Review of The Great Épinal Escape by Ghee Bowman

The Hindu

7 hours ago

I'd never heard of these POWs before — all those Great Escapes & never a brown face among them.' This line in the Epilogue of Ghee Bowman's The Great Épinal Escape perfectly expresses a reader's state after finishing the book. The tale of over 500 Indian prisoners of war escaping from a German camp during World War II has lain buried in various archives and libraries until unearthed and excavated by the historian and author. But this book is more than just a story of an escape.
Theatres of action
Bowman opens with an overview of 'an army in transition, from a country in transition' in which he sketches the reasons for young men to join the army and the impact of India's freedom movement on recruitment. He moves across the various theatres of action to show how widely spread the Indian soldiers were across Europe and Africa, and how many were taken as prisoners by the Germans.
Even before he gets to the great escape, Bowman showcases characters such as Shriniwas Raghavendra Kulkarni, a clerk in the Mobile Workshop Company of the Ordnance Corps, who was captured in June 1942 in North Africa. He escapes, is captured, escapes again, hides in an Arab village, disguises himself as an Arab, trudges across Italy and finally falls in with New Zealand troops. A performance that was awarded the Indian Order of Merit.
But not all prisoners were as lucky. Bowman offers a detailed account of the life of a PoW in a German camp with extracts from letters written by the men. As Havildar R.P. Shirke of the Postal Service writes: 'It seemed that Man had jumped from the civilised 20th century back to the Stone Age …'
The escape
The second part of the book is devoted to the escape. On May 11, 1944, American planes dropped bombs in Épinal in northeastern France to destroy the railway lines. With some bombs falling on a PoW camp and destroying its walls, the prisoners took the opportunity to grab 'everything we could by way of food, blankets etc ...' and escape. When you stop to think about this, it boggles the mind.
Strangers in France, not knowing the language or customs, visibly different from the locals, without money or any papers... yet they did not hesitate. There's a heart-warming incident of two soldiers returning to the camp to rescue a friend before continuing on their way to freedom. In this, the attitude of the French also played a big role: whether it was feeding the escapees, hiding them, guiding them in the right direction, and hoodwinking the Germans. Yet things could get complicated, given the nature of the Swiss border, which meandered into France and Germany. Bowman narrates one story of a group of prisoners who lost their way and returned to the farm they had been sent on from.
Once in Switzerland, they were free but it was of a limited nature. Bowman writes about the racism — overt and covert — with which the Indians were treated and of their return to India. The Epilogue looks at what the Épinalepisode had done to the men. Bowman also points out that while those who fought in the Indian National Army are being feted, those who served in the British army are 'not well remembered. They should be. They are no less worthy of record than the Americans and Britishers at Colditz and Stalag Luft III. For the sake of their families, and to set right the historical record, their stories should be told and retold'.
The Great Épinal Escape: Indian Prisoners of War in German Hands Ghee Bowman Context ₹699
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