Crawl to Freedom

Australian POW escapes of World War One

By Darren Prickett

Published by Big Sky Publishing
RRP $32.99 in paperback | ISBN 9781923144255

This is Darren Prickett’s second book with Big Sky Publishing. His first book, Purple Patch, the history of the 3rd Field Company Engineers, was published in 2019.

It was during his research for the earlier book that he became interested in the stories of the Australians taken prisoner during the war and especially, the stories of those who escaped captivity,

It seemed to him that in all the literature published since on the First World War, the prisoner of war experiences of the Anzacs were frequently forgotten, being largely treated as mere footnotes in the broader story.

Where individual stories have been told they are often from the perspective of life as a POW. It could be assumed that the Australian POWs of WWI passed quietly into captivity. The opposite was in fact the case.

Many of the Anzacs attempted escape, with over 40 successfully making their way to England or across the battlefields of Western Europe to Allied lines.

Crawl to Freedom is a collection of stories of those successful escapes.

From enlistment to capture, the journeys and efforts of the escapees are forensically explored as the Anzacs fight for their freedom.

The astonishing stories tell of mateship, courage and determination in the face of adversity, these soldiers succeeded in overcoming their hardships to fulfil their ingenious endeavours to escape.

Crawl to Freedom is the result of the author’s meticulous and wide-ranging research, including making contact with descendants of some of the men, where, remarkably, the stories had been kept alive through the generations of families.  The stories he tells are inspirational and remarkable. A good read indeed.