Excerpt from Under the Wire
From Chapter One: “An Apprenticeship in Escapology”
More than sixty years ago, in March 1942, I was a young warrior—a rare creature in the form of an American Spitfire pilot, flying a magnificent, gleaming machine in the skies over Occupied France. I had joined up to fight the Nazis while America was still neutral. That action had cost me my citizenship, and in an ill-considered burst of gratitude, the British had put me in charge of a Spitfire.
A Spitfire cockpit is small. It smells of metal and leather, of raw horsepower and excitement. Once in the sky a Spitfire pilot is alone, a hunter, an acrobat, and a warrior king. The only trouble in my case was that the king was about to be beheaded.
I looked down at a small French village, looming closer by the second. Then I looked up at half a dozen enemy aircraft, Focke-Wolf 190s, circling and taking leisurely turns trying to blow me out of the sky. For the first time, I began to wonder if the British were about to regret entrusting me with their magnificent flying machine. My plane was shot up. My gun button was jammed and useless. I had just switched off my coughing engine, which was full of cannon holes and threatening to burst into flames.
As the Luftwaffe planes roared in for the kill, I turned to face them, minimizing myself as the target, and stared directly into their cannon fire. I knew that it was time to end one career as a Spitfire pilot and to start a new one. My career choices were limited: I could become a prisoner, an escape artist, or a corpse. How, I asked myself as I looked for a field in which to crash-land, did an American, flying for the Canadians, fighting for the British, come to be blown out of the sky by a German, somewhere over France?
People seeking an answer to that question, or those who know a bit about my first wartime career as a Spitfire pilot and my second, rather longer stint as a prisoner of war and escape artist, sometimes ask me about my early life. They are apparently looking for clues to why a young American would go halfway across the world to fight for the British against the Nazis while the United States was still staunchly neutral. Sometimes they also ask me if there was anything in my childhood in Depression-hit Texas that pointed me toward a career as an unlikely escapologist on what turned out to be a somewhat bumpy unauthorized tour of Occupied Europe. To them, and to you, all I can say is that from my earliest memories I have always disliked bullies, and from just as early, I have always loved running away….
From Chapter 2: “Discovering America”
By early 1939 I had left Austin as a young, restless Texan with an urge for adventure and not much hope of getting a real job in the depths of the Great Depression. Along with ten million unemployed people, I drifted from place to place all over the Midwest for the best part of a year, mostly hitching rides in battered cars, but sometimes riding the rails and avoiding the railway bulls who were employed to knock non-paying passengers off the freight cars they were clinging to. In truth, though, by the end of that tumultuous decade the bulls had almost given up. The volume of men hoboing from one place to another looking for work was so great, usually matched by an equal number coming in the opposite direction for the same reason, that the train bullies lowered their expectations. Instead of attempting to eradicate their entire species, they concentrated on keeping the hobos out of stations and cracking a few heads when they thought they could get away with it.
The most common place to hop a train, free from the threat of the bulls, was always on what was called a blind. This was usually a place on the outskirts of town, sometimes on an upward slope that slowed the train, and not far enough out of town for it to have picked up too much speed, for otherwise it would be too hard for us nonpaying passengers to reach. Where these conditions coincided with a curve, there was often a blind spot toward the rear of the train where the driver and guard could not see what was going on, and that was the perfect spot for jumping on.
Years later, trapped behind the multiple layers of wire in prisoner-of-war camps, I was to find this early training in blind spots very handy. Sometimes prison machine-gun posts were built along the wire in such a way that there was a small blind spot between the guard posts where the searchlights or lines of sight could not reach, and these were perfect places to dig a lightning tunnel or to attempt to chop through the wire with homemade cutters.
But back in Depression America, I had no reason to appreciate this education as I raced alongside a freight train that seemed to go on forever in either direction, and did not seem to be moving all that slowly compared to me. My worldly possessions were slung in a bindle, or blanket bundle, around my neck, and I was often one of a small army of people, all trying to get on the same train at the same time. The art of “chasing a train” must now be largely forgotten. I would look for a freight door that had been left open a crack and try to prise it open enough to hurl myself on board, sprawling in the dust or the straw on the floor….
After a year of hoboing from job to job and place to place all over the country, I arrived in early 1940, slightly ragged and fresh off a freight train, at the Hungry Man Diner in Detroit. It was a rough “one-arm joint” where you leaned on the counter with one arm and shoveled stew with the other. There you could have all the stew you could get on a plate for fifteen cents, but you were fined another dime if you left any on your place. This was the unlikely jumping-off point for my war against Hitler. I remember some of the locals having a laugh at my expense as I set off walking over the border-spanning bridge to Windsor, Ontario, where I attempted to enlist in the Royal Canadian Air Force. [The US had not yet entered the war.]
In Canada, a dour British recruiting sergeant gave me a physical exam and pronounced me too malnourished to be any use. I explained that since I wanted to join the air force it was in their best interest for me to be as light as possible. Think of all the fuel they would save! Despite my seamless logic, I was sent packing. I limped my way back to the Hungry Man Diner to be scoffed at by my detractors for having won the war so quickly.
I persuaded one of the doubting locals to lend me twenty dollars, which he reluctantly did at 20 percent interest compounded monthly “just to teach me the value of money.” I handed over my new riches to the short-order cook at the diner and took up residence at one of the tables. Every day for two weeks solid, like a desperate man in an eating contest, I consumed everything they could shovel into me. I even became something of a local landmark as people checked in at the diner to see my progress. The cook wanted me to stay on, since business was booming, thanks to this new tourist attraction, but two weeks to the day after my rejection, I waddled back to Canada….
For a moment when I reentered the RCAF recruiting station, my thought became a bit more practical. Would they throw me out again, for being too thin, or too fat, like some mad version of Goldilocks and the Three Bears? This time, when I stepped on the air force scales like a prizefighter, the entire office cheered. I was in.
….I remember the final seconds before my first solo flight. We had just studied the theory of flying. Thrust by a propeller creates a vacuum over a curved surface such as a wing, and that vacuum lifts the object skyward. Staring at this hulking great machine on the runway, I was utterly unconvinced that anything other than a stick of dynamite could cause it to move upward. But once I was airborne, all my doubts evaporated.
Suddenly I was soaring. I had left the ground, the Depression, and the landlocked expectations of others far below, where people looked like ants and even the huge aircraft hangers looked like toys. My destiny was in my own hands, and I felt like an eagle looking down, master of all I surveyed. I knew that my new power and liberty was a fragile thing and that I could be brought crashing down by a single mistake, like Icarus flying too close to the sun, but I also knew I was alive, that flying was a form of music, and that the song in my head was the one I had been born to sing.
The only other experience I can compare to that first flight is swimming under water, where the effects of gravity are suddenly changed and you can do all sorts of things that would be impossible on the ground. I didn’t dwell on the science too much, since I figured if I did, I might plummet to earth in a burst of logic. Maybe that’s why I loved flying so much—the incredulity and delight that accompanied actually being up in the air never left me, at least not until I was shot down.
From the book UNDER THE WIRE: The World War II Adventures of a Legendary Escape Artist and “Cooler King” by William Ash with Brendan Foley. Copyright © 2005 by the authors. Reprinted with permission from Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s Press, LLC. 
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