The Greater Escape

In World War II lore, The Wooden Horse, and The Great Escape get star billing as heroic stories of Allied prisoners of war escaping German captivity from the Stalag Luft III in occupied Poland.

- KANIKA DATTA

Both accounts appeared as books that were made into popular movies.

The heavily fictionalized version of The Great Escape went on to become a blockbuster with its stellar cast of Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, and Richard Attenborough. The Great Epinal Escape may not have the ingredients of a Hollywood (or Bollywood) hit, but as a story it is long overdue in the telling.

The Great Epinal Escape involved much larger numbers. In The Wooden Horse, three British officers escaped (successfully) after building an escape tunnel under a vaulting horse in the prison camp gym. In The Great Escape, 50 officers made it out through a maze of tunnels, only to be caught and executed in cold blood. In The Great Epinal Escape, over 500 prisoners of war (POWs) of all ranks escaped from a German prison camp in occupied France and made it to neutral Switzerland. Yet this episode remained unknown in war histories because, as the author Ghee Bowman points out, "...the escapers' faces were brown, not white, and as many were not officers, their experience has languished in the pool of the unremembered for years."

Bowman is a rare British historian who has chosen to focus on the Indian army in World War II, a contingent gaining grudging recognition in the multiple histories of the 1939-1945 conflict. Over 2.5 million soldiers of undivided India fought under the British flag in a global conflagration that scholarship increasingly presents as a European imperialist war. Since most were enlisted men rather than officers—the Indian army began the "Indianisation" of officer ranks after World War I but the process had a way to go at the outbreak of World War II—accounts from colonial sources are sparse.

Bowman sought to bridge this information deficit in 2020 with The Indian Contingent: The Forgotten Muslim Soldiers of the Battle of Dunkirk.