The Great Epinal Escape: Bowman's book is a long-overdue tale worth telling

Business Standard

16-05-2025

The Great Epinal Escape: Indian Prisoners of War in German Hands
Author:
Publisher: Westland
Pages: 272 Price: ₹699
In World War II lore, The Wooden Horse and The Great Escape get star billing as heroic stories of Allied prisoners of war escaping German captivity from the Stalag Luft III in occupied Poland. Both accounts appeared as books that were made into popular movies. The heavily fictionalised version of The Great Escape went on to become a blockbuster with its stellar cast of Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, and Richard Attenborough. The Great Epinal Escape may not have the ingre­dients of a Hollywood (or Bollywood) hit, but as a story it is long overdue in the telling.
The Great Epinal Escape involved much larger numbers. In The Wooden Horse, three British officers escaped (successfully) after building an escape tunnel under a vaulting horse in the prison camp gym. In The Great Escape, 50 officers made it out through a maze of tunnels, only to be caught and exec­uted in cold blood. In The Great Epinal Escape, over 500 POWs of all ranks escaped from a German prison camp in occupied France and made it to neutral Switzerland. Yet this episode remained unk­nown in war histories because, as the author Ghee Bowman points out, '…the escapers' faces were brown, not white, and as many were not officers, their experience has languished in the pool of the unremembered for years.'
Bowman is a rare British historian who has chosen to focus on the Indian army in World War II, a contingent gaining grudging recognition in the multiple histories of the 1939-1945 conflict. Over 2.5 million soldiers of undivided India fought under the British flag in a global conflagration that scholarship increasingly presents as a European imperialist war. Since most were enlisted men rather than officers — the Indian army began the 'Indianisation' of officer ranks after World War I but the process had a way to go at the outbreak of World War II —accounts from colonial sources are sparse. Bowman sought to bridge this information deficit in 2020 with The Indian Contingent: The Forgotten Muslim Soldiers of the Battle of Dunkirk.
The Great Epinal Escape goes beyond the narrow story of this extraordinary 1944 breakout to present a wider history of the roughly 15,000 Indian Army POWS in German hands. Bowman reminds us of the innately multicultural nature of the Indian Army. 'They were Sikhs, Muslims, Hindus, Indian Christians, and Gurkhas from right across South Asia….They had been taken prisoner in North Africa, France, Italy, Greece and Ethiopia, and on the high seas. They endured up to five long years behind barbed wire, making music, learning languages, grumbling about the food, and praying to god.' Among the more celebrated POWs (though he was not at Epinal) was P P Kumaramangalam, later chief of the army staff in independent India.
Combining prodigious research, archival and physical, Bowman tells the story of subaltern soldiers and the minutiae of camp life in alien lands against the larger picture of the shifting fortunes of battle and of popular racist theories that roiled Europe (not just Germany). Bowman paints a picture of soldiers who were also awakening to the freedom struggle. Like many Indians back home, they too had their allegiances to Jinnah, Gandhi, Nehru, and often with mixed feelings, Subhas Chandra Bose.
Not all the Indian POWs were soldiers. The earliest prisoners were lascars of the merchant marine, sailors earning one-sixth of their European counterparts but who were the 'lifeblood of the empire'. The first Indian soldiers to be imprisoned were from the animal transport company of the Royal Indian Army Service Corp, and became the longest-serving Indian POWs. Of camp life and their struggles, Bowman shows the different religions appeared to coexist peacefully if separately.
Unlike their brutal treatment of POWs of French colonial soldiers from Africa — of which little has been written — and Russians, who were seen as Untermenschen or subhumans, the Germans equated Indians with Aryans and, therefore, equivalent to Nordic Germans, so their treatment was relatively less cruel.
The town of Epinal (pronounced ippinal), in north-west France, had been occupied by the Germans since 1940. Two of its military barracks became Frontstalag 315 with Indians occupying four large buildings, overseen by a kindly, elderly officer, Oberst (Colonel) Luhren affectionately known as Papa-di-Epinal. He treated his charges, who behaved like 'spoilt or badly brought-up children,' with patient forbearance. When the Indians arrived in January 1944, the Germans were already on the back foot; Hitler's invasion of Russia had stalled, the Allies had prevailed in North Africa, the bombing campaign over European skies was sapping Wehrmacht morale, and the French Resistance was gaining traction.
The opportunity to escape en masse came not from The Great Escape-type derring-do but from an Allied bombing attack on May 11, 1944, that almost levelled the camp and enabled POWs to take their chance in the ensuing melee. Crossing the barbed wire individually or in groups was only the start; POWs had to navigate the enormous challenges of making it to the Swiss border, a little over 100 km away, through miles of uncharted terrain, thick wooded valleys, in snow and freezing temperatures alien to men of the north Indian plains, dodging German patrols, some equipped with sniffer dogs.
If most of the POWs made it successfully to 'their promised land' of Switzerland, much of the credit goes to the French Resistance providing food, shelter, and medical aid to escaping POWs and risking their lives to act as scouts and guides along the escape routes against many odds. This is a story of understated heroism that rarely attracts headlines in war. Several Resistants were discovered and executed by the Germans. Apart from interviews and a recce of the Epinal-Swiss border terrain, this part of the story draws on a remarkable secret diary kept by Jules Perret, a 59-year-old blacksmith and farrier. A key member of the Resistance, Perret and his family played a seminal role in rescuing Indian POWs. Other ordinary folk like him — housewives, pastors, schoolchildren — did their bit. For them, the POWs' brown skin counted for less than the fact that they had played their part in liberating Europe from the Nazis.