London, Sunday, 21 May 1944, morning. The city is awake in its fifth year of war, the weather is cloudy but dry. The invasion of Western Europe and the opening of the Second Front is on everyone’s mind. The previous day, The Times had published a short article entitled “The Tragedy of Stalag Luft III’, which detailed the shooting of 47 Allied officers who had escaped from that air force camp. London is tense, expectant, on edge. At 8 am at the War Office, the building opposite Horseguards, where the Household Cavalry stands vigil, a telegram marked ‘Secret’ arrives. It comes from the Swiss capital, Berne, and was written the previous evening in code on a One Time Pad, using a random secret key. The message is from Henry Antrobus Cartwright, the British Military Attache in the Swiss capital, and is short – sparse even. Addressed to MI9, the part of the War Office responsible for prisoners of war, it reads: Swiss internal authorities inform me that up to midday today 186 Indian prisoners of war who escaped from camp near Épinal as a result of recent bombing there have entered Switzerland and are at present being kept in Porrentruy district. One man was killed by Germans when swimming a river on the frontier and his body was recovered by fellow escapers. Three days later, after considerable press speculation, a further telegram arrives from Berne, based on information gleaned from escapers. This message gives the names of some of the prisoners, details of the bombing by the Americans and the loss of life, and relates some of the circumstances of the journey to the neutral frontier. The total number of escapers in Switzerland has reached 278, and that number will continue to rise over the next few weeks. Although not all the information in the telegram proved to be completely accurate, the core of it was true: this was a mass escape unlike any seen before. The escapers included Barkat Ali from Punjab, who is buried in a cemetery at Vevey beside Lake Geneva. There was also a Gurkha called Harkabahadur Rai, who escaped and joined the French Resistance in the mountains south of Belfort. Their comrade A.P. Mukundan was a postman by trade, captured at Mersa Matruh in Egypt in 1942. He escaped from Épinal but was recaptured, and wrote of his experience in a fascinating and detailed account. They were assisted along the way by hundreds of French people… The story of the escapes, and the support given by France, is completely unknown. No film has been made, no book written, no article exists on the Internet or in an academic journal. The Stalag Luft III escape, however, us well known – it would go on to become a book and later a film, The Great Escape, made memorable by Steve McQueen jumping over barbed wire on a motorbike. In fact, the Great Épinal Escape involved many more escapers, and many more successes, but as the escapers were brown not white, and as they were not officers, their experiences languished in the pool of the unremembered for eighty years. This book will tell their story in full. Excerpted with permission from The Great Épinal Escape (Westland) The Great Epinal Escape By Ghee Bowman Westland pp. 272; Rs 699
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