AZ: The History of Arizona podcast · David Rookhuyzen

Episode 238: The Great Papago Escape, Part 1: The Tunnel

·31 min·2 clips

Twenty-five German prisoners emerged from their tunnel and disappeared into the Phoenix night.

Mid-1943, the desert gets turned into a prison. The Army takes Civilian Conservation Corps buildings east of Phoenix, below Papago Buttes, and makes them part of Service Command Unit 1982, a name with all the warmth of a filing cabinet. The host walks the ground: a dirt road that is now 64th Street, Thomas Road to the north, the Arizona Crosscut Canal to the east, and 160 cleared acres behind double barbed wire. Fifteen towers ring the place. Inside, it is less master plan than wartime patchwork, with CCC huts, wooden shacks, and white government barracks split into five compounds. Then command trouble starts to matter on the map. Holden, a World War I veteran who helped set up the Florence camp for Italian prisoners in 1942, inherits Wattenberg, the highest-ranking German officer, and Wattenberg is not playing along. He will not tell his men to give up escape attempts for nearby movies, because escape is still their duty as they understand it. The complaints keep coming too. Some are petty. Some are real, including German officers being called out for headcounts by Americans of lower rank or by non-commissioned officers. Holden answers with containment. He puts Wattenberg and the other agitators in Compound 1A, which looks tidy until you remember these are commanders, administrators, and men with earlier POW escape experience. The assistant director of internal security and intelligence had already warned about blind spots created by Papago Park's rolling ground, including one in Compound 1, and the host finds no sign anyone acted on it. The Germans find the spot. It sits between a small laundry wash house near the eight-foot double fence and a coal box about a meter south, helpfully converted for the Yanks. Then the tunnel does its job. At 6:30 p.m., ten Fluggruppen leave in staggered intervals, climb through a shaft within 50 centimeters of a telephone pole, slip into the Crosscut Canal, and disappear into a cold, rainy Phoenix night. Wattenberg's recapture is still 37 days away.

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