This is the memory palace, I'm Nate de Mayo. His submarine had sunk. He had taken on

three British destroyers at once, which had turned out to be at least two to many.

Two of his men had been killed, the rest captured. And now, in the summer of 1943,

Captain Jurgen Voughtenberg was one of 1700 knots he prisoners awore, and a camp

6,000 miles away from his home in the Chile port city of Lubbock, in the Baltic Sea.

In the middle of the Arizona desert, wilting in the heat. Things were going great.

The American radio stations were reporting about allied defeats at the hands of

the German army, and since the local radio just had to be filled with lies and

Yankee propaganda, if they were reporting on these losses, clearly the war was

nearly over. Also, his men were loving the volleyball. The prison camp was

heavily fortified, surrounded by impossible desert terrain, and in the middle

of nowhere. There were eight miles away from Phoenix, and Phoenix and nowhere were a

potato paton on the back in 1943. So it wasn't like these guys were going to escape.

So when Captain Voughtenberg's men asked the American guards for some shovels to

carve a regulation volleyball court out of the rocks in sand, they said, sure,

knock yourself out. And so the prisoners did. So when they were serving and

spiking and setting, holding round robin tournaments, they were

browsing and cheering loudly every day. All according to Voughtenberg's plan, that

cheering and whooping at the volleyball court, covered up the sound of the

digging that had been going on underneath since they first broke ground in the

court. The POWs were scraping out a tunnel inch by inch. Nearly every prisoner

was in on it. Some procured light bulbs and wire to light the inside of the

...