/ 26 April 2011

What have been the greatest escapes?

Nearly 500 Taliban prisoners have tunnelled their way out of an Afghan prison, but how does their feat match up to those other great breakouts?

One would not want to be the governor of Sarposa prison in Kandahar, southern Afghanistan, just at the moment. To lose one Taliban prisoner may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose 475 looks like carelessness.

Perhaps Easter Mondays are especially sleepy in Afghanistan, but to allow the Taliban to spend five months digging a 320m tunnel, and then four and a half hours getting the entire political wing of the prison through it and into a fleet of waiting cars does look like an Everest among security lapses.

But where does it rate among the great prison escapes? We have assessed the most memorable prison breaks of all time and given them marks for ingenuity, daring, degree of difficulty and myth-making. The top mark in each category is 25. On this system, the Taliban escape scores 16 for ingenuity, 18 for daring, 5 for degree of difficulty (the Afghan authorities were hopelessly incompetent), and 15 for myth-making (the fact I am writing this piece suggests a myth is in the process of being made). Total score: 54. Not bad. So how do the other great prison breaks stack up?

Colditz
Colditz, the castle in eastern Germany where allied PoWs with a particular propensity to escape were held during World War II, has become synonymous with daring prison breaks. PoWs seem to have spent the duration of the war digging tunnels with teaspoons, rigging up radios and even building a glider that they planned to launch from the ramparts. There were multiple escapes from Colditz, though the number of so-called “home runs” — prisoners who made it out of German-controlled territory, usually to Switzerland — was just 15. The two most famous are British — Pat Reid, who immortalised Colditz with books written after the war, and Airey Neave, who became a Conservative MP and was assassinated by the Irish National Liberation Army in 1979. But there were also several French escapees, including three who escaped while on a visit to the town dentist. Neave scores high marks for daring — he marched out of the camp in a German uniform — and the mythology triggered by Reid’s books makes it the best known of all escape narratives. But the sheer number of escapes, the fact that the castle was so huge it was hard to police effectively and the stupidity of the Germans in putting several hundred proven escapers together means it must be marked down for difficulty. Sadly, the glider never flew — the prison was liberated before take-off.
Ingenuity 15; Daring 18; Degree of difficulty 12; Myth-making 22. TOTAL: 67.

The Great Escape
Yes, you will already be whistling the tune. The 1963 film The Great Escape has become a standby at Christmas, that time of the year when many people are dreaming of escape. For Hollywood this was a story of US derring-do, but in fact no American PoWs escaped during the incident on which it is based — a mass breakout from Stalag Luft III PoW camp in what is now Poland. Americans had been among the 200 PoWs involved in the 15-month operation to dig three tunnels out of the camp, but they had been moved by the time of the escape on March 24 1944. Only one tunnel was used, 76 men escaped but most were quickly recaptured — 50 were executed — and only three made it to safety, two Norwegians and a Dutchman.
Ingenuity 20 (digging three tunnels was the masterstroke as when one was discovered, it didn’t occur to the authorities that another on so vast a scale could exist); Daring 20; Difficulty 15 (the camp was purpose-built and had been designed to make tunnelling difficult — but the guards were poorly motivated and some colluded in the provision of forged documents); Myth-making 10 (it has been dangerously Hollywoodised and Steve McQueenised). TOTAL: 65.

Alcatraz
Alcatraz island in San Francisco Bay was a federal prison from 1933 to 1963, and housed prisoners who had proved disruptive in other jails. Two-and-a-half kilometres offshore, it was claimed to be escape-proof. There were 14 escape attempts in the prison’s 30-year history. The most famous came in June 1962 when Frank Morris and brothers John and Clarence Anglin — all of whom were serving long sentences for robbery — escaped through air vents, cut the perimeter fence and improvised a raft using plywood and raincoats. They had left papier-mache dummies in their cells to fool the guards, and their escape was not detected until the morning. Their broken-up raft was found in the bay and the assumption was they had drowned, but there were reported sightings, one inmate received a postcard purporting to be from them saying “Gone Fishin'”, and the 1979 film Escape From Alcatraz implies that they made it to the shore.
Ingenuity 21; Daring 15; Difficulty 23; Myth-making 12 (the open-endedness is frustrating). TOTAL: 71.

Pascal Payet
Payet is serving a 30-year jail term for murder and is famous for twice escaping from French high-security jails using hijacked helicopters. While on the run after his first escape in 2001, he organised a breakout by three other prisoners, also using a helicopter. All very clever, but using a helicopter every time shows no imagination. Ingenuity 0; Daring 0; Difficulty 10; Myth-making 6, though he presumably has traction among French helicopter enthusiasts. TOTAL: 16.

John Gerard
Gerard was an English Jesuit priest imprisoned in the Tower of London in the 1590s for Catholic propagandising. On the night of October 4 1597, accomplices rowed across the Tower moat and got a rope up to him. He abseiled down, almost falling because his hands were damaged from frequent torture, and was whisked to safety. Ingenuity 16; Daring 20; Difficulty 20; Myth-making 5 at present, though his story surely has Hollywood potential. TOTAL: 61.

Maze escape
Irish republicans call the breakout from the Maze prison on September 25 1983 by 38 IRA prisoners their own Great Escape. The prisoners overpowered their guards, hijacked a truck and burst through the main gate. Four officers were stabbed, two shot, and one died of a heart attack after being stabbed. Scoring an event marked by violence rather than derring-do would be unsavoury. This was less an escape, more a battle in a long-drawn-out war. TOTAL: 0.

The Catalpa rescue
A more appealing escape by Irish republicans occurred in 1876, when six so-called Fenians who had been convicted of sedition, transported to Australia and imprisoned in Perth, were picked up by the Catalpa in a carefully planned operation funded by Irish home-rule sympathisers in New York. The Catalpa was an American whaling ship bought for the mission and had been at sea for almost a year. The six convicts broke away from a prison work party and were rowed out to the ship, getting to it just ahead of a police vessel. The whaler was then pursued by a gunboat, before making its escape into the Indian Ocean and back to New York.
Ingenuity 18; Daring 23; Difficulty 20; Myth-making 12. There has been an Australian TV drama, several plays, and lots of songs by Irish and Australian punk bands, but the Catalpa still awaits its Spielberg. TOTAL 73. – guardian.co.uk