The daring and ingenious escape at the Stalag Luft III prison camp had a long
pedigree, and memorable getaways certainly did not end with it. Throughout
history, prisoners of all sorts have gone to unheard-of lengths to free
themselves from confinement, whether it be house arrest in Tibet or a life
sentence in Alcatraz. Most have failed, but a significant minority has tasted
freedom through patience, skill, and in many cases sheer dumb luck. Here,
relive some of the greatest jailbreaks of all time.—Lexi Krock
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Mary, Queen of Scots (Scotland)
When Mary, Queen of Scots arrived in Scotland in 1561 from France, where she
had been raised in exile, she expected eventually to assume the throne that was
her birthright. But in 1567, during a rebellion of Scottish nobles, she was
imprisoned in remote Lochleven Castle. Though Mary begged in letters to Queen
Elizabeth and the Queen of France for help in getting free, she was unable to
interest anyone in her cause. Before long, she began plotting her escape.
In her first attempt in March 1568, Mary disguised herself as a laundress and
tried to escape from the castle by boat. But when the boatmen she attempted to
hire noticed her pristine hands and beautiful face, her identity was revealed
and her plan foiled (though remarkably, she did manage to return to her cell
without the castle's guards learning of her ploy). Determined to succeed, Mary
fled the prison again on May 2, 1568. With the help of an orphan she befriended
at the castle, she was able to get out of the castle, across by boat to the
mainland, and successfully away on a horse stolen from her captors' stables.
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Tower of London (England)
The Tower of London has served as a royal palace, arsenal, royal mint,
menagerie, and public records office. But its best-known role, which lasted for
850 years, was as a dark, dank, and bone-numbingly cold political prison.
Dozens of accused spies, traitors, and prisoners of war imprisoned therein made
bids for freedom over the centuries, and a lucky and wily few succeeded.
In 1597, a Jesuit priest named John Gerard made a hair-raising escape. After
hacking away at the stones around the door to his cell, Gerard sneaked past the
guards in the corridors one night and reached a high wall overlooking the moat.
Down below, a boat he had arranged through a sympathetic prison warden waited
in the darkness. The boatmen tossed him a rope, which Gerard tied to a nearby
cannon. When he received a signal that his accomplices had tied off the other
end of the rope across the moat, Gerard slid down the rope to freedom. He was
never recaptured.
The Earl of Nithsdale, who was jailed in the Tower in 1715 for his role in the
Jacobite Rebellion, made a less physically demanding exit. During a visit by
his wife and her three ladies-in-waiting, Nithsdale donned the clothes of one
of the ladies-in-waiting, a Mrs. Mills, and simply walked out with the other
three. (Mrs. Mills, now wearing another set of clothes she had brought with
her, left separately before the alarm was raised.) Safely away from the Tower,
Nithsdale bribed a boatman to carry him and his wife out of the country; they
eventually settled in Rome.
The final escape in the Tower of London's reign as a prison revealed security
so lax it is perhaps best that the Tower soon thereafter became a British
national monument and museum. A British soldier taken into custody during World
War I for writing phony checks became bored one night, even though he was
allowed as many visitors to his cell as he wanted. Leaving his unlocked cell,
he made his way past the guards by nonchalantly strolling past them wrapped in
an overcoat. They took him to be just another visitor, and he headed out for
some nighttime fun in central London. Curiously, he returned to the Tower later
that night and attempted to reimprison himself.
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Giacomo Casanova (Italy)
In 1755, Giacomo Casanova was sentenced to five years in Venice's famously
forbidding prison, "the Leads," for repeatedly committing adultery. A
determined escape artist in both marriage and prison, Casanova began plotting
his exit not long after he arrived at the Leads, which was named for the lead
that coated its walls and roof. As he later put it, "It has always been my
opinion that when a man sets himself determinedly to do something and thinks of
nought but his design, he must succeed despite all the difficulties in his
path...."
Casanova found an iron rod in the prison yard and fashioned it into a digging
tool. For several months, he secretly worked on a tunnel that would take him
out of his cell. His hopes were dashed, however, when he was suddenly forced to
move to another cell. Realizing the guards would carefully watch him in his new
cell, Casanova gave his iron tool, which he had managed to retain, to the
prisoner in the next cell, a monk named Balbi, and begged him to dig one tunnel
joining their cells and another between the monk's cell and the outside. Balbi
agreed, and when he had completed the tunnels, both prisoners crawled out of
Balbi's cell and managed to escape from the Leads using the iron tool to force
open doors and gates in their way. Once they arrived in central Venice, Balbi
and Casanova split up. The police searched for them everywhere to no avail.
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Henry "Box" Brown (North Carolina)
Escape stories abound about runaway slaves, many of whom used the Underground
Railroad to reach the freedom of the North. Less common are stories about
slaves who successfully escaped on their own. One of the most audacious escapes
was that of Henry Brown, who was born as a slave in 1816. After his owner
suddenly sold Brown's wife and children to a new owner in another state, Brown
made an agonizing solo escape to freedom on March 19, 1849.
Brown had a sympathetic carpenter build a box three feet long and two feet
wide. After writing "right side up with care" on the outside of the box, two
friends mailed the box, with Brown squeezed inside of it, from North Carolina
to the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society in Philadelphia. The journey lasted
over 27 hours. Brown had water and ventilation holes, but for several hours,
despite the box's label, he remained upside down. He made it, however, and
later became an active member in Philadelphia's abolitionist community.
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William F. Cody (Colorado)
Popularly known as Buffalo Bill, William F. Cody was a buffalo hunter, U.S.
Army Scout, and Indian fighter who helped create the myth of the Wild West with
his traveling variety show, the melodramatic "Wild West Congress of Rough
Riders of the World." Known for his accurate marksmanship, courage, endurance,
and brutal fights with Indians, Cody made one of the most fearless escapes in
American history.
In the early 1860s, Indians captured Cody near Fort Larned, Colorado. Knowing
that his captors' supply of meat was low, Cody convinced them to let him lead
them to a nearby herd of cattle he knew of. Though a large group surrounded him
as they traveled, Cody, who was allowed to ride in front, eventually broke free
and urged his mule into a brisk canter. For six miles, the Indians pursued
Cody, who never had more than a half-mile lead. Though the Indians shot arrows
at him and tried to knock him off his mule, Cody prevailed, eventually slipping
unnoticed into a Fort Larned bar and escaping.
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The Great Escape (Germany)
Nazi authorities took great pains to guard against the escape of their
prisoners during World War II at both their horrifying civilian concentration
camps and at prisons for captured members of the Allied forces. At one of the
largest prisons for Allied airmen, Stalag Luft III, the Germans planted
seismographs in the ground every 33 feet so that they could detect the sounds
of tunneling. They also raised the prison huts off the ground on stilts so that
they could observe suspicious digging activity and built a huge trench around
the entire prison to form yet another barrier between the prisoners and
freedom. Despite all these measures, Stalag Luft III saw one of the biggest
mass escapes of all time.
The Germans set the stage for a massive getaway when they chose to put nearly
10,000 strong, militarily trained men in Stalag Luft III together. Free to move
about the prison, these men had nothing better to do than put their collective
brainpower and might towards an escape plan. Among the inmates in 1944 were
scores of talented miners, carpenters, engineers, even physicists and
geologists, all of whom were willing to help execute an escape.
The Escape Committee was run by a South African airman named Roger Bushell,
who devised a plan in 1943 to dig three tunnels, "Tom," "Dick," and "Harry."
Fully 30 feet deep, each tunnel would lie beyond the reach of the listening
devices (see Inside Tunnel "Harry"). As they dug, the prisoners removed tunnel dirt by trolley, concealed
it in the legs of their pants, and later dumped it inconspicuously around the
prison grounds. Groups of prisoners took turns guarding the tunnels from the
watchful eyes of the Germans and covering for "missing" prisoners when they
were underground.
On the 24th of March, 1944, 76 men were able to escape through Harry.
Unfortunately, only three of them reached safety (see The Three That Got Away). Fifteen were captured and
returned to the prison. Eight were sent to a concentration camp (though they
ultimately survived the war). The remaining 50, Bushell among them, were
rounded up and shot on orders from Hitler himself, who was embarrassed and
infuriated by the mass escape. Hoping to deter any further prison breaks,
Hitler ordered the ashes of the 50 murdered men scattered at Stalag Luft III by
other prisoners.
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Dalai Lama XIV (Tibet)
When they gained control of China in 1949, the Communists under Mao Tse Tung
vowed to erase religion in China and regain economic and political power of the
country's so-called "autonomous regions." Tibet, with its rich natural
resources and friendly, pious inhabitants, became an immediate target. In 1959,
as Communist armies stormed the Tibetan capital of Lhasa, the Dalai Lama,
Tibet's spiritual and political leader, decided he had to try to escape from
his homeland in hopes that he could lead his people from a safer perch in
exile.
While huge crowds of Tibetans swarmed around the Dalai Lama's summer palace in
an attempt to protect him from advancing troops, the Dalai Lama disguised
himself in work clothes and crept unnoticed through the crowds and out of the
city. "For the first time I was truly afraid," he wrote later, "for if I was
caught all would be lost." When he reached the Kyichu River outside the city,
he boarded a waiting boat and took it safely across. Eventually, the Dalai
Lama, his brother, and a few loyal servants crossed through the Himalayas over
the 16,000-foot Che La Pass and into the safety of India, where he has lived
ever since.
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Alcatraz (California)
When Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay opened its doors as a state prison in
1934, becoming home to the most violent criminals in the United States, its
guards and overseers were confident that it was escape-proof. Alcatraz lay more
than a mile from the mainland, in the midst of chilly waters surging with
currents. The prison bristled with electric wires, fences, bars, and gun
towers, and it had hidden microphones designed to detect even the faintest ping
of a tunnel under construction.
Despite these obstacles, Alcatraz was the setting for several daring escapes,
one of which, in 1962, remains one of the most notorious prison breaks in
history. Frank Morris and the brothers Clarence and John Anglin spent six
months chipping away at the concrete around the air shafts in their cells,
trying to create enough space to climb inside and wiggle their way through
Alcatraz's mazelike ventilation system and out to freedom. Using a range of
makeshift digging implements, including nail clippers, spoons, and a drill made
from a fan, the three men bore through concrete and cut through steel bars.
Each night they hid their progress by filling in the missing chunks of wall
with a paste made from wet newspaper.
On June 11, they snuck through the ventilation system and out of the prison,
then set themselves adrift on a raft made out of barrels, mesh wire, and old
raincoats. The next morning, after finding dummies in the men's beds, Alcatraz
guards searched in vain for the inmates in the waters around the prison. No
trace of the men was ever found, and many assume they drowned in San Francisco
Bay.
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Berlin Wall (Germany)
During the 26 years when the Berlin Wall separated East and West Berlin, and in
the years since it tumbled in 1989, the wall has been a symbol of the ruthless
determination of Communist leaders to keep their people behind the Iron
Curtain. The wall also symbolized the passionate desire of many people to free
themselves from a repressive system. Risking life and limb, hundreds of people
were able to escape over the years through concrete, steel, and barbed wire,
and past land mines, guard dogs, and sentries armed with automatic rifles and
under strict orders to shoot to kill.
One of the cleverest forms of escape, used numerous times with success,
involved passing through one of the Wall's many checkpoints hidden inside a
car. Couriers with a legal right to pass through ferried countless refugees
into West Berlin this way. Horst Breistoffer, a somewhat professional organizer
of escapes, was a master of this method. Knowing that the East German guards
carefully examined large cars and trucks for stowaways as they drove through
the checkpoints, Breistoffer bought a miniscule car, a 1964 Italian Isetta,
hoping the guards would forgo searching it. After spending more than two months
modifying its structure to make room for an escapee, Breistoffer safely
shuttled nine people over the border curled up in the space once taken up by
the battery and heating system. (While transporting the tenth, he was
caught.)
Tunneling beneath the Wall was another popular means of escape. Tunnel builders
included professional gangs, which charged refugees extortionate rates to use
them, and idealistic students, who hoped to help large groups of people cross
the border at once. In 1964, Wolfgang Fuchs built one of the most important
tunnels, which enabled more than 100 East Germans to reach the West. Fuchs
spent seven months digging and orchestrating the 140-yard tunnel, which ran
from a bathroom in the East to a basement in the West. A similarly successful
tunnel began in an East Berlin graveyard. "Mourners" brought flowers to a grave
and then disappeared underground. This escape route worked well until Communist
officers discovered a baby carriage left by the "grave" and sealed the
tunnel.
One of the most daring escapes involved two East German families, who worked
together to create a homemade hot-air balloon. For months, Peter Strelzyk and
Guenter Wetzel collaborated in their basements on a flamethrower and gas burner
powerful enough to propel them out of Communist East Berlin using a
65-foot-wide, 75-foot-high balloon their wives stitched together from curtains,
bedsheets, and random scraps. On the night of September 15, 1979, the Strelzyks
and the Wetzels launched their contraption. They had just enough fuel to make
it over the wall and land, whereupon they ran to freedom.
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Billy Hayes (Turkey)
In 1970, Turkish authorities sentenced Billy Hayes, a 22-year-old American
caught trying to carry four pounds of hashish out of Turkey, to serve 30 years
for smuggling, and threw him into a notoriously brutal prison in Istanbul
called Sagmalicar. After over a year of beatings and a steady loss of hope,
Hayes was transferred to a prison on an island in the Sea of Marmara, where he
was allowed to spend his days unloading cargo from ships. Six months of
plotting and waiting yielded an escape plan for Hayes, whose story later became
the subject of a book and subsequent movie entitled Midnight Express.
Hayes snuck out of the prison, stole a rowboat, and made it to shore. Hoping to
reach Greece, Hayes dyed his blond hair black and began travelling towards the
border. Barefoot, exhausted, and lacking a passport, he swam across a river and
walked for miles. When he finally came upon an armed soldier, he thought that
he had lost his bid for freedom, but the soldier yelled at him in Greek. Hayes
eventually made it back to the U.S. safely.
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