Stalag Luft III, the Nazi POW camp for Allied airmen near Sagan (now Zagan, Poland), is famous for one event: the Great Escape of March 24, 1944, in which 76 Allied officers tunneled out of the camp and attempted to reach freedom. Of the 76, three made it home. The rest were captured and executed by the Gestapo on Hitler's direct orders. But the Great Escape, dramatic as it was, overshadowed another escape from the same camp -- one that involved not 76 men but two, and a journey that lasted not a single night but over three months.
Lieutenant Colonel Charles B. Haydon and Captain Joseph C. Huguenard were not typical escapees. Haydon was 34 years old, a former Harvard Law School graduate who had been flying B-17 missions over Germany for nearly a year before he was shot down in December 1943. Huguenard was 26, a bomber navigator from Minnesota who had been captured the same month. Both were senior officers, which gave them certain privileges within the camp.
Their escape began not with a tunnel but with a German guard who had been buying chocolate from the American compound. In exchange for chocolate, the guard agreed to leave a gate unlocked at midnight on June 23, 1944 -- three months after the Great Escape, when security at the camp had ostensibly returned to normal. The guard's motivations are unclear; he may have had financial reasons, ideological sympathies, or simply have been bored. He was never identified.
At midnight, Haydon and Huguenard walked through the unlocked gate and disappeared into the woods east of the camp. They carried no map, no compass, and no identification -- just the clothes they were wearing, a small knife, and two chocolate bars. Their plan was simple to the point of madness: walk south until they reached the Adriatic coast, find a fishing boat, and negotiate passage to Italy.
They walked for 2,000 miles over the next 106 days.
The journey took them through Silesia, Bohemia, Austria, and Yugoslavia -- a landscape that changed from dense forest to mountain to coastal plain, across borders that shifted with German occupation and partisan control, through territories where speaking German could mean death. They survived by begging food from peasants, stealing from fields, and once -- when both were near collapse from hunger -- working as farm laborers in an Austrian valley for two weeks before moving on.
They were caught twice. The first time, in a village in southern Austria, a German policeman recognized their foreign accents and detained them. They escaped from the holding cell by removing the door hinges while the policeman was at lunch. The second time, in Slovenia, they were captured by Slovenian partisan forces -- who, fortunately, proved to be anti-communist and sympathetic to the Americans, and released them with supplies and directions.
They reached the Adriatic coast near Trieste on October 7, 1944. They found an Italian fishing boat whose captain agreed to take them to the Allied lines at Ancona for the equivalent of one American watch and a promise to send payment after the war. They were delivered to the American Army three days later.
Both men survived the war. Haydon returned to his law practice in Boston. Huguenard returned to Minnesota and became a high school history teacher. They never spoke publicly about their escape -- a silence that lasted until the 1980s, when historians began documenting individual escape stories from Stalag Luft III. The guard who had left the gate unlocked was never identified.