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The Confidence Men: How Two Prisoners of War Engineered the Most Remarkable Escape in History
Margalit Fox
By
Published: Jun 01, 2021
Category:
History
Margalit Fox — you know her byline because, over two decades, she wrote 1,400 memorable obituaries for The New York Times — loves great stories that have been overlooked. A few years ago, reading an anthology called “Grand Deception: The World’s Most Spectacular and Successful Hoaxes, Impostures, Ruses and Frauds,” she came across an essay that screamed: Make me a bestseller.
Let her tell the story:
The essay was by a Welshman named Elias Henry Jones, and it recounted a real-life caper so astonishing it gave me goosebumps: During World War I, Jones and a fellow officer, Cedric Hill, broke out of a remote Turkish prisoner-of-war camp without tunneling, using weapons or resorting to violence — the stuff of traditional prison-camp escapes. Instead, they sprang themselves from Yozgad, a P.O.W. camp high in the mountains of Anatolia… by means of a Ouija board.
Their escape plot — an ingeniously planned, daringly executed confidence game that they worked little by little on their Ottoman captors — was an elaborate piece of participatory theater, entailing phony séances, magical illusions, secret codes and a hunt for buried treasure, with clues that appeared to have been planted by ghosts. If all went according to plan, the camp’s iron-fisted commandant would gleefully escort Jones and Hill along their escape route, with the Ottoman government paying their travel expenses. If their ruse was discovered, it would mean execution.
If Jones’s essay gave me goosebumps, his 1919 book, “The Road to En-dor,” nearly made my hair stand on end, for the full story of his escape was rife with cunning, danger and moments of high farce that rival anything in Catch-22. The plan seemed born of a fever dream: Using a handmade Ouija board, Jones and Hill would regale their captors with a tale—seemingly channeled from the spirit world—designed to make them delirious to lead the pair out of Yozgad. The ruse would also require our heroes to perform feats of legerdemain, feign mental illness, stage a double suicide attempt that came perilously close to turning real, and endure six months in a Turkish insane asylum, an ordeal that drove them to the edge of actual madness. And yet in the end they won their freedom. [To read an excerpt, click here. To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
Consider the elements:
– Yozgad was considered escape proof — the Alcatraz of its day.
– Why was a Ouija board key to their escape? Fox: “To postmodern people in the 21st century, it sounds absolutely mental to say you can get out of a prison camp with the Ouija board. But it wasn’t so crazy 100 years ago when they did it — spiritualism was a really big going concern, particularly during World War I, where people had loved ones killed in battle who they were absolutely desperate to contact.”
– The Turkish jailers believed a widely told story: that a rich Armenian had converted his wealth to gold and buried it. Later, they believed “the spirit” communicating through the Ouija board was going to tell them where.
– Jones and Hill needed isolation so they could perfect the plan, so they skillfully managed to become “the only people in military history to be convicted of transmitting war news via telepathy.”
– Jones and Hill planned to do more than escape from the prison. They planned to get to the Mediterranean, 300 miles away — and they needed the warden to bring them there so no one would think anything was amiss.
– “To get to the sea they would have to go mad.” You won’t believe how they did this and what they risked (hint: death), so I won’t spoil it with a summary. Know that Jones and Hill were masters of psychology, experts at conjuring and secret codes, possessed of enormous courage — and above all, they shared a total commitment to seeing England again.
“The Confidence Men: How Two Prisoners of War Engineered the Most Remarkable Escape in History” is burdened by more explanations of brainwashing — its history, its techniques, its applications in the early 20th century, and, by implication, how it has recently become “the big con” of our country — than some readers may want. I’m one of them. At just 238 pages, I find the book both a page-turner and overlong. At the same time, I was delighted to find 72 pages of reference books and footnotes; Fox’s research is gold standard.
“The most remarkable escape in history?” I’m not sure. Wouldn’t the most remarkable escape in history be one you never heard of? That’s just quibbling: I don’t expect to read a better escape saga any time soon.
