PRISONERS OF WAR

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22612, 28 December 1936, Page 6

PRISONERS OF WAR

AN EX-OFFICERS' REUNION EPIC ESCAPES RECALLED [FROST; A SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT] LONDON, Nov. 28 Seventy men sat down to dinner in a .West End hotel this week and talked of the times when they went without bite or sup for days on end. They were members of the ofacers' Prisoners of War Club. Only those men are eligible for membership who were captured by the Germans between 1914 and 1918. Specially, favoured are those who escaped, or attempted to escape. The nucleus of the club was formed by the men who were sent to the gaol at Holzminden. A group of them spent ten months tunnelling under the walls. The tunnel was 50yds. long. It could admit only one man at a time, lying prone, and even then the roof pressed on his back. The tunnel was driven with just two tools, a trowel and a chisel Boards on which the diggers or their friends slept were sacrificed to shore up thf crumbling walls. Straw mattresses were filled with the last loads of earth. Twenty-nine men passed through the tunnel, and ten of them got away. They travelled the 15 miles to the Dutch frontier and were shipped back to Britain. The other 19 men were brought before a German court martial on a charge of conspiracy and sentenced to six months' imprisonment in a fortress. The sentence was never carried out, as the Armistice intervened. The epic escape of Holzminden involved fantastic adventures. The officers digging the tunnel had to dress as oHerlies, because the orderly quarters were nearer the walls than any other building. Although every prisoner knew the plan, not one gave it away.