Another corker by Michael Gilbert, this one based on Gilbert's experiences in a WWII Italian POW camp and Gilbert's escape with three other POWs--with a couple of murders tossed in to ratchet up the tension even more. It was published in 1952 when, certainly, the memories of WWII were still fresh.
This POW camp is set in Italy and holds about 300 soldiers, most of whom are English but there are a few Americans and "other colonials" as well. The war is winding down and while you might think that would be good news for POWs, it isn't because they don't know how things are going to play out and none of the options are good. First, Italy's army is in its death throes with most senior officers (including those supervising POW camps) madly collecting wealth so that, if/when Italy collapses, they can flee the country before they are tried for war crimes. And if a camp loses its leaders, its very uncertain how the subordinates will act once they are outsmarted and outnumbered. Even if the POWs live through the collapse of Italy, it isn't clear who will take over: Germany is coming in strong from the north but there are also rumors that England has made a landing at the southern end. While that's great news for the POWs in southern Italy, our story is in one of the northern camps and the German army is NOT very far away--however brutal the Italians guards were, they know the Germans will be far, far worse.
So the only sensible thing to do is to plan an escape. Each "hut" houses 20 or so men. There are 14 huts, plus a dozen or so "admin" buildings for Italian soldiers and various "orderlies" (technically POWs but for some reason regarded are harmless and so allowed to move around the camp following order of the Italian officers. Huts A and C have both decided to build an escape tunnel. Escapers in other huts focus their attention on "going over the wall." So far, all wall jumping efforts have ended in quick death. Indeed, SO quickly, the general feeling is that there must be someone in the camp who is working for the Italians. The "Escape Committee" (composed of 6 most senior English officers) holds a meeting to decide how to focus their efforts. The need for this Escape Committee soon becomes clear when they approve the continued building of both tunnels, despite the risk that the Italians know about one or both, and order the tunnelers to make use of any materials they need--including stuff other soldiers have traded for (including their beloved rugby goal posts). The "theft" of tunneling materials (bags for removing sand, boards to keep the ceiling from collapsing, timber for supporing the ceiling boards) causes no end of resentment, especially among those who are opposed to escaping because they are banking on the English arriving and freeing them. Why waste energy and risk being killed, when you can sit tight and wait?
More about these tunnels: Tunnel A is unambitious. It is not far below the surface and headed to just beyond the northern camp wall, which runs along the nearest road. This tunnel will be 50 or so feet long and is almost complete. The idea is that it will take the least time and effort to complete and the escaping men can work their way along the road at night, finding sympathetic farmers to get food from and barns to hide in while waiting for the English invasion. Because successful escape requires knowing which Italians are on guard at any time as well as delivery schedules, the men in Hut A spend all their spare time watching and meticulously recording the guards' activities.
The characters we learn most about, including protagonist Goyles, are digging Tunnel C. Tunnel C is far more ambitious: it is deep--20' straight down then levels, heading south for 400'. Its exit (if all goes according to plan) will open up into the side of a small canyon that runs along a wide river. Across the river is wooded forest on rough, mountainous terrain. The idea is that, though much slower to build, Tunnel C is much safer than Tunnel A: since they will emerge below the line of sight of the camp, escapees can simply scoot down the side of the canyon, float downstream, then climb out of the water wherever the woods are deepest and darkest. The extra wonderful part of Tunnel C is that its entrance is right underneath a collosal iron stove. Hut C engineers rigged up an astonishingly complex pulley system with ropes and tackle (ostensibly for drying wet laundry) they use to hoist up the stove's stone foundation, revealing a 3' diameter hole with ladder going into the tunnel. Four men stand guard at the stove while two tunnel, one digging through sand and the other collecting sand, bagging it up and crawling back to the entrance to hand the bags to the four men on watch. Those guys hand off the sandbags to one of their "baggers" who hides them under their clothes, slowly distributes the sand around camp, and then returns the empty bags back to Hut C. The description of the tunneling process was harrowing: a very detailed account of the difficulty of jiggling along on your stomach, arms stretched out in front, hot stuffy air, only a few weak light bulbs tacked to the ceiling, and constantly dribbling sand falling from the ceiling, all while removing and paddling sand back along ones sides (so effectively the digger is narrowing the tunnel segment they are in) all while Tunneler 2 goes back and forth, collecting up and eliminating the sand as it accumulates. Those minutes while Tunneler 2 is gone, back at the tunnel entrance, are an eternity. Tunnel sessions are limited to 2 hours per team to keep the men from going bonkers.
One day, extra excited about recent progress, Goyles and Long (another Hut C guy) advance far beyond their ceiling supports and the inevitable happens: a cave in right on top of Goyles. His body is trapped and he can't dig himself out because his arms are stretched out in front of him. The weight of the sand crushes his body and each time he exhales, the sand presses down more, preventing him from inhaling. Within a minute his eyeballs feel like they are bursting out of his head and he's losing consciousness. Long manages to find him in the dark and, using a piece of lumber as a lever, pulls Goyles' limp body free. Goyles regains consciousness but it is clear that, the closer they get to the river, the softer the soil is, so the more ceiling supports are needed. Digging is halted while they set to work collecting all the boards and lumber they can find for ceiling supports so that there is no risk of the tunnel ever collapsing again.
Then things take a turn: the morning tunneling team shows up ready to get to work and lifts up the stove. Two enter the tunnel and there, just a few feet along, they find a corpse: it's a Greek soldier named Coutoules face down in the sand and it seems he's died because of a ceiling collapse. They haul his body out and hide it in Hut C. It certainly looks like he died in a tunnel collapse--indeed his fingernails are broken off from his desperate attempts to scrape himself loose. But how did he get into the tunnel by himself--he wasn't even part of a tunneling team! And that part of the tunnel had the most supports--there just seems to be no way that it could have collapsed. Extremely mysterious. Well, they can't keep a corpse secret from the Italians so the real question is, what do they do with him and when do they report his death? They decide to sacrifice Tunnel A. They convince dozens of men to stage a fight between two rival rugby teams and two "players" carry Coutoules's body as the mob moves across the camp from Hut C to Hut A. This allows them to get the corpse inside Hut A and then down in toTunnel A. They wait for the following morning and alert the Italians.
The Italians conduct a healf-hearted post mortem and announce the cause of death as suffocation, blaming Coutoules for his own death. They order Hut A to collapse their tunnel but then say no more. One of the POWs is a doctor and he asks to observe the post mortem: he agrees that Coutoules inhaled sand, but there are unexplained dark bruises on the back of his neck which falling sand wouldn't cause. He's also suspcious of their estimate of time of death--they put his death just a few hours before his "discovery" yet he knows Coutoules's death was at least 24 hours earlier.
Once again the escape committee convene: it is obvious that someone killed Coutoules: he could not have gotten into Tunnel C by himself and no team works at night. But who? And why? And how?
As the tunneling tension builds, it is discovered that everyone is not as they seem: a new guy, Potter, is put into Hut C. He claims he knew Coutoules from another POW camp. He claims that Coutoules had "worked his way" across Italy, hop skipping from one POW camp to another for years. If he's an agent for Italy, then was he killed by English soldiers who found out? Or was he an agent for someone else--Germany?--spying on Italy to permit an easier take over? In that case, the Italians must have killed him him--but that means they know about Tunnel C and yet allow its contruction to continue. But maybe Potter is an Italian plant and is lying about Coutoules to ingratiate himself into the inner circle of tunnelers. It's time to start keeping an eye on everyone.
Finally everything comes to a boil: Italy has surrendered, the senior Italian guards are fleeing and the German army is closing in. Safety be damned, it's time to finish the last stretch of the tunnel and make their escape. And then they devise a bold plan: every single POW is going to escape through Tunnel C in 40 minute shifts of 20 people, from 9 in the morning until late evening after lights out. The scheming required to pull off this plan is incredible: people are assigned to teams because of their skills, personality and reliability--the LAST thing they can do is have "Potter" (or whoever he is) in the first group only to have him circle around to the front of the camp and alert the guards before even 10 people have gotten free. Outfits, maps, rations and tools all have to be divvied up and distributed, ensuring that each group has an equal chance of surviving. Once through the tunnel and across the river, mini-teams of three or four will head off into different directions in the woods ensuring that, even if one team is caught, the others are not. Half the book is spent describing that one day, every action of every person, as a slow trickle of people works its way through the tunnel.
Goyles is in the last team, the team least likely to escape as the more POWs disappear the more obvious it becomes that people are gone. You may fail to notice that 20 of 300 people have gone missing if those remaining are milling around noisily but it's pretty difficult to fail to notice 280 of 300 POWs have gone missing no matter how frenetically those last 20 move about. Goyles and his pal Long (the guy who pulled him out of the tunnel) and Byfold (another mate from Hut C) are in the last group and form a three-person team once across the river. Is that the end of the book? Not by a long shot--we still have 1/3 the book to go! Not only do we have to know if our team is able to trek 400 miles south to "the line" but Goyles finally has an epiphany and figures it all out--how and why Couloutos was killed and why all the wall jumpers were caught and killed: there was indeed a spy in their camp and it wasn't Potter a German, working as a double agent against the Italians (ensuring a quick and easy German take over from the north) and against the English (pumping POW officers for information about weaponry, numbers and strategies), ensuring that Germany wins the war.
If any of this sounds like the movie Stalag 17, it should: many of the themes (how spys in a POW camp get installed and operate, how they are discovered, how escape plans are hatched and carried out, how a POW camp is organized and operates) are exactly the same in this book as they are in that movie. And the crazy duality of the whole experience is the same: on the one hand, the Italian officers take special glee in torturing and killing the POWs (apparently pulling off fingernails during questioning is at art form) but they also like to attend theatre performances put on by the POWs and give genuine praise for skillful acting and high production value. So are the Italian guards friends with the POWs? Yes but also no: they joke around, do trades, permit the POWs a certain level of jocularity and teasing but then, seemingly randomly, they drop the boom and haul a POW away "for a few questions", never to be seen again.
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