The Confidence Men: How Two Prisoners of War Engineered the Most Remarkable Escape in History

We love stories of daring escapes from a prisoner of war camp. The daring. The bravery. The improbability. The patience and planning, sometimes accomplishing just a tiny amount of daily progress that succeeds over a long period of time. The cheering for the underdog against the powerful. Even when we know the end, we hold our breath. Someone sneaks across and cuts the fence just making it between the sweeps of the spotlight. Prisoners who dig a tunnel, shoring it up with wood from their beds dumping the dirt by releasing it from bags in their pants legs in the prison yard when guards are not looking. This book is about an escape attempt of a wholly different kind and proof that truth is stranger than fiction. It couldn’t have been a novel, because it wouldn’t have been deemed believable. First, the two conspirators. Elias Henry Jones was Oxford-educated and the son of a Welsh lord, a magistrate in Burma before the beginning of the Great War (WW I). Cedric Waters Hill was an Australian mechanic who had become a pilot and also an amateur sleight-of-hand artist. Both ended up in a Turkish prison camp in Yozgad, central Anatolia, a place so remote that guard towers and tall fences were unnecessary because there was no way anyone could hope to escape on foot. The two prisoners fashioned a Ouija board and performed sleight-of-hand “magic” as entertainment for fellow prisoners, but succeeded so well that even their friends couldn’t be convinced that it wasn’t real. The guards and the Turkish translator assigned to the prison even started attending and asking questions. That’s when they realized that, by keeping up their act and perfecting it further, they might be able to use it to engineer an escape. The author points out that the time was just right. There had been a renewal of spiritual interest in the late 1800s. The phonograph could preserve a voice to be played back at will and few could fathom how that could be done just by a needle picking up vibrations from invisible bumps on a piece of vinyl. The telephone could instantanesously transport a voice over miles of wire leading a prominent Philadelpia newspaper to warn its readers not to talk to sick people on the phone for fear of catching their disease. And now you could even do it wirelessly by radio. If that was possible, why weren’t there potential channels for communicating with the dead? Locally, the Armenian genocide, in which estimates say 90 percent of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire were killed, was still recent and the prison superintendant had heard rumors of rich Armenians having hidden their wealth before trying to flee the area. And thus the beginnings of the con. The book provides us with the same plot-twists, changes of plans, and near-misses of any escape narrative but in a story so wild that it is unlike anything you’ve read before. There are times when it seems like a “McHale’s Navy” or “Gilligan’s Island” type of comedy and other times when it’s so serious that you’re convinced that it is over. The book’s weakness is that it is too long. While some of the digressions are helpful to understand the times and explain how they could have fooled their captors, the detailed explanations of psychology, spiritualism, magician’s tricks, confidence games, and manipulation tactics is sometimes too long and distracting. But, fortunately you can skim when your interest wanes because the story itself is so good. This is just fun and what makes it even more exciting is that it is true. I can’t think of anyone who wouldn’t enjoy this book.

WW1, military-history, historical-places-events, historical-research, history-and-culture, Turkey, prisoners-of-war, nonfiction, POW***** Incredible and inspiring. Existing in horrible conditions after having been starved out and captured, two ingenious British soldiers housed in a Turkish camp manage to scam their way to freedom. I found it fascinating and all the better because it is well-researched and documented nonfiction. I requested and received a free temporary ebook from Random House Publishing Group/Random House, via NetGalley. Thank you!