Chapter 1

A mad old bugger

Group Captain Gilbert Insall, my great-uncle, holds a unique record. He is the only person to have both won a Victoria Cross and escaped successfully from a German prisoner of war camp during the First World War.* Gilbert trained as a pilot and was posted to 11 Squadron in the Royal Flying Corps (RFC), in which my grandfather Jack also served as an observer. Gilbert won his VC in November 1915. He was involved in combat with a German fighter, which he shot down. After descending to a low level to drop a bomb and ensure its destruction, his own engine was damaged and he was obliged to make a forced landing just behind the French front line. Ignoring intensive German shelling, he oversaw repairs to his aircraft overnight and took off - again under heavy fire - and returned to base the following morning. A few weeks later, after an encounter with another German aircraft in which he was quite badly wounded by anti-aircraft shrapnel, he was shot down and captured.

After three months in hospital, he was sent to a series of prison camps. Once he had recovered from his injury and, later in September 1916, from an operation for acute peritonitis performed without anaesthetic (he was told that this was due to the scarcity of drugs in Germany, which precluded their use for prisoners1), he began to plan an escape. All of his attempts required at least some temporary confinement in unpleasantly constricted areas. His first, at Heidelberg, was through a tunnel more than forty yards long, which required the removal and disposal or concealment of some five tons of earth. For the second, from Crefeld,┼ near Düsseldorf, he and Captain William Morritt hid in a space which had been created among piles of boxes on a cart transporting prisoners' luggage to storage. It was very cramped and Morritt was obliged to kneel on Gilbert's head for much of the journey, before they slipped unobtrusively off the cart and attempted to get away from the area. After being transferred to Ströhen, Gilbert and several companions concealed themselves in a claustrophobically small space they had excavated under the floor of the bathhouse (which was just outside the camp perimeter) and remained there for seventeen hours, enduring the heat of a summer's day while a fruitless search for them was carried out. They eventually emerged early the following morning and reached Holland a few days later in September 1917.

But this is not just a story about Gilbert, for he could not have managed to plan and execute his escapes without assistance from his family, then based in Paris. In the first years of conflict, the War Office provided no assistance or advice to servicemen to help them prepare for the consequences of capture. And, before the beginning of 1917, there was no British organisation to provide escaping equipment or advice either. So, prisoners wanting to escape had no official support. Fortunately, in some cases, families were able to provide help. My family played a significant role and found some clever ways of helping Gilbert once they managed to work out ways of communicating safely with each other without attracting the attention of German censors. They were able to provide nearly all the escaping equipment which he required, mainly maps, files and compasses - though also, remarkably and with French assistance, a large pair of wire cutters, which were successfully smuggled in to him. But that was not all. Gilbert's father (another Gilbert, so hereafter called Gilbert senior) was also active in lobbying officialdom on his behalf and in raising public awareness about some of the harsh conditions in which prisoners were held and how they were being punished. For example, when Gilbert was sentenced to five months in solitary confinement (in a cell measuring nine feet by six feet, with restricted light), Gilbert senior drew attention to it by writing to The Times. His complaint attracted plenty of attention and sympathetic comment. Gilbert senior also arranged for questions to be asked in Parliament and wrote repeatedly to the Foreign Office Prisoners of War Department. This encouraged others to do the same. It was against this background that the government decided to negotiate with Germany over changes to the treatment of prisoners, leading to the Hague Agreement of July 1917, whereby such extreme punishments were discontinued. As a result, Gilbert was spared having to serve most of the five-month sentence in solitary he had received for his escape from Heidelberg. There were a few other improvements too which made life as a prisoner a little more tolerable.

Conditions in German prison camps during the First World War were different from those in the Second, not least because the Geneva Convention had not by then been signed. (Though that certainly did not prevent the harsh treatment of, as well as some serious crimes being committed against, prisoners during the Second World War.) Two Hague Conventions were negotiated in 1899 and 1907, but they were not effective and both sides tended to interpret or violate them as they saw fit - for example, over the use of gas as a chemical weapon. But there's no doubt that conditions in German camps were considerably worse than those in the UK. The American Deputy Red Cross Commissioner to Switzerland, Carl Dennett, wrote of the treatment of Allied prisoners of war (PoWs): 'Germany . notoriously failed even to provide them with the necessities of life, and it is a fact beyond dispute that the ravages of disease, including tuberculosis, due to malnutrition, and even starvation, have killed tens of thousands of prisoners in the hands of the German military forces.'2

Prisoners were given poor and inadequate food, and all but officers were required to work, sometimes in agriculture but also in salt and coal mines and similar places in appalling conditions - and sometimes dangerously close to the front lines. Overall, 11,147 British prisoners are officially listed as having died in captivity, but the real figure is estimated to be significantly more than that.3 French figures were higher still.

Gradually, towards the end of the war, the War Office began to realise the advantages which could be gained from helping prisoners to escape - not just in terms of the disruption which escaping prisoners could cause to their German captors but also in securing the return of trained, skilled fighting manpower. There could also be propaganda value, too. The main British intelligence organisations of that period - GHQ1b and MI1c (which later became known as the Secret Intelligence Service, SIS, or MI6) both began at the end of 1916 to develop sections which concentrated on helping prisoners of war. (As will be described in Chapter 8, the French had already started to do so, with some effect, rather earlier.) MI1a also played a role, though it was more analytical than operational. My family, and in particular my grandfather Jack, developed contacts with these organisations and exchanged information with them about escaping activities. However, family links with Gilbert were so well developed that they were in a position to decline an offer of assistance from MI1c in July 1917, a few weeks before Gilbert succeeded in getting out of Ströhen. They had a very productive relationship with the French intelligence service as well. Indeed, it was actually the French who gave them the most practical assistance.

Very little is known about the work of these escape sections. Few documents have survived. In 1919, the War Office instructed officers in the Intelligence Corps to burn nearly all their files. The papers which survived that weeding were mostly destroyed in the Blitz.4 However, it has been possible to discover hitherto unpublished material about some of the early activities of these sections, as well as my family's links with them. The British organisations were operating on a fairly small scale and, since they only began their work in the later part of the war, did not have much opportunity to achieve significant results. Nonetheless, some of those who had been in MI1a or who had successfully escaped played a significant role╬ when a reconstituted MI1a was in the late autumn of 1939 renamed and turned into what became the much larger, better-known and considerably more effective organisation MI9.5 It is estimated that some 23,000 prisoners of war, assisted by MI9 and its American counterpart MIS-X, managed to escape successfully during the Second World War. This was admittedly from a much larger number of conflict zones.6 When attempting a comparison between the two wars, it is difficult to make a reliable estimate of the numbers. However, the War Office calculated that there were some 190,000 British and empire prisoners captured in the First World War - though there were also around another 100,000 who for one reason or another were unregistered. About 570 of them escaped successfully, mainly other ranks, not officers, who were able to abscond from outside working parties relatively easily and thus did not have to solve the problem of how to get out from a well-guarded camp. (Of this total, 420 were British prisoners.) Around fifty of the 570 were officers.7 Of those, thirty-five - well over half - were from the RFC.§...