The Mammoth Book of Secrets of the SAS & Elite Forces

by Jon E. Lewis

  Eat the food

  You will get less, worse and stranger food than you have ever had – a poor version of the stuff the enemy eats. If you are a finicky eater, get over it. Many men have died in a short period of captivity because they could not adapt to the food – they have starved themselves to death.

  Add to your diet with roots, weeds, bark, a hidden garden, animals or reptiles. Ants and grasshoppers are good sources of protein. Cat, dog and monkey meats are staples of many diets.

  Steal from your captors. If your Senior Ranking Officer approves, trade with the enemy, and share with those PoWs who need it at least as much as you do. If it’s edible, eat it.

  The enemy knows that lack of enough food or the right kinds of food decreases mental and physical powers, making you less able to resist and easier to manipulate. Therefore he will withhold food to make you do what he wants.

  Drink the water

  You must drink, even though your water smells bad, is dirty and is alive with bugs. Strain or purify it with chemicals or by boiling if you can. Make a still to obtain water or suck the juices from fruits. Tomatoes are an excellent source of fluid as are some plants, such as cacti. Catch rain or snow. If you think, you’ll drink; if you panic, you’ll dehydrate.

  Exercise for survival

  Try to take some sort of exercise every day. Keep up your muscle tone, but don’t overdo it – you won’t be getting the proteins and carbohydrates in your diet that will allow you to do strenuous exercise.

  Keep your mind active too. Try to be learning something new all the time. If you’re in a large camp, with lots of other people, the chances are that you’ll be able to learn pretty much anything you can think of. You’ll have skills that others will want to learn too.

  Play can be just as important as work. Not just physical games and sports, though these are very important, but entertainment of all kinds. Painting and drawing and writing need very little in the way of materials, and they don’t just keep you busy – they allow you to express yourself, your inner thoughts, in an important way.

  Remember, it may be hard work trying to stay fit and healthy, but it’s nothing compared with the job you’ve got if you lose your health and fitness and then have to get it back again. Your captors will like it a lot better if you just sit around doing nothing all day and every day, weakening your own morale and destroying your will to stay awake and alive. Don’t do it! Your life is in your own hands.

  Join in

  The men appointed to the jobs of Sports, Education and Entertainments Officers will want to set up as many activities and events as they can. Get involved in these activities. It doesn’t matter if you’re not too good at whatever it is – what matters most is that you get busy and active and stay that way.

  The folks back home

  Keeping in touch with your family and friends is very important for both sides. You need to know you’re not forgotten and they need to know that you’re as safe and well as possible.

  Letters and photographs are the only way you’ll be able to keep in contact, and the enemy will know this and use it to weaken you. Be ready to share your letters, photographs and parcels, if you get them, with the people around you. The SRO will put someone in charge of mail, and keep an accurate list of letters sent and received.

  Outgoing letters are often a source of intelligence for the enemy. Try to restrict yourself to a brief note like “I’m alive and well” and if you’re in any doubt about the value to the enemy of something you want to say in a letter home, ask the SRO’s advice – that’s another one of the many things he’s there for.

  Make sure that you circulate any scraps of news that you get in your letters. The best way is for a group of people to produce a camp newspaper. It needn’t be more than a handwritten sheet that gets passed on from person to person around the camp. If that’s not possible, then you’ll have to do it by word of mouth.

  Get one over

  Let no chance go by to “get one over” on the enemy, and make sure that everyone knows about every little victory. Give all the guards and camp personnel nick names – the crueller the better! Don’t use them to their faces of course, but in private use every chance you have to make fun of them. Leave them in no doubt of what you think of them.

  Camp communication

  There are many ways to communicate with other prisoners. The PoW isolation barrier and enemy-imposed ban on communication must be broken. If you can see, hear or touch other PoWs, or if articles are brought into and taken out of your place of confinement you can communicate.

  Sign language

  The standard deaf-mute language may be learned, but it is difficult. There is a simple variation that is quicker to learn, using hand signals. Either hand can be used. Numbers are rotated to indicate that they are numbers and not letters. The code uses the standard US Navy hand signal numbers; zero is shown by rotating the letter O. Let your hand drop slightly after each series of letters or words.

  To indicate “I understand”, the receiver may nod slightly in a prearranged manner. Different body movement such as blinking the eyes, flexing the hands or arms, shrugging the shoulders etc; all natural and meaningless to the enemy – can be worked out in advance to indicate different responses.

  Tap codes

  The morse code can be learned quickly. But it has a serious drawback; it consists of dots and dashes that sometimes cannot be distinguished. There is a better system that consists of a square marked off in 25 subsquares; 5 across and 5 up and down, with the letters of the alphabet in the subsquares (the letter K is not used because it sounds like C). The squares running from left to right are rows; the squares from top to bottom are columns.

  Taps are used to identify the letters. The first series of taps gives the row; after a short pause the second series of taps gives the column. The letter is in the block where the row and column meet. To find the letter O for example, three taps would designate the third row (L-M-N-O-P); a slight pause followed by four taps would designate the fourth column (D-I-O-T-Y); the row and column meet at the letter O.

  A longer pause indicates the end of a word. Two taps indicate that the word has been received. A series of rapid taps indicates that the word was not received or not understood. When a receiver has enough letters to know what the word is, he gives two taps and the sender goes on to the next word. Each time the code is broken by your captors you can rearrange the letters.

  The methods of getting a message across with this code are almost unlimited. The code can be tapped, whistled, winked, coughed, sneezed or hummed; you can nudge the guy next to you; you can use finger movements, eye movements, twitches, broom strokes, pushups; or you can bang objects together.

  Word of mouth

  This can sometimes be dangerous. To disguise the content from the enemy, language variations can be used; subculture language (street language of minority groups), for example or pidgin English, ordinary slang etc.

  Talking through the wall

  Roll up a blanket in the shape of a ring doughnut and put it against the wall. Put your face in the centre of the doughnut and talk slowly. The receiver puts his ear against the wall on the other side or presses the open end of a cup against the wall with his ear against the other end.

  Different noises

  Various sounds such as grunting, coughing, sneezing, blowing your nose, whistling or humming can be used as prearranged signals to pass messages such as “all is well”, “enemy around”, “stop” “go” etc.

  Writing messages

  You will not usually have writing materials available, but you can improvize; use charred wood, fruit juices, ashes mixed with any fluid etc. Use any pointed object as a writing implement. Leaves, wood, cloth, toilet paper and any material can be used as a writing surface.

  Mail deliveries

  As well as personal deliveries, messages can be left in any hiding place – latrines, trees, rocks, crevices, holes etc; the best places are those that the enemy would expect you to visi
t normally. The hiding places should be changed frequently and couriers should deposit and collect their dispatches at different times.

  ESCAPE

  The first hours

  The best chances to escape will come straight after your capture. You’ll still be close to your own forces, and so you’ll know which direction to head in, and you may even be familiar with the country. You’ll be fitter and healthier than after any time in captivity, and if you can keep your wits about you, you may be able to take advantage of the confusion that is usually to be found just behind the fighting front, with reinforcements and resupply trying to go forward and medevac and empty resupply units trying to move back.

  You’ll be in the hands of combat troops, not people trained in holding prisoners, and their inexperience may give you opportunities. But at the same time they’ll be psyched up for battle, so will probably shoot rather than ask questions. They might just shoot you for the fun of it.

  For all these reasons every army has a plan for dealing with prisoners of war, for getting them out of the combat zone as quickly as possible, so that they can be interrogated while the information they have about troop strengths and movements is still worth something.

  The chances are that if you’re captured on your own, or as part of a small group, you will be held somewhere like the regimental command post, and then transferred to the rear echelon headquarters run by intelligence security units, military police or internal security troops. This will not be far from the fighting front.

  In transit

  When enough prisoners have accumulated, you’ll be moved back, being kept to open country and avoiding towns and villages. The enemy is likely to be short of motor transport – or, at least, will give a very low priority to the transportation of prisoners, so you may well find yourself evacuated on foot.

  He’ll be short of personnel too, so the PoW column may have too few guards, who may even be unfit for active duty – walking wounded perhaps, themselves on their way to rear echelon hospitals. That means that there will be more chances to escape.

  If the guards are placed at the head and tail of the column, as is often the case, pass the word through the ranks of prisoners to spread out and make the line of marching men as long as possible.

  Keep the pace as slow as you can. At a bend in the road, you may suddenly find that the head and the tail are out of each other’s sight, which means that men in the centre of the column can slip away to either side of the road and get quickly into some kind of cover.

  The larger the number of men who make the break, the greater are the chances of their absence being noticed straight away. One or two men missing probably won’t be noticed until the next head count is made, and that may not be until the end of the day.

  Take advantage of any diversion, too. Artillery bombardment and attack from the air or extreme weather conditions, for instance, are likely to cause a lot of confusion, and may permit men to slip away while the guards’ attention is distracted.

  If you’re being transported by truck out of the combat zone, you will probably be moved by night. If the guards are not alert and you are not locked inside the vehicle, you may get a chance to jump for it when the truck slows down – climbing a hill, for instance, or negotiating a section of damaged road. Try to sabotage the vehicles – put sugar or sand in the petrol, for example – so that they are forced to stop. Once again, an air raid may give you the necessary cover.

  Permanent PoW camps are usually placed as far away as possible from the battlefield and from borders with neutral or enemy territory, so the last move will probably be made by train. Large groups of prisoners in transit are usually locked into freight cars, the guards relying on the physical security of the locked wagons to stop escape attempts.

  The conditions inside these cars especially during a long journey in the middle of summer or winter can become lethal, and the fact that you’ll probably be packed in very tightly doesn’t help. Even so because you’ll have long periods without observation this may provide your best chance. Try to break though the floor, the walls (especially at a window or a ventilator) or the roof.

  If you’re travelling in passenger coaches, then you have two other advantages, even though you may have guards to worry about; it’s much easier and quicker to break out through a window than the solid sides of a freight wagon, and you’ll probably be able to communicate in some way with prisoners in other compartments or even in other carriages.

  Don’t relax for a moment, but always stay alert to any possibility, because you never know if you’ll ever get another chance. If you’re not in a position to escape yourself, help others to do so even if it means that you’ll be punished for it later.

  RESCUE

  As technology takes over from human observation and scrutiny, escape has become more and more difficult. But what technology has taken away with one hand it has given back with the other. Spy satellites and high-altitude observation flights give intelligence officers a clear view of every part of the Earth’s surface. That means you have a way of signalling to your own people, no matter where on Earth you may be. There’s no need to rush it. You can trace out the letters of a message in the soil of a compound – or even stand around in groups that shape the letter in human bodies – in such a way that the enemy won’t even be aware that you’re doing it. Make certain that each arm of each letter is at least two metres long or it might not be seen from above. But remember, it’s as likely to be seen by enemy satellites as your own.

  Once your position has been identified either by this method or by a successful escaper being de-briefed, a coded letter getting through, or an enemy national selling the information – it may be possible for a rescue mission to be put together. Even if you’re four or five hundred miles from the nearest friendly border or sea coast, your own authorities may be able to get a rescue force through.

  The odds on a successful rescue will be a lot greater if there’s a channel of communication from the would-be rescuers to you, and that probably means coded radio messages. There have been many cases of prisoners building radio receivers in camps, and here technology lends a hand once again, modern radio receivers being small enough to be easily hidden in all sorts of places.

  Any information should include a validation code, such as mention of a pre-arranged subject such as trees or weather, or even the days of the week. Leave this code off only when under duress.

  Every piece of information that you can exchange with the people planning the rescue attempt will increase its chances of success. One of the most vital will be to set up the signalling system you’ll use to call the rescue force in at the last moment.

  The chances are that it will be helicopter borne and the pilots and mission commanders will need to be shown exactly where to land to be most effective, wind direction, where to expect resistance, and perhaps even where the prisoners they’ve come to rescue are to be found.

  In the camp

  Escaping from an established prisoner of war camp is a much more difficult task than making a break from a train or from a column of marching men.

  The camp itself will have been built specifically to keep you in; barbed wire, electronic surveillance, floodlights, watch towers, dogs and thermal imaging for tunnel searches are just some of the weapons at the enemy’s disposal. And even if you do succeed in getting out of the camp itself, you’re still faced with a difficult and dangerous journey through enemy territory, where just your physical appearance may be enough to give you away.

  The escape committee

  Part of the prisoners’ secret organisation in the camp will be devoted to the business of escaping. There will be very few ways of making an escape from a camp, and each time an attempt is made it will cut down those possibilities even further.

  The escape committee will coordinate escape attempts, to try to ensure that each one has the best possible chance of success and also set up the infrastructure that each will need – tools, diversions, false documents, intelli
gence and so on. You should collect and hoard everything, even useless articles; these will mask the useful ones if you are searched by camp guards.

  Most escape attempts will need this sort of organisation – but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t go for it on your own if a chance presents itself unexpectedly, perhaps from a labour party working outside the camp.

  DOCUMENTS AND DISGUISES

  Before you get too far in your escape planning, you have to think how you’ll cross the enemy territory that lies between you and neutral or friendly forces. There are two methods – either you try to blend in with the local population, or you try to stay hidden.

  If you try to fit in, you’ll need clothing, documents, money and at least some knowledge of the language, all of which will either have to be produced inside the camp or stolen once you get outside.

  Unless aircraft are flying slowly at low altitude you will probably not be seen. To attract the attention of friendly aircraft you need to make a large sign which will stand out; letters should have arms of not less than two metres. Alternatively you can send the emergency “SOS” signal in Morse code. Look around for any useful material; stones, fertilizer sacks, anything that can be arranged into a shape to catch the pilot’s attention. Or when on parade in PoW camp, form your parade up so that it spells out the letters “SOS” as shown above.

  In order to forge documents, you have to know what they look like to start with, and you must have the right sort of raw material available – paper, inks and dyes, pens and so on, not to mention the skill to do it. And as magnetic encoding like that used on credit cards gets more common, the chances decrease of producing forged documents that will pass any sort of examination.

  The other option is to travel in secret using your survival training to keep out of enemy hands. In many ways this is more practical and at least you know where you are when you depend only on your own skills.