Meanwhile, Lady Nithsdale maintained the pretense that her husband was still in the building. “When I was in the room,” she later wrote, “I talked to him as if he had really been present, and answered my own questions in my Lord’s voice as nearly as I could imitate it. I walked up and down, as if we were conversing together, till I thought they had time enough to thoroughly clear themselves of the guards.” As she left the room, she told the guard outside she was going to fetch her maid herself because Evans had still not arrived, and asked that he please leave his Lordship to his prayers. She then walked out of the Tower, and joined her husband in hiding at the home of a friend. They eventually fled to Rome, but not before Lady Nithsdale sneaked back up to Scotland to recover the vital documents she had buried there.
“For a man in my Lord’s situation it was the very best thing he could have done,” King George reportedly—and grudgingly—said of Nithsdale’s bold escape. As for his wife, though, he swore that she had given him “more mischief than any woman in the whole of Christendom.”
3
Special Delivery from Bondage
I entered the world a slave,” Henry Box Brown wrote in his autobiography, “in the midst of a country whose most honored writings declare that all men have a right to liberty.” It was from the dehumanizing system of bondage, where his wife and children were sold away from him by men who called themselves Christians, that Henry Brown was determined to escape. “I now began to get weary of my bonds,” he wrote of that terrible time when his family was taken away, “and earnestly panted after liberty.” To achieve it, he came up with a simple, yet daring plan: he would have himself mailed to freedom in Philadelphia.
A carpenter built the shipping crate, barely large enough to contain him, while a sympathetic shopkeeper in Richmond agreed to arrange for a friend of his to take possession of the human cargo when it arrived in the North. Brown then had to contrive an excuse to be absent from work at his master’s tobacco plant so he wouldn’t be missed while the plan was executed. He had an injured finger, but it wasn’t enough to satisfy the overseer. So Brown’s friend Dr. Smith procured for him some corrosive oil of vitriol. It burned his finger to the bone when he applied it, and the damage convinced the overseer to excuse him.
On the morning of March 29, 1849, Brown met Dr. Smith and the shopkeeper at the place that had been arranged for him to be packed into the crate. Several breathing holes were bored into the box, which measured only three feet, one inch in length, two feet in width, and two feet, six inches in height—a dangerously tight squeeze. Brown’s only provision was a flask of water. “Being thus equipped for the battle of liberty,” Brown wrote, “my friends nailed down the lid and had me conveyed to the Express Office, which was about a mile distant from the place where I was packed. I had no sooner arrived at the office than I was turned heels up, while some person nailed something on the end of the box.” He would be at the mercy of careless cargo handlers throughout the arduous journey. During a transfer from train to steamboat at Potomac Creek, Virginia, he was left upside down.
“I felt my eyes swelling as if they would burst from their sockets,” he wrote; “and the veins on my temples were dreadfully distended with pressure of blood upon my head. In this position I attempted to lift my hand to my face but I had no power to move it; I felt a cold sweat coming over me which seemed to be a warning that death was about to terminate my earthly miseries, but as I feared even that, less than slavery, I resolved to submit to the will of God, and under the influence of that impression, I lifted my soul in prayer to God, who alone, was able to deliver me. My cry was soon heard, for I could hear a man saying to another, that he had traveled a long way and had been standing there two hours, and he would like to get somewhere to sit down; so perceiving my box, standing on end, he threw it down and then the two sat upon it. I was thus relieved from a state of agony which may be more easily imagined than described.”
After twenty-seven hours, and several more mishaps, including being dropped on his head during a transfer in Washington, D.C., Henry Brown emerged in Philadelphia—but not quite a free man. The Fugitive Slave Act, passed in 1850, eventually forced him to escape once again, to Britain. It was a longer journey, but at least Brown didn’t have to endure it as cargo.
4
Sneak Retreat
The Gallipoli campaign of World War I was an unmitigated disaster—except for its conclusion. It was then that one hundred and forty thousand Allied soldiers escaped almost certain slaughter in an epic ruse that completely fooled the Turkish foe.
The poorly planned offensive on Turkey’s Gallipoli Peninsula, which tarnished for a time the reputation of its champion, First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, was intended to open a second front in the east to divert German strength from the stalemated western front, open a supply route to Russia, and facilitate the capture of Constantinople (now Istanbul) to immobilize the Turks. But the massive force that landed on the shores of Gallipoli in the spring of 1915 was immediately overwhelmed by enemy fire from the hills above the beaches. After several months, a staggering number of lives had been lost but little progress made. Churchill was called “the butcher of Gallipoli” amid cries for the feckless campaign to be abandoned. Opponents of withdrawal argued, however, that a retreat would result in a bloodbath if the soldiers left what little cover they had to make their way across the beaches to waiting evacuation ships.
A compromise was reached when it was decided that two of the three beachheads the Allies had managed to establish on Gallipoli would be abandoned. Lieutenant General Charles Monro was in charge of the evacuation, which required stealth and deception to succeed. His plan was to have hundreds of men slip away every night without the Turks noticing by making the beachheads appear unchanged. First the enemy had to be desensitized to the growing silence of the vanishing troops. For several days all sounds were muffled as much as possible. Soldiers held their fire. Blankets were spread in the trenches, and boots were wrapped in burlap. Then, on the night of December 10, 1915, the actual escape was set in motion. Flour marked trails from the camps to the shoreline where evacuation boats waited, and every night hundreds of men silently made their way to safety.
To maintain the illusion that the camps were still full, the remaining soldiers tended an unchanging number of campfires, set up dummy troops, drove empty supply wagons, and even played cricket to give the appearance of normalcy. A mechanism was also rigged to fire unmanned rifles at random intervals. “It’s getting terribly lonely at night,” an English soldier wrote in his diary. “Not a soul about. Only the excitement keeps us from getting tired.”
The Turks were oblivious to the mass escape that was occurring right below them, and on December 20, the last soldiers slipped away after setting fire to huge piles of equipment and exploding mines that sent the bewildered enemy rushing to the beaches. Monro’s deception was so successful that not one life was lost in the evacuation, which was repeated at the third beachhead several weeks later. Only Winston Churchill, who continued to stubbornly defend the Gallipoli campaign, seemed unimpressed, and wrote of Monro: “He came, he saw, he capitulated.”
5
Out of Colditz
The primary duty of every prisoner of war is to try to escape. It was a responsibility the Allied officers held by the Nazis at Colditz Castle responded to with gusto throughout World War II. They were called Deutschfeindlich, anti-German troublemakers who had proven themselves to be high security risks at other POW camps, and they made Colditz a veritable escape factory. Though not all their attempts were successful—indeed only a handful actually made it out of Germany—even the failures were ingeniously plotted, and if nothing else they drove their captors to constant distraction.
Colditz Castle sits high on a rocky outcrop above the Mulde River in the heart of Germany. With its barred windows, floodlit courtyards, and precipitous drops, the towering edifice was deemed by the Nazis to be escape-proof. Even if a prisoner made it past the imposing walls and
barbed wire, he would still have to contend with ever vigilant German citizens, especially the Hitler Youth, as he tried to get to the nearest neutral border hundreds of miles away. But the Nazis underestimated the tenacity and imagination of the British, French, Dutch, Belgian, Polish, and, later, American officers who spent their otherwise monotonous days and nights at Colditz looking for ways out. Escape was their sole preoccupation. They dug tunnels, created disguises, and even secretly built a glider in the castle’s attic to fly off the roof.
The resourcefulness of the officers was extraordinary. Almost any available item became a tool of escape. Jelly from Red Cross parcels was used in a makeshift printing press to reproduce maps of Germany—then eaten. Blankets were refashioned into civilian overcoats. The prisoners even made a camera out of a cigar box and a pair of broken spectacles to take photographs for use on forged identity papers. And what couldn’t be made or found at Colditz was smuggled in from the outside. The British War Office set up a special branch of the secret service called M19 for that very purpose. They sent parcels, called “naughty boxes,” that contained all manner of escape apparatus—cheese wire for cutting bars concealed inside shoelaces, maps pressed into wax gramophone records, compasses hidden inside walnuts or bars of soap.
On one occasion, a German guard recorded the arrival of five dress uniforms for English officers, which were permitted, and the separate discovery of civilian clothes buttons hidden inside a board game. “What do they want with these buttons in a POW camp?” the guard wrote in his diary. “There has to be a connection between these and the dress uniforms! When we made another detailed search of the latter, we made the following discovery: when the front seam of the [uniform] collar was opened and the stiffening material pulled out, the collar immediately turned into a soft fold-over civilian collar. . . . Pockets and epaulets were only very lightly attached and could be pulled off easily. Within a minute the uniform turned into a civilian suit. A really clever piece of work, proving to us, in connection with all items we found hidden in things sent to the English, that there was an entire industry at work over there that produced escape items and sent them, masterfully hidden, to their POWs.”
Although the British were forever devising new ways to escape, it was the French who first managed to get members of their ranks out of Colditz. One officer took a wild leap over a fence; another slipped into a house adjacent to the castle’s exercise area and hid there until it was safe to steal away. The French were followed by the Dutch, who found a unique way out. In the exercise area was a large manhole cover secured by a heavy nut and bolt. Below it was a ten-foot-deep well. A Dutch officer managed to get the exact dimensions of the bolt and made a glass replica of it. The plan was to have a couple of officers slip into the well during the allotted exercise period and hide there until after dark. The glass bolt would make the cover look secure to the Germans, but would allow the men in the well to lift the cover and climb out. They would then sweep up the broken glass bolt and replace it with the real one so it would appear the cover had never been opened.
On the appointed day, the Dutch played a game of rugby as the guards watched. Using a scrummage as cover, they unfastened the bolt and the first man was quickly lowered into the well. Later in the game, he was followed by the second, with the real bolt in his pocket. The glass bolt was then applied. As the two officers were certain to be missed during a head count at the end of the exercise period, a third man created a dangerous diversion. He clipped a hole in the barbed wire fence around the enclosure and walked out into the surrounding woods. Having made no effort to conceal himself, he was quickly spotted by the guards. As they rushed toward him, guns leveled, he shouted into the woods, “Run! Discovered!” The tactic gave the Germans the impression that two others had gone out through the fence before him. Fortunately, he wasn’t shot. While the surrounding area was scoured for the two phantom escapees, the real ones stood waiting in the well. They emerged later that night and commenced their adventurous trek across Germany to freedom. Two more Dutch officers were able to escape the same way a month later.
After thirty-five failed attempts, the British finally made their first “home run”15 in early January 1941. Major Pat Reid, the British officer in charge of escapes, discovered a passage out of the castle beneath the stage where prisoners put on plays and musical revues. It was an incredibly risky route, though, because an escaper would have to walk right through a room full of guards. Airey Neave, a British officer with a demonstrated knack for making realistic German uniforms, was chosen to make the first run. He was paired with Tony Luteyn, a Dutch officer who spoke perfect German. Because of his fluency, which was vital to the success of the venture, Luteyn was to pose as a senior German officer. Neave’s impersonation of a junior officer, however, needed a little work.
“Normally Airey walked with his hands in his pockets, like most of the British officers at Colditz, slouching around,” Luteyn later recalled in an interview with author Henry Chancellor. “I had to train him to be subordinate to me, so we spent a week walking in the courtyard, up and down, him walking on my lefthand side, because I was a superior, and when I turned, he had to turn around me. I’m not sure Airey liked pretending to be an upstanding, well-dressed German lieutenant, walking around with his captain.”
On the night of January 5, right after a performance by the camp orchestra, Airey Neave and Tony Luteyn disappeared beneath the stage. They quickly removed their outer garments, beneath which they wore civilian outfits, then put on their homemade German uniforms. After sneaking through a series of passages, they approached the guardroom. “We heard voices and knew the guards were inside,” Luteyn recalled. “Now if an officer comes into a room everybody has to jump up and stand to attention. So when we went in a guard shouted very loud, ‘Attention!’ And all the guards sprang up, and we walked in, me first and then Airey—he had to keep the door open for me. And the sergeant of the guard opened the front door and let us out.”
There were several harrowing moments as Neave and Luteyn walked across an outer courtyard toward a dry moat at the castle’s perimeter, but they weren’t stopped. At one point a guard suddenly appeared out of the darkness, and the two startled escapers saluted him. The guard stopped and stared back at them. Luteyn had to think quick. “I remembered that this soldier had not returned my salute,” he said, “so I turned around and scolded him in German. ‘Why did you not salute your senior officer?’ Then the soldier sprang to attention, and he marched away.” Luteyn and Neave continued on the moat path, scaled a fence, and soon were away from Colditz. Two days later they crossed the Swiss border. Nine months after that, another pair of British and Dutch officers made an equally bold escape—through a hole cut into the wall of a German NCO’s office.
One of the more audacious escape attempts from Colditz was an operation dubbed “Franz Josef,” in which Lieutenant Mike Sinclair was to impersonate an older German officer named Rothenberger, whom the prisoners called Franz Josef because his bushy white moustache made him look like the late Austrian emperor. Rothenberger made a nightly inspection of the sentries on the eastern terrace of the castle, then exited by a guarded gate. Sinclair, posing as Rothenberger, was to dismiss the guards around the terrace with the bogus announcement that an escape was in progress on the other side of the camp, then march up to the pair of sentries at the gate, replace them with two British officers dressed as Germans, and demand the gate key. If all went well, this would allow a few minutes for twenty British officers—perhaps more—to descend by rope from windows above the terrace and escape out the gate before the dismissed German guards found the real Rothenberger back at the guardhouse.
The operation required intense preparation. To transform Mike Sinclair into “Franz Josef,” a false moustache was fashioned out of shaving brushes. The German’s prominent Iron Cross was replicated by melting zinc taken from the castle roof and molding it with a broken-off table knife. His greatcoat was made from dyed blankets, and his leather holster from hea
vy cardboard buffed with boot polish. Sinclair spoke impeccable German and mastered Rothenberger’s gait and mannerisms. But success still depended upon the darkness to obscure his features because he was thirty years younger than Rothenberger.
Identity papers and travel permits required of all German citizens also had to be forged for the large group of escapers. They were produced in an assembly line of sorts. “I suppose we worked union hours,” Kenneth Lee, one of the chief forgers, told Henry Chancellor. “Every day we sat at a table opposite each other painstakingly copying the German Gothic script on the paper forms. We started in pencil then carefully went over the top of everything in india ink. The raw materials came from the canteen shop and I suppose it never occurred to the Germans that we might be able to use this for escaping purposes. They thought we were all drawing still lifes.” A homemade typewriter was used to fill in the date and time of travel on the documents, and they were stamped with an insignia meticulously carved in a shoe heel.
Operation Franz Josef commenced on the night of September 4, 1943. Sinclair, in his Rothenberger disguise, crept out of a window accompanied by the two other officers posing as German guards. They approached the first sentry on the terrace, and when Sinclair announced that an escape was in progress, the guard dutifully marched off. So did the second and third when they were approached. Things were going well. The trio then came to the terrace gate. Sinclair climbed a catwalk above it, relieved the guard there, and replaced him with his own disguised man. But when he came to the other guard at the gate and demanded the key, the German balked. Sinclair shouted at him in Rothenberger’s thick Saxon accent, but the guard still refused and asked to see the color-coded pass carried by all personnel at Colditz. When Sinclair produced his pass, lifted earlier from another guard, the German became more suspicious and rang an alarm bell. The pass color had apparently been changed that evening, so the one Sinclair carried had just expired. Relief officers rushed to the scene, and Sinclair was shot and wounded by one of them. Franz Josef had failed, but as one officer said earlier, when the plot was conceived, even if it did fail, “it would still make a damn good story.”
A Treasury of Deception Page 20