The Invisible Men
Prisoners' Bluff. By Rolf Magener. (Rupert Hart-Davis. 12s. 6d.)
HERR MAGENER and his companion, von Have, escaped from the internment camp for Axis civilians at Dehra Dun at the same time as Heinrich Harrer. He, as most of the leading public know by now, made his way successfully to Tibet; Magener and von Have—equally successfully but with less happy results for themselves—reached the Japanese lines in Burma.
The main reason why virtually no successful escapes were made by Allied prisoners from Japanese POW camps was that, within a very few weeks of capture, the prisoners were so weakened by their privations that to attempt (as was necessary everywhere except at Hongkong) an immensely long journey through difficult country was out of the question. But even if the prisoners had not been virtually starved, Asia would still have confronted them with one major problem which was not a limiting factor in Europe—they were the wrong colour, they had only to be seen to be recognised for what they were.
Harrer accepted this handicap and somehow got away with it. Magener and von Have avoided it, but took on risks of a different order, by going (as it were) British. Both spoke good English and had a working knowledge of our curious race. Dressed in bush shirts and topees, they presented a vaguely military appearance; by 1944, the year of their escape, India swarmed with war-time organisations of one sort or another and, especially in the hot weather, the fact that a traveller looked rather nondescript was not in itself enough to arouse suspicion.
Nevertheless, after they boarded the train at Saharanpur for the thousand-mile journey to Calcutta, the two Germans had many anxious moments and several narrow escapes from exposure. They were lucky, though no luckier than they deserved, in slipping through the wide mesh of routine security arrangements in the South East Asia Command, and one suspects that they owed a good deal to von Have's temperament, which disposed him, when he had to make the choice, in favour of brazen rather than furtive tactics.
After a desultory sojourn in Calcutta they headed, by train and various forms of water-transport, for the Arakan and soon found themselves in a forward operational area, where most of their involuntary contacts were, fortunately for them, with Indian or Gurkha units (they seem to have credited the Gurkha with far quicker wits than he in fact possesses). After a good deal of strenuous but aimless bush-whacking, some of it in close proximity to shell-tire, they suddenly found themselves looking down the barrels of three rifles and accepted defeat. But gradually it dawned on them that the men behind the rifles were Japanese. 'We are Germans,' they said, using the only Japanese words they knew. They had won through against heavy odds; and their worst troubles were about to begin.
It had been comparatively easy to persuade the British that they were British; it proved virtually impossible to convince the Japanese that they were German. After all they had been through the two men were in poor physical shape. They were now made to do a series of forced marches; their hands were bound at night, they got hardly any food and at intervals they were interrogated, very stupidly, by officers who lost no chance of humiliating them. At the end of this ordeal they found themselves in Rangoon gaol, whence they were later transferred to the headquarters of the Kempetai, where they were kept incommunicado for two months. Then, all of a sudden and for no apparent reason, they were taken out and made to give an interview to the Press, and soon after this they were flown to Tokyo. They were not able to leave Japan until 1947, and thus got back to Germany nearly a year later than their fellow-internees who had not troubled to escape. `So you might say,' the author good- humouredly concludes, 'that the British had the last word after all.' Herr Magener tells the story of a bold and singular exploit racily and modestly. The pattern of his escape has a sort of ironic novoity from being, as it were, the wrong way round. At the beginning, on enemy territory in India, the two Germans have almost complete freedom of action and are invariably treated with kindness; the moment they reach their allies' lines and liberty they are trussed like chickens, brutalised and kept in continual fear of execution. Students of the less admirable aspects of the Japanese character will find much of interest in Herr Magener's close-up of the Kempetai at work; other white-men have seen tie same things, but very few have lived to say
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