Conn Smythe, later the lion of the Toronto Maple Leafs and builder of Maple Leaf Gardens but a young aviator with the Royal Flying Corps at this time, would also be imprisoned in Magdeburg — and a few other POW camps — after his plane was shot down and he was taken prisoner in no man’s land during the Battle of Passchendaele in 1917.)
Campbell spent the next two years in that camp with about 900 other captured British and French officers. He recovered from his wounds (although he bore serious scars and had problems with his arm for the rest of his life), and endured the boredom, deprivation and abuse of captivity.
That boredom and deprivation was alleviated by the arrival of letters and parcels from home, a lifeline made possible through the heroic and tireless efforts of the International Committee of the Red Cross. But in the fall of 1916, Campbell received a letter that did not bring comfort and joy, but rather distress and pain. Campbell’s sister Gladys wrote to say their mother, Louisa Campbell, was dying of cancer.
Campbell had not seen his mother since before the beginning of the war more than two years earlier. He was desperate to see her again before she died and hit upon a desperate, wildly improbable scheme to reach her in time. Campbell wrote directly to Kaiser Wilhelm II, pleading to be allowed a safe-conduct pass to visit his dying mother in England, with the promise that he would — on his word of honour as an officer and gentleman — voluntarily return to captivity in Germany once he had seen her.
The commandant of the Magdeburg POW camp seems to have been a remarkably compassionate man: He sent Campbell’s letter up the military chain of command with his own urgent recommendation that the application for temporary parole be granted.
Remarkably — unbelievably — the letter actually reached the kaiser and must have reached him at the perfect moment to appeal to Wilhelm’s maudlin, theatrical nature. Even though Wilhelm had an almost pathological hatred of his own English mother, he must have seen this as an opportunity for a grand, knightly gesture — the reunion of a hostage son and dying mother made possible by a benevolent monarch in the midst of ferocious conflict.
Within a few days, orders came back down the chain of command from the highest authority: Capt. Robert Campbell was to be granted a two-week parole from his status as prisoner of war and allowed to return to England with the promise that he would return to Magdeburg within that two-week period. The parole gave Campbell two days in each direction for his journey and 10 days at home in Gravesend, just down the Thames from London, with his mother and family. And so — on Nov. 5, 1916 — Campbell set out by train through Germany and neutral Holland, crossed the English Channel by boat from Rotterdam, and reached his astonished mother’s home on Nov. 7.
Campbell spent 10 days with his mother (who would die in February 1917). Then, true to his promise to the German kaiser, he returned by boat and train across the channel and through Holland and Germany to the prison camp in Magdeburg. But that isn’t the end of the story. Once he had returned to captivity and fulfilled his obligation to satisfy the terms of parole, Campbell immediately set about trying to escape.
For the next nine months, Campbell and a group of other prisoners dug a tunnel out of the Magdeburg camp. The group succeeded in escaping, according to author Richard Van Emden, but Campbell was recaptured near the Dutch border and returned to Magdeburg where he spent another year in captivity before the war ended.
Campbell stayed in the British Army until 1925, later moving to the Isle of Wight in the English Channel. He re-enlisted when war broke out again in 1939 and served as chief observer of the Royal Observer Corps on the Isle of Wight, spotting Luftwaffe formations headed for the mainland.
Capt. Robert C. Campbell died, still on the Isle of Wight, at age 81 in 1966, 50 years after he kept his promise to Kaiser Wilhelm that he would return to Magdeburg prisoner-of-war camp from the bedside of his dying mother in England.
