Outwitting the Hun: My Escape from a German Prison Camp

In Short

Outwitting the Hun is the true escape memoir of Lieutenant Pat O'Brien, an American aviator serving in the Royal Flying Corps during World War I. After being shot down in 1917, surviving an 8,000-foot crash, and being taken prisoner by German forces, O'Brien leaps from a moving prison train traveling over thirty miles an hour. For seventy-two days, he crawls, hides, starves, and bluff-walks his way across occupied Luxembourg and Belgium toward the Dutch border. It endures as an unvarnished testament to sheer luck, resourceful deception, and an invincible human spirit.

The Story

The narrative opens in the high-stakes, lethal air over France, where Lieutenant Pat O'Brien serves as a fighter pilot for the Royal Flying Corps. After downing his first German aircraft, O'Brien is caught in a ferocious dogfight six miles behind enemy lines. Bullets shatter his instrument panel, and one rounds through his mouth and throat. He loses consciousness as his plane enters a violent, fatal spinning nose dive from over eight thousand feet.

Miraculously surviving the impact, O'Brien wakes up the next morning inside a filthy, crowded German emergency hospital near the front. He soon learns the tragic news that his closest friends and squadmates have been killed in action. Transferred to the Intelligence Department of the German Flying Corps and eventually to a heavily guarded prison camp in Courtrai, Belgium, O'Brien realizes that staying captive means lingering in misery or facing execution as an American combatant. He resolves to escape at the first opportunity.

That chance comes during a troop train transfer into the heart of Germany. Capitalizing on a quiet moment at four o'clock in the morning while his guards drop their vigil, O'Brien forces himself out of a narrow window while the train speeds along at over thirty miles per hour. Landing heavily on the sharp rock ballast, he cuts his face, damages an eye, and badly strains his ankle, but immediately flees into the pitch-black countryside before guards can halt the locomotive.

What follows is an agonizing, two-month trek on foot toward the neutral Netherlands. O'Brien moves almost entirely by night, navigating by the North Star, sleeping in freezing mud or wet ditches, and subsisting on raw field vegetables like sugar beets and celery. In occupied Belgian towns, he survives by pretending to be a deaf-mute peasant, carrying a heavy stone wrapped in a handkerchief for self-defense. In one city, he relies on a local Belgian who promises a forged passport, only to be betrayed when the man tries to withhold his papers. O'Brien aggressively bluffs his way out, forcing the man to return his belongings. He even risks his life attending a local theater full of enemy officers simply to maintain his nerve.

Upon reaching the heavily fortified Dutch border, O'Brien faces a lethal barrier: an electric fence guarded by armed sentries. Working carefully with his bare hands and broken fingernails, he digs under the live wires, unhooking staples one by one. He successfully crawls beneath the charge with inches to spare. Safe in Holland, he meets King George V in England before finally returning to his home town in Illinois.

How It Unfolds

Disaster in the clouds During a dogfight behind enemy lines, O'Brien downs a German plane before a volley of bullets destroys his instruments and sends a bullet through his lip and throat. He loses consciousness as his aircraft plummets toward the earth.

Captivity and grief Waking in a dirty front-line hospital, O'Brien learns he is a prisoner of war. A German officer hands him a photo taken from his fallen best friend, confirming his comrade's death before O'Brien is marched off to a international prison camp in Courtrai.

The leap for freedom While being transported deeper into Germany on a train traveling over thirty miles an hour, O'Brien squeezed through a narrow window at dawn. He crashes into the sharp gravel along the track, badly injured but free.

Crawling through the wild Bleeding and disoriented, O'Brien navigates dark forests and swampy ditches by night. Lacking proper supplies, he survives for weeks by chewing raw celery and beets while nursing a damaged eye and discarded clothing.

Deception in the cities Entering occupied Belgian settlements, O'Brien poses as a deaf-mute to beg for food from sympathetic peasants. He outwits German street guards by ducking into crowd shadows and later confronts a corrupt contact who tries to steal his personal papers.

Digging to liberty Reaching the Netherlands border, O'Brien encounters a lethal electric fence. Using his bare fingers to pull fence staples and scoop out mud, he crawls on his stomach beneath the high-voltage wire to cross into safety.

The People

• Pat O'Brien: An adventurous American flying officer in the British Royal Flying Corps. Driven by an overwhelming desire for liberty, he refuses to resign himself to a German prison camp. Armed with quick thinking, physical resilience, and a fiery willingness to gamble everything—including bluffing his captors or jumping from a speeding train—he adapts to every crisis he encounters.
• Paul H. Raney: O'Brien’s closest friend and fellow aviator from Toronto. Raney represents the tragic loss of youth in the air war. After carefully packing O'Brien’s personal items upon his disappearance, Raney is killed in battle just days later, leaving behind a legacy that O'Brien carries in his pocket throughout his escape.
• Huyliger: A Belgian resident in a occupied city who promises to procure forged identity papers for O'Brien. His sudden change of heart and suspicious behavior threaten to ruin the escape, forcing O'Brien to use aggressive threats of exposure to reclaim his stolen documents and map.
• The Belgian Peasants: Courageous unnamed civilians living under occupation who risk summary execution by giving food, shelter, and directions to a desperate fugitive pretending to be deaf and dumb.

In Its Own Voice

"While I was still looking at the instruments the whole blamed works disappeared."

O'Brien describes the sudden, violent moment his fighter plane is shot down over enemy lines.

"Standing up on the bench as if to put the bag on the rack, and taking hold of the rack with my left hand and a strap that hung from the top of the car with my right, I pulled myself up, shoved my feet and legs out of the window, and let go!"

The heart-stopping instant O'Brien hurls himself out of a moving train at thirty-five miles per hour.

"Then I lay down on my stomach and crawled or rather writhed under the wire like a snake, with my feet first, and there wasn't any question of my hugging Mother Earth as closely as possible..."

O'Brien recalls squeezing under the deadly electrified border fence to reach the Netherlands.

What It's Really About

Underneath its thrilling adventure framework, Outwitting the Hun is an exploration of survival instinct stripped down to its bare essentials. It contrasts the mechanical, industrial nature of modern World War I aviation with the primitive, animalistic struggle of an unarmed man traveling through wet mud, eating raw roots, and depending on basic human solidarity. O'Brien’s account shines a light on the quiet resistance of occupied populations—ordinary Belgian citizens who quietly defied their occupiers to feed a stranger. The narrative also captures the lingering mental strain of war; even after returning to London, O'Brien struggles with severe anxiety, proving that escaping physical capture is only half the battle when surviving combat trauma.

Why Read It Today

Outwitting the Hun remains an immensely readable, pulse-pounding true story that feels remarkably modern in its pacing and grit. O'Brien writes with a straightforward, unpretentious American voice, avoiding romanticized heroics in favor of frank observations about fear, bodily injury, and extreme hunger. Readers who enjoy survival stories, military histories, or classic wartime escapes will find themselves completely absorbed by his resourcefulness and nerve.

The book does reflect its period setting; readers will encounter early 20th-century slang, regional terminology, and the sharp anti-German sentiments expected from an Allied combatant writing in 1918. However, these period elements only heighten the book's authenticity. O'Brien’s self-deprecating humor—such as burying his oversized Canadian mittens in the mud or watching sausage-obsessed guards through a keyhole—keeps the prose grounded. What lingers long after the final page is the sheer durability of the human spirit when faced with impossible odds, alongside the quiet bravery of the everyday people who helped a fallen pilot make it home.