They Escaped an Arizona POW Camp Carrying a Boat

They Escaped an Arizona POW Camp Carrying a Boat Subscribe before the guards notice! In 1944, Camp Papago Park, six miles east of Phoenix, Arizona, held more than 3,000 German naval prisoners, most of them U-boat officers and crewmen. The U.S. Army had chosen the site for its desert location—and because of a loophole. The Geneva Convention required heated barracks but said nothing about cooling them. Officers and non-commissioned officers could not be forced to work, so the men of Compound 1A, where the Army had concentrated its least cooperative prisoners, had little to do but plan. In September, they began digging. Working in three-man teams for 90-minute shifts, the prisoners used a coal shovel and a bucket to excavate a tunnel beneath a coal box near a bathhouse. The entrance sat in a blind spot between two guard towers. They flushed dirt down toilets, hid it in attics, carried it in their trouser pockets, and scattered it across flower beds. Eventually, they concealed it beneath a volleyball court that the guards had approved—and even helped rake. On the night of December 23, 25 prisoners crawled through a 178-foot tunnel beneath two fences and a road before entering the Cross Cut Canal. Their plan was to reach the Salt River and float to Mexico. Three men carried a folding canvas boat for 30 miles to the Gila River. Both rivers were dry. Nine months earlier, at the same camp, a German seaman who had provided information to the U.S. Navy was hanged in a shower room by fellow prisoners within seven hours of arriving. Seven men were later executed for his murder at Fort Leavenworth in August 1945—the last mass execution carried out by the United States. Behind The Walls History reconstructs one year inside an American institution through the records it was legally required to keep. SOURCES United States Army. General court-martial records, United States v. Fischer et al. (Werner Drechsler case), Papago Park, 1944. Summarized in Eppinga, 2017, and Bailey, 2007. John Hammond Moore. The Faustball Tunnel: German POWs in America and Their Great Escape. Random House, 1978. Ronald H. Bailey. “The Not-So-Great Escape.” World War II Magazine, November 2007. https://historynet.com/the-not-so-gre... Jane Eppinga. Death at Papago Park POW Camp: A Tragic Murder and America’s Last Mass Execution. The History Press, 2017. Arizona Historical Society and City of Scottsdale. “Papago Escape Tunnel” historical marker, Cross Cut Canal. https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=300476 Phoenix Gazette, December 28, 1944. Quoted in Bailey, 2007, and Phoenix Magazine, 2023. Lloyd Clark. “The Yuletide Escape.” Arizona Highways, December 1993. https://www.arizonahighways.com/archi... Douglas Towne. “Nazis in Papago.” Phoenix Magazine, November 2023. https://www.phoenixmag.com/2023/11/01... Arnold Krammer. Nazi Prisoners of War in America. Stein and Day, 1979. Warfare History Network. “Werner Drechsler: Hung by Shipmates in a U.S. POW Camp.” https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/art... Daughters of the American Revolution. “Papago Park Military Reservation” historical marker, 2006. https://tempazmarkers.arizonadar.org/... Lawrence Journal-World. “German POWs Buried at Prison.” May 25, 2008. https://www2.ljworld.com/news/2008/ma...