Escape in Arizona

The 3,500 Germans at Arizona’s desert-bordered Papago Park camp were full of wooden-faced horseplay. Prisoners nagged their guards, sometimes hid for days only to turn up well-fed and grinning. They were tough, picked men, almost all from Nazi U-boat crews. Beneath their erratic behavior guards could sense some hidden discipline, could only guess, month after month, at its purpose. Last week the patternless war of nerves seemed to be approaching a climax. Hundreds of prisoners formed ranks one afternoon to cheer the German advances on the western front. Then, as guards advanced, the shouting stopped. The next day—Sunday—the men behind the wire were quiet.

But at 7 o’clock that evening a man walked into a lonely, brightly lighted pumping station on the Salt River, two miles from the camp. He wore faded Army fatigue clothes, was drenched with the rain which was falling outside. As George Jackson, the lone man on duty, stared at him, he calmly announced that he was an escaped prisoner. Though he carried a 100-pound pack containing food, cigarets and other supplies, he politely asked for something to eat. He offered no resistance when Jackson reached for the telephone. At almost the same time two more Germans knocked at a farmhouse three miles away, also surrendered.

The Secret. As the telephone began to ring at Papago Park, the camp’s tall, grey-haired commander, Colonel William A. Holden, knew for the first time that 25 prisoners, all ardent Nazis, had escaped under his nose. Guards soon discovered camouflaged holes in the fence. Then, two days after the break, they discovered a tunnel which opened in an outdoor coal shed, led 200 feet to the bank of a deep irrigation canal.

To build it, prisoners had spent months in molelike mining with small shovels from barrack coal scuttles. To hide the earth and rock they removed, they granulated it and scattered it on the camp’s graveled grounds. Authorities, reluctantly admiring the secret tunnel, soon suspected an additional evidence of Nazi cunning. Three more prisoners were caught, and all were enlisted men. They began to seem suspiciously like decoys, pledged to lay down a false trail, then surrender.

Radio cars patrolling the roads and armed men searching freight trains by week’s end had found nothing of the other 19 escaped prisoners. Unless they had help from the outside, the vanished prisoners (twelve of them Nazi officers) faced nearly 200 miles of trudging across barren cactus-studded desert to reach the Mexican border. Veteran Arizona sheriff’s deputies and U.S. border patrolmen settled down to patient, poker-faced waiting.