The Long Way Home

Three telephone engineers from Glasgow were called up in 1939, injured in action near Boulogne and spent four years in prisoner-of-war camps. During two of those years, one of those prisoners, John McCallum, habitually broke out of camp in the Sudetenland in order to court a German girl called Traudl, sneaking back in again before morning roll call to escape detection. Determined to make a complete break for freedom, however, John enlisted the help Traudl to forge documents for him and his three friends. As they made their escape in March 1944 they passed through the town of Sagan at the same time as the 76 airmen of the Great Escape from Stalag Luft Drei were being pursued and recaptured. However, unlike the Great Escape, in which only 3 out of 76 airmen got home to Britain, all three friends in the Lesser Escape reached home safely via the port of Stettin, where they stowed away in the coal hole of a ship bound for Sweden.In this extraordinary story John McCallum describes his and his fellow escapees' encounters with danger during this perilous journey candidly and with humour. Unable to communicate with Traudl for fear of endangering her life, he eventually heard that she had married a Czech Army Officer.Although their escape route was devised independently, it turned out to be an official one, so this story could not be told for forty years under the Official Secrets Act.