The Madness of Courage

Group Captain Gilbert Insall holds a unique record: as the only person to have both won a Victoria Cross and escaped successfully from a German prisoner-of-war camp during the First World War. The Madness of Courage describes how, shot down behind French lines, Gilbert ignored intensive German shelling in order to repair his aircraft overnight and return to base. A few weeks later, after an encounter with another German aircraft in which he was badly wounded by anti-aircraft shrapnel, he was shot down and captured. And thus began a distinguished career in prison breaking.

At Heidelberg, he managed to dig a tunnel more than forty yards long, removing and concealing some five tons of earth in the process. At Crefeld, near Dusseldorf, he hid among piles of boxes on a cart transporting prisoners’ luggage to storage. After his transfer to Ströhen, Gilbert and several companions concealed themselves in a claustrophobically small space they had excavated under the floor of the bathhouse and remained there for seventeen hours, enduring the heat of a summer day while a fruitless search for them was being carried out. They eventually emerged early the following morning and reached Holland a few days later in September 1917.

Meticulously told by Gilbert’s great-nephew, the critically acclaimed intelligence historian Tony Insall, The Madness of Courage is a remarkable story about a remarkable man at time before the Geneva Convention, when conditions for prisoners of war were appalling and the British War Office had not yet realised the advantages that could be gained from helping prisoners to escape. Instead, Gilbert’s family, assisted by French intelligence, gave him the help and support he needed.