by Paul Simpson
The original glider was still in position when Colditz was liberated by the Americans in April 1945 – the only photograph of it was taken by one of the US soldiers. However, it was duplicated on three occasions. In 1993, a miniature version was constructed from Goldfinch’s original designs, which he had kept since the war, and launched from the castle roof. For a Channel 4 documentary in 2000, a full-size replica was built and launched at RAF Odiham: both Goldfinch and Jack Best witnessed their dreams become reality. On 17 March 2012, a further full-scale version of the glider flew from Colditz Castle, for all of fifteen seconds before crashing into the exact field that Bill Goldfinch had identified nearly seventy years previously. Sadly Goldfinch had died five years earlier, but as the youngest member of the reconstruction team, Jess Nyahoe told the Radio Times, “If we got it wrong, then the world would have thought that they got it wrong. For them and their memory we wanted to get it right.”
Sources:
Chancellor, Henry: Colditz, The Definitive History (Hodder & Stoughton, 2001)
Radio Times, 17 March 2012: “Colditz Castle glider escape plot realised more than 65 years after the war”
Daily Telegraph, 12 October 2007: “Obituary: Flight Lieutenant Bill Goldfinch”
PBS, 6 February 2001: “Nazi Prison Escape” (edited from the Channel 4 Escape from Colditz series)
A Christian Helper
According to official US records, only three servicemen captured during the Korean War made it back across enemy lines. Of those, just one was captured and escaped twice, and had to contend with both ankles so badly fractured that the bones had come out of the side of his feet. Major Ward Malvern Millar bore the marks of his escape until his death in January 1999.
Millar had served in the United States Air Force during the Second World War, and after being demobbed, had gone to study nuclear physics at Reed College in Oregon. However, when the North Koreans invaded South Korea in 1950, and the USAF became active in the conflict assisting the United Nations, Millar was called back to active service, flying sorties over the North Korean lines.
In June 1951, during his thirtieth mission, his plane caught fire, and he had no option: he had to bail out over North Korean territory, knowing that he would be captured and held in one of their prisoner-of-war camps. His problems were compounded by his bad landing: it was very obvious to him that he had broken both his ankles, but his Chinese Army captors either didn’t understand him, or chose not to take any notice of his pleas. Instead they told him to march off to a nearby hut.
With guns pointing in his face, Millar didn’t think he had any option. He stood up, but as he did so, he could hear the bones of his ankle crunch. As a direct result of the pressure of his weight on them, he ended up with a compound fracture of the bones of his right ankle. When they saw this, even the Chinese realized that he was not going to be able to go any further. He was therefore permitted to crawl on his belly to the hut – at least until some American planes started to fly over. At that point, one of his captors picked him up and carried him on his back the remaining hundred yards.
Once he was finally in the hut, Millar was stripped of all of his possessions, although he was allowed to keep his service jacket and his “Mae West”, the inflatable lifejacket which USAF personnel were issued with as part of their flight gear, named after the buxom film star. Millar was pleased that they let him keep the Mae West: he figured that it would help him when he reached the coast after he escaped. And escape was what he intended to do, no matter what injuries he might have received.
Millar guessed that he was being kept not too far from the coast; if he could get there, he had a good chance of finding a boat which would take him to one of the US Navy ships. Before he could do any major planning, he was interrogated by the North Koreans, who alternately promised to release him, and then start preparations for his execution. Millar was determined that they weren’t going to break him; he was simply not going to give them that satisfaction. He stayed firm, and in the end was transferred to a small hospital in a nearby village, where his injured legs were put into a cast.
Although rations for prisoners of war weren’t particularly large, Millar started to stockpile a cache of food, ready for the long trek to the coast. He was aided by a seventeen-year-old South Korean boy, Ho, who was willing to go with him. Each night while the other patients slept, Millar practised crawling but he discovered that his toes were protruding from the end of the cast, and dragging painfully along the ground. He therefore developed some protection for his feet, by tying two boards to his legs to act as skids, then attached tin cans to his insteps so the boards wouldn’t cut into the top of his feet, and wrapped pieces of cloth around his toes. Unfortunately, before he could test this out very much, he had two pieces of bad luck: the teenager was taken away, and Millar’s cast, which had previously only extended up to his knee, was replaced with one that nearly reached up to his hips. The only upside was that this new cast meant that he was free of the lice which had crawled inside the old one and caused him almost intolerable itching. However, when he split the back of the cast down to the knee, he gained some manoeuvrability and on 27 July 1951, he started to crawl away from the hospital.
It took Millar three hours to crawl twenty-five yards. At that speed it would take him 211 hours – seventy-two days – to make the first mile. Reluctantly facing up to the reality of his plight, Millar turned back and made the equally painful and slow return trip. By sheer luck, his exploits weren’t noticed.
A week later, on 5 August, the medical team at Na-han-li hospital removed the cast from his leg. But whoever had placed it on his leg had no real idea what he was doing: instead of placing the bones at the correct angle so they would heal properly, they had been set in such a haphazard manner that his toes pointed downwards stiffly at a grotesque angle – when Miller stood up, his body tilted backwards. However, as far as the staff at the hospital and his Chinese guards were concerned, the treatment had been a success. At a suitable time in the near future, he would be transferred from there to a regular prisoner-of-war camp.
Millar wasn’t given any boots, despite asking for them, although his captors did allow him to use a couple of sticks as crutches, and for a time he had use of a pair of tennis shoes. Eventually he was provided with an old pair of galoshes which were designed to fit a shoe two sizes larger than Millar’s feet. Although he initially thought these would be useless, he came to realize that they might be exactly what he needed after all. There was enough room in them to build a false heel, which would allow him to walk better, and if he stuffed rags around the lower part of his legs, the upper part of the galoshes would fit comfortably, and provide a degree of ankle support. With that bolstering, the galoshes allowed Millar to get up a turn of speed that he had begun to believe would be impossible again.
The airman checked that his “escape kit” was ready: he had some rock salt, a few small pieces of soap; a piece of towelling; a tin can top bent over, which could be used as a crude knife; and 200 won inside the lining of his Mae West. In better spirits than he had been in some time, Millar waited for his chance to go. The evacuation to the prisoner-of-war camp had been delayed because heavy rains were preventing trucks from getting through to the hospital, but when those dried up on 14 August, Millar knew he had to chance it now, or risk being much further behind enemy lines. He managed to gain one extra night in the hospital by faking a bad cough, but was warned that he was being sent to Pyongyang the next day.
Millar knew that he would be checked up on around 11 p.m., and as soon as the Chinese nurse had done the inspection, he made himself ready, and at midnight, he hobbled out of the hut. Rather than head immediately for the UN lines to the south, Millar decided to head north, hoping that this would put his pursuers off the scent. He managed to get a few miles before collapsing into an exhausted sleep. Over the next few days, he realized that he was nowhere near the coast, as he had first thought: Ho had told him that they were being held in the centre of Korea
, around seventy miles from the sea, but Millar had dismissed the boy as being illiterate.
Recognizing that there was nothing for it but to keep going, Millar headed west. He was wracked with dysentery, irritated by lice, and in perpetual pain from the chafing of the galoshes on his skin. He had one run-in with a Korean who found him, and tried to hand him in to the local authorities, but the man was mute, and was unable to make the Chinese understand what he was trying to tell them.
After eleven days hobbling across North Korea, Miller was finally captured, after another civilian spotted him and went to fetch soldiers. The North Korean military found him hiding in the bushes, but when their leader, Kim Chal Phail, started to search Millar, he discovered a tiny cross that the airman had created from a twig. He said three simple words to Millar which proved to be the American’s salvation: “Jesus, Mary, Christian?” Millar nodded: his faith and his love for his family had been all that had kept him going over the past week.
Kim carried Millar the four miles to his village on his back, and once they were alone, he explained that he too wanted to get away from the north. He hoped to defect to South Korea. Between them the two supposed enemies devised a plan of escape.
When Kim was ordered to transfer Millar up to a prison camp at Hwangju in the north a few days later, he drained fuel from the truck so that it would run out before they reached their destination. Kim took a circuitous route towards the camp, and, as he had planned, the fuel ran out when they were partway there. Finding a replacement supply would take some time, so Kim sent the four soldiers who had accompanied them off on a search, while he and Millar used a headlight and the truck’s battery to flash an SOS at passing US aircraft.
For four days, they tried to attract attention, using a mirror during the day, and the headlight at night. On 10 September, the pilot of an F-80 saw the glint in his cockpit mirror, and turned to investigate. When he saw the two men, he signalled to them that they had been spotted and radioed for help. Two hours later, nearly fifty Allied planes reached them, and wiped out the surrounding villages with machine-gun fire, rockets and napalm bombs, to allow a helicopter to land safely to collect them.
The element of luck (or perhaps divine providence) that had assisted Millar throughout his escape hadn’t deserted him at the last minute: the F-80 had in fact been looking for the crashed pilot of another plane who had been forced to land in the area a few days earlier.
After the end of the war, Kim Chai Phail was given a special commendation by the US 5th Air Force; Millar was also decorated. After the war, he went on to a career in medical technology. His escape and his fortitude were regularly cited in US military survival manuals, and in 1955 he wrote an account of his travels through North Korea.
Sources:
The Miami News, 25 January 1955: “Jet Pilot Tells of Escape From Korea”
Toledo Blade, 29 April 1954: “North Korean Cited; Saved U.S. Officer” (note: this report was written before full details of Millar’s escape were released by the US military; a number of details are therefore incorrect)
Catholic Sentinel, 26 February 1999: “Obituaries: Ward Millar”
Millar, Ward: Valley of the Shadow (D. McKay Co., 1955)
So Near and Yet So Far
Very few escapees successfully managed to make their way out of North Korea during the conflict in the 1950s; when the United States became embroiled in another conflict in South-East Asia the following decade, even less men achieved every prisoner of war’s aim of escape. Only one American was able to travel from North Vietnam into the south – but his freedom was exceedingly short-lived, and he would spend six years being tortured and incarcerated as a direct result of his escape attempt.
Aged just sixteen, George Everett Day, known as Bud, enlisted in the Marine Corps straight after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. He served on Midway Island during the Second World War, took a law degree in 1949, and two years later was called to active duty with the US Air Force. He had a couple of lucky escapes, including an incident when his parachute failed to open while based in England, and another time when he had to carry out a zero visibility, zero ceiling landing (effectively bringing his plane in blind). “That was as scary as it was going to get,” he commented at the time, little realizing what the Vietnam War would bring his way.
On Easter Sunday 1967, Major Bud Day went out to Vietnam as a Combat Fighter Pilot and Squadron Commander. One hundred and thirty-seven missions over South and North Vietnamese airspace went without major incident; on 26 August 1967, Day and Captain Corwin Kippenham were tasked with taking out a North Vietnamese surface-to-air missile (SAM) site very close to the demilitarized zone (DMZ) between the two opposing sides. They were about to blow the Russian SAM to pieces when their F-100 was hit. The two airmen bailed out, but their parachutes were immediately spotted by the North Vietnamese members of the local militia. Kippenham was lucky: he was rescued by American forces almost as soon as he hit the ground. Day was much less fortuitous: he was looking down the barrel of a rifle in the hands of an enemy soldier. The helicopter that had rescued Kippenham tried to swoop in to collect Day, after picking up the distress signal from his parachute, with Kippenham given a rifle and told to provide covering fire. However, the pilot realized that he was not going to be able to land; Day was, very reluctantly, left to his fate.
In some ways, Day’s situation was similar to that of Ward Millar a decade and a half earlier; he too suffered serious injuries during his landing, although in Day’s case, it was his upper limbs that were badly damaged. He had bone protruding through the skin on his left wrist, and multiple fractures to his right arm; he had also dislocated his left knee, and was forced to march to the Vietnamese soldiers’ base in a nearby village. His watch, knife, boots and flight suit were taken from him, and he was then thrown into an underground bunker, which had a log roof. His broken left wrist was tied to the ceiling, and his feet were bound. Not, as Day recognized, the easiest situation from which to escape, but, like Millar before him, he was absolutely determined to reunite with his family.
Day was brutally interrogated by the North Vietnamese, but he refused to divulge anything other than his name, rank, and serial number. This dogged attitude earned him worse torture, but Day made sure that he made its effects look worse than they actually were. The majority of the soldiers guarding him were simply teenagers, unused to combat, or the discipline of the army, and he was certain that if he could lull them into a false state of security, he would be left alone long enough to be able to untie his ropes, and escape into the jungle under cover of darkness.
His opportunity came on the sixth night after his capture, and Day was able to get a two-mile head start on the North Vietnamese. Guessing that he was approximately eighteen miles from the DMZ, Day struck out for the border, but was slowed down by his injuries and a lack of covering for his feet. To begin with, he was able to navigate by the stars, but as the jungle canopy grew increasingly thick the further south he went, he was unable to get accurate bearings, and in the end, had to rely on going along the trails that he was pretty certain ran from north to south. These, of course, were also the paths that were used by the Viet Cong as they travelled around, so he spent a lot of time hiding from passing patrols, as well as the guards and dogs who were busily searching specifically for him.
Soldiers weren’t the only problem he faced: the only items of food he could find were live frogs and berries, and anyone who crossed his path was unlikely to be a potential ally. Even children had to be treated with extreme caution. His own comrades in the US forces didn’t help: bombing raids were a regular occurrence, and on more than one occasion, Day was far nearer to the impact zones than he would have liked. Shrapnel became lodged in his leg, and his eardrums were ruptured by being too close to explosions on only his second night of freedom. He suffered from periods of delirium, violent nausea and dizziness as a result.
Day was never too certain how long he was wandering for – somewhere between
twelve and fifteen days – but during that time he managed to cross the Ben Hai River on a bamboo log. He realized that he was getting close to the sanctuary he sought when he started to find discarded US rations wrappers on the ground, and tried in vain to signal to passing American aircraft. He wandered within South Vietnam for some time before finding the US Marine base at Con Thien, but he didn’t want to approach it at night, in case the troops opened fire on a perceived enemy. He waited for the next morning, but he was hailed by a young boy who saw him hiding in the bush. Day had no intention of surrendering this close to home, and tried to make a run for it. He managed to get about a dozen yards before he was shot in the thigh and through the hand. Refusing to give up, he kept going and tried to hide in the jungle, but a couple of teenagers were able to follow the trail of blood that he was leaving, and a day and a half later, they captured him.
The next time that Bud Day saw freedom was 14 March 1973; over the intervening five and a half years, he was severely tortured and interrogated to an extent that, as he admitted in his autobiography, death began to have some appeal. He became cellmates with future Presidential candidate John McCain who later commented, “Bud Day is the toughest man I have ever known. He had an unwavering and unshakeable sense of honour that made him able to withstand physical and mental pressures of an enormous degree.” He was back on active service only a short time after being released and retired in 1977.