of, of, of starting MI nine said, well, we need to talk to the experts.
00:44:18.680And then the experts were the people from world war one.
00:44:22.380And, and many of them were the Holtzman escapees.
00:44:25.900And 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,
00:44:38.160giving 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.
00:44:50.800And 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.
00:45:05.180I'm curious, as you were researching and writing about these escape artists, did you take away any life lessons?
00:45:13.960Like, was there something about these guys that inspired you?
00:45:16.000And you're like, I, I should have, I should try to develop that sort of attribute that they, these guys manifested with this experience.
00:45:22.760Well, I think, you know, I mean, my takeaways were, were first this idea of like, you know, what is, what is freedom?
00:45:33.100I mean, these, these officers were in a place where, okay, they were in some ways had it pretty, pretty nice.
00:45:40.860They had people making them tea in the morning and polishing their boots.
00:45:44.660But 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.
00:45:58.640And 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.
00:46:09.120And 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.
00:46:16.760David 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.
00:46:27.140He needed to depend on his friends to make it out and to make it through.
00:46:31.360And 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.
00:46:57.680He's the author of the book, The Escape Artist.
00:46:59.820It's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.
00:47:01.980You can find out more information about Neil's work at nealbascomb.com.
00:47:05.460Also 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.
00:47:13.740Well, that wraps up another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
00:47:27.700For more manly tips and advice, make sure to check out the Art of Manliness website at artofmanliness.com.
00:47:32.060And if you enjoy the show, you've gotten something out of it.
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