Great News !!! Kendal Burt & James Leasor's The One That Got Away has been re-issued. If you want to find out how to buy a copy, e-mail me. |
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Swiss-born
and German- raised Franz von Werra 1914-1941), shown in the accompanying
photograph, lived a very exciting life in his twenty-seven years.
A Luftwaffe pilot of a Messerschmitt 109
during the Battle of Britain in the early years
of World War II, a prisoner-of-war who achieved legendary status, and the
subject of a book and a movie several years after his death, the pivotal
event in his life began in Smiths
Falls Ontario Canada at 5:30am on Friday, January 24 1941.
Oberleutenant Franz von Werra was shot down
over England's County of Kent on September 5 1940. Following interrogation
in Kensington Palace Gardens in London he
was shipped north to a prison camp near Grizedale Hall in the Lake District,
which at the time was the only camp in Britain for captured officers.
Grizedale Hall (below) was also known as "U-Boat Hotel", due to the large number of prisoners from that branch of the service. 
(For an account of the officers of one U-Boat at Grizedale Hall, go here). A former stately home, it lay in isolated countryside between Windemere and Coniston Water. It was the site of von Werra's his first escape attempt. On an escorted exercise march on October 7 with several other prisoners, he dove over a low stone wall. He remained at large until he was spotted by a shepherd on October 12 and was recaptured. Following a punishment of solitary confinement, von Werra was shipped to another camp, Swanwick, near Nottingham. On December 20 1940, he made his second escape. He and four others crawled through a shallow tunnel.  None
of the Germans got completely away, but von Werra came very close.
Using his natural charm and command of English, and posing
as
a Dutch pilot whose plane had crash landed, he walked into the RAF base
at Hucknall. At his first opportunity he climbed into the cockpit
of a parked Hurricane fighter plane which
he planned to steal and fly to France. He was apprehended as he sat
in the plane, trying to start the engine. (For a more detailed account
of his escape attempts in England go here).
In January 1941 von Werra was shipped to Canada for internment in a prisoner-of -war camp on the north shore of Lake Superior. He was one of 33,800 German prisoners sent to Canada during World War II. The ship docked at Halifax, "an unnamed East Coat port", in the news reports of the day. On Wednesday January 22 a train full of German prisoners left the Nova Scotia port for a lengthy trip to Neys, Ontario. The journey took the train across through New Brunswick, Quebec City, Montreal, on to Smiths Falls. For von Werra and another prisoner, Otto Hollman, this was their last stop. They both jumped  from
a window of the train into a snow bank as it moved slowly through the railway
yards in the bitter cold of the pre-dawn. Hollman was quickly
apprehended in the same yards by Lance Corporal Lyle Thompson and CPR Constable
Ernest Potter. Hollman was taken to the local jail where he entertained
Police Chief John Lees and Constable Reg Wride,
before being turned over to the military.
Franz von Werra escaped detection and made his way to Johnstown on the St. Lawrence River, even though a search was soon mounted. "Rural telephone operators cooperated by spreading alarm among farmers advising all to be on the lookout for suspicious characters." Following a harrowing experience and with the help of a stolen rowboat, he made his way across the partially frozen river to Ogdensburg New York, on neutral American soil. He was charged with illegal entry into the United States, but soon got to New York City. 
Over the next several weeks von Werra was at the centre of a diplomatic tug-of-war, with the Canadian authorities trying to get him returned to Canada. By all accounts von Werra enjoyed his time in the limelight tremendously. After some time in the United States, funded by German money he made his way into Mexico, on to Panama, Peru, Bolivia, and, by mid-April, to Rio de Janeiro. He flew back to Germany from Brazil. On October 25 1941 von Werra's plane crashed off the coast of Holland while on a routine Luftwaffe mission. Neither von Werra's aircraft nor his body were ever found. |
So that's a thumbnail sketch of the wartime story of Franz von Werra. Pretty exciting stuff, but surely it didn't make him unique? Well, actually, yes it did. Franz von Werra was the only prisoner-of-war captured in Great Britain during World War II who escaped back to Germany. In 1956 two British writers, Kendal Burt and James Leasor wrote a book about his exploits. 
The title of the book was, not unsurprisingly, "The One That Got Away".
The following year the J. Arthur Rank organization turned the book into
a well-reviewed movie
with the same title. The film version starred a young Hardy
Kruger as the charming and flamboyant von Werra( below, with Michael
Goodliffe) .
Cover of Wilfried Meichtry's new book on Franz von Werra and his family (Click for larger image) |
Copyright (c) Douglas G. Phillips This page last updated on July 03, 2001 |
