Customer Reviews

The Faustball Tunnel: German POWs in America and Their Great Escape (Bluejacket Books)

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"The Faustball Tunnel". By John Hammond Moore. Subtitled: "German POWs In America And Their Great Escape". Random House, New York, 1978.

When I pulled this book from the library shelf, my rudimentary German told me that the title was "The Fistball Tunnel". When I looked in my German/English dictionary, I found that "Faustball" was a form of volleyball, and this, naturally, was explained in the beginning text of the book. I should have started to read the book in the library.

It seems that German Prisoners of War (POWs) had the same ideas as their British counterparts on the other side of the world. The German POWs were mainly maritime individuals: either Kriegsmarine or German Merchant Marine. In their prison in Arizona, these German sailors hit upon the idea of building a volleyball court so as to hide the dirt that was coming up from the tunnel they were building. "Hide in plain sight". This was quite similar to what some British were doing in their prison camp in Germany (see "The Great Escape" by Paul Brickhill). However, the German escape into the Arizona desert was NOT made into a major motion picture.

In the Arizona camp, the American Army guards were lackadaisical, to say the least. Some Germans escaped. The German escapees were surprised by the distances involved, and Arizona is not as big as Texas! Further, they were surprised to find people who did not speak English, but spoke Spanish. In this regard, I wonder why the Germans wanted to escape to Mexico, a country that was also at war with Nazi Germany; the German POWs were at greater risk inside Mexico than they were in the U.S. Interestingly, after their recapture, the German sailors learnt that the buzzing noise in the desert was the sound of rattlesnakes shaking their warning tails and that rattlesnakes are dangerous. All in all, the German escapees were as deficient in their knowledge of North America as the contemporary American/British escapees were about Europe.

Interesting, although the "great escape" of the title was a fizzle. If it ever hits you that German POWs must have been kept somewhere and you're casually wondering where and how, this is a good place to start reading -- it's the story of one camp and some of the men (on both sides) who served there, not an academic-style "history" full of facts and figures and analysis.