AZ: The History of Arizona podcast · David Rookhuyzen

Episode 239: The Great Papago Escape, Part II: The Crazy Boatmen

·35 min·2 clips

The episode opens by presenting the Great Papago Escape as one of the stories Arizona history always seems to circle back to. Rickhausen treats it as a wartime episode that turns up in just about every broad history of the state. From there, the story follows German POWs trying to make their way out of the desert and learning that Arizona rarely cooperates with tidy plans. A river on the map, the episode reminds us, is not the same thing as water in the ground. One pair of escapees decides they have probably had enough and turns themselves in to a farmer, even trying to make the surrender feel proper before the farmer drives them to a nearby POW branch camp. The next day, two more Germans are captured. They had hidden in Roosevelt School in South Phoenix over the Christmas holiday before heading south across Levine and into the desert. Their problem quickly becomes the same problem every traveler in the story has: water. Just after midnight on December 31, 1944, they stop at a creaky water pump in the Tohono O'odham village of Kaka. The noise from the pump helps give them away. By January 1, they have eaten rabbit roadkill and are still planning to cross into Mexico the following night. Instead, they are surrounded by armed men. Frank Tolle, an ex-marine who spent his days hunting down smugglers, is among the people who track them down, along with two Tohono O'odham scouts. The prisoners are identified by their shoe prints, which leave a distinctive V pattern. They assure their captors that they are unarmed, are taken to cells, and then brought to Tolle's house while the army is on the way. There they are allowed to wash, shave, change clothes, and sit down to dinner. The episode uses that odd mix of enforcement and hospitality to show how local people shaped the outcome. It also keeps widening the wartime frame, noting the different treatment of German POWs, Italian soldiers, and Japanese immigrants and Japanese-American children who were sent to internment camps. Rickhausen closes by saying the Japanese internment story will have to wait for a later episode. The whole piece stays rooted in place, movement, and the plain difficulty of surviving the desert with a bad plan.

As heard by us

A dry, grounded escape story where the desert keeps undoing every plan.

Episode 239 returns to the Papago Park breakout and stays with the part history keeps circling back to: the moment a plan meets the land. The strongest stretch follows the plain, practical nonsense of escape in southern Arizona, from a river that barely behaves like one to a…

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want a wartime escape story where the desert keeps winning.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from AZ: The History of Arizona podcast