The Escape Artists

by Neal Bascomb

  By April 1916, with newspaper accounts and letters from home chronicling the German advances at Verdun, Kennard could no longer remain on the sidelines. He returned to England and joined the RFC. Twenty-five years old, tall and big-boned, he looked like he could wrestle a steer to the ground with little trouble. A bushy mustache, dark slicked-back hair, and bronzed skin—and the carved wooden pipe perpetually stuck between his teeth—added to the overall South American cowboy effect. After earning his wings in late June, he served in a reserve squadron before being sent to Saint-Omer in October. It had taken him less than a week to be shot down.

  A company of German soldiers surrounded Kennard and Digby before they could climb out of the plane. They took them to a holding camp—“Somewhere behind the German lines,” Kennard wrote to his parents three days later. Although “lucky to be alive,” he described being consumed by “one big feeling of disappointment . . . You can imagine how we feel. It was my first flight to the lines, and to have to come down without ever having had a decent scrap of it.”

  Days later, their captors took Digby to a German camp for common soldiers and sent Kennard to Gütersloh.

  The airman did not remain there for long. Hungry for more than bitter soup, bristling against his imprisonment, and desperate to be back in a fight he had only just joined, Kennard looked for any opportunity to escape. When a guard making the lunch rounds came to his cell, Kennard hurled him against the wall, sprinted through the door, and turned the key, locking the guard in.

  He found himself alone in the hallway, with no plans for where to go next. If he stepped out of the building and tried to make a run for the gate in broad daylight, he would be shot by guards. If he hid out until dark, he would be found missing at roll call and a search would ensue. Resigned to his rash mistake, he sat down and waited to be discovered.

  As a consequence of his action, the Germans delivered him straightaway to Osnabrück, where Commandant Blankenstein had him thrown in a solitary cell, giving no indication when—or if—he would be allowed to join the general barracks. Kennard was beginning to understand that the Germans had no intention of abiding by the international agreements governing the treatment of prisoners of war.

  “Those vanquished in war are held to belong to the victor,” stated Aristotle, and indeed for most of the history of humankind, death or enslavement awaited soldiers captured on the battlefield. Often their families suffered the same fate, and homes and entire villages of those defeated in battle would be razed. Egyptian, Greek, Mongol, Persian, Viking, Aztec, Slav, Roman—the only difference was location. Brutality was strength; mercy, weakness. To warn against further resistance, a Byzantine emperor blinded fourteen thousand prisoners and sent them home in columns led by the one man out of every hundred from whom he had taken only a single eye.

  Neither philosophy nor religion made any provision in how an enemy combatant was treated. Christian crusaders and Muslim conquerors alike routinely killed those who surrendered to them.

  During the Middle Ages, there was a stir of change, albeit not a benevolent one. Knights serving their kings bore the brunt of the cost of war, bringing men-at-arms and horse archers into battle with them. To offset the expense, these “noble warriors” took many prisoners—to hold to ransom. The captives’ chances depended on their status and bloodline, an early signal that a soldier’s rank decided his treatment. Seeing an opportunity, merchants opened shops to trade in ransoms. In 1347 a good French knight listed in Calais for fifteen hundred pounds. Of course, captors had to pay a share to their lords, if the latter did not simply take the best prizes for themselves.

  Enrichment did not, however, supplant the bloodthirsty rage of some conquerors during this epoch. At the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, Henry V of England set his army loose on his surrendered enemy, the French. Later, a historian chronicled the brutal fate of these vanquished soldiers: “sticked with daggers, brained with poleaxes, slain with mauls, others had their throats cut, and some their bellies panched.”

  In 1625 the Dutch legal theorist (and former prison escapee) Hugo Grotius published his seminal work, On the Law of War and Peace, demanding that nations commit to a set of international rules between warring parties, including for those captured on the battlefield. A short while later, during the English Civil War, Parliament stated that “None shall kill an Enemy who yields and throws down his Arms.” Of course, without agreement from both sides or consequences for violation, these regulations and norms amounted to empty promises.

  Slowly, however, there was cause for hope in the event of surrender. The Age of Reason put a value on the individual above how he might serve the state. Prisoners were “merely men, whose life no one has a right to take,” declared Jean-Jacques Rousseau. With the rise of professional armies in the eighteenth century, internment and POW exchanges became more standardized. France’s King Louis XV instructed his officers to treat the vanquished British “like your own.”

  Nonetheless, the British and French, particularly during the Napoleonic Age, ran a race to the bottom in their handling of the captured, many of whom were interned in the dark, sodden underbellies of moored ships, or “hulks.” Some American soldiers in the Revolutionary War died in these same “sinkholes of filth, vermin, infectious disease and despair” as prisoners of the British outside New York City. On the heels of the formation of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva in 1863, Abraham Lincoln made a marked leap forward by codifying some principles of prisoner treatment in an army field manual, not the least of which stated that POWs should be given the basic needs of shelter, food, clothing, and medical attention.

  In 1899, and again in 1907, delegations from across the globe gathered in The Hague, the Netherlands, to “civilize war.” Beyond stipulations on diplomacy, naval warfare, and restrictions over the use of poisonous gases and hollow-point bullets, the two international conferences set out clear rules about the treatment of prisoners. It was forbidden to kill or wound an enemy combatant who had surrendered his arms or who could not defend himself. Prisoners must be “humanely treated” on the “same footing as the troops of the Government who captured them.” Enlisted soldiers (but not officers) could be used for labor, but the tasks were not to be excessive, nor related to the war. Finally, relief societies were to be allowed to channel aid to prisoners.

  Germany, Britain, France, Russia, Italy, the United States, and Austria-Hungary, among many other nations, agreed to these conventions. Such was the laundry list of dos and don’ts, a British international lawyer stated in 1911 that the future POW (a “spoilt darling”) could expect “a halcyon time to be nursed fondly in memory, a kind of inexpensive rest-cure after the wearisome turmoil of fighting.”

  None of the diplomats gathered in The Hague in 1899 or 1907 could have anticipated the vast populations of prisoners that would come out of industrialized total war—nor the challenges this would involve. In the first six months of World War I, 1.3 million soldiers became POWs across Europe. Combatant nations struggled to confine and maintain this tide of men, and there was no sign that it would ebb anytime soon. By mid-1916 Germany held 1.65 million men in an archipelago of prison camps across the country. Its treatment of the British, let alone the French and Russians, was far from the high standard of “civilized war” promised by the Hague Conventions and the like.

  In the act of surrender on the Western Front, one in five British soldiers was shot or bayoneted. The moans of wounded in no-man’s-land were often silenced the same way, or men were simply left to die on stretchers behind the lines. Those who reached field hospitals often perished from neglect, as German doctors would frequently carry through on their Hippocratic oath only after attending to their own countrymen. Individual acts of kindness occurred in these first hours of captivity, but they were far from the general rule.

  Before being brought to Germany, soldiers were carefully relieved of watches, money, cigarettes, wedding rings, and even boots. More out of tradition than adherence to the Hague Con
ventions, officers were separated from the rank and file, who were to suffer the worst in captivity. At the start of the war, their camps were overcrowded cities of mere tents surrounded by sentry boxes and barbwire fences. Some held thirty thousand to fifty thousand prisoners. Wood-slatted huts eventually replaced the canvas shelters, but the improvement only offered an excuse to pack in more men.

  Lack of food, threadbare clothes, poor sanitation, and bitter winters meant that disease ran rampant. In winter 1914–15 an outbreak of typhus at Wittenberg camp prompted the Germans manning the facility to abandon its interior and restrict patrols to the perimeter. Supplies were delivered in by chute. Eventually six British doctors volunteered to enter the camp to tend to the unfortunate men, a mix of their own countrymen and French and Russian prisoners. Three of the doctors died. Those who survived reported unlit rooms where the sick wandered around delirious or shared a mattress with the already dead. “The patients were alive with vermin,” one report stated. “In the half-light, [a doctor] attempted to brush what he took to be an accumulation of dust from the folds of a patient’s clothes, and he discovered it to be a moving mass of lice.”

  Roughly 80 percent of enlisted men taken prisoner were forced to work for the Germans. Small numbers of fortunate ones, often the recovering wounded, served as orderlies in officer prison camps, cooking meals and cleaning rooms, like Jeeves of old. Volunteers for these positions were easy to find. The majority of enlisted suffered hard labor in Arbeitskommandos (work parties). They dug in the salt and coal mines, plowed fields, cut peat, split rocks in quarries, laid railroads, emptied barges, and worked in factories. They were treated little better than slaves—and flogged and abused the same. For a period, their death rates were greater than those on the front lines. According to one historian, some fifty thousand Allied troops and civilians perished under such conditions.

  In comparison, captive officers had it much better. They inhabited less crowded, solidly built prisons. They did not have to work and were even afforded the services of rank-and-file prisoners to perform basic manual duties. An officer who pledged not to escape might be allowed to take parole, or temporary leave, typically for walks outside the camp. Such was the currency of a gentleman’s word being his bond and the vestiges of the old class system that once dominated all of Europe.

  Imprisoned officers and rank-and-file men alike were subject to a German high command that connived against the Hague Conventions. At the outbreak of war, Kaiser Wilhelm gathered his generals at his army headquarters in Koblenz and urged them to “take no prisoners.” The old general Paul von Hindenburg declared that a German triumph depended on war production; to turn this “screw up the most,” Germany needed prisoners to do the work. The army issued a handbook to its troops that called attention to the Hague pledges but included amendments about how prisoners could be put to death for insubordination, for attempting to escape, in reprisal for similar measures by the enemy, and the very broad “in case of overwhelming necessity.”

  Other nations were far from blameless in their treatment of prisoners. The British and French were known to employ captured Germans near the Western Front, in direct violation of the Hague Conventions. Early in the war, Britain imprisoned some POWs and interned civilians in overcrowded ships that likened to the hulks of yesteryear, yet despite accusations of widescale abuse from Germany, the majority were maintained in decent conditions. Russia was one of the worst caretakers of POWs, who died in vast numbers from neglect, exposure, and hard labor, many in Siberia.

  The political leadership in each country may have set the standard for POW treatment, but in Germany, at least, the individual army district in which a prison camp was located was the most important factor. The general in charge of each district, and the commandants tasked to run individual camps, had the autonomy to do mostly as they pleased. Diplomats, led by James W. Gerard, the American ambassador to Germany before the United States entered the war in 1917, tried to alleviate the worst of the abuses, but with 165 POW camps scattered throughout Germany and orchestrated efforts by their commandants to deceive inspectors, diplomats who succeeded in shutting down one camp faced the opening of another of equal—or worse—conditions to serve the same population. Their rights under the Hague Conventions ignored or abused, prisoners in Germany were largely left to fend for themselves.

  In mid-October, Gray, Blain, and the other RFC officers brought from Gütersloh to Osnabrück were led out of their room one by one to meet with a civilian investigator from Berlin. He harassed each of them with repeated questions on the latest British planes, including their guns and types of ammunition. The airmen were circumspect in their responses, no matter the yelling and threats from their interrogator. The next day, guards moved the lot of them into the camp’s general barracks. Commandant Blankenstein offered no explanation for the reprieve of their death sentence. Nor would he comment on a rumor circulating among the men that another RFC pilot was being held in isolation at the prison. Several days later, however, that rumor was confirmed.

  When Kennard emerged from his segregation, he had decided that escape was his best shot at survival. While he was being led into the gravel yard for his first evening roll call, he noticed that the few straggly trees around the yard’s edge had all but lost their leaves since his arrival. They looked as haunted and gray as his twenty-eight fellow airmen, who now stood with two hundred Russians and ninety French in the cold dusk chill. Blankenstein arrived, and one of his lieutenants shouted out the roll call. Though he answered when his name was called, Kennard otherwise distanced himself from the quiet chatter among the airmen, his unlit pipe stuck firmly between his lips. Once all the prisoners were accounted for, Blankenstein stepped forward and singled out Kennard in the line, warning that any further attempts at escape would bring the harshest of punishments. Then he dismissed them.

  A guard brought Kennard to a second-floor room, where seven of his countrymen, including Blain, were already installed. There were beds for each of them, two chairs, a single table, and a stove—with no supply of coal. A Russian orderly, who spoke no English, cleaned the room and made the beds each morning.

  Beyond the schedule of roll calls and meals, there was little to do. Some of the British made friends with their fellow Russian and French officers, and they started language lessons between them. Others organized boxing and wrestling matches in the small yard. The airmen also spent their time writing home. They were allowed to send only two letters (of four pages maximum) and four postcards each month, so these missives were often written in minute script, covering the front, back, and margins of the paper. Most letters included requests, for food, clothing, money, books, and a host of other items.

  The British Red Cross helped facilitate these deliveries and sent its own fortnightly parcel of food to every British captive. The German high command was more than happy to allow the enemy to sustain its imprisoned troops. Osnabrück also ran a brisk business out of its canteen, which supplemented the meager, often putrid, meals served by the Germans. Prisoners paid for items with Lagergeld, specially issued camp money funded either from their military pay in captivity (per an agreement between the British and German governments) or through transfers from their own banks in England.

  Throughout his first days after leaving solitary, Kennard continued to keep himself at a remove from the others. His roommate Blain tried to befriend him, but Kennard was too preoccupied brooding over his capture and stalking Osnabrück, looking for a means of escape. In early November he discovered a window with a missing latch at the end of the second-floor hallway. The window faced a twelve-foot-high wall topped with barbwire. In his mind, a plan fell into place: he would drop out of the window at night, cut through the short fence that surrounded the barracks, climb over the wall and onto the street below. From Osnabrück, he would take a train to a town close to the Dutch border, some seventy miles away. Once in the Netherlands, a neutral nation, he would be free to return to England and to the fight.

  Fir
st he would need to learn a few words of German. His fellow prisoners at Osnabrück knew that Captain Gray spoke fluent German, despite his efforts to hide it. Going to the room to which Gray was assigned, Kennard asked his countryman to teach him the phrases he would need to buy a train ticket in German. And fast. Gray was reluctant, especially when Kennard refused to explain what he was up to. Disciplined and uncompromising, Gray was not one to involve himself in any foolhardy schemes. Having no other choice, Kennard divulged his plan. It was probably the most he had spoken in weeks.

  Gray thought the idea had promise but suggested there was no way a few phrases in German would be enough to secure Kennard a railway ticket. Kennard would have a better chance, Gray maintained, getting to the border on foot. For that he would need a compass, food, and a map, and it would be best if he had help. Together with a couple of men, he could more quickly gather the essential supplies. He would have help on the night of the breakout and during the journey to the Netherlands. Before Kennard could ask, he had a partner.

  To round out the group, Gray recommended a third man join them. Helder, his former observer, had shown little interest in risking an escape during their earlier conversations, so Gray suggested Blain. The young pilot had also come to him for tutoring. Although his knowledge of Cape Dutch enabled him to understand some German, as Gray had witnessed on the train to Osnabrück, Blain was unable to speak the language with any proficiency. But he had guts to spare. Before Kennard went to bed that night, the three were a cabal, with Gray decidedly its leader. For the first time since his capture, Kennard felt his dark mood lift. Now, there was hope.