Free When Hitler Took Cocaine and Lenin Lost His Brain by Giles Milton Page A

the service tunnel. The men then had to steal a long piece of cord in order to reach the manhole that covered the air vent. When they finally lifted the manhole cover, they replaced the metal bolts with fake ones made of soap. Finally, on the night of 11 June, all was ready. It was time to make their escape.
    Everything went exactly to plan. They crawled into the utility corridor, climbed the air vent and reached the prison roof. Then they clambered down to the rocky ground and began pumping air into a raft that they’d previously made from rubber raincoats. They’d even managed to make oars.
    What happened next is a complete mystery. The three men disappeared and were never seen again. They were never captured, despite an extraordinary FBI manhunt, and nor were their bodies ever found.
    Their raft was washed up on the following day on Angel Island, some two miles from Alcatraz, and there were footprints leading away from the raft. But there the trail went cold. Did they drown? Did they get away? These are questions that no one has ever been able to answer.
    A recent investigation discovered that a car was stolen on the very night of the escape; the prisoners had always intended to make their getaway by car. But despite an exhaustive investigation, detectives are no closer to solving the mystery.
    If they survived, the escapees would now be in their eighties. This does not mean that the case has been closed. According to US Marshal Michael Dyke, ‘There’s an active warrant and the Marshals Service doesn’t give up looking for people … There’s no proof they’re dead, so we’re not going to quit looking.’
    And so the search goes on. The FBI website requests anyone with any information regarding the prison’s greatest escape to call (415) 436-7677.

 
    21
    A Lonely Trek Through the Andes
    There was a sickening crunch and a violent jerk. The right wing of the plane was ripped off by the mountain peak and flung backwards into the rear of the fuselage. The plane, wildly out of control, smashed into a second peak, which tore off the left wing.
    Inside the cabin, the terrified passengers expected the shattered plane to plunge them to their deaths. But the plane’s crash-landing miraculously spared some of those on board. The fuselage hit a snow-covered mountain slope and slid downwards before coming to a halt in a deep drift.
    As a wall of silence descended over the wreckage, the injured and groaning survivors came to their senses. They were lost in the wilds of the High Andes. But they were alive.
    There had been forty-five people on board Uruguayan Air Force flight 571 when it took off on Friday 13 October 1972. Among the passengers was the Old Christians Club rugby team from Montevideo, en route to Chile.
    As the injured survivors clambered from the wreckage they found that thirty-eight of them were still alive, although several were suffering from such injuries that they would clearly not survive for long.
    Their pitiful plight soon struck home. They were lost in the snowbound Andes at an altitude of more than 3,600 metres with no food or winter clothing. Worse still, they lacked any medical supplies – a major handicap given that many of them were suffering from wounds sustained in the crash.
    They gathered together the remaining food on board. It did not amount to much: some snacks, a little chocolate and a few bottles of wine. There was nothing to eat on the windswept mountains, nor any animals to hunt.
    â€˜At high altitude, the body’s caloric needs are astronomical…’ wrote Nando Parrado, one of the survivors. ‘We were starving in earnest, with no hope of finding food, but our hunger soon grew so voracious that we searched anyway … Again and again we scoured the fuselage in search of crumbs and morsels … Again and again I came to the same conclusion – unless we wanted to eat the clothes we were wearing, there was nothing