Only four days after the beginning of the war Fritz von Werra was shot down in his Messerschmidt 109 over England. He was captured and escaped from two POW camps. On his second escape he pretended to be a Dutch pilot, walked inton an Air Force base where he tried to steal a Hurricane fighter plane and fly to France. It was only as he sat in the plane trying to start the engines that he was captured again. In January 1941 he was sent to Canada to another camp. During the train transport he and another prisoner escaped again. While his comrade was captured only little later, von Werra made his way to the then still neutral US and eventually to New York. Canadian authorities unsuccessfully tried to return him to Canada. Von Werra instead with the help of German funds managed go to Mexico, on to Panama, Peru, Bolivia, and, by mid-April, to Rio de Janeiro. He flew back to Germany from Brazil. On October 25 1941 von Werra's plane crashed off the coast of Holland while on a routine Luftwaffe mission.