Henri Honoré Giraud was one of the outstanding personalities of France during the Second World War , to the point not only of being considered among the fathers of the Fourth Republic but also that shortly before he had been co-president of the CFLN (Comité Français de la Libération Nationale) together with De Gaulle, who ultimately managed to postpone him and assume all the prominence.
But the facet of Giraud that interests us here is his extraordinary ability to escape from German prisons in which he was confined.
This character, murky and ambiguous, was born at the beginning of 1879 in Paris son of a humble family. Although his father sold coal, he made an effort to provide him with a good education and after passing through several schools he entered the Sait-Cyr military academy in 1898.
Upon graduation he was posted to North Africa, until the outbreak of the First World War took him back to France.
He was in command of a Zouave regiment when he was severely wounded in combat, falling into the hands of the enemy on August 30, 1914. The wounds caused an infection that led to pleurisy, inflammation of the pleura that causes terrible pain when breathing, and he spent two months recovering in the Origny-Sainte-Benoite hospital .
After that time he must have improved enough to carry out his first feat: escape in the company of another officer . He returned to French territory on an odyssey that took him through the Netherlands to move from The Hague to England and then arrive in his country by boat.
Congratulated by all, Giraud was incorporated into the General Staff of the Fifth Army, under the orders of General Louis Franchet d'Espèrey, returning to the front. He participated in the battle of Chemin des Dames and in the capture of Fort Malmaison , to then fight in the Balkans. After the war, he was still in Constantinople when General Henri Mordacq asked him to collaborate in his project of military reform .
Later he found a new assignment in the same land where he had started, the protectorate of Morocco, where, having already reached the rank of lieutenant colonel, he served under the command of the famous general Hubert Lyautey in the Rif War :it was to Giraud that Abdelkrim surrendered , the winner of the Spanish in Annual, the spring of 1926. This gave him the Legion of Honor and a couple of years of tranquility at the head of the L'École de Guerre, until 1929.
He then returned to Africa to pacify the Moroccan border with Algeria, where the Berbers had taken up arms. By then he had reached the generalship -of brigade- and as such he remained in Oran until in 1936 he became a division officer and was appointed military governor of Metz . There he crossed paths for the first time -but not the last- with Charles de Gaulle, of whom he was superior and with whom his bad relationship was immediately clear.
He wasn't the only one he had a falling out with. Around that time he was sounded out by Eugène Deloncle , a founding politician of La Cagoule (La Campana), an extreme right-wing terrorist organization that aspired to carry out an armed uprising in France against the Third Republic similar to the one Franco was leading in Spain (in fact, he collaborated with him by sending him weapons), with the aim of establishing a dictatorship military.
Giraud promised support but only in the event of a communist revolution. In any case, Deloncle was discovered and arrested in 1937, and the general got away unscathed for not having explicitly committed himself.
He then came the Second World War . Following his conservative ideology, Giraud was opposed to French participation, a commitment made with the German invasion of Poland. He also disagreed with de Gaulle's tactic of using armored divisions offensively.
However, being in command of the Seventh Army, in May 1940 he had to go to the border with the Netherlands, following the Dyle-Bréda Plan of General Gamelin to protect that area from a possible enemy invasion.
At that time, after the fall of Poland, German operations stopped for a time -what became known as the Joke War- and there was only a timid attack on France through the Saar, since Belgium and Holland were neutral. But then the Wehrmacht broke in violently and Giraud had to go to great lengths to try to contain them in Breda .
The Gallic casualties forced the remains of the Seventh and the Ninth to be merged and the command was given to him; what he didn't know is that the Ninth didn't really exist anymore having been annihilated. Searching for him, Giraud was taken prisoner of General Von Kleist.
Given his graduation they did not send him to a camp but to Königstein , a fortress enabled as a prison for commanders, hence it was popularly known as the Bastille of Saxony .
It was -and still is- a massive castle, with thick walls, barred windows and a courtyard, which was located at the top of a steep mountain near Dresden since the 13th century.; that is, in the heart of Germany, which made any escape even more difficult, although this did not discourage Giraud and he immediately began to think of an escape plan.
Interestingly, since his imprisonment he sent his support to the government of Marshal Pétain , stating that, in his opinion, the defeat was due to extra-military factors related to the politics of the Third Republic:democracy, parliamentarism, trade unionism and, in short, loss of authority.
All this was expressed in a letter to his children that was widely distributed. Perhaps for this reason he was awarded the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor .
Now, it was one thing to be deeply conservative, and even to have some sympathy for the Teutonic regime, and another to remain a captive. For two years, in an unprecedented display of tenacity and patience, he dedicated himself to learning German , to memorize a map of the region and to accumulate wires .
Finally, on April 17, 1942, with the help of other companions, he closed the bars of his window and lowered himself from it using the cable formed by the gathered wires, so that he was able to save the forty-meter precipice. 
He had shaved off his glossy mustache and arranged for himself in civilian clothes, which allowed him to go unnoticed. Thus, he managed to reach the town of Bad Schandau , where he was waiting for a contact from the SOE (Special Operations Executive, an espionage and resistance organization created by Churchill, which had thirteen thousand agents spread across Europe), who helped him get to Switzerland by train. .
It was a long and tense journey of eight hundred kilometers that did not end there because from the Alpine country he crossed Alsace on foot and reached Vichy France , the one not occupied by the Germans.
That escape caused a sensation . First in Germany, where the Gestapo had desperately sought him out with orders to kill him while Hitler was furious and reproached the German ambassador to France, Otto Abetz, for his clumsiness; and second in this country, where his heroics were enthusiastically celebrated by the Resistance and de Gaulle requested that Giraud be made easier to reach England.
And it is that the Vichy government did not see Giraud's feat with such good eyes because he compromised him before the Germans and, in fact, his meeting with Prime Minister Pierre Laval It was very tense because, according to the politician, the evasion had frustrated the negotiation to free two hundred thousand French prisoners.
Giraud then offered to return to Königstein if Marshal Pétain asked him in writing but, despite Teutonic pressure, no such thing happened.
Giraud settled in Lyon, where he refused to collaborate with the Resistance, which he considered close to communism, but accepted contacts with the Allies, who were already planning to land in North Africa and wanted to have his experience in that area.
Using the pseudonym of King-Pin he met in Gibraltar with Eisenhower , who asked him to try to convince the Vichy Government forces in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia not to resist the impending Operation Torch. .
Disappointed that he expected to have absolute command of the operation, which was granted to Generals D'Astier and Aboulkier, Giraud refused to participate . In the end, the Resistance seized power in Algiers and Admiral François Darlan accepted Allied authority. That meant the occupation of all of France by the Wehrmacht and a clash between Darlan and De Gaulle, who did not trust him because of his sympathy with the Vichy regime.
When a monarchist assassinated Darlan and Giraud was appointed to replace him, things got worse; let us remember that he did not exactly get along with De Gaulle and on top of that he ordered the arrest of the members of the Resistance. Despite everything, he was useful to the allies and they let him do it, getting him to repeal the Vichy legislation.
It was from then on that he shared the head of the CFLN mentioned at the beginning, but his continuous reluctance to collaborate ended up irritating the allies , who openly opted for De Gaulle.
Dismissed, Giraud chose to retire, survived an attack and, after the war, participated in politics without much success because it already had a single protagonist:Charles de Gaulle.
He passed away in 1949 leaving behind two books: Un seul but:la victoire. Algeria 1942-1944 (A single goal:victory. Algiers 1942-1944) and Mes evasions (My escapes).