The Mammoth Book of Prison Breaks (64 page)

For four days, they tried to attract attention, using a mirror during the day, and the headlight at night. On 10 September, the pilot of an F-80 saw the glint in his cockpit mirror, and turned to investigate. When he saw the two men, he signalled to them that they had been spotted and radioed for help. Two hours later, nearly fifty Allied planes reached them, and wiped out the surrounding villages with machine-gun fire, rockets and napalm bombs, to allow a helicopter to land safely to collect them.

The element of luck (or perhaps divine providence) that had assisted Millar throughout his escape hadn’t deserted him at the last minute: the F-80 had in fact been looking for the crashed pilot of another plane who had been forced to land in the area a few days earlier.

After the end of the war, Kim Chai Phail was given a special commendation by the US 5th Air Force; Millar was also decorated. After the war, he went on to a career in medical technology. His escape and his fortitude were regularly cited in US military survival manuals, and in 1955 he wrote an account of his travels through North Korea.

Sources:

The Miami News,
25 January 1955: “Jet Pilot Tells of Escape From Korea”

Toledo Blade,
29 April 1954: “North Korean Cited; Saved U.S. Officer” (note: this report was written before full details of Millar’s escape were released by the US military; a number of details are therefore incorrect)

Catholic Sentinel,
26 February 1999: “Obituaries: Ward Millar”

Millar, Ward:
Valley of the Shadow
(D. McKay Co., 1955)

Very few escapees successfully managed to make their way out of North Korea during the conflict in the 1950s; when the United States became embroiled in another conflict in South-East Asia the following decade, even less men achieved every prisoner of war’s aim of escape. Only one American was able to travel from North Vietnam into the south – but his freedom was exceedingly short-lived, and he would spend six years being tortured and incarcerated as a direct result of his escape attempt.

Aged just sixteen, George Everett Day, known as Bud, enlisted in the Marine Corps straight after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. He served on Midway Island during the Second World War, took a law degree in 1949, and two years later was called to active duty with the US Air Force. He had a couple of lucky escapes, including an incident when his parachute failed to open while based in England, and another time when he had to carry out a zero visibility, zero ceiling landing (effectively bringing his plane in blind). “That was as scary as it was going to get,” he commented at the time, little realizing what the Vietnam War would bring his way.

On Easter Sunday 1967, Major Bud Day went out to Vietnam as a Combat Fighter Pilot and Squadron Commander. One hundred and thirty-seven missions over South and North Vietnamese airspace went without major incident; on 26 August 1967, Day and Captain Corwin Kippenham were tasked with taking out a North Vietnamese surface-to-air missile (SAM) site very close to the demilitarized zone (DMZ) between the two opposing sides. They were about to blow the Russian SAM to pieces when their F-100 was hit. The two airmen bailed out, but their parachutes were immediately spotted by the North Vietnamese members of the local militia. Kippenham was lucky: he was rescued by American forces almost as soon as he hit the ground. Day was much less fortuitous: he was looking down the barrel of a rifle in the hands of an enemy soldier. The helicopter that had rescued Kippenham tried to swoop in to collect Day, after picking up the distress signal from his parachute, with Kippenham given a rifle and told to provide covering fire. However, the pilot realized that he was not going to be able to land; Day was, very reluctantly, left to his fate.

In some ways, Day’s situation was similar to that of Ward Millar a decade and a half earlier; he too suffered serious injuries during his landing, although in Day’s case, it was his upper limbs that were badly damaged. He had bone protruding through the skin on his left wrist, and multiple fractures to his right arm; he had also dislocated his left knee, and was forced to march to the Vietnamese soldiers’ base in a nearby village. His watch, knife, boots and flight suit were taken from him, and he was then thrown into an underground bunker, which had a log roof. His broken left wrist was tied to the ceiling, and his feet were bound. Not, as Day recognized, the easiest situation from which to escape, but, like Millar before him, he was absolutely determined to reunite with his family.

Day was brutally interrogated by the North Vietnamese, but he refused to divulge anything other than his name, rank, and serial number. This dogged attitude earned him worse torture, but Day made sure that he made its effects look worse than they actually were. The majority of the soldiers guarding him were simply teenagers, unused to combat, or the discipline of the army, and he was certain that if he could lull them into a false state of security, he would be left alone long enough to be able to untie his ropes, and escape into the jungle under cover of darkness.

His opportunity came on the sixth night after his capture, and Day was able to get a two-mile head start on the North Vietnamese. Guessing that he was approximately eighteen miles from the DMZ, Day struck out for the border, but was slowed down by his injuries and a lack of covering for his feet. To begin with, he was able to navigate by the stars, but as the jungle canopy grew increasingly thick the further south he went, he was unable to get accurate bearings, and in the end, had to rely on going along the trails that he was pretty certain ran from north to south. These, of course, were also the paths that were used by the Viet Cong as they travelled around, so he spent a lot of time hiding from passing patrols, as well as the guards and dogs who were busily searching specifically for him.

Soldiers weren’t the only problem he faced: the only items of food he could find were live frogs and berries, and anyone who crossed his path was unlikely to be a potential ally. Even children had to be treated with extreme caution. His own comrades in the US forces didn’t help: bombing raids were a regular occurrence, and on more than one occasion, Day was far nearer to the impact zones than he would have liked. Shrapnel became lodged in his leg, and his eardrums were ruptured by being too close to explosions on only his second night of freedom. He suffered from periods of delirium, violent nausea and dizziness as a result.

Day was never too certain how long he was wandering for – somewhere between twelve and fifteen days – but during that time he managed to cross the Ben Hai River on a bamboo log. He realized that he was getting close to the sanctuary he sought when he started to find discarded US rations wrappers on the ground, and tried in vain to signal to passing American aircraft. He wandered within South Vietnam for some time before finding the US Marine base at Con Thien, but he didn’t want to approach it at night, in case the troops opened fire on a perceived enemy. He waited for the next morning, but he was hailed by a young boy who saw him hiding in the bush. Day had no intention of surrendering this close to home, and tried to make a run for it. He managed to get about a dozen yards before he was shot in the thigh and through the hand. Refusing to give up, he kept going and tried to hide in the jungle, but a couple of teenagers were able to follow the trail of blood that he was leaving, and a day and a half later, they captured him.

The next time that Bud Day saw freedom was 14 March 1973; over the intervening five and a half years, he was severely tortured and interrogated to an extent that, as he admitted in his autobiography, death began to have some appeal. He became cellmates with future Presidential candidate John McCain who later commented, “Bud Day is the toughest man I have ever known. He had an unwavering and unshakeable sense of honour that made him able to withstand physical and mental pressures of an enormous degree.” He was back on active service only a short time after being released and retired in 1977.

Day was awarded the Medal of Honor for his bravery and on 14 March 1997, the Air Force named its new Survival School building at Fairchild Air Force Base in Washington State, the “Colonel George ‘Bud’ Day Building” in honour of his escape.

Sources:

Siouxland Lifestyle
magazine, Winter 2005: “Col. George ‘Bud’ Day, Siouxland’s Hometown Hero”

US Air Force official website: “Maj. George ‘Bud’ Day”

Airforce
magazine, February 1984: “Valor: The Long Road to Freedom”

Vietnam
magazine, June 2007: “Bud Day: Vietnam War POW Hero”

Airforce
magazine, December 2005: “The Strength of Bud Day”

The American Civil War, which raged between 1861 and 1865 following the secession of seven states from the union to form the Confederate States of America, led to the creation of thousands of prisoners of war. Many of these were housed in dreadful conditions, and officers saw it as their duty to get back to their armies if at all possible.

One of the biggest escapes of the Civil War, and indeed from an American jail in the nineteenth century, came from the Confederate-run Libby Prison (sometimes referred to as Libey in contemporary news reports), in Richmond, Virginia. A former ship-supply shop and warehouse had been taken over at the start of the war – the owner was given forty-eight hours to pack up and leave – and hundreds of Union prisoners, as well as Confederate deserters, were stashed there. If they looked out of the windows, they risked being shot: Confederate guards would treat a head as a legitimate target, and there were numerous instances of Union soldiers being shot when they were doing nothing more than sitting reading the newspaper.

The prison occupied an entire city block, with Carey Street running along the north side of the prison, and sloped down to the south where a canal and then the James River flowed. The jail was on three floors, each divided into three rooms, with cellars beneath each of the rooms on the ground floor. Prisoners were kept on the upper two storeys, one of the rooms on the ground floor was used as a dining room, and an area in the cellar beneath the hospital was initially used as a kitchen during the day before an infestation of rats forced its closure. The ground floor also housed the commandant’s office and a hospital. The middle cellar was used as a carpenter’s shop – because the prison was built on a hill, there was access to it from the street to the south side. The Confederates cut doors between the rooms on the upper levels, allowing the inmates to mingle freely, but the rooms on the ground floor, as well as the cellars, were kept as separate units. To the east of the prison was a vacant lot between two buildings, about seventy feet away from the jail walls.

Although 109 men escaped from Libby on the night of 8 February 1864, they were by no means the first to do so. As early as 23 October 1862, Confederate deserters who were being held in the prison hospital, took what the
Richmond Dispatch
referred to as “French leave” – in other words, they escaped. A month later, four deserters got up to the roof, and then let themselves down to the ground using a rope made from blankets. The guards that they passed during their escape were sent for court martial. Another escaper, James Simmon, was returned to Libby in December after being arrested for drunkenly drawing a knife. Nine black slaves ran off at some point during the morning of 16 February – they were only counted twice a day, so had plenty of time to make a clean getaway. And so it went on, as hundreds of Yankee prisoners were brought through the doors, some to be exchanged for Confederate POWs, others to remain within the walls.

One of those brought to Libby following the battle of Chickamauga on 20 September 1863 was Colonel Thomas E. Rose. He had already proved that he wasn’t going to submit to prison easily: on the journey to Richmond, he escaped from his guards in North Carolina but was recaptured after a day wandering around the woods. Arriving at Libby, he took stock of his surroundings and noticed that rats exited from the prison into the river when the tide was high, and that there was a sewer running beneath the street immediately between the prison and the canal. Chatting with another prisoner, Major Hamilton, Rose deduced that the best means of escape would be by a tunnel to go from the easternmost cellar down to the sewers. From there they could reach the canal, and thus to safety.

There were only two snags immediately apparent. The easternmost cellar was the one that had been abandoned because of the large colony of rats that lived there, lending it the nickname Rat Hell. And there was no easy way of getting to it. The only room on the ground floor to which they could get access was the dining room, which was in the middle.

Before they could even begin digging a tunnel, they needed to find a way into Rat Hell, and Hamilton devised the solution. They would need to cut a hole in the back of the dining-room fireplace, without breaking through the wall into the hospital room, or disturbing the ceiling of the carpenters’ cellar beneath, both of which were visible to Confederate guards throughout the day. They then had to cut a way down the portioning wall so that when they did break through, they were in the rat cellar – creating an inverted S shape. The gap had to be wide enough to allow a man to get through, but small enough that its entrance could easily be hidden from guards, or, indeed, other prisoners who crowded round a stove in front of the fire from dawn until dark.

For days, between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m., Hamilton worked using only an old jack-knife and a chisel to remove the mortar from between the bricks, hiding the dust in an old rubber blanket, which he then removed and began digging at the wall behind to create the tunnel. Promptly at 4 a.m., Hamilton and Rose would replace the bricks, and throw soot at the area to hide their handiwork.

When the S-bend was complete, Rose volunteered to test it out, and nearly ruined the whole enterprise. He lost his grip on the rope which they had tied to a support in the dining room and fed down through the hole, and pinioned his arms by his side. The shape of the tunnel meant that he couldn’t move either up or down, and the more he struggled, the more tightly wedged he became. As Rose began to asphyxiate, Hamilton raced to the upper levels for help, and with only seconds to spare, was able to pull Rose free. Hamilton widened the tunnel.