THE LAST ESCAPER

A remarkable memoir of a British lad’s salad days flying bombers against the Nazis and then repeatedly escaping their prison camps.

Tunstall, who died in 2013, suggests that his debut might be the last of its kind: “To the best of my knowledge, there are fewer than half a dozen of us still alive who were in Colditz during the Second World War.” The author grew up simultaneously irreverent and patriotic, entranced by the early spirit of aviation. An RAF officer when war broke out, Tunstall yearned to fly fighters and participated in chaotic raids against German fuel production, piloting the primitive Hampden bomber. After navigational problems forced him to land on a Dutch beach in August 1940, he and his fellow soldiers were captured by German occupiers. The British prisoners maintained a cheerful defiance, following Tunstall’s training to become “as big a bloody nuisance as possible to the enemy” once a prisoner of war. Immediately, Tunstall became preoccupied by the determination to escape: “I had not [yet] learned that the best time to escape is usually as soon as possible.” Recaptured after two cunning attempts involving fabricated uniforms, Tunstall was sent to the notorious “punishment camp” Colditz Castle. Though considered escape-proof, the Nazis erred in consolidating the most recalcitrant Allied POWs in one place. As the war continued, MI9 increasingly aided the British POWs, smuggling in money and forged documents, while Tunstall audaciously sent them intelligence inside split photographs, via letters he was permitted to send to his fiancee. Tunstall portrays a brutal, surreal time with detailed recall and elegant, roguish humor, though he never loses sight of the larger stakes, noting how the Germans “seemed to wallow in the atmosphere of harsh oppression and hopelessness they had created.”

An engrossing valediction to the tough, imaginative generation forged by the war.