Gunther Plüschow (8 February 1886 – 28 January 1931) was a German aviator, aerial explorer and author from Munich, Bavaria. His feats include the only escape by a German prisoner of war in either World War from Britain back to Germany; he was the first man to explore and film Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia from the air. He was killed on a second aerial expedition to Patagonia in 1931. As an aviator and explorer he is honoured as a hero by the Argentine Air Force to this day.
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When the First World War began in August 1914, Lieutenant Plüschow was assigned to the East Asian Naval Station at Tsingtau, a German colony in China. Two Taube airplanes had been shipped in crates from Imperial Germany. After supervising the assembly of the planes, Plüschow began serving as pilot and aerial observer. The second plane, flown by Lt. Friedrich Müllerskowski, soon crashed, leaving Plüschow to fly alone. A Japanese ultimatum on 15 August 15 the German evacuation of Kiautschou Bay was understandably ignored, and eight days later Japan declared war. Japanese and British forces then jointly besieged the German colony. By November 1914, the military situation at Kiautschou Bay had become untenable, and on 6 November Plüschow (who had flown reconnaissance and had downed a Japanese aircraft with his pistol) was ordered to fly out in his Taube, carrying the last dispatches and documents from the governor. After flying about 250 kilometers in his much-repaired aeroplane, Plüschow crashed into a rice paddy. He set fire to his Taube, and started for Germany on foot.[1]
Plüschow walked to Daschou, where the local mandarin gave a party for him. He managed to obtain a pass to cross China, as well as a junk he used to journey down a river, finally arriving safely at Nanking. He sensed that he was being watched, even by officials openly friendly to Germany. When he was about to be arrested, he leapt in a rickshaw and went to the railway station, where he bribed a guard and slipped on a train to Shanghai.
In Shanghai, Plüschow met the daughter of a diplomat he knew from Berlin. She provided him with documents as a Swiss national, as well as money and a ticket on a ship sailing to Nagasaki, Honolulu and finally San Francisco. In January 1915 he crossed the United States to New York City. He was reluctant to approach the German consulate there, as he had entered the country under a false identity. Worse, he read in a newspaper that he was presumed to be in New York.
His luck saved him again. He met a friend from Berlin who managed to get him travel documents for a ship that sailed on 30 January for Italy. Bad weather however forced his ship to dock at Gibraltar, where the British arrested him as an enemy alien. They soon discovered he was the famous aviator of Tsingtau.
On 1 July 1915 Plüschow was sent to a prisoner of war camp in Donington Hall in Leicestershire.[2] Three days later he escaped during a storm and headed for London. Scotland Yard issued an alert, asking the public to be on the lookout for a man with a dragon tattoo on his arm.
Disguised as a worker, Plüschow felt safe enough to take souvenir photographs of himself at the London docks. He occupied himself reading books about Patagonia, and at night hid inside the British Museum.
For security reasons, no notices were published announcing the departure of ships, but a lucky encounter with another of his lady friends allowed him to obtain the information to board the ferry Princess Juliana, sailing for neutral Holland. He arrived safely and finally reached Germany, where he was at first arrested as a spy - no one believing he could have accomplished such a feat!
Once he was identified, Plüschow was acclaimed as "the hero from Tsingtau". He was decorated, promoted and named commander of the naval base at Libau in occupied Latvian Courland. In June 1916, in an airplane hangar at Libau, Plüschow married. He also wrote his first book, The Adventures of the Aviator from Tsingtau, which sold more than 700,000 copies. In 1918, his son Guntolf Plüschow was born.
Unfortunately, 1918 was a year of profound crisis in Germany. In November Wilhelm II, German Emperor was forced to flee to Holland as his nation dissolved into chaos. In 1919 the harsh Treaty of Versailles was imposed on Germany by her victorious enemies, and several military and civil revolts took place. Kapitänleutnant [lieutenant commander] Plüschow refused to participate. Instead, at age 33, he reluctantly resigned from the Reichsmarine.
After he left the Navy, Plüschow worked at various jobs before he was hired on the sailing vessel Parma, bound for South America. The ship took him around Cape Horn to Valdivia, Chile; he then traveled overland across Chile to Patagonia. On his return to Germany, he published Segelfahrt ins Wunderland ("Sailing Journey to Wonderland"), which earned him enough for further explorations.
On November 27, 1927, Plüschow took the wooden two-masted cutter Feuerland to Punta Arenas, Chile. His engineer, Ernst Dreblow, brought his seaplane, a Heinkel HD 24 D-1313, aboard a steamer. By December of 1928 the airplane had been fully assembled and the inaugural flight brought the first air mail from Puntas Arenas to Ushuaia, Argentina. In the months following, Plüschow and Dreblow were the first to explore by air the Cordillera Darwin, Cape Horn, the Southern Patagonian Ice Field, and the Torres del Paine of Patagonia. In 1929, Plüschow had to sell the Feuerland to obtain funds to return to Germany. There he published his explorations and photographs in a book, Silberkondor über Feuerland ("Silver Condor over Tierra del Fuego"), and a documentary film of the same name.
The following year he returned to Patagonia, to explore the Perito Moreno Glacier. There, both he and Dreblow were killed in fatal crash near the Brazo Rico,[3] part of Lake Argentino, on January 28, 1931.
The Gunther Plüschow Glacier in Tierra del Fuego is named in his memory.
Posthumously:
Franz von Werra — a Luftwaffe pilot who escaped from a Canadian prisoner of war camp during World War II and who subsequently returned to active service in Germany.
(1914) First and Second Class