Commentary
This is an interesting table, but like any other body of statistics it cannot be claimed as perfect.
Its left-hand column, meant to show the areas or theatres of war it deals with, calls for a gloss. ‘Western Europe’ covers escapes and evasions through Denmark, Holland, Luxembourg, Belgium, and France; the ‘operational rescues after “D” Day’ in Normandy, 6 June 1944, mean such operations as ‘Marathon’ or ‘Pegasus’-Those included under ‘Switzerland’ are not counted again under ‘Western Europe’. The dividing line between ‘Mediterranean West’ and ‘Mediterranean East’ appears to put Italy and Tunis on the western side, the Balkan Peninsula and the Libyan Desert on the eastern; this was not quite the line of division between IS 9(CMF) and IS 9(ME).
The table contains minor slips – no mention of the Dutch and French officers who escaped from Colditz, a miscount of the nurses who evaded from Albania – ten instead of thirteen, no mention of the European Allies who were recovered in the Mediterranean; and a number of major eccentricities.
The Pacific is ignored entirely, presumably because there were no British Commonwealth escapers or evaders there, or at any rate none of whom London had heard. Whoever the 2,690 Indian Army other rank escapers in Asia were, few of them appear in E Group’s history of its own activities. Might they not have been better categorised as stragglers, who had eventually rejoined their units – perhaps with some cover story of having spent a few hours in Japanese hands? Is it really credible that hardly a single US army escaper got into Switzerland, while nearly 5,000 British ones did so? The figures of American air force escapers and evaders do not tie up at all with the American figures of those interned in Switzerland, as negotiated with the Swiss government in the winter of 1944–5. Many swiftly escaped prisoners, who only spent a few hours in enemy hands, rejoined their units without ever figuring in MI 9’s statistics at all. And who on earth, one cannot help wondering, was the solitary Russian sailor who is classified as an evader, not an escaper, through Western Europe? 350
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353Another aspect of these figures that might mislead an unwary reader lies in the division between officers and other ranks: a real division in the armed forces of those days, as at present, however closely the two groups might intermingle in the stress of battle. The proportion of officers to other ranks among escapers and evaders shown here – one to six-and-a-half – is by no means the same as it was in the armed forces as a whole, where it was about one to eleven; on the other hand, in air forces a much higher proportion of officers were at risk of capture, and this explains why the air force proportion of officer to other rank escapers and evaders is that of five to nine for the British, and for the Americans (who commissioned a still higher proportion of their aircrew) as high as seven to eight. There are no data, either way, in this table to support or to confute any suggestion that the officer class was defter or less deft at escape and evasion than any other stratum of society. One day, if an historian can be found with the patience, the statistics, and the computer to work out a more sensitive set of figures, there may be more to be known.
It is reasonable to conjecture that Crockatt, preparing his final report, asked his chief clerk to compile him a return; his admirable personal assistant, Susan Broomhall – cousin of Colonel W. M. Broomhall, RE, once SBO in Colditz – was away on a visit to MIS-X in Washington at the close of the war. Crockatt himself was too busy writing his report, writing citations, and looking after the handover to Derry and the disbanding of MI 9 to give 354more than a glance to the return, see that it looked workmanlike and plausible, and extract the essential figures from it.
If MIS-X drew up a table similar to Crockatt’s, the present writers have missed it. There is however a note on file in Washington, prepared by Russell Sweet for Catesby Jones at the war’s end, which gives the following figures for American escapers and evaders – not distinguished from each other – as ‘reported by theaters’ up to 25 August 1945.
| Occupied France, Belgium, Germany | 3,096 | ||
| Occupied Holland and Denmark | 47 | ||
| Italian prisoner of war camps and German-occupied Italy | 6,335 | ||
| North Africa | 18 | ||
| Occupied Greece | 100 | ||
| Balkans including Albania and Yugoslavia | 1,333 | ||
| Japanese occupied territory including 83 from prison ships sunk | 218 | ||
| From China through AGAS | 853 | ||
| TOTAL | 12,000 | ||
The final figures are, of course, suspiciously round. Some of them are near enough to Crockatt’s to suggest a common source – MI 9 for instance reckoned 3,462, compared to the Americans’ 3,143, for the top two figures in Sweet’s table. Others are far astray; MI 9 only had 3,466 Americans collected in the western Mediterranean, against over 6,000 in Sweet’s table; and the Far Eastern figures do not begin to marry up. Sweet was certainly much better placed than Crockatt to estimate the number of Americans who had evaded and escaped in Asia; the reverse may be true of Italy.
Deliberate exaggeration can be ruled out; transmission or copyists’ errors can not. A fair conclusion would seem to be that Crockatt’s grand total of Americans – 7,498 – was below the true figure, but that Sweet’s might be somewhat above it. 355Conjecturally, 2,000 might be taken off Sweet’s figure of escapers and evaders in Italy. This would leave a grand total of British, Commonwealth and United States escapers and evaders, for the whole war, of 35,190: about three divisions, and no mean feat.