Compelling presentation. These guys are money, as many of you know. And were so fortunate, so privileged to be associated with them. Tonight we welcome david mills and kayla westra of the Minnesota West Community and Technical College, the coauthors of great wartime escapes and rescues. Ill start by saying they had me in grade school. I was a fourth grader, i think, when hollywood released the great escape. The classic adventure drama. It pretty quickly became a tv staple and all of the guys in my class at st. Josephs Elementary School in missouri fell in love with it and wed play it out at recess. Each one of us would take one of the roles. Of course all of us wanted to be mcqueen. I think i wound up with the attenborough role which is fine by me, though, i get executed at the end of the movie. Of course mcqueen survives. What we didnt realize then and what we probably didnt care about was that the movie was based on a true story, the escape of 76 allied soldiers and officers from germany in 1944. The film pretty much gave us the reallife tragic ending to that story, only three of those men who escaped stayed escaped. Two thoefrnorwegian pilots, no americans. The other 73 were killed or recaptured. More than twothirds of them were executed. The fact is, escaping was hard. And it wasnt often tried during world war ii in particular and when it was, it often didnt succeed. And when it did, it really was an inspiration. It was often hollywood stuff. David and kaylas book details the cias rescue of americans in tehran during the 1979 iran hostage crisis which was the basis for the best picture oscar winner argo. This is the third time that david has spoken here at the library. The last was a little less than a year ago when he talked about the power pairing of Dwight Eisenhower and marshal. Kayla who is a former kansas City Resident is here from where she now lives in worthing ton, new hampshire, where shes the dean of institutional effectiveness at the Technical College thank you so much for making the trip. Join me in welcoming both of them. [ applause ] good evening, everybody and thanks for coming out. Looks like the weather is cooperated, if you remember from last year, we were supposed to have a couple of different presentations that eventually got canceled because of the weather. Im dave mills and this is my good friend kayla westra. Weve been friends for about ten years. We worked together at Minnesota West Community college up until a few years ago when i took a position down here. About two years ago, kayla and i decided to right this book about p. O. W. Escapes and rescues. Many of you probably remember the bud man who was instrumental in orchestrating in of the discussions and the talk about world war ii down here. So when i told the budman about our book, he asked us to come and talk about a number of these episodes. So this evening were going to start off talking about the history of prisoners and their treatment and then well talk about why its so hard to make a successful escape. Then were going to talk about specific episodes of the prisoners and the escape attempts they made. We have a variety of stories for you tonight. Were going to talk about the great escape in a little bit more detail. Were going to talk about a prison camp in the philippines where the entire prison camp was rescued and then were going to talk about a number of individual escapes that include american, french, german and british officers. So i hope you enjoy it. In 2004 when tom brokaw coined the phrase the greatest generation, he was talking about those who lived during world war ii and it was at a time when we still had a number of those people in our midst. 15 years later, were seeing fewer and fewer of that generation. Were losing that generation. This is my dad. This is my dad. My dad would have gotten a kick out of that. He had the greatest sense of humor. But my dad was part of that greatest generation and he served in world war ii as well. As we talk about these escapes and rescues, we focused on a couple of episodes. When we were working on this book, i did not watch the movies. Im a movie buff and i know a lot of movies. But i did not track down the movies on these. As entertaining as they are, theyre not always aligned to history as we know. Im not antimovie. I use movies im an english teacher by trade. I use movies to get students excited about history but we must think beyond what the movie tells us. I can tell you from the research that we did, that theres very little glamour in these escapes and rescues. But its important that we tell these stories and retelling them is critical to remembering the people and their efforts as well as all of those untold stories, especially from those who did not get out. Im going to take you back to actually my favorite time period which is the middle ages. Dave as worked me a little bit and brought me over to world war ii. But to understand a little bit more about p. O. W. S, you should understand just a little bit about where this concept came in the middle ages there were very few prisoners of war because unless you were noble you werent worth a whole lot. If you were noble, you might be ransomed back to your family. If you were a commoner, they didnt have much use for you so they would probably either kill you off or enslave you or massacre you. There wasnt any point in trying to keep you around. And then we have the french wars in the 14th century and changes in tactics and weaponry. Army composition changed. Armies became larger and more lethal and the common soldiers actually became a little more important because they were fighting with picks and long bows and eventually rifles. It was at this point that a commoner could actually kill a noble if they could get close enough to do some damage, so the value of that common soldier increased. And then nobles refined the rules of engagement a little bit more. In the 16th and 17th centuries armies numbered in the thousands. So, if you can imagine taking care of prisoners of war on that kind of a scale became more difficult. By the mid 18th century we went from small, professional armies to more National Armies and soldiers who fought for ideology, in other words for an idea. It became more difficult to get men to switch sides. That was a common tactic in the middle ages. How about you fight for us and we wont kill you was a pretty strong argument. And then, of course, more men were needed if you were keeping these prisoners of war. It became a time where they had to write down rules of engagement and how things were going to be handled. While the term has been used for centuries prisoner of war became a legal status only after the haig paes conference in 1989. The provisions for the treatment of prisoners were extensive but in guaranteed humane treatment and specified what work prisoners could do. The agreement required each prisoner to divulge true name, rank, date of birth and Service Number if they had one. The geneva peace conferences further refined the treatment of prisoners and placed responsibility of the protection of the prisoners on the leadership of the powers that captured them. Torture was specifically outlawed as a means of extracting information, but as we know the communist forces in korea and vietnam notoriously violated that provision. So youre going to go ahead and advance my slide for me and point out i was supposed to do that first. Thanks. All right. So escape, right. It just sounds like it ought to be a nobrainer. It sounds like everybody would want to try and escape, but there are a number of problems that you have to consider if youre going to try and escape from a prison. The first one is probably first and foremost, you know you can be shot upon escape or upon recapture. That kind of thing happened. So, it was not a decision to be taken lightly. But once a prisoner decided that he, or she, was going to try and escape, there were a number of questions that have to be answered. So, the first question is, how are you going to get out of prison, right . Youve got a lot of really smart people who put together a prison in order to keep you inside of it, so there are some considerations that you need to think about, like guards and dogs and electrified barbed wire fences and search lights and watch towers and land mines and a number of obstacles designed to keep you in. Lets assume that you do get out of the prison. Whats the next question that you probably need to ask yourself . How are you going to travel and where are you going to go . So walking takes a lot of time and a lot of energy, and prisoners would probably want to avoid the public where they could attract suspicion and maybe the attention of the police. A prisoner didnt have money to purchase a ticket on an airplane, a train, a ship, or any other kind of mode of transportation. And they probably didnt speak the local language, so, a number of problems that need to be overcome. The third major issue is one of logistics. For most prisoners the clothes that they would be wearing were out of the ordinary. Most soldiers are captured in their uniforms and the enemy uniforms or enemy personnel walking down the street are undoubtedly going to attract the wrong kind of attention, right. So, what about identification papers that everybody, at least in europe, was required to carry at this time. How would you eat . You had no money. You want to avoid the local population. You cant just walk into the local dennys and order up some grub. The fourth major issue is, in either germany or japan, is the problem of fitting in. I mean this is particularly obvious with an american in the Pacific Theater where the japanese would have control of the philippines and other islands and territories. But even in germany, i mean, i lived in germany and russia for a number of years, and nobody ever mistaked me for a local. I mean, i dont know how they knew i was an american, but they always did. And so then the last question is one of physical limitations. As you can see a whole lot of these guys are not treated particularly well, and so the idea of getting out of a prison camp and putting some distance between themselves and the guards who would probably be looking for them rather quickly is raises some obvious problems. So there are a number of issues that youve got to think through before you can even consider the idea of escape. So one of the things you might want to do is get some help in your escape effort and for these reasons, every escapee had to have the help of other prisoners. And so, large prison camps would have escape committees. Theyre usually made up of the highest ranking folks in the prison camp itself and if you were if you were a prisoner and you had an idea that you were going to escape from prison you would need to go to the escape committee and present your plan. Remember, this is a military organization. The idea of hierarchy is one thats embraced. So, if you have a plan, you go to the escape committee. You brief the escape committee on your plan, and the committee can either approve it or disapprove it. So one of the reasons that the escape committee might disapprove of your plan, say nope, you cant escape in that manner at that time in that way that youve described, you need to put your plans on the back burner, one of the reasons that might be the case is you might interfere with another escape plan thats already in the works. So, you need to coordinate that. The last thing you would want is to mess up one plan because you stumbled into something. Another reason that the escape might be disapproved is that it had little chance of success. So the escape committee might look at this idea and say, you know, all youre going to do is bring a whole lot of scrutiny and attention to the prisoners and the idea of escaping which May Institute new rules and regulations that will make it harder for everybody else and you really did need to have some semblance of or chance of success in getting out. Now, if the Committee Approved your escape plan, that meant that the entire committee and most likely a whole lot of folks within the prison itself were going to help you out and assist in your escape. Theres not a lot that folks could do, but maybe a distraction to draw attention away from whatever area you were going to be focussed on in getting out of the prison. There were also there used to be a number of civilian occupations that would help a prisoner in their escape, like used to be a whole lot of folks who were printers and new ink and paper and were able to make and forge identification papers. Artists were also very good at helping with the more intricate details of faking identification papers. Tailors is another one, where they might be able to take your uniform and make it look more like a civilian suit than an army uniform, especially if it was dyed. So bribing guards is another thing that the prison system would do. Everybody would be checking, so how vulnerable is this new guard. Can i bribe him . Can i buy some things from him . How amenable is this person to making a trade of some sort . So oftentimes the only way that you could get really critical equipment like a typewriter or a camera to take pictures of people to make these fake i. D. Papers was to bribe guards. Lots of folks didnt even know exactly where they were in the prison camp system but information could be had from guards. You could bribe guards to get money so that prisoners once they escaped would actually have some currency maybe if they spoke the language well enough, they could try to purchase a ticket and that sort of thing. So yeah, on one hand escape is pretty difficult, but, you know, you can try and leverage the knowledge and the expertise of folks within the prison. A lot of times you had a pretty good shot at least of getting away a little bit and so with that, im going to advance the slide and turn it back over to kayla. Hes trainable. Thats why were friends. So, a little bit of my thunder was stolen, but i get to talk about the great escape today. And i imagine a number of you know the story, but for those who dont, dave was talking about the logistics of getting out of the camp. The men still tried to escape even with all of those issues that they had. In fact, the allied prisoners were notorious for trying to escape from their german captors. The germans put the worst of the offenders in their best camps, including their most secure camps including stalog 13. That camp primarily held allied air force personnel, located in poland about 100 miles southeast of berlin. So as you can see in the image on the left side for you, the barracks were built off the ground, tunnelling efforts were pretty difficult, and there was sand underneath the topsoil that had a golden color. As they were trying to tunnel they had to put that sand somewhere and they quite often would put it in socks and take it up above and try to walk around and get rid of it, but when its golden on top its noticeable. The tunnels also had to be extremely long because the barracks were back from the fence quite a ways. In order to tunnel, they had to hide what they were working on and they actually, again, being a little bit humorous, named the three tunnels, the tom, dick and harry tunnels and the tom tunnel was built in the dark corner of one of the barracks, harry under a stove and the last one, the dick tunnel was in the shower room underneath the drain. Each tunnel went straight down for about 40 feet, which enabled them to avoid the microphones they had in place so they could hear the tunnelling. And then, of course, that sandy soil as we talked about. Eventually they ran out of places to put all of that sand and they decided they would sacrifice one of the tunnels, the dick tunnel, and fill that with sand and all of the supplies they needed for once they got out. But shortly after that, then the germans found the tom tunnel and so two of their tunnels were compromised. So they began working on the last tunnel, the harry tunnel with some renewed enthusiasm. They had heard that they were going to be shipped to a more secure camp because of some of their shenanigans and they wanted to get this moving and get out as soon as they could. They finished this tunnel about mid march. Took them about 15 months to complete one of the tunnels. They had to wait for a moonless night in order to get out. So the plan was 40 feet down, 300 past the fen, 28 outside the fence and into the woods. The first ones out were the ones that spoke german, probably had escaped before, a little more confidence they could do this. Then they had a lottery for the next 100. They thought they could get about 200 men out in a single night. So at 10 30 that night, the first man made it through the tunnel. And found the tunnel cleared the fence, went under the fence but didnt make it to the woods. This was something they had not really accounted for. The tunnels exit could be seen from the guard tower and greatly slowed down the process of getting the men out. They thought they would be able to send out 60 an hour and were only able to do about ten. Then to complicate things at about midnight, they started at 10 30, at midnight, the air raid sirens went off and, of course, those pesky americans had plugged into the electricity system in the tunnel. So when the air raid sirens went off, they cut the power. The power came back on. They had to stop. The power came back on, and then one of the tunnel, one of the braces let loose and the tunnel collapsed and they had to dig that part out again. At 5 00 in the morning they had gotten 76 of the 100 men out. The 77th one was caught. So the men who got out all ran into the forest. They thought they would be able to find their way to the rail station with all of their papers. It was not as easy as they thought. There was also quite a bit of snow left. Even just traveling around was pretty difficult. All but three of them as you mentioned were caught and rounded up within two weeks. The germans executed 50 of those 76 within two weeks. The three who made it back to their homelands were two norwegian pilots and one dutch pilot. Some of you know this story, probably parts of it from the great escape. It was a pretty fictionalized account but an entertaining one nonetheless. You mentioned the cooler king. Im glad you did because this is the character that Steve Mcqueen was based upon. He was known as the cooler king because he was captured and escaped several times. He was the basis for Steve Mcqueens character. He was a native texan and had volunteered for the Royal Canadian air force in june of 1940, earned his pilots wings in a commission and gone to britain to fly spit fires. He was shot down on a mission in france. He was one of the most heavily punished prisoners in world war ii spending over six months in solitary confinement. His first stint came after a prank against the german guards. The guards were trying to