: Tony Insall
: The Madness of Courage The Exceptional Achievements of Gilbert Insall
: Biteback Publishing
: 9781785909597
: 1
: CHF 21.60
:
: Neuzeit bis 1918
: English
: 352
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
Group Captain Gilbert Insall holds a unique record: he is the only person to have both won a Victoria Cross and escaped successfully from a German prisoner of war camp during the First World War. The Madness of Courage describes how, when forced down by engine damage after destroying a German fighter, Gilbert ignored intensive shelling in order to repair his aircraft and return to base. But a few weeks later, he was shot down and captured. And thus began a distinguished career in prison breaking. He tunnelled out of Heidelberg prison camp and later hid among boxes on a horse-drawn cart to get away from Crefeld, each time being recaptured. Then, in Ströhen, Gilbert and several companions concealed themselves in a claustrophobically small space they had excavated under the floor of the bathhouse. They remained there for seventeen hours, while a fruitless search for them was carried out, and eventually emerged and successfully reached Holland. Meticulously told by Gilbert's great-nephew, the critically acclaimed intelligence historian Tony Insall, The Madness of Courage is a gripping true story about a remarkable man at a time before the Geneva Convention was signed, when conditions for prisoners of war were often appalling and the British War Office did little to help prisoners escape. Instead, Gilbert's family, assisted by French intelligence, gave him the support he needed to break out of captivity in an extraordinary feat of bravery, resilience and ingenuity.

Dr Tony Insall worked for more than thirty years in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and served in Nigeria, Hong Kong, China and Malaysia, before spending five years in Norway. He was also an associate editor of FCO Historians and has published several books and articles on Norwegian history, most recently Secret Alliances, an account of Anglo-Norwegian wartime resistance cooperation. Tony is a senior visiting fellow in the Department of War Studies at King's College London and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He lives near Guildford in Surrey.

Group Captain Gilbert Insall, my great-uncle, holds a unique record. He is the only person to have both won a Victoria Cross and escaped successfully from a German prisoner of war camp during the First World War.* Gilbert trained as a pilot and was posted to 11 Squadron in the Royal Flying Corps (RFC), in which my grandfather Jack also served as an observer. Gilbert won his VC in November 1915. He was involved in combat with a German fighter, which he shot down. After descending to a low level to drop a bomb and ensure its destruction, his own engine was damaged and he was obliged to make a forced landing just behind the French front line. Ignoring intensive German shelling, he oversaw repairs to his aircraft overnight and took off – again under heavy fire – and returned to base the following morning. A few weeks later, after an encounter with another German aircraft in which he was quite badly wounded by anti-aircraft shrapnel, he was shot down and captured.

After three months in hospital, he was sent to a series of prison camps. Once he had recovered from his injury and, later in September 1916, from an operation for acute peritonitis performed without anaesthetic (he was told that this was due to the scarcity of drugs in Germany, which precluded their use for prisoners1), he began to plan an escape. All of his attempts required at least some temporary confinement in unpleasantly constricted areas. His first, at Heidelberg, was through a tunnel more than forty yards long, which required the removal and disposal or concealment of some five tons of earth. For the second, from Crefeld,† near Düsseldorf, he and Captain William Morritt hid in a space which had been created among piles of boxes on a cart transporting prisoners’ luggage to storage. It was very cramped and Morritt was obliged to kneel on Gilbert’s head for much of the journey, before they slipped unobtrusively off the cart and attempted to get away from the area. After being transferred to Ströhen, Gilbert and several companions concealed themselves in a claustrophobically small space they had excavated under the floor of the bathhouse (which was just outside the camp perimeter) and remained there for seventeen hours, enduring the heat of a summer’s day while a fruitless search for them was carried out. They eventually emerged early the following morning and reached Holland a few days later in September 1917.

But this is not just a story about Gilbert, for he could not have managed to plan and execute his escapes without assistance from his family, then based in Paris. In the first years of conflict, the War Office provided no assistance or advice to servicemen to help them prepare for the consequences of capture. And, before the beginning of 1917, there was no British organisation to provide escaping equipment or advice either. So, prisoners wanting to escape had no official support. Fortunately, in some cases, families were able to provide help. My family played a significant role and found some clever ways of helping Gilbert once they managed to work out ways of communicating safely with each other without attracting the attention of German censors. They were able to provide nearly all the escaping equipment which he required, mainly maps, files and compasses – though also, remarkably and with French assistance, a large pair of wire cutters, which were successfully smuggled in to him. But that was not all. Gilbert’s father (another Gilbert, so hereafter called Gilbert senior) was also active in lobbying officialdom on his behalf and in raising public awareness about some of the harsh conditions in which pr