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Great Desert Escape: How the Flight of 25 German Prisoners of War Sparked One of the Largest Manhunts in American History
Dramatic and exciting account of how twenty-five determined German U-Boat crewmen tunneled from American POW camp, crossed the unforgiving Arizona desert, and attempted to return battle. It was the only organized, large-scale domestic escape by foreign prisoners in U.S. history.
288 pages, Hardcover
Published April 1, 2019
16 people are currently reading
95 people want to read
About the author
Keith Warren Lloyd
10 books22 followersKeith Warren Lloyd is an author and historian, a US Navy veteran, and a retired firefighter. Lloyd graduated from Arizona State University, where he studied history and political science. He lives in Flagstaff, Arizona.
Keith's newest work is The War Correspondents: The Incredible Stories of the Brave Men and Women Who Covered The Fight Against Hitler's Germany, released by Globe Pequot's Lyons Press in October 2025. He is also the author of the following titles:
Dark Nights, Deadly Waters: American PT Boats at Guadalcanal. (2023)
Avenging Pearl Harbor: The Saga of America's Battleships in the Pacific War. (2021)
The Great Desert Escape: How the Flight of 25 German Prisoners of War Sparked One of the Largest Manhunts in American History. (2019)
The Greatest POW Escape Stories Ever Told, an anthology of famous prisoner of war escape stories. (2020)
Above and Beyond: The Incredible Story of Frank Luke Jr., Arizona's Medal of Honor Flying Ace of the First World War. (2015)
Keith's When Heaven Was Falling, Cape Hatteras and On Island Time are historical novels, featuring fictional characters thrust into actual events and often interacting with real-life historical figures.
Keith's newest work is The War Correspondents: The Incredible Stories of the Brave Men and Women Who Covered The Fight Against Hitler's Germany, released by Globe Pequot's Lyons Press in October 2025. He is also the author of the following titles:
Dark Nights, Deadly Waters: American PT Boats at Guadalcanal. (2023)
Avenging Pearl Harbor: The Saga of America's Battleships in the Pacific War. (2021)
The Great Desert Escape: How the Flight of 25 German Prisoners of War Sparked One of the Largest Manhunts in American History. (2019)
The Greatest POW Escape Stories Ever Told, an anthology of famous prisoner of war escape stories. (2020)
Above and Beyond: The Incredible Story of Frank Luke Jr., Arizona's Medal of Honor Flying Ace of the First World War. (2015)
Keith's When Heaven Was Falling, Cape Hatteras and On Island Time are historical novels, featuring fictional characters thrust into actual events and often interacting with real-life historical figures.
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
September 20, 2019
I read this book as part of my research for my master thesis. It is a nice and easy read and probably well suited for someone who gets in contact with the topic for the first time. I especially liked the author's use of material from the National Archive, although his source material does not seem to go beyond material from American institutions. Therefore some mistakes have unfortunately crept into the work, which would have been avoidable through a wider use of sources, e.g. from German archives. Nevertheless, this is a book that is enjoyable to read. The author's main contribution on my opinion is that he re-introduces this topic to a new readership and therefore brings back this historical event into people's minds.
December 28, 2021
Very interesting
April 25, 2025
3.5 stars. Interesting topic, well-written, good exploration of the various personalities involved, and excellent scene-setting, placing the story in the larger context of WW2. The interaction between the local civilian population and the military presence of the POW camp was interesting.
Missing a couple of things that would have made this a better book:
- Competent copyediting. The proofreading was fine, but there were a couple of glaring and avoidable misplaced modifiers, and at one point the author writes that a fishing attempt was unsuccessful because the fish were "disinterested." It's good to know that the local wildlife was so fair-minded.
- A map. Would have been nice to have the location of the camp, the routes of the escapees, and the places they were retaken laid out. I was reading on Kindle, which I believe contained all of the images in the book, but perhaps the hardcopy has a map.
- Footnotes. He lists his sources but doesn't use in-text citations of any kind, and there's at least one issue I want to track down. He writes that the longest-escaped group camped between Piestewa Peak and Mummy Mountain, and he claims that the group walked to Lake Pleasant for a single day on one occasion. That's at least 35 miles as the crow flies, which doesn't match the stated "2 or 3 hours" of walking. There's at least one Arizona Highways article that says the location was Cave Creek Dam, and that seems much more likely geographically, but gives a bit of trouble with the claim that the group went fishing and swimming. Cave Creek Dam is a flood control dam with no reservoir behind it. The amount of water there isn't usually swimmable, not to mention that swimming outdoors on New Year's Day, even in Phoenix, is very cold. But it's the right distance from the hideout location, and given the amount of rain described in the book, it's possible there was a reasonably sized body of water at the dam at that time.
So anyway, I'm about to go bug the State Library about that one.
Missing a couple of things that would have made this a better book:
- Competent copyediting. The proofreading was fine, but there were a couple of glaring and avoidable misplaced modifiers, and at one point the author writes that a fishing attempt was unsuccessful because the fish were "disinterested." It's good to know that the local wildlife was so fair-minded.
- A map. Would have been nice to have the location of the camp, the routes of the escapees, and the places they were retaken laid out. I was reading on Kindle, which I believe contained all of the images in the book, but perhaps the hardcopy has a map.
- Footnotes. He lists his sources but doesn't use in-text citations of any kind, and there's at least one issue I want to track down. He writes that the longest-escaped group camped between Piestewa Peak and Mummy Mountain, and he claims that the group walked to Lake Pleasant for a single day on one occasion. That's at least 35 miles as the crow flies, which doesn't match the stated "2 or 3 hours" of walking. There's at least one Arizona Highways article that says the location was Cave Creek Dam, and that seems much more likely geographically, but gives a bit of trouble with the claim that the group went fishing and swimming. Cave Creek Dam is a flood control dam with no reservoir behind it. The amount of water there isn't usually swimmable, not to mention that swimming outdoors on New Year's Day, even in Phoenix, is very cold. But it's the right distance from the hideout location, and given the amount of rain described in the book, it's possible there was a reasonably sized body of water at the dam at that time.
So anyway, I'm about to go bug the State Library about that one.
April 4, 2019
The Great Desert Escape in an entertaining read, with facts that I was not aware of in the high plains desert country that I love. Roswell had a POW camp but it was very loosely supervised from what I understand. The camp at Papago Park outside of Pheonix, AZ eventually housed 4,000 German Navy personnel, for the most part, submarine sailors. All but 7 of Germany's submarines were sunk by the Allies, but I had no idea the remaining crew members numbered in the thousands, nor that they were all housed together in the desert. It was an excellent place to house them - theoretically at least - and it certainly makes for a fine tale.
Keith Warren Lloyd brings us the well-documented story of the POW camp at Papago Park from conception to closing and brings to us the interesting personalities of the inmates and their interactions with each other and their guards. This was a history I thoroughly enjoyed and am pleased to recommend to friends and family.
I received an ARC of the Great Desert Escape from Netgalley, Keith Warren Lloyd and Lyons Press. I have voluntarily read this history and provided this review.
pub date April 1, 2019
Lyons Press
Keith Warren Lloyd brings us the well-documented story of the POW camp at Papago Park from conception to closing and brings to us the interesting personalities of the inmates and their interactions with each other and their guards. This was a history I thoroughly enjoyed and am pleased to recommend to friends and family.
I received an ARC of the Great Desert Escape from Netgalley, Keith Warren Lloyd and Lyons Press. I have voluntarily read this history and provided this review.
pub date April 1, 2019
Lyons Press
May 18, 2019
An outstanding book about German PWs and how they planned the escape and eventual recapture as well as the camp commandant who was lax in his duty as well as his officers.
August 20, 2022
This was a nice account of an underreported incident during World War II: the escape of 25 German prisoners of war from a camp in Arizona.
Captured German U-boat crews were interned at Papago Park, a scrub land sitting between Phoenix and Scottsdale. The Germans successfully built a tunnel and sent two dozen of their own to make a break for it.
It's a well-written story, how the escapees organized into groups of three, each with their own plan to hopefully get to Mexico, where they could then contact sympathetic German expatriates. However, after a little over one month, all were recaptured without incident, and they were treated well afterward despite the humiliation of the US military.
I had to chuckle when I read how one group decided to take a portable boat with them to sail down the Gila River to the Gulf of Mexico, only to discover what we Arizonans know - the Gila is dry.
This story resonated with me since I live where it happened, in Phoenix. Now, I have to go find these locations for myself.
Captured German U-boat crews were interned at Papago Park, a scrub land sitting between Phoenix and Scottsdale. The Germans successfully built a tunnel and sent two dozen of their own to make a break for it.
It's a well-written story, how the escapees organized into groups of three, each with their own plan to hopefully get to Mexico, where they could then contact sympathetic German expatriates. However, after a little over one month, all were recaptured without incident, and they were treated well afterward despite the humiliation of the US military.
I had to chuckle when I read how one group decided to take a portable boat with them to sail down the Gila River to the Gulf of Mexico, only to discover what we Arizonans know - the Gila is dry.
This story resonated with me since I live where it happened, in Phoenix. Now, I have to go find these locations for myself.
January 28, 2019
This story was sort of like “Hogan’s Heroes” in reverse. Instead of the Americans getting all sorts of contraband and digging tunnels in a German POW camp, it was the Germans doing so in an American POW camp in Arizona. The first half of the book looks at WWII in general, including exploring the German U-boats that sank Merchant Marine ships. (Much more can be found about that topic in William Geroux’s The Mathews Men: Seven Brothers and the War Against Hitler's U-boats). The second half concentrates on the big escape of 25 POWs from the Arizona camp in December 1944, and all that went into recapturing them. Quite a few of the Germans turned themselves in for one reason or another, and others were tracked down, including some by Tohono O'odham trackers.
The escape got lots of attention from the local and national press, and generated much hostility from the public, because it was believed the POWs were being coddled. They even were being fed bacon when there was a shortage of it for Americans during the war. In addition, more POWs escaped while some of the original 25 escapees were still on the loose. Plus, amazingly, one of the original 25 returned to the camp in order to get information, and it wasn’t detected right away that he was back! Once the war ended, too, and the Nazi concentration camp photos and films were shown in the United States, more anger surfaced about the lenient treatment of German POWs. All and all, an interesting read about a topic many know little about.
(Note: I received a free e-ARC of this book from NetGalley and the publisher or author.)
The escape got lots of attention from the local and national press, and generated much hostility from the public, because it was believed the POWs were being coddled. They even were being fed bacon when there was a shortage of it for Americans during the war. In addition, more POWs escaped while some of the original 25 escapees were still on the loose. Plus, amazingly, one of the original 25 returned to the camp in order to get information, and it wasn’t detected right away that he was back! Once the war ended, too, and the Nazi concentration camp photos and films were shown in the United States, more anger surfaced about the lenient treatment of German POWs. All and all, an interesting read about a topic many know little about.
(Note: I received a free e-ARC of this book from NetGalley and the publisher or author.)
September 25, 2019
"The Great Desert Escape: How the Flight of 25 German Prisoners of War Sparked One of the Largest Manhunts in American History" eBook was published in 2019 and was written by Keith Warren Lloyd (https://keithwarrenlloyd.com). This is Mr. Lloyd's first published book.
I received an ARC of this novel through https://www.netgalley.com in return for a fair and honest review. I categorize this novel as ‘G’. The story is set in 1944.
Some captured German military personnel were being held in prisoner of war camps in the US. One of those camps was at Papago Park just outside of Phoenix, AZ. Several of the prisoners worked for months to dig a tunnel 6 feet deep and 178 feet long. The tunnel was finished in December 1944 and 25 prisoners escaped into the Arizona desert.
The story of those who escaped is told as well as that of those hunting for them.
I enjoyed the 5.5 hours I spent reading this 288-page history. I had read before of German POWs being held in the US, but this is the first account I have read giving more details. I thought that this book gave an interesting view of life in the German POW camp and a glimpse of the 'home front'. It read well for a non-fiction book. I like the selected cover art. I give this novel a 4 out of 5.
Further book reviews I have written can be accessed at https://johnpurvis.wordpress.com/blog/.
I received an ARC of this novel through https://www.netgalley.com in return for a fair and honest review. I categorize this novel as ‘G’. The story is set in 1944.
Some captured German military personnel were being held in prisoner of war camps in the US. One of those camps was at Papago Park just outside of Phoenix, AZ. Several of the prisoners worked for months to dig a tunnel 6 feet deep and 178 feet long. The tunnel was finished in December 1944 and 25 prisoners escaped into the Arizona desert.
The story of those who escaped is told as well as that of those hunting for them.
I enjoyed the 5.5 hours I spent reading this 288-page history. I had read before of German POWs being held in the US, but this is the first account I have read giving more details. I thought that this book gave an interesting view of life in the German POW camp and a glimpse of the 'home front'. It read well for a non-fiction book. I like the selected cover art. I give this novel a 4 out of 5.
Further book reviews I have written can be accessed at https://johnpurvis.wordpress.com/blog/.
April 27, 2019
This is a very readable history of the escape of German soldiers from a prison camp near Phoenix, Arizona called Papago Park. German POWs, like their American counterparts in Europe, felt a duty to escape from their prison camps. This is the German version of the well-known Great Escape involving Allied prisoners who escaped en masse from a German prison camp. I have short bits of information about this escape and the murder of the German POW Drechsler in other books about WWII. Most of them portray the German soldiers in the same light WWII propaganda did.
This book portrays the escapees as soldiers doing their job as POWs. That job was to escape. To be sure, these men were ruthless, but they were not inhuman. The Americans who ran the camp are shown to be inept at keeping their prisoners confined. Escapes occurred again and again. This book does not attempt to show Nazi's and Nazism in a favorable light. Instead it shows soldiers doing what they were trained to do when they were caught and interned. That is to escape.
I highly recommend that anyone who is interested in WII, foreign POWs in America or just a really good story. Even if you do not agree with humanity of the escapees, it is darn good well-written history.
This book portrays the escapees as soldiers doing their job as POWs. That job was to escape. To be sure, these men were ruthless, but they were not inhuman. The Americans who ran the camp are shown to be inept at keeping their prisoners confined. Escapes occurred again and again. This book does not attempt to show Nazi's and Nazism in a favorable light. Instead it shows soldiers doing what they were trained to do when they were caught and interned. That is to escape.
I highly recommend that anyone who is interested in WII, foreign POWs in America or just a really good story. Even if you do not agree with humanity of the escapees, it is darn good well-written history.
December 9, 2021
Since moving to AZ five years ago, I've been eager to learn as much as I can about my new home state. So when this book came across my check-in station at the library I snagged it.
Papago Park is a lovely but barren area comprising many dozens of acres of beautiful desert land practically in the heart of Phoenix, but at one time it was just more of the open, dry land that is Arizona. So it was particularly suited for an isolated POW camp.
Surrounded on all sides by seemingly endless desert, on land that I know of now as desert cement but is formally known as caliche, it seemed escape-proof.
But at Christmas time in 1944 a bunch of German POWs tunneled out of Papago Park Camp and set the area residents on edge while they were rounded up and returned to camp.
It's a real The Great Escape (the movie based on a daring similar escape from a German camp holding American POWs) type of story, with suspense and cunning.
I sometimes found myself rooting for the German prisoners to make a successful escape.
It was an enjoyable read.
Papago Park is a lovely but barren area comprising many dozens of acres of beautiful desert land practically in the heart of Phoenix, but at one time it was just more of the open, dry land that is Arizona. So it was particularly suited for an isolated POW camp.
Surrounded on all sides by seemingly endless desert, on land that I know of now as desert cement but is formally known as caliche, it seemed escape-proof.
But at Christmas time in 1944 a bunch of German POWs tunneled out of Papago Park Camp and set the area residents on edge while they were rounded up and returned to camp.
It's a real The Great Escape (the movie based on a daring similar escape from a German camp holding American POWs) type of story, with suspense and cunning.
I sometimes found myself rooting for the German prisoners to make a successful escape.
It was an enjoyable read.
March 25, 2019
THE GREAT DESERT ESCAPE, by Keith Warren Lloyd, tells the amazing true story of the 25 German U-boat men who escaped a POW camp in Arizona in December 1944. Lloyd elaborates on men who serve on a U-boat and how most of the men ended up at the Papago Park POW camp leading up to the escape. In detail, Lloyd describes how the escape happened, where things went right and wrong on both sides and ultimately what happened to those 25 men, as well as outcomes for many of the US military men that were key participants at camp and during the escape investigation.
POW camp life at Papago Park was casual to say the least and Lloyd make sure to explain in detail the lazy approach to managing the POW's as well as the privileges POW's at Papago Park received that were unnecessarily beyond the norm. Lloyd walks the reader through the geography of the camp and how an escape route was established using the desert landscape and the layout of the camp buildings. Lloyd constantly toes the line on whether the escape happened because of ineptitude of camp management or ingenuity of the German POWs. In the end, while acknowledging the intelligence of the German soldiers, I believe Lloyd puts more blame on management of the camp, which I think Lloyd finds disappointing.
Fascinating look at an event few people today know about, THE GREAT DESERT ESCAPE enlightens and educates the reader in a very entertaining way. The book was a joy to read.
Thank you to Rowman & Littlefield/Lyons Press, Keith Warren Lloyd, and Netgalley for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review!
POW camp life at Papago Park was casual to say the least and Lloyd make sure to explain in detail the lazy approach to managing the POW's as well as the privileges POW's at Papago Park received that were unnecessarily beyond the norm. Lloyd walks the reader through the geography of the camp and how an escape route was established using the desert landscape and the layout of the camp buildings. Lloyd constantly toes the line on whether the escape happened because of ineptitude of camp management or ingenuity of the German POWs. In the end, while acknowledging the intelligence of the German soldiers, I believe Lloyd puts more blame on management of the camp, which I think Lloyd finds disappointing.
Fascinating look at an event few people today know about, THE GREAT DESERT ESCAPE enlightens and educates the reader in a very entertaining way. The book was a joy to read.
Thank you to Rowman & Littlefield/Lyons Press, Keith Warren Lloyd, and Netgalley for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review!
July 19, 2019
Well researched and entertaining story of 25 German PWs that escaped from the prisoner-of-war camp on the outskirts of Phoenix during WWII. The prisoners put together a well thought out plan, that included a diversion the day they escaped. What makes us giggle today is that one small group of escapees thought they could float down the Gila River to Mexico. That river is normally dry due to all the dams upstream.
April 25, 2024
Ugh… this was a book club pick and it was difficult for me to get through. I don’t usually choose nonfiction, but this read like an assigned textbook from my college class. The positive was that being from the Valley, and close to Papago, I knew the areas being discussed.
September 6, 2025
An excellent read of an essential piece of Arizona history that is commonly overlooked! This thoroughly researched and well-organized story does a great job capturing the events leading up to, during, and following the Great Desert Escape!
October 1, 2019
Good information but not much story telling.
January 16, 2023
Hogans Heroes meets Papago Park
January 11, 2024
Interesting true story about German POWs escaping into the AZ desert. I wasn't aware this and probably intended to be low key.
June 23, 2023
I served in the Arizona Army National Guard. Part of our HQ was located on the site of the camp.
I knew much of the story.
I knew much of the story.
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews