In 1944, twenty-five German prisoners of war held at Camp Papago Park near Phoenix, Arizona, pulled off one of the most ambitious escapes on American soil. The POWs, most of them U-boat crewmen, spent months digging a 178-foot tunnel beneath their barracks using makeshift tools fashioned from cans, boards, and even a stolen pickaxe. On a cold December night, they crawled through the tunnel and slipped into the desert darkness, believing freedom awaited just beyond the horizon.
Their plan was daring but flawed. Armed with homemade collapsible rafts built from scavenged wood, rubber, and tar-coated cloth, they intended to reach the Gila and Salt Rivers, thinking they could float all the way to Mexico. But the rivers marked on their maps were seasonal and bone dry during the winter. Instead of water, they found miles of barren desert. Some hid in irrigation ditches and haylofts, while others wandered aimlessly in the cold night, exhausted and disoriented.
Within days, hunger and fatigue forced most to surrender voluntarily. The last two were captured after nearly two weeks on the run, barely clinging to survival. No one was harmed, and the entire episode became a bizarre footnote in wartime history, remembered more for its irony than its danger. The great escape from Camp Papago Park ended right where it began, at the camp’s front gate.
Cart and oxen in Oklahoma City, Indian Territory. Circa 1889. Oklahoma Historical Society: The Gateway to Oklahoma History.