Six Notable Prisoners of War

 

President of France, Charles de Gaulle

Once recovered from two wounds suffered in the early fighting, de Gaulle rejoined his regiment first as company commander, then as aide to the colonel. He was wounded a third time during the battle of Verdun, at Douaumont, in 1916. Left for dead, he was given a "posthumous" mention in army dispatches. He was, in fact, captured and received hospital treatment in Mainz before being imprisoned in various locations, including the fortress of Ingolstadt in Bavaria. After five failed escape bids, he was moved frequently and not freed until the Armistice. 

Soviet Marshal, Mikhail Tukhachevsky

During the first half-year of the war Tukhachevsky was rewarded with six decorations for personal courage. In February 1915 he was captured by German troops and tried to escape four times. While being imprisoned in the Bavarian fortress of Ingolstadt, where the most obstinate and dangerous captives were kept, Tukhachevsky met the then captain Charles de Gaulle, future Resistance hero and French president. His fifth attempt to escape was a success and he managed to return to Russia in October 1917 when the Bolshevik revolt was in full swing.

Air Innovator Roland Garros

When the war erupted, Garros, already famous, joined the French air service and was posted to a squadron near Nancy. There he took on the task of devising a method of shooting down the enemy. On 18 April 1915, the fuel line of his Morane Saulnier Type G became clogged, causing engine trouble. He came down in German-controlled territory where he was grabbed by alert German Infantrymen. Garros spent three years as a prisoner of war before escaping in early 1918. He insisted on returning to combat, but after three years he was not the same man—he was weaker, older, and needed glasses. Moreover, aircraft had improved dramatically in speed and capability. Nonetheless, Garros insisted. Now flying a Spad XIII, he shot down another German and was then shot down himself on 5 October 1918. This time he did not survive the crash.

Revolutionary and America's Favorite Communist,

 Josip Broz (Tito)

Josip Broz was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army in 1913, completed non-commissioned officer training, and was sent as a sergeant in the war against Serbia in 1914. Transferred to the Russian front in early 1915, he was seriously wounded and captured by the Russians in April 1915. After a long hospitalization he was sent to prisoner-of-war camps, where he became acquainted with Bolshevik propaganda. He managed to escape his last camp and make his way to Petrograd (St. Petersburg). In 1917 he participated in the July Days demonstrations and, after the October Revolution, joined a Red Guard unit in Omsk, Siberia.  In the photo above, the former prisoner of war is shown on a 1971 visit to the White House with President Richard Nixon.

Musical Showman, Maurice Chevalier

In the first weeks of combat a shrapnel shell exploded in Chevalier’s trench, hitting his chest, and entering his lung. “Then it was, as the English Tommies used to say, that I got my packet.” He recalls the pain, blood oozing from his mouth, and soldiers carrying him to a village behind the lines. The next day the Germans took the village: those too badly injured to move, including Chevalier, were captured. Chevalier was in hospital at Magdeburg before being moved to Altengrabow prison camp. “That was a bitter experience for discipline was strict,” he later said. He feared the injury had ruined his singing voice, but he was relieved to find he could still entertain his fellow prisoners. Through a complex deception involving his Folies Bergère girlfriend, Mistinguett, the neutral King of Spain, and his own forgery skills, Chevalier was reclassified as an ambulance worker eligible for a prisoner exchange program. After two years and four months as a prisoner of war, Chevalier was free. He returned to Paris and was declared unfit to carry out further war service. He was discharged and awarded the Croix de Guerre.

Aerial Explorer, Gunther Plüschow

After an epic escape from the siege of the German colony at Tsing Tao, naval aviator Plüschow subsequently became the only German to escape from a British Prisoner of War camp in either World War. His capture in Gibraltar in 1915 terminated his epic Nanking-Shanghai-Nagasaki-Honolulu-San Francisco self-extraction from the Asian theater.  After his Gibraltar capture, he again demonstrated his remarkable escape skills. After promptly departing his Leicestershire prisoner of war camp, Plüschow made his way to London, where he worked and spent time visiting the British Museum, eventually slipping aboard a ship bound for the Netherlands, from where he snuck back into Germany to resume his duties with the German Navy.