Escaper’s Fudge: Improvised escape rations for Allied aircrew Prisoners of War during WWII
By Brick Billing, CD, M.A.
Nowadays, the average active person enjoys the benefits of modern science and nutritional advances and can choose from a veritable galaxy of high calorie, high energy shakes, bars, and blends specifically designed to meet their nutritional needs. All of them are designed to provide the maximum nutritional and energy content in as small a package as it is possible to produce. Concentrated energy and nutrition: all in the palm of your hand.
However it hasn’t always been this way. In the past, high calorie, high energy food was often difficult to come by, and what was available was highly specialized and often handmade: modern industrial examples were nonexistent. This posed an particular problem for Allied Prisoners of War (POWs) during WWII.
Like most POWs throughout history, the question of escape, and a return to home and possibly active duty, has been an important and formidable one, for it is a complex and multi-faceted problem. Allied POWs during WWII were held in large compounds containing hundreds of men, all of them located deep inside enemy-held territory. The camps were comprised of buildings surrounded by multiple fences of barbed wire, brilliantly lit at night and complete with patrolling guards and periodic inspections.
How then to accomplish an escape from such a place? Over the imprisoning barbed wire, or through it, or perhaps a tunnel underneath? Or perhaps one could bluff one’s way out of the main gate? Once outside the camp, another equally thorny set of problems presented themselves. How to traverse several hundred miles of enemy-held territory and reach a neutral country like Spain, Sweden or Switzerland? On foot or by train? Clearly, whatever method they chose, the escapers would need to travel secretly through the country to avoid suspicion and possible recapture.
Hence, much effort was expended on the problem of traveling secretly through Germany. Wearing a Allied military uniform was out of the question and so much effort was given over to the manufacture of altering uniforms to more closely resemble civilian clothes. Elaborate identities – complete with forged identity papers – were constructed for those who could speak German or some other language, since wartime Germany was filled with millions of foreign workers engaged in the German war effort.
All of these formidable obstacles were tackled one by one and ultimately conquered by the ingenieous POWs, however one fact remained. However perfect the escape, or the clothing, or the forged identity papers, the escaping POW was not going to get very far without something to eat, especially considering the fact that the nearest neutral country was hundreds of miles away.
Enter David Lubbock: Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve.
The Problem
David Lubbock was an Fleet Air Arm officer who had been shot down and captured in 1941 while fighting over Europe. Before the war he was the Assistant to the British Minister of Food Sir John Boyd-Orr, and was a highly skilled nutritionist in his own right. In 1940 he and Boyd-Orr co-authored an 88 page study called Feeding The People In Wartime[1], which was published by MacMillan and which had formed the basis for the British Government’s Rationing programme during the war (and even after).
Almost from the minute he arrived at his first POW camp David became involved in escape operations. A large man with an aggressive red beard, Lubbock knew probably early on that his chances of escaping and returning to England were fairly small. Such a large, conspicuous red-headed man would quickly be recognized and picked up by the authorities, regardless of the excellence of his disguise, or of his forged papers. This, coupled with his inability to speak German, led him into other avenues of the escape process.
Lubbock applied hinself to the problem that Allied POWs required a high-calorie, concentrated, portable type of food in order to accomplish the arduous task of escaping out of Germany. Obvious methods of obtaining food – eating at a restaurant, buying food from local merchants, or even stealing crops from fields – were all risky, and carried with them the highly likely chance of discovery and recapture. What was required was some sort of small, easy to transport food that could be readily and surreptitiously carried by the would-be escaper.
In fact, similar food of this kind had been in existance for several hundred years. Explorations of the Arctic and Antarctic poles and even the first Voyages of Discovery had solved this portable food problem. For many hundreds of years explorers had lived off such creations as Pemmican[2], heavily salted beef and pork, portable soup (concentrated soup rendered down into thin, leathery slices ready for rehydration), and hard tack (thrice-baked flour and water), all supplemented by rum or spirits.
The problem was that the types of concentrated food described above simply did not exist in the POW camps. Lubbock decided that, in order for his fellow escapers to succeed, he would have to concoct an entirely new type of concentrated food himself.
The Concept
In mid 1942, David Lubbock began to put his theories to the test. Working only with what was available to him in the camp – mainly the contents of International Red Cross parcels distributed to the prisoners – he began to develop a type of concentrated escaping food. Drawing on his knowledge as a nutrionist, he calculated the caloric
needs per day of an average person and began to synthesize a new type of food. Lubbock envisioned it as a type of bar, easy to carry and to conceal, with enough concentrated protein, fats, carbohydrates, and energy to keep a would-be escaper on his feet for several days. An escaper armed with three or four of these bars could, theoretically, survive for a number of weeks without suffering serious nutritional harm, or the loss of essential vitamins and minerals.
It was scientific, it was precise, and it would work. It also came with a veritable multitude of problems.
First, and foremost was the stark scarcity of supplies and ready ingredients at hand. Lubbock was reliant on the provisions provided by the Germans, supplemented by food parcels sent out by the International Red Cross in Switzerland. The food parcels were a conglomeration of dried, tinned, and bulk items that weighed roughly ten pounds (5kg) each and some four of them were designed to feed somewhere between ten to fifteen men for roughly a week. They consisted of tinned salmon and sardines, bully beef, Spam, canned vegetables, flour, and a variety of beverages and condiments such as tea bags, sachéts of Nescafé instant coffee, hot chocolate mixtures, sugar, cocoa, and drink powders such as lemonade and Bovril. (Cigarettes and loose pipe tobacco were also included. They proved to be useful barter items.)
Lubbock made a levy of these Red Cross parcels, singling out the special “Invalid” packages that were reserved for bed-ridden and wounded POWs. These packages contained shipments of esoteric items such as “Bengars” and “Bemax,” potent, vitamin-enriched wheat products that were produced initally for infants and which had been adapted for the sick and elderly. Another much coveted substance was “Horlick’s”: a British product touted by the maker as an early form of meal replacement. Sadly, it wasn’t: it was more like a fortified cough drop than an actual meal. It was described as “ a mixture of milk powder, dried whey, calcium carbonate, dried skimmed milk, sugar, palm oil, salt, Anti-Caking Agent [E551], and a mixture of vitamins and minerals.”[3] It was hardly appetizing, which was probably just as well as it was available (when it was available) in extremely limited quantities to the POWs.
It was against such problems as these that Lubbock set out to concoct his escaping food. Flight Lieutenant (F/L) Oliver Philpot, a pilot with 42 Squadron RAF was a newly arrived POW at Stalag Luft III when he saw a rather special presentation of what he described as an “escaper’s fashion and equipment show.”[4] He (along with others) was shown several examples of military uniforms that had been converted to civilian-type clothes, and other escaping paraphernalia. Then the floor was turned over to Lubbock. Philpot recounts:
As regards food...avoid two things...don’t take useless bulk, such as loaves of bread, and, whatever you do, avoid anything that makes you thirsty...we have here,” – [Lubbock] held up a hard, chocolatey block about the size of an English half-pound margarine brick – “a very special food…and only a very little of this every day will give you all the nutrition you need to keep going – even walking hard and roughing it – for quite a long time.[5]
The escaping food that Lubbock had concocted was know colloquially amongst the POWs as “Escaper’s Fudge,” although Lubbock deemed it “The Mixture.” It was a conglomeration of the ingredients that were available to the prisoners in Stalag Luft III, and was made at considerable risk, and personal cost. The risk of discovery by their German guards was obvious, however the cost to the Allied POWs was somewhat more nebulous.6 The rations were hard to come by, and hunger amongst the prisoners was a very real and present thing. The precious (and calorically dense) rations were accordingly much coveted, and the cooking of the Fudge was a closely-watched occaision. As Lubbock observed: “I won’t issue the food until the day you are going [i.e. escaping]…I feel that if I do, and the stuff is lying about your rooms, perhaps…it won’t only be the [Germans] who will take it!”7
The Recipe
Lubbock’s original formula for Escaper’s Fudge was a mix of the following ingredients:
This recipe was a relatively balanced mix of carbohydrates, fats, proteins, vitamins, and starches that would enable an escaper to function for a considerable amount of time. The entire mess was mixed together and stirred until smooth. The result was then poured off into pans and set to bake. The results were described as looking like “old glue.”[8] Once cooled, they were carved
out of their pans and set into small tins for transporting. Paul Brickhill in his book The Great Escape attests that escapers traveling by train were allowed up to four cans of Fudge, although the “hard arse-ers” (i.e. those who were going to attempt a cross-country escape) could take up to six tins.[9] As Brickhill states: “Lubbock had worked it out that one four-ounce tin held enough calories to last a man two days. The difficulty was to get it down past the ribs, where it tended to stick tenaciously.”[10]
The Result
Following its creation in 1943, all Allied escapers – including the 76 POWs who broke free in March 1944 during the Great Escape – carried at least one tin of David Lubbock’s home-made “Escaper’s Fudge” with them. Several credit it with being a key factor in their successful escape, and an essetnial part of their “escaping kit.”
Compared to modern protein bars and shakes, the efforts of the men of Stalag Luft III might seem somewhat tame by today’s standards, and perhaps even pathethic. But the fact remains that Lubbock’s “Escaper’s Fudge,” created and manufactured in secret and from extremely limited resources inside an Allied POW camp, stands out as a truly remarkable achievement: even eighty-odd years later
Footnotes
[1]. Imperial War Museum Library Number LBY 18497.
[2]. a Cree word meaning “Meat Fat,” finely pounded, dried meat, mixed with fat and fruit.
[3]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horlicks
[4]. Stolen Journey. P. 127.
[5]. Ibid: P. 129.
[6]. The Escaper’s Fudge or “The Mixture” also earned its other, more derisitory nickname around about this time when an excess of Fudge had been buried under the huts by the prisoners as a cache for future escape attempts. The German guard dogs had sniffed out the cache and dug up and ate the entire stash. The “Escaper’s Fudge, or “Mixture” ” was known forever afterwards by the POWs by the sobriquet: “Dog Food.”
[7]. Ibid: P. 129.
[8]. The Great Escape, P. 164.
[9]. Ibid, P. 164.
[10]. Ibid.
Bibliography
Brickhill, Paul. The Great Escape. London: Faber and Faber, 1951.
Philpot, Oliver. Stolen Journey. London: Hodder and Stoughten, 1950.
Williams, Eric. The Wooden Horse. London: Collins, 1949.
Williams, Eric. The Tunnel. London: Collins, 1951.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horlicks
© 2025 Brick Billing, CD, M.A.
Written by Brick Billing, CD, M.A.
* Views expressed by contributors are their own and do not necessarily represent those of MilitaryHistoryOnline.com.
By Brick Billing, CD, M.A.
Nowadays, the average active person enjoys the benefits of modern science and nutritional advances and can choose from a veritable galaxy of high calorie, high energy shakes, bars, and blends specifically designed to meet their nutritional needs. All of them are designed to provide the maximum nutritional and energy content in as small a package as it is possible to produce. Concentrated energy and nutrition: all in the palm of your hand.
However it hasn’t always been this way. In the past, high calorie, high energy food was often difficult to come by, and what was available was highly specialized and often handmade: modern industrial examples were nonexistent. This posed an particular problem for Allied Prisoners of War (POWs) during WWII.
Like most POWs throughout history, the question of escape, and a return to home and possibly active duty, has been an important and formidable one, for it is a complex and multi-faceted problem. Allied POWs during WWII were held in large compounds containing hundreds of men, all of them located deep inside enemy-held territory. The camps were comprised of buildings surrounded by multiple fences of barbed wire, brilliantly lit at night and complete with patrolling guards and periodic inspections.
How then to accomplish an escape from such a place? Over the imprisoning barbed wire, or through it, or perhaps a tunnel underneath? Or perhaps one could bluff one’s way out of the main gate? Once outside the camp, another equally thorny set of problems presented themselves. How to traverse several hundred miles of enemy-held territory and reach a neutral country like Spain, Sweden or Switzerland? On foot or by train? Clearly, whatever method they chose, the escapers would need to travel secretly through the country to avoid suspicion and possible recapture.
Hence, much effort was expended on the problem of traveling secretly through Germany. Wearing a Allied military uniform was out of the question and so much effort was given over to the manufacture of altering uniforms to more closely resemble civilian clothes. Elaborate identities – complete with forged identity papers – were constructed for those who could speak German or some other language, since wartime Germany was filled with millions of foreign workers engaged in the German war effort.
All of these formidable obstacles were tackled one by one and ultimately conquered by the ingenieous POWs, however one fact remained. However perfect the escape, or the clothing, or the forged identity papers, the escaping POW was not going to get very far without something to eat, especially considering the fact that the nearest neutral country was hundreds of miles away.
Enter David Lubbock: Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve.
The Problem
David Lubbock was an Fleet Air Arm officer who had been shot down and captured in 1941 while fighting over Europe. Before the war he was the Assistant to the British Minister of Food Sir John Boyd-Orr, and was a highly skilled nutritionist in his own right. In 1940 he and Boyd-Orr co-authored an 88 page study called Feeding The People In Wartime[1], which was published by MacMillan and which had formed the basis for the British Government’s Rationing programme during the war (and even after).
Almost from the minute he arrived at his first POW camp David became involved in escape operations. A large man with an aggressive red beard, Lubbock knew probably early on that his chances of escaping and returning to England were fairly small. Such a large, conspicuous red-headed man would quickly be recognized and picked up by the authorities, regardless of the excellence of his disguise, or of his forged papers. This, coupled with his inability to speak German, led him into other avenues of the escape process.
Lubbock applied hinself to the problem that Allied POWs required a high-calorie, concentrated, portable type of food in order to accomplish the arduous task of escaping out of Germany. Obvious methods of obtaining food – eating at a restaurant, buying food from local merchants, or even stealing crops from fields – were all risky, and carried with them the highly likely chance of discovery and recapture. What was required was some sort of small, easy to transport food that could be readily and surreptitiously carried by the would-be escaper.
In fact, similar food of this kind had been in existance for several hundred years. Explorations of the Arctic and Antarctic poles and even the first Voyages of Discovery had solved this portable food problem. For many hundreds of years explorers had lived off such creations as Pemmican[2], heavily salted beef and pork, portable soup (concentrated soup rendered down into thin, leathery slices ready for rehydration), and hard tack (thrice-baked flour and water), all supplemented by rum or spirits.
The problem was that the types of concentrated food described above simply did not exist in the POW camps. Lubbock decided that, in order for his fellow escapers to succeed, he would have to concoct an entirely new type of concentrated food himself.
The Concept
In mid 1942, David Lubbock began to put his theories to the test. Working only with what was available to him in the camp – mainly the contents of International Red Cross parcels distributed to the prisoners – he began to develop a type of concentrated escaping food. Drawing on his knowledge as a nutrionist, he calculated the caloric
needs per day of an average person and began to synthesize a new type of food. Lubbock envisioned it as a type of bar, easy to carry and to conceal, with enough concentrated protein, fats, carbohydrates, and energy to keep a would-be escaper on his feet for several days. An escaper armed with three or four of these bars could, theoretically, survive for a number of weeks without suffering serious nutritional harm, or the loss of essential vitamins and minerals.
It was scientific, it was precise, and it would work. It also came with a veritable multitude of problems.
First, and foremost was the stark scarcity of supplies and ready ingredients at hand. Lubbock was reliant on the provisions provided by the Germans, supplemented by food parcels sent out by the International Red Cross in Switzerland. The food parcels were a conglomeration of dried, tinned, and bulk items that weighed roughly ten pounds (5kg) each and some four of them were designed to feed somewhere between ten to fifteen men for roughly a week. They consisted of tinned salmon and sardines, bully beef, Spam, canned vegetables, flour, and a variety of beverages and condiments such as tea bags, sachéts of Nescafé instant coffee, hot chocolate mixtures, sugar, cocoa, and drink powders such as lemonade and Bovril. (Cigarettes and loose pipe tobacco were also included. They proved to be useful barter items.)
Lubbock made a levy of these Red Cross parcels, singling out the special “Invalid” packages that were reserved for bed-ridden and wounded POWs. These packages contained shipments of esoteric items such as “Bengars” and “Bemax,” potent, vitamin-enriched wheat products that were produced initally for infants and which had been adapted for the sick and elderly. Another much coveted substance was “Horlick’s”: a British product touted by the maker as an early form of meal replacement. Sadly, it wasn’t: it was more like a fortified cough drop than an actual meal. It was described as “ a mixture of milk powder, dried whey, calcium carbonate, dried skimmed milk, sugar, palm oil, salt, Anti-Caking Agent [E551], and a mixture of vitamins and minerals.”[3] It was hardly appetizing, which was probably just as well as it was available (when it was available) in extremely limited quantities to the POWs.
It was against such problems as these that Lubbock set out to concoct his escaping food. Flight Lieutenant (F/L) Oliver Philpot, a pilot with 42 Squadron RAF was a newly arrived POW at Stalag Luft III when he saw a rather special presentation of what he described as an “escaper’s fashion and equipment show.”[4] He (along with others) was shown several examples of military uniforms that had been converted to civilian-type clothes, and other escaping paraphernalia. Then the floor was turned over to Lubbock. Philpot recounts:
As regards food...avoid two things...don’t take useless bulk, such as loaves of bread, and, whatever you do, avoid anything that makes you thirsty...we have here,” – [Lubbock] held up a hard, chocolatey block about the size of an English half-pound margarine brick – “a very special food…and only a very little of this every day will give you all the nutrition you need to keep going – even walking hard and roughing it – for quite a long time.[5]
The escaping food that Lubbock had concocted was know colloquially amongst the POWs as “Escaper’s Fudge,” although Lubbock deemed it “The Mixture.” It was a conglomeration of the ingredients that were available to the prisoners in Stalag Luft III, and was made at considerable risk, and personal cost. The risk of discovery by their German guards was obvious, however the cost to the Allied POWs was somewhat more nebulous.6 The rations were hard to come by, and hunger amongst the prisoners was a very real and present thing. The precious (and calorically dense) rations were accordingly much coveted, and the cooking of the Fudge was a closely-watched occaision. As Lubbock observed: “I won’t issue the food until the day you are going [i.e. escaping]…I feel that if I do, and the stuff is lying about your rooms, perhaps…it won’t only be the [Germans] who will take it!”7
The Recipe
Lubbock’s original formula for Escaper’s Fudge was a mix of the following ingredients:
- Bemax (a British vitamin and mineral enriched wheat preparation);
- Oatmeal (ground, so as to add bulk);
- Powdered milk and malt extract;
- Powdered chocolate or cocoa;
- Ground up biscuits;
- Margarine (butter was sometimes substituted);
- Evaporated milk;
- Powdered milk; and
- Sugar.
- Oatmeal (ground, so as to add bulk);
- Powdered milk and malt extract;
- Powdered chocolate or cocoa;
- Ground up biscuits;
- Margarine (butter was sometimes substituted);
- Evaporated milk;
- Powdered milk; and
- Sugar.
The Result
Following its creation in 1943, all Allied escapers – including the 76 POWs who broke free in March 1944 during the Great Escape – carried at least one tin of David Lubbock’s home-made “Escaper’s Fudge” with them. Several credit it with being a key factor in their successful escape, and an essetnial part of their “escaping kit.”
Compared to modern protein bars and shakes, the efforts of the men of Stalag Luft III might seem somewhat tame by today’s standards, and perhaps even pathethic. But the fact remains that Lubbock’s “Escaper’s Fudge,” created and manufactured in secret and from extremely limited resources inside an Allied POW camp, stands out as a truly remarkable achievement: even eighty-odd years later
| * * * |
Footnotes
[1]. Imperial War Museum Library Number LBY 18497.
[2]. a Cree word meaning “Meat Fat,” finely pounded, dried meat, mixed with fat and fruit.
[3]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horlicks
[4]. Stolen Journey. P. 127.
[5]. Ibid: P. 129.
[6]. The Escaper’s Fudge or “The Mixture” also earned its other, more derisitory nickname around about this time when an excess of Fudge had been buried under the huts by the prisoners as a cache for future escape attempts. The German guard dogs had sniffed out the cache and dug up and ate the entire stash. The “Escaper’s Fudge, or “Mixture” ” was known forever afterwards by the POWs by the sobriquet: “Dog Food.”
[7]. Ibid: P. 129.
[8]. The Great Escape, P. 164.
[9]. Ibid, P. 164.
[10]. Ibid.
Bibliography
Brickhill, Paul. The Great Escape. London: Faber and Faber, 1951.
Philpot, Oliver. Stolen Journey. London: Hodder and Stoughten, 1950.
Williams, Eric. The Wooden Horse. London: Collins, 1949.
Williams, Eric. The Tunnel. London: Collins, 1951.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horlicks
| * * * |
Written by Brick Billing, CD, M.A.
* Views expressed by contributors are their own and do not necessarily represent those of MilitaryHistoryOnline.com.
