The Mammoth Book of Prison Breaks by Paul Simpson Page A

guard’s uniforms, and then split the rest of the escapees into two groups to apprehend the other guards. One group rounded up the cooks and anyone else in the kitchen area; the other locked guards into the tool room.
    However, when the freed prisoners started to cross the yard, one of the guards started to raise the alarm. According to the account given by survivor Ernesto Carratalá in his memoirs, “it was the first and only time in my life I saw a man killed. A group of my countrymen accurately, brutally and repeatedly hit the guard on the head. They did so with a hammer, and did not stop until they had overcome his resistance, and the soldier fell inert.” The guard succumbed to his injuries, the only one to die – Pico had given instructions that no one was to be killed. Entering the Oficina de Ayudantía, Pico and his men disarmed the guards, and made one of them request the guard on the far side of the door to open it. When he did so, he was also disarmed, and the prisoners were then able to get access to the keys to the cells. As the other guards, who were either having their dinner or were on duty watching the perimeter, were rounded up, the prisoners were released from their cells.
    All seemed to be going to plan. Within half an hour, the prisoners had taken control of the fort, and those that wanted to could make a mass getaway. However, Pico couldn’t anticipate that one of the guards would return from Pamplona, see the situation unfolding and run back to the town to raise the alarm. Nor could he have expected that one of his fellow prisoners, Angel Alcazarde de Valasco, would flee from the fort to inform the authorities.
    Pico had banked on the escape remaining undetected until the next batch of guards arrived to take over duties the following morning, but instead, military trucks with huge searchlights were dispatched from Pamplona, and many of the prisoners turned tail and returned to the fort. By 3.30 the next morning, there were 1692 inmates remaining in San Cristobal. Nearly one third of the total population, 795 men, had fled to the surrounding thickly wooded hills.
    Carratalá, who was only eighteen years old at the time of the escape, remembers that the confusion was total. Some people thought that the war was over, and made their way to the train station in Pamplona, where they were arrested when they tried to buy a ticket. He himself spent a quarter of an hour running through the woods, but when he heard the sound of the approaching vehicles, he decided to cut his losses and head back to the prison. Like many of his comrades, he was back in his usual place by the time the military arrived.
    Many of them didn’t last long in the wild; 207 were shot rather than arrested; 585 were brought back to San Cristobal. Among them was Felix Alvarez, who very nearly reached the border with France. Running from the troops, who were shooting the escaping prisoners like rabbits, he and a couple of men from the same area got as far as the village of Gascue-Odieta, but a woman there reported them to the military. She did make up for it to a certain extent – before they were returned to San Cristobal, she made them what Alvarez still recalled as the best soup of his life.
    The military authorities were humiliated by the sheer scale of the escape, and tried to claim that many of those who fled were common criminals “of the worst kind . . . a bunch of murderers, robbers and thieves”. When they were returned to San Cristobal, they were thrown into the worst cells, on the lowest level, and were often left naked and without food for days on end, receiving regular beatings from the guards. One man, Amador Rodriguez Solla, later nicknamed Tarzan by his peers, managed to remain on the loose, hiding in a cave eating snails, frogs and plants, until 14 August.
    Seventeen leaders of the escape were tried by a military court; fourteen of them were sentenced to death and shot in the centre of Pamplona on 8 September 1938;