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After US bombing damaged the German prisoner-of-war camp at Épinal, France, on 11 May 1944, Indian prisoners fled through eastern France toward neutral Switzerland. By the end of June, 500 had reached Switzerland, according to the University of Exeter. That figure is a cumulative total—not a count of men who escaped together. The quickest groups reportedly made the journey in five days.
What happened at Épinal in 1944?
More than 3,000 Indian prisoners of war had been brought to the camp at Épinal, in eastern France, according to the University of Exeter’s 2024 account. They had been gathered there from across the Third Reich. The prisoners included Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims and Gurkhas.
On 11 May, US bombing damaged the camp and pierced its wall. In the confusion, prisoners fled. The Swiss frontier was about 100 kilometres away, but getting there meant crossing fields, forests and mountainous terrain while avoiding German forces.
How many Indian prisoners reached Switzerland?
The figures rose over several weeks, so the often-repeated total of 500 needs a time frame: it refers to Indian escapees reported to have reached Switzerland by the end of June 1944, not to a single mass arrival or the number who left the camp at once.
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| Date | Reported number in Switzerland | What the figure represents |
|---|---|---|
| 21 May 1944, by midday | 186 | Swiss authorities’ count, reported by British Military Attaché Henry Antrobus Cartwright in a telegram reproduced by the University of Exeter. |
| Three days later | 278 | A later telegram’s reported total, as summarized by the University of Exeter. |
| By the end of June 1944 | 500 | The cumulative number the University of Exeter says had reached Switzerland. |
Cartwright’s 21 May telegram, as reproduced by the University, said the 186 men were being kept in the Porrentruy district. It also reported that one escapee had been killed by Germans while swimming a frontier river; fellow escapees recovered his body. The account does not establish every escapee’s fate.
How did the prisoners make the escape?
The men moved across eastern France toward Switzerland, travelling through exposed countryside as well as forests and mountains. The University of Exeter says the fastest groups completed the journey in five days. That is the reported time for the quickest groups, not a typical journey time for everyone who escaped.
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The Swiss border offered refuge from German captivity, but reaching it did not end the men’s wartime displacement. The rising telegram counts—from 186 to 278, then the later cumulative total of 500—show that arrivals took place over time.
Did the Indian escapees join the French Resistance?
Some individual escapees appear to have joined or assisted French Resistance groups, but the accounts conflict and do not show that this was typical of the 500. Ghee Bowman’s published excerpt in Scroll juxtaposes an August 1944 Times of India report that Indian soldiers were fighting with the Maquis with a local French historian’s claim that the escapees refused to take up arms again. It also describes a British Embassy telegram reporting that 30 Indians joined the Maquis west of Belfort.
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Those reports concern specific claims and individuals; they do not establish broad participation by the escapees as a group. The escape from Épinal itself is documented separately in the contemporary telegrams reproduced by the University of Exeter.
What happened to the escapees after Switzerland?
The University of Exeter says the men were placed in camps in Switzerland. When French borders opened, some moved on to southern France, Italy and Egypt. They returned to India at the end of 1944.
The return was not a triumphant homecoming for many. The University’s account reports that the men were not widely welcomed as heroes, that some waited months for back pay, and that morale was low amid dissatisfaction over medals and awards.
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The losses continued to trouble the postwar accounting. A man was killed at the frontier, and the University of Exeter reports that some escapees were murdered later in 1944. In 1946, an Indian Military Mission excavated bomb craters at Épinal. The University says 64 bodies were found, most unidentified, and 125 men were still listed as missing when the mission completed its work that year.
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The account also describes the later identification of Dafadar Jodha Ram, whose grave had been marked as that of an unknown Frenchman. These reported figures do not resolve the fate of every missing man.
Why was this escape significant?
The escape involved hundreds of Indian servicemen held far from home, moving across occupied France toward neutral territory. Its scale is captured by the cumulative total of 500 arrivals in Switzerland by the end of June, while the contemporary counts preserve the staggered progress of the escape.
Historian Dr Ghee Bowman, whose work on Indian soldiers in the Second World War is discussed by the University of Exeter, called the scale extraordinary and said the story was not better known in India and Britain. The University reports that Bowman built a database containing names and service information for 12,000 men, placing the Épinal escape within a much wider Indian POW experience in Europe and North Africa.
Where to read more
For a fuller account, Ghee Bowman’s The Great Epinal Escape: Indian Prisoners of War in German Hands is directly focused on the story. Scroll published an excerpt on 7 March 2025, credited to Context/Westland, which is particularly useful for the disputed accounts of resistance activity.
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