(Interviewer – So did you try and escape from there, when you were there or what?) Well what happened was, like I said, they had me working above, not down in the mine, so I was sitting there. They use to have what they call Frühstück, now that’s lunch and we use to take about half a sandwich from the lager, which was over at the other side of this little village and we would take one of those with us and eat that. Let us get off for that. I was sitting there, looking at this fence. One of these wire fences. It wasn’t chain link. It was like that (hands showed rectangle shape. It was about that far (1 to 1 ½ feet) from the bottom of the fence. I thought to myself, well, hmmm. I sat there this one day, when we went for Frühstück and instead of eating my half of a sandwich, I stuffed it in my pocket, crawled under the fence, across several rail lines and a bunch of cars sitting there. And of course the cars, I was hiding behind. They couldn’t see me from the other side of this fence because of these many cars. I went across the road and up a side of a hill and there was an out cropping of rock there. I just sat down in the out cropping of rock and watched them hunt for me. And they were hunting all through these cars, opening and closing the doors on them and just beating the bushes and I’m just up there watching all of this. (Interviewer – Was this when they were getting ready to go back and they took a head count?) No, there was only about four of us working in the Brom. So they knew right away, one man short. When it got dark, I came out. I had a map, a silk map. An Army Air Force man gave me that. I had went up to this lazarette in Bitterfeld, this town of Bitterfeld. It wasn’t too far down the road. I don’t remember why this time I went but there was something wrong with me. I was in there and this Army Air Force man came in and he gave me..they hadn’t searched him yet. He had been hit, had been in an aircraft. They put a shoot on him and threw him out. So he would get medical treatment before he bled to death on the way back to England. There was a fair amount of that. We had quite a number of people that happened to. He gave me his silk map before they searched him. Of course they came in and stood him up against the wall. The guy had several wounds in his legs. Bleeding all over the place but never the less, they stood him up there, searched him. But I had the map. But I didn’t have a compass. Very important, the compass. I had never done a celestial navigation at that point. I wasn’t sure just how good at it I was gonna be. I knew how but I had never done it. When it got dark I stuck the North Star behind me. I knew I had to go due south. I knew that there was this town Naumburg. Now Naumburg had a rail road yard but the tracks only came down to Naumburg and stopped at the rail road yards. They hauled in, they had a bunch of burned out cars there too. Thanks to the Anglo-American Airborne Demolition Company. If I hit that rail road and then a highway then I knew that I had to turn left to get into the yards. On the other hand, if I didn’t hit the rail road but hit the highway, then I knew I had to turn right. Simple deduction. I hit that almost on the nose. Now I figure about 25 miles over land, no highways, no paths, no nothing. I came that close. I spent the next 50 years just patting myself on the back for a dam good job on navigation. I got in there and that was the time I used the chrome ore thing. I got caught outside Friedrichshafen (Note: His plan was once he got there was to swim across the lake to Switzerland.) I got caught outside Friedrichshafen on the Swiss border. (Note: He could see light across the lake to Switzerland. He said at the mine he was given trousers and a jacket to wear during work and that was what he wore during the escape. After he was caught, he was returned to the Lager for the salt mine. He was held for a couple of days in the city jail first and then put back in the Lager. He returned to work at the mine and went down to 2100 feet inside the mine. After about 3 weeks or so his dysentery was very bad and he was extremely weak. A German guard named Schuze took him from the Lager, which was on the west side of town to the mine that was on the east side of town. He could not walk and was sick. The guard began whipping him and made him crawl on his hands and knees to the mine. He was hit along the way with the guard’s rifle and the flat end of the bayonet. Once he got to the mine and down the shaft, the French POW’s kept him behind them in a cave to rest. At that point he had to notify the Germans who he really was so that he could get some medical attention. On the way back to the Muhlberg, he stayed overnight in Stalag 4G, Torgau. He was put into the clink that was in the basement of a concrete building. There was another POW in with him, a rather large Italian. He was pretty sick with dysentery and he woke up during the night and found the other POW trying to pick his pocket. He had a small knife and thinks the POW had seen him with it. He yelled at him and pushed him away and wasn’t bothered by him anymore that night.)