00:00:17
Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hey, everyone is Jared Martinez.

00:00:23
Speaker 2: Before we get into this episode, I wanted to let you know that you can listen to the entire season of Medal of Honor right now ad free with Pushkin Plus. Get all our incredible stories of courage with a Pushkin Plus subscription. Sign up and save on the Medal of Honor show page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot fm, slash Plus. Use the code M twenty five for twenty five percent off an annual subscription.

00:00:50
Speaker 1: Okay, now to the episode.

00:00:55
Speaker 2: The passenger train chugged into Germany's Black Forest. It was July sixth, nineteen eighteen. The fourth class carriage was packed with German soldiers. They were back from the front lines of World War One, dressed in their uniforms, smoking and talking, happy to be out of the trenches. An American prisoner sat on a simple wooden bench. One German guard was on his left, another faced him, but both had their guns trained on him. The prisoner looked out the window, and he watched as the light shifted through the trees.

00:01:35
Speaker 1: For hours, the.

00:01:36
Speaker 2: Train went slowly, pushing its way uphill deeper into the forest. The prisoner ran his hands through his dark brown hair. He hadn't had much to eat for weeks. He was dressed in rags, but he was hyper focused. He was determined to find the right moment to escape, to jump off of this train. It was a totally insane idea, but that wasn't going to stop him. Then he felt the train going faster. They were heading down hill, which meant they were almost at their desk the nation.

00:02:12
Speaker 1: His heart was pounding.

00:02:14
Speaker 2: The window next to him was shut tight, but the one across the aisle was wide open. He saw farms flash by people working in the fields. The train was going around forty miles an hour, maybe more. And then the prisoner noticed that the guard across from him was falling asleep. He watched as his eyes closed as his head dropped right then the guard beside him turned to talk to another soldier.

00:02:44
Speaker 1: The prisoner realized it was now or never.

00:02:49
Speaker 2: He stood up and he ran across the aisle and went headfirst through the open window.

00:03:01
Speaker 1: I'm JR.

00:03:02
Speaker 2: Martinez and this is Medal of Honor Stories of Courage. The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States. It's awarded for gallantry and bravery and combat at the risk of life, above and beyond the call of duty. Each candidate must be approved all the way up the chain of command, from the supervisory officer in the field to the White House.

00:03:26
Speaker 1: This show is about those heroes.

00:03:28
Speaker 2: What they did, what it meant, and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice. In this episode, we're going to meet Edward Isaac. He was a naval officer who was captured by the Germans in nineteen eighteen. And from the moment he was captured, he was trying to escape. He plotted, he planned, He hid maps and money and yeat. He jumped out of a moving train. He tried to escape not once, not twice, but seven times, and each attempt was dangerous and honestly borderline crazy. The man just refused to give up. That's not what makes Edward's story so different from the ones I've told you before. His story is unique because he didn't risk his life to say one man, or even a group of them. He ran and ran and ran because he wanted to stop the whole damn war. Explosions were rocking the USS President Lincoln. Torpedoes skimmed across the ocean. One hit then two, then three men were shouting, racing to their post, and cascades of water and debris were raining down on the decks. It was May thirty first, nineteen eighteen, and the Lincoln was on its way back to the United States. It was a naval transport ship and it had just taken thousands of American troops to France. This was way before the time when troops could be flown overseas. They had to go by boat.

00:05:23
Speaker 3: Theirs is the gigantic task of delivering men, munitions, and food to Europe, battle the deadly submarines and blockade Germany.

00:05:37
Speaker 2: The Atlantic Ocean was full of German submarines. They'd been hunting Allied ships for months. The US Navy was desperately trying to stop them. Those subs were sinking thousands of ships, not just warships but commercial boats too, causing more than ten thousand deaths. And so here was the US S Lincoln in the crosshairs of a German submarine, the U ninety. It was nine am when the torpedoes hit, and Edward Isaac was eating his breakfast. He was twenty six lieutenant. He had thick, dark hair and a dimple in his chin. He had a wife and a baby girl who were waiting for him back home. He had grown up in a hard working family on the Iowa Frontier. His dad was a French immigrant who built wagons for a living. Edward was the youngest of nine kids, and he was always kind of stubborn, obsessed with doing.

00:06:34
Speaker 1: The right thing.

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Speaker 2: His willpower was well, you'll find out soon the torpedoes ripped through the Lincoln. Edward put down his breakfast and raced through the wreckage.

00:06:46
Speaker 1: Soon the captain.

00:06:47
Speaker 2: Ordered abandoned ship men ran to the lifeboats, loading up and pushing off as far from the sinking ship as they could. Then they tied their boats together so that nobody would drift off and be lost. And at nine point thirty the USS President Lincoln put her nose in the air and sank to the bottom of the ocean. Almost everyone had made it off alive. A feeling of relief swept over the lifeboats. They sent up distressed flares and waited to be rescued and checked this out. As the flares went up, they sang this song. He hal his hail, Hell were full of cheer. Their ship just went down. Suddenly, the U ninety surfaced again. The Americans weren't sure what the Germans wanted, but they knew it wasn't good. Edward was in his officer's uniform and was noticed by the subs captain Walter Remy.

00:07:57
Speaker 4: When the submarine came to the surface. After the ship went down, Raymie spotted me and put a megaphone to his mouth and said, come alongside.

00:08:10
Speaker 2: Edward was in a you in nineteen eighty one, when he was ninety. He still remembered that moment like it was yesterday.

00:08:17
Speaker 4: Two sailors from the submarine reached down and pulled me up. So I went up to the skipper, who was in the Connie tower. He said, are you the captain of the President Lincoln. I said no, I'm only the first lieutenant. Well, he said, you point out the captain. I have orders whenever I sink a man of war to take the captain prisoner.

00:08:45
Speaker 2: Now, Edward wasn't about to let his captain be captured, so he lied to Remy.

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Speaker 4: I turned to him and I said, I think he went down with a ship. Oh, he said, he had plenty of time to get out.

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Speaker 2: Remy had to have a prisoner, so he kept Edward. He offered him a glass of sherry and gave him some nice dry clothes. It was a preview of what life would be like on board the unit. It was all weirdly civilized. Edward dined with the officers. They played bridge. The Germans spoke English. It was taught at their naval academy.

00:09:22
Speaker 1: And get this.

00:09:23
Speaker 2: One day they stopped at a remote Scottish island that had tons of wild sheep. The Germans went hunting for food, and they even brought Edward back a little lamb to keep as a ped As he later said, quote we named it Rona, and we were the best of friends. But Edward wasn't just playing cards and hanging out with Rona. He was furious about being captured and not being able to help with the war, so he decided to make up for it. He was going to spend his captivity studying the U boat. After all, this was the weapon that was winning the war for Germany. Now he had a front row seat to how this killing machine actually worked. He would learn what he could, and then he would escape. It didn't matter how it was going to be. He would risk everything to bring his intelligence to the Allies and help finally destroy the enemy fleet. On June ninth, the U ninety surfaced a cruise slowly through a channel. Sweden was on one side, Denmark was on the other. Two more German submarines appeared, then a destroyer. It was a secret rendezvous point. Now Edward had even better intel and he could see land. It was just a few miles away, so he decided to jump right there and swim for freedom. He moved towards the guard rail, trying to seem casual, and then someone shouted behind him. It was Captain Remy. He ordered Edward below deck. Escape Attempt number one was over, But the two men were gentlemen, so they never spoke of it again.

00:11:08
Speaker 4: Not a bad guy, as a matter fact, he treated me very well. That took us twelve days on that submarine. Eventually we got to the base of the High Seas Fleet and we went down the Kiel Canal. From that time on the course, I was at the mercy of these prisons.

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Speaker 2: And Captain Remy must have known how bad things were gonna get. He secretly brought Edward some German money, a toothbrush and soap. After Remy left, Edward was moved to a place nicknamed the Listening Hotel. The Germans would put prisoners who spoke the same language together, hoping they would share secrets with each other because each room had hidden listening devices. But previous prisoners had scratched beware the dictaphones on various surfaces, so instead the men just loudly insulted the Germans. Next, Edward was sent to a prison camp. It was grim, food was scarce.

00:12:16
Speaker 4: After about a week starvation diet as usual, they transferred me down to carlsdru It's a distribution camp for Allied prisoners.

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Speaker 2: That's where the hunger really began. All they got was thin broth and black bread, and it wasn't even bread at all. It was a mix of water, potatoes, sawdust, and sand. Edward was already determined to escape. He was dying to share his intel. Being hungry just made him want to leave sooner. Edward got along with the other Allied prisoners, particularly the ones from France. After all, he'd grown up speaking French at home, and those guys had learned a thing or two about German prisons.

00:13:05
Speaker 4: They had been at war two or three years before we got into it. He had quite a school there learning how to get loose finally.

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Speaker 2: First, he and a few other men bribed a guard to help them get out, but the guard was caught. Escape plan number two failed. Then came attempt number three. Edward climbed a tree next to the fence in the middle of the night, planning to drop to the other side when the guards wandered away, but somehow the guards never moved. He didn't have a chance to try that again.

00:13:42
Speaker 4: Early one morning, after several attempts to escape, they came for me, and I had just time enough to grab a little knapsack that I had made out of an old shirt.

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Speaker 2: He didn't know where they were taking him, but wherever he was going, yeah, that's right, he was going to try to escape. So with the knapsack there was money hidden in a can of shaving cream, a tiny compass, and a jar of lard, and a map and a tin of cocoa powder. The guards poked into the jar of lard and into the coco but they didn't find a single thing.

00:14:21
Speaker 4: Then they put a chargean and a corporal as my guards.

00:14:26
Speaker 5: With loaded rifles to escort me to the train.

00:14:31
Speaker 4: I finally got from them that we were going to the Russian and the American prison camp for officers in the Black Forest.

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Speaker 2: They found spots in that crowded train car. Other men would have settled in for that ride, but not Edward. He was getting ready for escape number four. He eyed the open window across the aisle. It was tiny, only eighteen by twenty four inches, and he kept on waiting for the right chance to jump. Even when the train started going. He watched his guards until he saw his opening.

00:15:16
Speaker 4: One was sort of dozing, the other was looking up and talking with a soldier. And I jumped past the guards, off the train, through my head and shoulders through.

00:15:29
Speaker 5: I expected to.

00:15:30
Speaker 4: Land on that running board, you know, alongside those fourth class carriages. This didn't have.

00:15:36
Speaker 2: Any Edward had no foothold, so he fell straight onto the track that ran parallel to the train.

00:15:44
Speaker 5: Now, I kept rolling over and over.

00:15:47
Speaker 2: His face hid one still tie, and his knees hit another. He blacked out, and when he woke up a few seconds later, he could hear the train screeching to a stop.

00:15:58
Speaker 4: By that time, the guards had pulled a string and the train stopped about three hundred yards farther down. These guards came out were shooting at me. When I realized that I couldn't run.

00:16:13
Speaker 2: He couldn't bend his knees, so we started hobbling away as fast as he could. The guards were firing warning shots around his head, screaming at him to halt. Finally he stopped and put his hands in the air. Their response was to hit him with the rifle. He fell to the ground. They kicked him. He struggled to get to his feet, and they knocked him down again. Later one of those guards would actually be court martialed, not for beating an arm prisoner before destroying German Army property. He had Edward so hard that he broke his gun. But even after the gun broke, they kept going.

00:16:55
Speaker 4: They jerked me to my feet and didn't risk the other gun. They crowded me with a bayonet. We were five miles from the prison camp at the time.

00:17:09
Speaker 2: They made him hobble all the way to the prison. By the time he arrived, he was near death. The camp doctor tended to his injuries. He had more than a hundred separate wounds.

00:17:21
Speaker 4: They put me in solitary confinement in a cell, and I was there or oh, I suppose three months.

00:17:32
Speaker 2: It would be weeks before Edward could walk again, months before he could bend his knees, but the pain just made him more determined. He had to escape and share the intel he thought could end the war. The prison camp of Villaingen was deep in the black forest, but there was one good thing about it. It was close to Switzerland, which was neutral territory. Edward Isaac knew that if he could make it to the border, he would be as soon as he got out of solitary, he started sizing up the camp. To anyone else, the situation would have seemed impossible. The whole place was surrounded by multiple bar wire fences, plus guards with rifles, and the man could barely walk. But the prisoners got German news in the camp, and every day he heard that Allied ships were being blown up. Sure, some of this was wartime propaganda, but even if half of it was true, the situation was dire. Edward was certain his intel would save lives, maybe even stop the war, so he started getting up early, doing calisthenics and taking a cold shower.

00:18:55
Speaker 1: Pretty soon he was.

00:18:56
Speaker 2: Walking fifteen miles a day around the prison barracks. I told you he was stubborn, didn't I? Then he worked up a plan. He decided that multiple prisoners would have to escape at the same time would mean more chaos, so we recruited other prisoners, which wasn't hard since everyone wanted to get the heck out of there, even though they all knew that failure could mean death. For escape plan number wait where are we oh right? Five, Edward planned for the men to go over the roof of a workshed. It was next to a segment of fence that didn't have much barbed wire, but then overnight the Germans added more wire there, so it was on to the next idea. For escape plan number six, they would sneak out a garden door. It wasn't guarded all that well. A guy named Harold Willis, another American prisoner and Edward's friend, was trying to make a key for the door, But then a Russian prisoner tried to escape at the same exact spot and he was caught, so.

00:20:06
Speaker 1: The guards were doubled.

00:20:08
Speaker 2: Edward was almost out of ideas, as he later wrote, quote, my fortunes reached their lowest EBB, but they were destined to brighten with the never dying hope of success. Never dying hope of success. Now that, my friends, is optimism, which brings us to escape. Plan number seven. Edward would secretly build the ladder to take them over the fences.

00:20:36
Speaker 4: There were two long pieces of pine that the Russians used to lay out sort of a volleyball set.

00:20:50
Speaker 2: Yeah you heard that right. The prisoners were allowed to play games in prison, and it sounds like the Russians really liked volleyball.

00:20:59
Speaker 1: Anyway.

00:21:00
Speaker 2: The border of the court was made of long pieces of wood, and Edward stole them.

00:21:06
Speaker 4: I got those two flats into my barracks, where there were eight cots with eight prisoners. I seek created these two under those cots.

00:21:19
Speaker 2: Then he needed to make rungs for the ladder. He stole the tops of the wooden boxes their food came in. He had all the pieces. Now he just had to figure out how to put the ladder together.

00:21:32
Speaker 4: There were no nails, but I took the screws out of all the doors in all the barracks, enough to keep the door swinging. But I got enough so that I could have a regular ladder leading right straight out.

00:21:49
Speaker 2: I mean, who thinks of this. The last part of the plan was cutting the lights to the camp so the prisoners could get out in the darkness. The power came in from the neighboring town, but unlike modern power lines, these were made from raw, uncoated wire. Edward figured out that if you threw a metal chain of them, the wires would short circuit and the lights would go out. So he recruited some friends to throw the chain at the appointed hour, and then they waited for their moment. It came October sixth, nineteen eighteen. The camp announced that all the Russian prisoners would be moved. It meant two things, first that all the barracks would be searched, and second, there would be way more guards per prisoner. They had to get out now. As night fell on October sixth, Edward gave the sign. His friends threw a chain over the wire to short circuit the lights.

00:22:52
Speaker 1: Edward held his breath. It worked.

00:22:57
Speaker 4: The lights went out, and then they came on. Immediately Well I realized what was happening. The thing was swinging back and forth and releasing Finally it blew the fuse and the lights went out.

00:23:17
Speaker 2: Next, some Russian prisoners had volunteered to create a distraction, so as soon as the lights went out, they started a racket on the far side of the camp, and then thirteen Americans headed out into the darkness. But as soon as the guards figured out what was happening, it was mayhem.

00:23:36
Speaker 1: Shots everywhere.

00:23:39
Speaker 2: Edward was the second man off the ladder, and as he swung to the ground, the guards yelled halt and trained their rifles on him. The shots were so close that Edward's hair got burned by the muzzle flash. He ran as fast as he could, bent over and zig zagging through the night.

00:24:00
Speaker 5: That's how we got out of the camp.

00:24:03
Speaker 2: He had arranged to meet Harold Willis, that guy who made the key for escape Planned number six, but his friend was late. Edward could hear the hounds in the distance. Then Willis came crashing through the trees. They ran together through the darkness. Willis had stolen pepper from the mill tent, and he sprinkled it behind them to keep the hounds off of their scent. They sloshed through swamps with water up to their shoulders, and finally, as the sun was rising, they hid themselves under a cliff. The hounds were still behind them. They could hear their barking, first so close, and then further and further away. The Swiss border was only eighteen miles from the camp, but any of the direct routes were blocked by German soldiers. Instead, their trip would cover one hundred and twenty miles. They stole vegetables from gardens. In the dark, they slept huddled under Willis's coat. Finally, six days later they reached the a Rhine River. Switzerland was just on the other side, but there were searchlights sweeping the river banks, so they painted themselves with mud, hoping to blend in with the rocks. They slowly moved into the water. The current was stronger than they expected. One minute, Willis was right in front of Edward. The next minute he was gone. As Edward said later quote, it was as if the earth had opened up and swallowed him. But he didn't have time to wonder what had happened, because the moment he inched forward, he was swept away by the current too. He was weak and freezing. There was just seven hundred feet of water separating him from freedom, so he swam as hard as he could, but the current was dragging him into a bend in the river. He knew it was about to push him back to the German side. He was exhausted, he had no fight left, so he turned over on his back, closed.

00:26:17
Speaker 1: His eyes and prayed.

00:26:36
Speaker 2: Edward Isaac was on his back, floating in the icy Rhine River. He'd been running for six days to escape the Germans. He was freezing, hungry, and tired.

00:26:47
Speaker 1: He was just done.

00:26:51
Speaker 2: And at that exact moment that Edward Isaac gave up his feet touched the rocks. He was in Switzerland. He had been a prisoner for one hundred and thirty six days, and now he was free. Attempt number seven was a success. Unbelievably, Willis had made it too. Of the thirteen men who tried to escape that night, only three actually did. Edward didn't spend any time pondering how crazy his escape had been. He just got to the Naval command center in London as fast as he could. He told him about all the inner workings of the German U boats, about that rendezvous point for the naval fleet, but his intel didn't quite make the impact he hoped for. Why because peace talks were already underway by the time Edward got to Washington on November eleventh, the war was over. He watched the celebrations with his new friend the Assistant Secretary of the Navy. The two had met while Edward was being debriefed. That friend's name was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and two years later, when Edward received his Medal of Honor, it was Fdr who presented it to him. Admiral William Simms, who commanded the Navy in Europe, didn't believe that Edward deserved the metal. He told reporters that quote, all he did was get captured by the enemy. But Josepha's Daniels, the Secretary of the Navy, deeply disagreed, and, as he put it, quote his rare experiences, his alertness to secure information that would aid his country, his resolve to find or make a way to escape, these make a story that would live in the animals of navel daring. Daniels asked Edward to write a book about his experiences, which he did, but Edward didn't see his story as heroic. In fact, his memoir ended on a wistful note. The very last line was I was too late. In nineteen thirty six, Edward was called back into the service of his country. He had retired from the Navy right after the war. His injuries had never quite healed, but now his old friend FDR was president, so he agreed to run for Congress in California.

00:29:26
Speaker 1: He won.

00:29:28
Speaker 2: As a congressman, he fought for veterans' rights, He fought to establish a battalion of black soldiers in the California National Guard, and he worked to create the naval base of San Diego, which changed that city and is still in use today. He and his wife, Agnes, had six kids. World War One was supposed to be the war to end all wars, but in nineteen forty one, Edward watched horrified as his country declared war on Germany again. Two of his sons joined the Navy and were sent overseas to fight, and then in April of nineteen forty five, Edward was in Germany too, standing in the middle of.

00:30:08
Speaker 1: A prison yard.

00:30:10
Speaker 2: His posture was as straight as ever, but his hair was snow white. He looked around him. There were signs of death everywhere. He was at a concentration camp. Edward and a delegation of other congressmen were there to bear witness to the horrors of the Holocaust.

00:30:28
Speaker 6: They came as the elected representatives of the American people, to see for themselves to see for America the incontrovertible evidence of Nazi in humanity. They and the people of now freed Europe will not forget.

00:30:45
Speaker 2: What Edward saw in the concentration camps at the end of the war broke his heart.

00:30:52
Speaker 4: I have never forgotten my first impression of Dachau. Here was a shed next to the crematorium, and it was an open shed fifty sixty feet long, in which human carpses were stacked exactly like cardwould.

00:31:17
Speaker 5: I would say there were thousands.

00:31:19
Speaker 4: I will never know because they were so emaciated that they didn't take up much space. There was not a pound of flesh on any of them. They had been starved to death.

00:31:43
Speaker 2: In their later years, Edward and Agnes lived on a little farm in Virginia. He rarely talked about World War One. In fact, he wrote a family history in nineteen seventy eight. It stretched all the way back to the eighteenth century, but in it he only mentioned that he joined the Navy. There is absolutely nothing about his great escape or his Medal of Honor. It's hard to know why. Maybe he felt like his actions didn't matter. He hadn't been able to stop his war or any of the wars he saw during his lifetime. Maybe that made him feel like he wasn't a hero. A lot of veterans feel that way. They ask what did I really do? But I think heroism isn't always about what you do. Sometimes it's about what you tried to do. Edward Isaac died in January of nineteen ninety. He was ninety eight years old. I think his story is about optimism more than anything. Even after the first escape attempt failed, he kept trying. He kept trying after the third attempt and the sixth. He saw the best of us and the worst.

00:33:01
Speaker 7: And yet he still had hope.

00:33:35
Speaker 1: Medal of Honor.

00:33:36
Speaker 2: Stories of Courage is written by Meredith Rollins and produced by Meredith Rollins and Ryan Schweiker. Our editor is Lydia gene Kott. Sound design by Jake Gorsky. Our executive producer is Constanza gayardro fact checking by Arthur Comperts. Original music by Eric Phillips. Additional editorial support from Karen Shakerji. Special thanks to Carl and Gwyneth Crawford. If you want to learn more about this story, take a look at our show notes, where we have some of the resources we used to put this episode together.

00:34:08
Speaker 1: We also want to hear from you.

00:34:10
Speaker 2: Send us your personal story of courage or highlight someone else's bravery. Email us at Medal of Honor at pushkin dot Fm. You might hear your stories on future episodes of Metal of Honor or see them on our social channels at Pushkin Pies.

00:34:27
Speaker 1: I'm your host, JR. Martinez