Months of digging
The tunnel was patient work. Camp Papago Park, on Scottsdale’s southwestern doorstep, held German prisoners who were largely Kriegsmarine men — navy crews whose war had ended at sea — and for months they dug with coal shovels, hiding the entrance under a bathhouse and the spoil wherever spoil could go unnoticed. The finished bore ran 178 feet under the wire. On the night of December 23–24, with the camp settled into its Christmas lull, twenty-five men crawled through and out into the desert dark, U-boat commander Jürgen Wattenberg among them.
The plan’s most famous flaw was cartographic. Several escapees intended to reach Mexico by water, having studied maps of the Salt River that showed a bold, confident blue line running toward the border. Arizona maps are aspirational that way. The river they reached was bone-dry, as it usually is, and the rafting party found itself hiking.
The manhunt, and the point
What followed was five weeks of the desert doing the Army’s work. Cold, hunger, and distance defeated the escapees more thoroughly than any search party did; several were caught after knocking at Valley ranch houses to ask for food. One by one, all twenty-five came back into custody within about a month. Wattenberg lasted longest, hiding in the hills north of Phoenix before venturing into the city and being recognized on January 28, 1945.
No one was hurt, no one got away, and the whole affair settled instantly into the best kind of local legend: the largest POW escape ever staged on American soil, undone by a river that was not there. Valley newspapers retell it every Christmas, and should. For where the escape sits in wartime Scottsdale’s larger story, see 1944 and the 1940s chapter.