Cinema: The New Pictures, may 26, 1958

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Fortunately, nobody took the bet. About a month later Von Werra ducked out of an exercise group at a prison camp in the north of England and lit out across the moors toward the Irish Sea. For five days, while a small army of police and Home Guards beat up the bracken in a driving Scotch mist. Von Werra ducked and ran, gnawed on turnips, slept in fodder huts. On the sixth day he was run to ground in a bog.

Transferred to a prison with tighter security procedures. Von Werra swiftly organized a mass escape, bluffed his way onto the nearest R.A.F. base as a fighter pilot with a "Mixed Special Bomber Squadron." was about to take off in a late-model Hurricane when the security officer tumbled to his game. After that, the British were taking no chances. They put Von Werra in cold storage -in Canada, 4,000 miles and more from Germany. Even if he did escape, where could he go? He could go, Von Werra decided, to the U.S., which in early 1941 was still a neutral country. And so one winter's night he jumped out the window of a prison train, hitched a ride to a town near the St. Lawrence River, hid until nightfall on the Canadian shore, then staggered across the ice to the U.S. Interned, he was released in custody of the German embassy, enjoyed a round of nightspot-ting in Manhattan before he escaped through Mexico to Brazil to Italy to Germany. There he made an invaluable report on British interrogation procedures, took command of a fighter unit, was credited with eight more planes before he was killed in a crash at sea.