Vault to Freedom

THE WOODEN HORSE (255 pp.)--Eric Williams--Harper ($2.75).

Stalag-Luft III, a prisoner-of-war camp for Allied airmen in Silesia, was a good deal like all the others in 1943. The prisoners spent most of their waking hours planning escapes and digging tunnels; with the help of detection devices the camp guards found the tunnels and headed off the escapes almost every time.* But one spring day Prisoner John Clinton watched a sheet of newspaper hop the camp fence in a gust of wind and got an idea for an escape plan that worked.

British Captain Clinton, an army officer among the camp's airmen, had been a university student before the war. The scrap of paper blown to freedom by the wind made him think of the deus ex machina that so often solved Greek tragedies. His thoughts turned to the fall of Troy. Suddenly he "found himself running ... an idea racing through his mind . . . Peter--he must find Peter."

Bags & Burrows. The escape plan that John related to Fellow Prisoner Peter Howard, a British airman, was inspired by one of history's oldest gambits in military deception: the Trojan horse.

John had in mind "a vaulting horse, a box horse like we had at school. You know, one of those square things with a padded top and sides that go right down to the ground. We could carry it out every day and vault over it. One of us would be inside digging while the others vaulted. We'd have a good strong trap [door] and sink it at least a foot below the surface [of the ground]. It's foolproof."

After a vaulting horse had been built from odds & ends of lumber, Peter and John hid inside it, while other prisoners carried it outdoors and set it up in front of a guard box. Almost every afternoon for the next four months the P.O.W.s vaulted tirelessly while Peter and John took turns burrowing away with a trowel at their ever-lengthening tunnel. The loose sand was packed into bags made from trouser legs. The bags were hung inside the wooden horse while the men were digging; later the sand was scattered in latrines, tomato patches, or under the prisoners' huts. Each time the diggers meticulously smoothed the original topsoil over the tunnel entrance.

Into the Forest. The guards never caught on. One reason: the thud of landing vaulters blanketed any vibrations from the digging which might have been picked up by the Germans' detecting devices. One October afternoon the two diggers, with a third man who had helped them, went down into their tunnel, more than 100 feet long. After scrambling out of the tunnel, they rolled into a ditch outside the camp, and then escaped into the nearby pine forest. Dressed in the clothing of French workmen, Peter and John caught the night train to Frankfurt, while their companion, disguised as a traveling salesman, hit out for Danzig. In Stettin Peter and John had no end of trouble trying to stow away aboard a Swedish ship, finally accepted a Danish crew boss's offer to smuggle them into Denmark and hand them over to the Danish underground. Half a dozen harrowing adventures later, they reached the British consulate in Goeteborg, Sweden, to learn that their fellow escapee had arrived by way of Danzig a full week earlier.

Eric Williams' "true account" of one of World War II's most original escapes (he is the "Peter Howard" of the story) sold more than 200,000 copies in England last year. An equally avid U.S. appetite for well-paced excitement could make The Wooden Horse one of the U.S. bestsellers of the year.

*Later on, the German camp authorities became less efficient. In March 1944, using a patiently dug tunnel, some 80 P.O.W.s crushed out of Stalag-Luft III in a single night. Yet only a few escaped from Nazi territory. Of those recaptured, the Germans reported they shot 50.

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