Escaping America in World War II: The History of Attempted Prison Escapes by Axis Prisoners in the United States

In the first half of the 20th century, war was fought on a global and industrial scale. Millions of men were flung into the grinder of World War I and World War II, leading to commensurately huge numbers of prisoners of war (POWs). Camps were built to hold thousands of captives, with their own barracks blocks, parade grounds, and even farms.

All of this meant that prisoners were taken across the world, and prisoners of war were typically comprised of two classes: officers and other ranks. Officers were often treated well, as there was still a sort of aristocratic courtesy among officers, particularly among the Germans, British, French, and somewhat less so for the Russians and Italians. Concepts such as honor still held considerable currency, and bravery was greatly admired. Enemy officers as a class often had more in common with each other than with the millions of draftees in their armies, so enlisted men as POWs generally were not as well treated.

Regardless of rank though, throughout the war, many of these men did not sit idle. Many spent their time preparing elaborate escape plans in the hopes of returning to their home nations and back to the fight. The wildly popular film The Great Escape (1963), has been a main factor in how the public views prisoners of war, and while that film was based on a book that details a mass escape of British and Allied prisoners from a World War II German prison camp for aviators, Stalag Luft III, a real escape from a German prisoner camp in World War I inspired the 1944 great escape from Stalag Luft III.

The greatest number of successful escapes was made by Allied troops in Europe, including soldiers left behind after the fall of France and airmen shot down in bombing raids, but escapes happened across the world, from Canadian trains to German castles, and from the mountains of Italy to the wilds of Australia. Axis as well as Allied troops made their bids for freedom, keeping both sides on their toes. Everybody was looking to make the next great escape.

The Second World War was full of escape stories, some bold, some tragic, and most filled with courage and ingenuity. There were moments of foolishness, like the story of an Italian on the run in Australia who was caught ordering red wine with a heavy accent. But there were also incredible feats, and on all sides, people sought to return to the war or to help others to do so. Their stories were not only part of the overall struggle, but added a very human dimension to a war with a scope so large that it still defies imagination.

Though it’s often overlooked today, during World War II, the United States held hundreds of thousands of enemy prisoners of war, and the country was unprepared for the influx, despite the fact that only weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the government started detaining Japanese Americans and foreigners from Axis countries. Some camps, used for training Army recruits, were repurposed as prison camps, and the experience of building camps for the 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans was useful in building camps for the POWs. In addition to the Japanese, about 31,000 German, Japanese, and Italian residents were placed in camps.