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The Confidence Men: How Two Prisoners of War Engineered the Most Remarkable Escape in History
The Great Escape for the Great War: the astonishing true story of two World War I prisoners who pulled off one of the most ingenious escapes of all time.
FINALIST FOR THE EDGAR® AWARD • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST AND NPR • "Fox unspools Jones and Hill's delightfully elaborate scheme in nail-biting episodes that advance like a narrative Rube Goldberg machine."-The New York Times Book Review
Imprisoned in a remote Turkish POW camp during World War I, having survived a two-month forced march and a terrifying shootout in the desert, two British officers, Harry Jones and Cedric Hill, join forces to bamboozle their iron-fisted captors. To stave off despair and boredom, Jones takes a handmade Ouija board and fakes elaborate séances for his fellow prisoners. Word gets around, and one day an Ottoman official approaches Jones with a query: Could Jones contact the spirit world to find a vast treasure rumored to be buried nearby? Jones, a trained lawyer, and Hill, a brilliant magician, use the Ouija board-and their keen understanding of the psychology of deception-to build a trap for their captors that will ultimately lead them to freedom.
A gripping nonfiction thriller, The Confidence Men is the story of one of the only known con games played for a good cause-and of a profound but unlikely friendship. Had it not been for "the Great War," Jones, the Oxford-educated son of a British lord, and Hill, a mechanic on an Australian sheep ranch, would never have met. But in pain, loneliness, hunger, and isolation, they formed a powerful emotional and intellectual alliance that saved both of their lives.
Margalit Fox brings her "nose for interesting facts, the ability to construct a taut narrative arc, and a Dickens-level gift for concisely conveying personality" (Kathryn Schulz, New York) to this tale of psychological strategy that is rife with cunning, danger, and moments of high farce that rival anything in Catch-22.
FINALIST FOR THE EDGAR® AWARD • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST AND NPR • "Fox unspools Jones and Hill's delightfully elaborate scheme in nail-biting episodes that advance like a narrative Rube Goldberg machine."-The New York Times Book Review
Imprisoned in a remote Turkish POW camp during World War I, having survived a two-month forced march and a terrifying shootout in the desert, two British officers, Harry Jones and Cedric Hill, join forces to bamboozle their iron-fisted captors. To stave off despair and boredom, Jones takes a handmade Ouija board and fakes elaborate séances for his fellow prisoners. Word gets around, and one day an Ottoman official approaches Jones with a query: Could Jones contact the spirit world to find a vast treasure rumored to be buried nearby? Jones, a trained lawyer, and Hill, a brilliant magician, use the Ouija board-and their keen understanding of the psychology of deception-to build a trap for their captors that will ultimately lead them to freedom.
A gripping nonfiction thriller, The Confidence Men is the story of one of the only known con games played for a good cause-and of a profound but unlikely friendship. Had it not been for "the Great War," Jones, the Oxford-educated son of a British lord, and Hill, a mechanic on an Australian sheep ranch, would never have met. But in pain, loneliness, hunger, and isolation, they formed a powerful emotional and intellectual alliance that saved both of their lives.
Margalit Fox brings her "nose for interesting facts, the ability to construct a taut narrative arc, and a Dickens-level gift for concisely conveying personality" (Kathryn Schulz, New York) to this tale of psychological strategy that is rife with cunning, danger, and moments of high farce that rival anything in Catch-22.
Editorial Reviews
"Enthralling . . . exceptionally entertaining."-Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
"Tales of spunky prisoners of war suffering horrifying privation or outfoxing their sadistic or imbecilic captors are a staple of military history and the movies. . . . Fact or fiction, few of them can match the latest entry in the genre. . . . Margalit Fox's The Confidence Men tells the tale of two Allied officers captured by the Turks during World War I who escaped their remote prison camp by pulling an ingenious and elaborate spiritualist con on the camp's greedy commandant."-The Wall Street Journal
"A wonder; a marvel; a feat of invention and dogged persistence; and most of all, a testament to the power of the human capacity to believe. The Confidence Men is a thrilling tale of courage and friendship and overcoming, not to mention tricks and lies and magician's cunning, and it will have you cheering the tricksters every step of the way. The story of their ingenuity offers joy, solace, and hope."-Liza Mundy, author of Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II
"The Confidence Men couldn't have come along at a better time. This story of two unlikely con artists-young British officers who use a Ouija board to escape from a Turkish prisoner-of-war camp-is a true delight, guaranteed to lift the spirits of anyone eager to forget today's realities and lose oneself in a beautifully written tale of an exciting and deeply moving real-life caper."-Lynne Olson, author of Madame Fourcade's Secret War
"Margalit Fox is one of the premier narrative storytellers we have today, and The Confidence Men is a wonderfully entertaining brew of history, thrills, and ingenuity, one that highlights the rare occasion when con artistry is employed for the greater public good."-Sarah Weinman, author of The Real Lolita and editor of Unspeakable Acts: True Tales of Crime, Murder,
"Tales of spunky prisoners of war suffering horrifying privation or outfoxing their sadistic or imbecilic captors are a staple of military history and the movies. . . . Fact or fiction, few of them can match the latest entry in the genre. . . . Margalit Fox's The Confidence Men tells the tale of two Allied officers captured by the Turks during World War I who escaped their remote prison camp by pulling an ingenious and elaborate spiritualist con on the camp's greedy commandant."-The Wall Street Journal
"A wonder; a marvel; a feat of invention and dogged persistence; and most of all, a testament to the power of the human capacity to believe. The Confidence Men is a thrilling tale of courage and friendship and overcoming, not to mention tricks and lies and magician's cunning, and it will have you cheering the tricksters every step of the way. The story of their ingenuity offers joy, solace, and hope."-Liza Mundy, author of Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II
"The Confidence Men couldn't have come along at a better time. This story of two unlikely con artists-young British officers who use a Ouija board to escape from a Turkish prisoner-of-war camp-is a true delight, guaranteed to lift the spirits of anyone eager to forget today's realities and lose oneself in a beautifully written tale of an exciting and deeply moving real-life caper."-Lynne Olson, author of Madame Fourcade's Secret War
"Margalit Fox is one of the premier narrative storytellers we have today, and The Confidence Men is a wonderfully entertaining brew of history, thrills, and ingenuity, one that highlights the rare occasion when con artistry is employed for the greater public good."-Sarah Weinman, author of The Real Lolita and editor of Unspeakable Acts: True Tales of Crime, Murder,
Readers Top Reviews
J. TuohyGabriel Stei
This is an amazing story of two enterprising British officers confined to a Turkish POW camp. By using a Ouija board and good old-fashioned greed they were able to manipulate the Turkish camp commandant to be crucial to the escape plot. The book combines the a story of amazing chutzpah and astonishing good luck with a fascinating tour of spiritual beliefs that the beginning of the last century. I recommend it highly
Eris PereseCurious S
The elegant writing style carries the reader forward but the detailed description of the method used to escape a prisoner of war camp in the Ottoman Empire during the last days of World War I is presented as though there was not wide suffering and deprivation. The prison camp is near Ankara but there is no description of the situation of the Turkish people who lived near the prison camp. Other accounts suggest that they too were suffering.
T. C. F.
If this was a novel no one would believe it. A true story of two POWs trying the impossible to escape. There is no lack of imagination in their plot to get free. Didn't want to put the book down, had to see what challenge they would face (and hope to overcome) next.
Sidd Vicious
The author, based primarily on the memoirs of the men involved, published now a century ago, recounts the incredible story of how two British POWs held in an Ottoman prison camp used fake seances to convince their captors to take them to the Mediterranean coast where they could escape. When this plan went awry, the clever Brits successfully feigned insanity in order to become eligible for a prisoner exchange. The author helps to explain their success through discussions of the popularity of spiritualism in the Victorian and Edwardian eras—even in Turkey—and of the psychology of cult members. A story hard to believe but fun!
kbaileyg
I had given “Conan Doyle …” to my British brother-in-law as a gift and was sending this along, too. When I let him know, he said, “Oh, of course, you know I read Jones’ book in the ‘50s …” So I thought he knew all about it, but turned out he “loved every page.” I think when you have become trusted as a writer, curious readers know your work will teach them more, the things they probably didn’t catch. They look forward to your next, and then hopefully, your next. This is what happened with “The Confidence Men”. Margalit Fox tells the best stories because she knows everything about her subject matter, then seems to hope she will find still more in the writing. It’s her greatest gift to the reader.
Short Excerpt Teaser
Chapter One
For King and Country
There was no barbed wire around Yozgad, nor did there need to be. One of a constellation of World War I prison camps spread over Turkey, it was among the most remote. More than 4,000 feet above sea level, it had been earmarked for incorrigibles-those British officers deemed most likely to escape. The town of Yozgad, in which the camp was set, lay 150 miles south of the Black Sea and 300 miles north of the Mediterranean. The nearest railway station, Angora (present-day Ankara), was five days' journey by cart through forbidding terrain: jagged mountains round the camp and the Anatolian desert beyond. As a result, Yozgad was considered escape-proof, the Alcatraz of its day.
If an inmate did manage to get out, he would have to contend with the cutthroat brigands, believed to number in the hundreds of thousands, who roamed the surrounding countryside. "A solitary traveller, however well armed, would not have stood a dog's chance," Major Edward Sandes, interned at Yozgad, would write in 1924. Men who had fled other camps and been set upon by brigands had been known to beg the nearest Ottoman official they could find to take them back.
But for the British officers at Yozgad, something else precluded escape even more forcibly: On orders of the camp commandant, an attempt by any one of them would bring down severe reprisals-including lockdown, isolation, and even execution-on those who remained, a punitive rite known as strafing. Men of honor, the prisoners swore to one another that they would not flee.
As Eric Williams, who in 1943 escaped from the Stalag-Luft III prison camp in Silesia, would write, "The exhausting . . . march to Yozgad . . . so told on the survivors that once they had settled down the opinion grew among them that it was wrong to escape, that the loss of privileges by those who stayed behind far outweighed the slim chance of the few who might get away."
Yet some, including Jones and Hill, dreamed of liberty. The question was how to attain it without compromising their countrymen.
The war with the Ottoman Empire has been called the forgotten theater of World War I, yet it was as brutal as anything on the Western Front. It spanned four principal arenas: Mesopotamia, including modern-day Iraq, where Jones was captured; the Sinai Peninsula and Palestine, including present-day Syria, Israel, and Egypt, where Hill was taken prisoner; the Caucasian Front, where the Ottomans fought Russia; and the Turkish Straits, where Allied forces suffered a devastating defeat at Gallipoli in 1915–16.
The Ottoman Empire had entered the war in the autumn of 1914 after allying itself with the Central Powers: Germany and Austria-Hungary. The Allies-including Britain, France, and Russia-formally declared war on Turkey, as the empire was known in Allied shorthand, soon afterward. For Britain, a crucial imperative was to ensure continued access to its oilfields in Persia (present-day Iran), which bordered Mesopotamia. In 1913, the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, had urged the Royal Navy to convert its fleet from coal-burning vessels to oil-fired ones: Oil burned hotter and generated steam faster, affording greater speed. Once the Ottoman Empire joined the conflict, Britain moved swiftly to protect its Persian assets.
"The British attitude and policy towards the Ottomans was a variable mixture of Orientalism and racism, on the one hand, and realpolitik on the other," the contemporary Turkish historian Yücel Yanıkdağ has written. "From the Ottoman perspective, the Great Powers, including Great Britain, were only interested in carving away the empire." What was more, he wrote, "the British [viewed] the Ottoman Empire as weak and degenerate [and] underestimated what it would take to defeat it." T. E. Lawrence, a British Army officer dispatched for a time to Mesopotamia-he would later become renowned as Lawrence of Arabia for his work in the Palestine campaign-called the British operation in Mesopotamia a "blunderland."
Of all Britain's campaigns in the region, very likely the most disastrous was the five-month siege and ultimate capitulation at Kut-al-Amara, on the banks of the river Tigris some 200 miles upriver from the Persian Gulf. In April 1916, after a siege of 147 days entailing three unsuccessful relief attempts and 33,000 British casualties, the British surrendered. It was, in the words of one twenty-first-century historian, "arguably . . . Britain's worst military defeat since the surrender of Cornwallis's army in 1781 during the American Revolutionary War." More than 12,000 men were taken prisoner at Kut. Among them was Jones, who with his fellows had endured five ...
For King and Country
There was no barbed wire around Yozgad, nor did there need to be. One of a constellation of World War I prison camps spread over Turkey, it was among the most remote. More than 4,000 feet above sea level, it had been earmarked for incorrigibles-those British officers deemed most likely to escape. The town of Yozgad, in which the camp was set, lay 150 miles south of the Black Sea and 300 miles north of the Mediterranean. The nearest railway station, Angora (present-day Ankara), was five days' journey by cart through forbidding terrain: jagged mountains round the camp and the Anatolian desert beyond. As a result, Yozgad was considered escape-proof, the Alcatraz of its day.
If an inmate did manage to get out, he would have to contend with the cutthroat brigands, believed to number in the hundreds of thousands, who roamed the surrounding countryside. "A solitary traveller, however well armed, would not have stood a dog's chance," Major Edward Sandes, interned at Yozgad, would write in 1924. Men who had fled other camps and been set upon by brigands had been known to beg the nearest Ottoman official they could find to take them back.
But for the British officers at Yozgad, something else precluded escape even more forcibly: On orders of the camp commandant, an attempt by any one of them would bring down severe reprisals-including lockdown, isolation, and even execution-on those who remained, a punitive rite known as strafing. Men of honor, the prisoners swore to one another that they would not flee.
As Eric Williams, who in 1943 escaped from the Stalag-Luft III prison camp in Silesia, would write, "The exhausting . . . march to Yozgad . . . so told on the survivors that once they had settled down the opinion grew among them that it was wrong to escape, that the loss of privileges by those who stayed behind far outweighed the slim chance of the few who might get away."
Yet some, including Jones and Hill, dreamed of liberty. The question was how to attain it without compromising their countrymen.
The war with the Ottoman Empire has been called the forgotten theater of World War I, yet it was as brutal as anything on the Western Front. It spanned four principal arenas: Mesopotamia, including modern-day Iraq, where Jones was captured; the Sinai Peninsula and Palestine, including present-day Syria, Israel, and Egypt, where Hill was taken prisoner; the Caucasian Front, where the Ottomans fought Russia; and the Turkish Straits, where Allied forces suffered a devastating defeat at Gallipoli in 1915–16.
The Ottoman Empire had entered the war in the autumn of 1914 after allying itself with the Central Powers: Germany and Austria-Hungary. The Allies-including Britain, France, and Russia-formally declared war on Turkey, as the empire was known in Allied shorthand, soon afterward. For Britain, a crucial imperative was to ensure continued access to its oilfields in Persia (present-day Iran), which bordered Mesopotamia. In 1913, the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, had urged the Royal Navy to convert its fleet from coal-burning vessels to oil-fired ones: Oil burned hotter and generated steam faster, affording greater speed. Once the Ottoman Empire joined the conflict, Britain moved swiftly to protect its Persian assets.
"The British attitude and policy towards the Ottomans was a variable mixture of Orientalism and racism, on the one hand, and realpolitik on the other," the contemporary Turkish historian Yücel Yanıkdağ has written. "From the Ottoman perspective, the Great Powers, including Great Britain, were only interested in carving away the empire." What was more, he wrote, "the British [viewed] the Ottoman Empire as weak and degenerate [and] underestimated what it would take to defeat it." T. E. Lawrence, a British Army officer dispatched for a time to Mesopotamia-he would later become renowned as Lawrence of Arabia for his work in the Palestine campaign-called the British operation in Mesopotamia a "blunderland."
Of all Britain's campaigns in the region, very likely the most disastrous was the five-month siege and ultimate capitulation at Kut-al-Amara, on the banks of the river Tigris some 200 miles upriver from the Persian Gulf. In April 1916, after a siege of 147 days entailing three unsuccessful relief attempts and 33,000 British casualties, the British surrendered. It was, in the words of one twenty-first-century historian, "arguably . . . Britain's worst military defeat since the surrender of Cornwallis's army in 1781 during the American Revolutionary War." More than 12,000 men were taken prisoner at Kut. Among them was Jones, who with his fellows had endured five ...
