Why did they escape in The Great Escape?

[Quercus]

As far as motivation for escape, I imagine one bit of motivation would be that there really wasn’t much else to do in a POW camp. I mean, sure, I bet the first week of having nothing to do would be a nice break, but they didn’t have cable TV or internet, you know. I imagine, even if I didn’t want to risk leaving myself, I’d be happy to think about and work on escape plans, just out of boredom. And I might take that risk, just on the theory that even if I get caught, at least I got to see something outside of the wire for a little bit.

[vontsira]

@vontsira

There was a bunch of a dozen “other ranks” guys in the regiment, all good friends, who came from the far north-west of Scotland; their mother tongue was Scottish Gaelic.

Amendment to my post #60, the sentence above (it seems there’s no “edit” facility on TSD): should read "half a dozen ‘other ranks’ ".

[Captain_Amazing]

@terentii

Bill Mauldin wrote about this in Up Front in response to an article claiming the American soldier was incapable of hate. I’m quoting him from memory here, but his reply was basically “Maybe we don’t share the deep, traditional hatred against the Germans that the French and Poles feel, but you can’t have friends killed without hating the men who did it. We’ve seen the face of Germany and we know her as a cold, cruel, and powerful enemy.”

The quote is:

I read someplace that the American boy is not capable of hate. Maybe we don’t share the deep, traditional hatred of the French or the Poles or the Yugoslavs toward the krauts, but you can’t have friends killed without hating the men who did it. It makes the dogfaces sick to read articles by people who say, “It isn’t the Germans, it’s the Nazis.” Our army has seen few actual Nazis, except when they threw in special SS divisions. We have seen the German–the youth and the men and the husband and the fathers of Germany, and we know them for a ruthless, cold, cruel, and powerful enemy.

When our guys cringe under an 88 barrage, you don’t hear them say, “Those dirty Nazis.” You hear them say, “Those goddamn Krauts.” Because our men soon learn to be more or less professional fighters at the front, they have a deep respect for the German’s ability to wage war. You may hear a doggie call a German a skunk, but he’ll never say he’s not good.

The very professionalism of the krauts which makes the American infantryman respect the German infantryman also makes him hate the German’s guts even more. The dogface is quite human about things, and he hates and doesn’t understand a man who can, under orders, put every human emotion aside, as the Germans can and do.

[terentii]

@Captain_Amazing

The quote is:

Thanks for posting Mauldin. I read Up Front when I was in fifth or sixth grade (I was already a great history buff) and that passage stuck in my mind forevermore.

[Loach]

The United States Military’sCode of Conductaddresses the reasons why. Even though the Code was written in 1955 and used some of the lessons from the Korean War the concepts were older.

Article III

If I am captured I will continue to resist by all means available. I will make every effort to escape and to aid others to escape. I will accept neither parole nor special favors from the enemy.

[Kobal2]

@vontsira

To quote a character in a fantasy novel about a World War 2-counterpart in a different universe, at a particularly confusing point in the war: “Who knows what’s real these days?”

My very favourite WW2 weird-language-and-nationality baffling-the-enemy story, is, alas, reckoned certain to be an “urban myth”, impossible to have really happened; but one feels that it ought to be true.

The story goes that at the time of the fall of France in 1940, many men of a British regiment – a Scottish Highland one – were captured by the Germans in Northern France. There was a bunch of a dozen “other ranks” guys in the regiment, all good friends, who came from the far north-west of Scotland; their mother tongue was Scottish Gaelic. Right from the moment of capture, they talked in Gaelic only, feigning to know no other language. The Germans were bewildered when they tried to question them: they had no idea what language they were speaking, and understood not a word. In any case there would have been no-one available, German or French, who knew Gaelic. The Germans were flummoxed – were these guys mercenaries in British service, from some strange place, or what?

After a few days’ puzzlement, the German interrogating officer produced a map of the whole of Europe and a bit beyond, and by dumb-show, asked the “Gaels” where they came from. The guys duly chatted volubly in Gaelic for a bit; after which the leader of the group put his finger on the most north-easterly spot in Russia which the map included. This was the last straw for the Germans, who at this juncture had bigger and more urgent things to worry about, than half a dozen random private soldiers. They indicated to the “Gaels”, “Just piss off: go wherever you like – simply get out of our hair,” and dismissed them. The guys duly set off southwards, and ultimately made their way down through the chaos in France, and got back to Britain via Spain. As said – has to be a tall tale: but you wish it had really happened.

Well, the ending does give it away as a probable tall tale, but WW2 was strange times where such tales might just have been possible.

Take the case of Yang Kyoungjongfor instance. Born in Korea, which at the time was still a Japanese colony, he was in Manchuria when the Russo-Japanese war broke out, at which time he was pressed into service in the Imperial army. He was captured by the Russians, then press-ganged into fighting against the Germans in a penal battalion. Captured again, the Germans forced him into garrison duty against the D-Day invasion. When he was captured *again *by the American army (boy, was he a terrible soldier or what ?! :D) nobody knew where the hell he’d come from nor what language he spoke.

[Ranger_Jeff]

I was stationed at a Coast Guard LORAN Station in the Bahamas for a year. Twice a week, we had to have a lecture/class in some sort of military instruction. We took turns giving the lessons; in the office was a filing cabinet with a drawer filled with ‘lesson plans’. Or we could come up with our own lesson plan. Once a month, after Morning Quarters, they’d assign topics and dates to us. Since I was on Watch that day and not attending, I got stuck with the Code Of Conduct.

So, I prepped by reading the lesson plan from the filing cabinet. Pretty straight forward stuff. When I finally gave the ‘class’ I started out with the standard stuff. After a while, the CO stepped out to do something or other. Once I finished with the lesson plan, I thought I’d add some situational and strategic analysis. I mentioned that in the Bahamas, where we were, it was unlikely that we’d be taken as prisoners by the Vietnamese, North Koreans, or Red Chinese. But since we were off the coast of Florida, if we were going to be POWs, it’d most likely be Cubans, with either Russian or East German advisors doing the prisoner taking. And I mentioned what firearms we had available to defend us from being overrun. And I mentioned that before the Code of Conduct really applied to us, we’d have to be captured or something.

So, when the CO returned, he found me leading the entire crew in holding their hands over their heads, chanting in unison “Amigo! Komerad! Tovarich! Amigo! Komerad! Tovarich! Amigo! Komerad! Tovarich!”

[Quintas]

Someone mentioned that Germany had alot of foreign workers from occupied countries as well as axis allied countries. If the escapees made it out and they had forged docs stating they were foreign workers, that would explain them not speaking German. But it would not explain a foreign worker just walking down a road somewhere would it?

I have no idea how it was for foreign workers, but I would imagine their documents would state where they were employed or something? If you have papers saying you are a foreign worker at a factory in Berlin and you finally get stopped and questioned in Bremen I don’t see how the papers will do you any good. They are gonna ask “why are you not in Berlin”? Or find someone who speaks your language to ask.

Putting myself in the situation of one of the POW’s, it seems the actual escape would be the easy part. “right, so once we escape, im gonna board a train full of Germans and at no point will a gestapo or army officer look at my papers and wonder why a foreign worker is on a civilian train 400 miles from his job”

I guess they knew it was a longshot, but the whole thing just seems impossible.

[vontsira]

I think the idea was, that your forged papers included something confected to say that you had a work assignment in a place near where you really wanted to go (near the border or the coast, “whichever”); and travelling by train was indeed the favoured way to get where you were going. I gather that occasionally, the ploy did work – unlikely though it seems. It helped, I think, that human beings – even Germans in the midst of a desperate war – are basically not very good at security-checking stuff: it gets mind-numbingly boring, and however dedicated one is, one’s attention sometimes lapses.