Thirty-six days in the hills
Of the twenty-five men who went through the tunnel on the night of December 23, Wattenberg proved the hardest to bring in. The senior officer among Camp Papago Park’s Kriegsmarine prisoners and the escape’s ringleader, he did not join the optimists heading for Mexico by way of a mapped river. He went to ground close by instead, in a cave in the hills north of Phoenix, and waited while the manhunt swept up his fellow escapees across five weeks of cold desert winter — many of them hungry, several caught after asking for food at Valley ranch houses.
It could not hold. The cave arrangement depended on risky trips back toward the camp’s orbit for food and news, and when one of his companions was caught the odds shortened further. Hungry, Wattenberg finally ventured into Phoenix itself on January 28, was recognized, and surrendered without incident — the last of the twenty-five back in custody, thirty-six days after the tunnel.
After the manhunt
The ending fit the escape. No violence, no getaway, and the score settled almost entirely by cold, hunger, and dry riverbeds — the desert had been the real perimeter all along. The recapture closed the largest POW escape ever staged on U.S. soil and fixed the story permanently in Valley memory; it gets retold every Christmas, dry Salt River and all.
For Scottsdale, January 1945 was also the beginning of the war’s long ending. Within months the fighting was over, and the servicemen who had learned the desert from a Stearman’s open cockpit at Thunderbird Field II began coming back with families and GI Bill loans — the migration that powers the rest of the town’s story. The escape became folklore just as the town it happened beside started becoming a city. The rest of 1945 picks up there.