IN ALL THE STORIES my father chose to tell me about his war, I don’t think he ever talked about being situated at the business end of a gun. In none of the photos I found in his files, years later, did I see him either holding or even close to a weapon. I don’t know if my father was a conscientious objector, but I do know that he never allowed a weapon, not so much as a BB gun, into our household when I was growing up. I didn’t much care for guns either, but at some point I asked him if his loathing of weapons had influenced his decision to become a medic. He told me that the vagaries of the army put him in the medical corps; in other words, on the day he joined up, the army was low on medics, so without regard for either his educational background or his civilian experience, the US Army chose to make him a medic.
My father’s medical corps buddy, Tony Mellaci, told me he was allowed a .22 at his house for shooting squirrels that raided the garden or rats at the local dump. But Mellaci said that during advanced training at Camp McCain, Mississippi, all medics received live-fire training,1 crawling on their bellies while live bullets whizzed above their heads and shells exploded around them; instructors told them it would help them get accustomed to the sights and sounds of combat. That probably sealed the deal for my father. He admitted, as well, that he never felt the “killer instinct” that appeared to be a basic requirement for becoming an arms-bearing soldier.2
As mentioned earlier, both my father and S/Sgt. Mellaci, his comrade in the 319th Medical Battalion, understood what the Geneva Convention said. Or at least they had a working knowledge of the basics. Going back to the nineteenth century, one article stipulated that hospital orderlies, medics, nurses, or stretcher-bearers who were collecting, transporting, or treating the wounded and sick “shall be respected and protected.” In other words, shooting a medic was considered a war crime. Equally vital in a war zone, the convention stated that a wounded combatant had the right to be collected and to receive care; once a soldier became a casualty, he became neutral, a non-combatant, and a patient of medics on either side of a war zone.
Another article spelled out rules for medics when captured, saying that as POWs medics were expected to perform medical functions only as the need arose. The convention also stated that if a medic were armed and chose to use a weapon offensively, that medic would forfeit the convention’s general immunity. The risk, as my father described it, was calculating whether everybody on the battlefield had read the fine print. During their service in the battle of the Saar-Moselle Triangle and beyond, medics in the line of fire couldn’t always rely on an enemy’s abiding by the rules.
MARCH 1945—LAMPADEN RIDGE, GERMANY
WHETHER OR NOT MEDICS could rely on immunity in the battlefield didn’t seem to preoccupy the minds of too many medics during the Battle of the Bulge. It was all they could do to manage the relentless flow of wounded in and out of their aid stations. Few regimental war diaries noted the toll that such day-in, day-out triage and lifesaving first aid took on medics, in addition to worries—conscious or subconscious—about whether the enemy might ignore the red cross on their sleeves or helmets and open fire. However, one GI’s personal journal did reflect on the physical and psychological pounding that US medics endured that winter of 1945. During the latter stages of the 94th Infantry Division’s push through the Saar-Moselle Triangle, William Foley kept track of his experiences by sketching on paper.
At age eighteen, Bill Foley went from US Army volunteer to hurriedly trained rifleman, to transatlantic passenger on a troopship, to front-line combat soldier in G Company, 2nd Battalion, 302nd Infantry Regiment, with the 94th Infantry Division of Patton’s Third Army. In barely a year, Foley’s career path led him from life in small-town New Jersey to infantry replacement in the middle of the Battle of the Bulge. In March 1945, that assignment found him up Lampaden Ridge, nearly surrounded by the German 6th SS Mountain Division.
To prevent fear getting the better of him—while withstanding artillery barrages, dodging mines and booby traps, crawling through no man’s land to snatch prisoners, and seeing comrades cut down in battle—Foley had rediscovered a childhood pastime, pencil drawing. In his pack he always carried the US Army-issue V-mail form* and a pencil, but instead of jotting down notes to send home to his family, he would draw. The habit was both a response to what he witnessed and a means of coping. “From somewhere in me, a surge of self-esteem welled up higher than the lift I gained from proving I could, so far, take infantry combat,” he wrote. “I had arrived at the point where I could call myself an artist.”3
In early March, in the town of Hentern, his platoon had dug foxholes around a building where their battalion medic, Fred Buckner, had set up an aid station in the basement. Waiting his turn for medical attention for a mild chest wound he’d sustained days earlier, Foley watched Buckner attend to a German prisoner with a broken arm. The sixteen-year-old POW couldn’t stop crying as the American medic set and splinted his arm; meanwhile, members of Foley’s squad shared rations with the captured soldier. That’s when Foley noticed how poorly their medic Buckner appeared to be coping. “This Louisiana boy with the beautifully chiseled facial features could not control his eye tic and badly shaking hands,” Foley wrote. “His black hair was graying over his ears and his voice was anything but steady.”4
Everything was different about life in the front lines. Foley noted how some of the rules and regulations had become pretty lax as well. Nobody could get or keep clean. In place of regulation army long johns, Foley admitted he’d resorted to a couple of pairs of long-unwashed green flannel pyjamas. Then one day a Jeep rolled up and men Foley described as “shockingly clean, pink-faced officers” entered the command post and started ordering people around.
“Everyone fall out for a short-arm inspection!” a sergeant called out.5
This inspection for cleanliness required GIs to drop their pants and to roll back their foreskins so medics could check for venereal disease.
“This hadn’t happened since before D-Day,” Foley noted. “And how long had it been since anyone had even seen a girl, much less gotten close to one?”
Nevertheless, Foley and the rest of his platoon lined up for the embarrassing inspection.
“Pull ’em out and roll ’em back,” the officer demanded. The sight of such unclean members provoked sharp intakes of breath among the reviewing officers and then sharp reactions. “Get out! Next! Move on, soldier. Next!” When half a dozen of the soldiers being examined failed to pass muster, one of the reviewing officers marched out and tore a strip off Foley’s commanding officer. As absurd as the order seemed—with no such facilities nearby—he demanded the GIs get baths daily.
Foley remembered a platoon mate saying that not even their own officers understood what front-line troops were up against. The scene left such a deep impression on Foley that he later made a sketch of it. Within a few days, the cleanliness protocol was forgotten when the battle for Lampaden Ridge took a turn for the worse. The building in which their medic had previously treated the wounded had become consumed by the combat. And medic Buckner had finally cracked. Foley recalled the man crouched on the stairs to the basement, holding his head and shaking badly. There was little refuge for medics in such situations, least of all the immunity of an article in the Geneva Convention. Instances throughout the winter had proven that.
On January 16, 1945, when the 376th Infantry Regiment advanced headlong into a snow-covered minefield at Monkey Wrench Woods (as described in chapter 3), medical corpsman Bill Cleary rushed forward to assist members of F Company wounded by exploding land mines. Despite the red cross on his helmet, German snipers shot him dead.6 Three days later, during the 302nd Infantry Regiment attacks near Nennig, medic John Riskey moved through the battlefield attending to wounded from C Company; administering first aid in the open, Riskey had his heavy jacket shredded by enemy fire and barely managed to save himself and his patients.7 Nevertheless, a number of situations during the battle for the Saar-Moselle Triangle forced both sides to trust that the Geneva Convention articles would be respected.
In February, the US 376th advanced north of Sinz into another wooded area, called Bannholz. The GIs encountered heavy return fire from artillery, tanks, and mortars concealed in the woods. They tried desperately to hold on to the section of Bannholz they’d entered, and then struggled to evacuate wounded out of the line; two medical aid men had been cut down in the attempt. This brought Lt. James McCullough of the US Medical Administrative Corps (MAC) into the battle zone. He drove a jeep into Sinz and then walked to within three hundred yards of the German tanks camouflaged at the south end of the woods. He waved his helmet, plainly showing the Red Cross insignia.8
Eventually a German officer emerged from the woods and waved McCullough forward. In broken English, the panzer commander negotiated a deal with the MAC lieutenant. The panzers would maintain a ceasefire over the area as long as the US medics evacuated both American and German wounded from Bannholz at the same time. Lt. McCullough agreed to the compromise and moved into the woods, where he immediately heard calls of “Hey, Doc!” The voices drew fire from enemy gunners who were unaware of the truce. Flying tree fragments exacerbated the wounds on both sides, but McCullough had soon taken care of the GIs and at least five German walking wounded. Eventually they all emerged from the woods, but before any of the wounded reached the safety of their home lines, both American artillery and German guns brought down more fire on the evacuation convoy. Thankfully, no further casualties resulted. The intermittent ceasefire and brokered evacuation had saved a few lives.
For GIs and medical corpsmen reversing the Bulge in the winter campaign of 1945, the Germans’ interpretation of the articles of the Geneva Convention would always present uncertainty and risk. As volunteers and draftees, they would always have to ask themselves if the immunity of long-ago rules of engagement applied on the ground in all-out war on the German front. Inevitably, they would regularly be forced to make snap decisions about respecting the immunity of medical personnel and the rights of casualties, whether comrade or foe.
For Raiden Winfield Dellinger, an officer in the 319th Medical Battalion on that German frontier, it wasn’t so much the Geneva Convention that governed his actions as the Hippocratic Oath. Dellinger had come by his respect for the sick or injured quite naturally. His father had been his role model. Dr. Arthur Dellinger had received his medical degree in 1916, done post-graduate work in Chicago and New York, and then come home to Rome, Georgia, to run a practice for over thirty years. Raiden pursued a related path, completing his degree in 1938 and his internships in New York and Florida, and then returning home to conduct hospital surgery. But when the war came, he needed to meet his military draft obligations.
In 1940 he joined the US Army Medical Corps, serving as a first lieutenant at Fort Ethan Allen, Vermont, as an orthopedic and surgical specialist, all the while keeping an eye on the war and “brushing up on my French in the event I have to use it.”9 But he finished his required year of active service, got married, and secured employment at a hospital in Florida, expecting to now focus on his career. Five months later, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and everything changed.
On December 9, 1941, the medical corps called for his return to active duty, and by March 1942, at age twenty-eight, he was a major serving with the medical detachment of the 301st Infantry Regiment of the 94th Infantry Division, en route overseas.
As it was for most of the 94th during its posting to western France in 1944, containing the two German armies at St. Nazaire and Lorient proved a relatively uneventful deployment. Maj. Dellinger and his friend, Capt. Jovell, enjoyed their relatively leisurely front-line service in their Brittany bungalow. They acquired a dog mascot (for a pack of cigarettes) and, at least in Dellinger’s case, enjoyed the comfort of sleeping at night in “blue silk pajamas,” as he wrote his parents. “Jovell kids me about them, but I find them convenient. Probably the only soldier in France with them!”10
Once the 94th hurriedly joined the American counteroffensive into the Saar-Moselle Triangle, sending letters home to his parents and his wife, Ruth, became a lower priority for Maj. Dellinger. And the correspondence from them reflected their fears for his safety. In February 1945, Ruth wrote her husband that the news “seemed to shorten the European war a lot, but I’m not laying any bets.”11 It turned out that as a CO in the medical battalion, Maj. Dellinger had indeed been quite busy. In the 209 combat days that the 94th Infantry Division had served in the European theatre, it sustained a total of 5,884 battle casualties—1,087 killed, 4,684 wounded, and 113 missing. Another 5,028 were put out of action because of trench foot, frostbite, or illness.12
Dellinger had served right in the middle of all that, often first into the fray—directing traffic at aid posts, attending to casualties directly, and when necessary dropping everything to deal with surgical life-and-death situations, even as bullets flew around his impromptu operating theatre. He never boasted about such actions, and even when credit was due—he was awarded a Bronze Star medal—he dismissed it as fulfilling his commitment to his country. During its push across the Saar-Moselle Triangle, the 94th had also taken 26,638 Germans prisoner—seven of them captured by Maj. Dellinger.
“My driver, Capt. Jovell, and I were driving down a road when . . . a [German] lieutenant, a sergeant and five men . . . stepped out and stopped the jeep and surrendered,” he wrote to his parents. “For a minute, there was some question of who was surrendering to who, but when we asked them, were they surrendering, the answer was ‘Ja.’”13
It’s unlikely that group of German prisoners of war realized how fortunate they were to have surrendered to Raiden Dellinger—an experienced medical officer and a resident of both big cities and small towns in the United States. The major coolly loaded all seven of the Germans aboard his Jeep and brought them in for processing and medical attention. It wasn’t so much a matter of respecting the Geneva Convention. For Raiden Dellinger, it was a reflex of experience and wisdom—and a belief that the welfare of those in his care, no matter what their military affiliation, was paramount.
JANUARY 1942—BANGKOK-TO-MOULMEIN RAILWAY, BURMA
EVEN MEDICS WHO EXPERIENCED combat medicine under fire might not agree on whether they felt as if they were targets or not. During the Second World War, news outlets among Allied nations that were prone to propagandize such things chose to vilify German soldiers when they printed the story of Pte. Louis Potts. An American corpsman with the 26th Infantry Division—and clearly wearing his Red Cross helmet and arm bands—Potts dodged sniper fire on Christmas Day 1944, when he entered no man’s land to attend to a wounded GI. Moving to a second casualty, Potts was struck in the forehead by a sniper’s bullet.14 Similarly, news reports on the German side played up the violation of medic immunity with the story of a German Jeep racing through the village of Vierville, France, on D-Day Plus Two. The vehicle carried two wounded men on stretchers lashed to the seats. At first no one responded, because the Jeep was flying a large Red Cross flag. Eventually, however, the Jeep was stopped, the medic shot (allegedly for carrying a pistol), and the two casualties left to die at the roadside.15
During the Battle of the Bulge that began in mid-December 1944, doctors and nurses at the US 77th Evacuation Hospital learned quickly that red crosses on or near their sites meant nothing to an enemy bent on driving perceived invaders from its fatherland. At Verviers, east of Liège, the 77th established a casualty clearing centre for American wounded. As per echelon protocol, doctors and nurses decided then and there how they would attend to incoming casualties. In some cases the medical staff could dress relatively minor wounds and send troops back to front-line duty. In other cases they might tag casualties and send them to a hospital in Liège. At the height of the German offensive, hundreds of American casualties went through the casualty centre, and the triage area took direct hits from German artillery and then strafing runs from Luftwaffe fighter aircraft. More than twenty nurses became additional casualties.16
Arguably, atrocities against medics, surgeons, and nurses occurred most often where the fighting raged between deeply philosophical opposites. A volunteer in the Republican Army during the Spanish Civil War recalled a nursing sister caught in the crossfire between those fighting for the restoration of the monarchy and democratic rule, and the Nationalists intent on replacing the monarchy and its communist sympathizers with a fascist state. The Republican rifleman recalled that the war had hardened him and his comrades in the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion from Canada and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade from the United States. When a wounded German parachutist fell into Republican hands, the casualty lay on a stretcher unattended until Nursing Sister Carrie approached the injured man and offered him a cigarette. “It wasn’t because we had forgotten the code of the medical corps,” the rifleman wrote, “but because still fresh in our minds was the work of the German flyers that morning.”17
Earlier in the day, he had recorded the entire Republican brigade retreating. Nurses and patients fleeing in ambulances. Equipment tossed willy-nilly into trucks. He remembered that the casualty clearing station had to be evacuated and that the roads were crowded with refugees—old men, women, children—all of them lugging their meagre possessions. The road was free of combat troops, but suddenly Nationalist fighter aircraft filled the sky and swooped down, machine guns blazing. In their wake, the Canadian reported, women, children, nurses, patients, and old men lay dead or dying. He wrote that he saw a mother with her slain baby in her arms, cradling it “as if her life’s strength could close those gaping wounds, close those staring eyes or shut the stilled mouth.”18
Few could be blamed for the intense hatred directed at the enemy paratrooper in their midst that afternoon; only their esprit de corps, he wrote, kept them from killing this man lying on a stretcher in front of them. He surmised that Nursing Sister Carrie had simply felt her duty more than others, or that her sense of Christian forgiveness had taken care of this wounded man where others wouldn’t.
“In two days came her reward,” the rifleman wrote. “A new raid. A new attack on the helpless and unarmed. Nurse Carrie carried another wounded man into a little depression just large enough for one. Her body helped to protect him. Nothing protected her. Machine gun bullets ripped off the top of her head. Death came to this fine woman. Thus, Fascism repays her debts.”19
In spite of this Republican soldier’s general condemnation of Nazi-indoctrinated troops in the Spanish Civil War, a post–Second World War survey of medics’ accounts from northwestern Europe claimed that German violations of the Geneva Convention were uncommon. The report showed that, despite some instances of aid men wearing Red Cross insignia being shot, such killings were rare. Generally, US medics serving in France, Belgium, and Germany responded by wearing arm bands on both sleeves and by keeping the red cross in its white square plainly visible on their helmets. Medics genuinely hoped their German enemies would respect such insignia if clearly visible. The survey also indicated, however, that all bets were off in the Pacific War, where Allied medics wearing red crosses became special targets of the Japanese. In response, medics often removed their arm bands and erased any helmet insignia completely, preferring to be invisible; some even dyed their white bandages green to disappear into the jungle even further.20
The apparent disregard for the convention that confirmed the immunity of medical staff is perhaps clearest in the Japanese Imperial Army siege of Hong Kong, which began eight hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941. From the middle of the month until Christmas, virtually all 14,000 Allied troops were overrun by the Japanese invading force of more than 50,000. An estimated 10,000 Hong Kong civilians were executed, and more than 1,500 Allied troops died in the slaughter. As each area of the island fell under Japanese control, so too did all medical facilities, including an advanced dressing station in the Wong Nai Chung Gap, a strategic passage between north and south Hong Kong. T.R. Cunningham, a sergeant in the Royal Army Medical Corps, documented events at his ADS beginning on December 18, when he recorded that the aid station housed an RAMC officer, a lance corporal, two privates, and a driver, as well as himself and ten St. John Ambulance personnel. The Japanese surrounded their position early the following morning.
“At daybreak we heard [Japanese soldiers] on the roof trying to force their ventilators open, but they were unsuccessful,” Sgt. Cunningham wrote. “After a series of explosions, we were able to see the St. Johns [sic] bearers with the Indian constable come out of their shelters and surrender. Although the bearers were full dressed, complete with Red Cross brassards, the Japanese killed everyone.”21
Similar atrocities befell many of those defending the British colony—whether the Middlesex Regiment, the Royal Rifles of Canada, the Winnipeg Grenadiers, or the Hong Kong volunteer defence corps—as well as patients and their caregivers at hospitals and aid stations across the island. At the Wong Nai Chung Gap, the ADS personnel spent a horrific night as Japanese forces sprayed their station with machine-gun fire or tried to break down the doors. Some inside suggested that the staff and casualties surrender, while others, fearing for the fate of the wounded, reminded the rest of their obligation to attend to them no matter what. Eventually Capt. B.D. Barclay improvised a Red Cross flag with a note attached saying that those in the ADS were unarmed. But when he pushed the flag through a crack in the building wall, the Japanese opened fire again.
“We heard a large body [of Japanese troops] assemble round the A.D.S.,” Cunningham continued. “So, we all came out and surrendered. We were then beaten, securely tied and our Red Cross brassards torn off. We were brought before a few officers [and] after interrogation we were again beaten.”22
The casualty numbers in the fall of Singapore were six times worse than Hong Kong’s. During seventy days of siege, nearly 9,000 British, Indian, and Australian troops lost their lives, and nearly 85,000 became prisoners of war (in addition to 50,000 already captured during the fighting down the Malay Peninsula). Among the casualties in what Prime Minister Winston Churchill described as “the worst disaster and largest capitulation”23 in British military history was a forty-two-year-old Romanian-born physician. His story would outlive even the mightiest of wartime empires. During the battle for Malaya, Jacob Markowitz served as a surgical officer at No. 5 Casualty Clearing Station, an Indian medical unit. Operating and retreating southward for days on end, Markowitz and his staff attended to casualties day and night for a month, until his medical team, like the British Army, ended up with its back to the sea.
“In this war, Dunkirk is . . . the outstanding example of an orderly retreat, followed by an evacuation by a fleet,” he explained later. “No such luck eventuated in Singapore Island . . . . As one Tommy put it, ‘When we ran out of earth, and had no place to retreat, we surrendered.’”24 Right away, Markowitz reported, his anesthetist had been killed and his sergeant dresser in the surgical team was missing, presumably killed.
As the Japanese conquerors continued their orgy of killing in Southeast Asia into 1942, Capt. Jacob Markowitz began an almost subterranean campaign to save as many around him as he could. After the capture of so many POWs, the Japanese essentially starved their prisoners for the next six months in Malaya. Markowitz recorded in his illegal diary that he’d lost twenty-eight pounds by summertime. He’d also witnessed the first outbreaks of disease—beriberi (paralysis followed by dropsy) and pellagra (sore tongue, loose bowels), and at least a thousand cases of dysentery (diarrhea with blood). Then, according to Markowitz’s notes, the Japanese moved thousands of the POWs farther inland with a promise of better working conditions and improved food. They delivered neither.
Instead, the Japanese transported about 50,000 British and Australian prisoners of war into the jungles of what was then Malaya, Siam, and Burma to build the Bangkok-to-Moulmein Railway. Pierre Boulle called his epic novel based on this POW story The Bridge over the River Kwai, and Columbia Pictures spent a then unprecedented $3 million filming the movie adaptation. To the 55,000 POWs and several hundred thousand South Asians forced to build the original, however, it was known as “the Death Railway,” and it cost more than 200,000 lives. “[In] the first year alone,” Capt. Markowitz later told newspaper reporters, “15,000 whites and 150,000 coolies died there. For every tie that was laid a native died; for every rail, a British Tommy.”25
Markowitz quickly discovered that the Japanese attitude in the POW camps was that the sick and injured were a nuisance and if they died it was the doctor’s fault. His job was to prevent workers from dying. In the Chungkai camp, at the Siam end of the railway, he attended to 9,000 patients, most suffering from tropical ulcers that bared the leg bones from the knee to the ankle. Markowitz would attempt to scrape out the stinking pulp of necrotic flesh with a sharpened spoon, but all too often gangrene would win out, and there would be no alternative but amputation.26 The Canadian doctor and his staff of four junior medical officers performed more than a thousand amputations with a hacksaw borrowed from the camp carpenter.27 They were allowed no medical instruments. The only anesthetic available was Novocain, injected at the base of the spine. He employed broken bottles as funnels for blood transfusions, and as he transfused a patient his orderlies kept the blood from coagulating by whipping it with a stick. Markowitz and his team administered 3,800 transfusions this way and, despite some severe reactions, recorded no deaths due to transfusion.
Just when the RAMC doctors sensed things could get no worse, there was an outbreak of cholera. “The Japanese who were terrified of this illness, supplied large quantities of cholera vaccine,” Markowitz wrote. “Medical officers inoculated 7,000 troops in twenty-four hours. . . . We had 152 cases of whom 60 died.”28
Markowitz proved as meticulous a note-taker as he was a surgeon. The Canadian Press reported later that he recorded the comings and goings of patients every day, and then each evening he slipped his notes into a corked bottle and hid the container under the shroud of a corpse. After the war his notes were unearthed, published, and heralded in the Journal of the Royal Army Medical Corps.
Capt. Markowitz’s route to the Death Railway was a circuitous one, but as it turned out, few medical men were better qualified for the primitive conditions he faced. Born in Romania in 1901, Markowitz came to Canada as an infant. His post-secondary studies led him routinely through the University of Toronto, graduating with his MD in 1923 and his PhD three years later. He moved to the University of Glasgow as an assistant professor in physiology, and then to the University of Minnesota to complete a degree in a medical practice that was off the beaten path, something called “experimental surgery.”
At the Mayo Clinic in 1932, he pursued investigative medical procedures and focused his attention on blood science, becoming the first surgeon to successfully transplant the heart of one warm-blooded animal—a dog—to another. And though he took his unique surgical techniques quite seriously, even he was amused by good-natured jokes that called him “the dog surgeon.” Markowitz lectured, travelled, wrote, and published his revolutionary concepts, although he had to pay $3,500 for the cost of printing the manuscript himself. His book, Experimental Surgery, sold 25,000 copies.
In 1940 Dr. Markowitz offered his medical services to the Canadian Army, but recruiters wouldn’t accept him because he didn’t have naturalization papers.29 So he sailed for England and enlisted in the Royal Army Medical Corps. He arrived at his wartime posting in Singapore seven days before the Japanese invaded the Malay Peninsula.
“Now occurred . . . the fulfillment of all my background,” he wrote in his curriculum vitae. “As a POW of the Japanese, I found my training of great use.”30
More than once Capt. Markowitz noted that the primitive hospital conditions seemed more like “an environment resembling the days of Moses.” Markowitz and his surgical team often operated out in the open, where fresher, cleaner air might circulate and where the light was brightest; but with the out-of-doors would also come dust and hundreds of flies to be “flicked off when they settled.”31 Of particular note, the medical officer they called “Marko” recorded treatment for an Australian soldier who underwent an amputation at the hip. Though the medical team had anesthetized the man with a spinal injection of percaine, Markowitz claimed the patient was saved on the operating table by a technique recorded in the Old Testament. Twenty minutes into the operation, the patient stopped breathing. The operating team applied artificial respiration, but since the man’s chest had collapsed into the expiratory position, trying to compress his lungs proved futile.
“Luckily there happened to be a piece of rubber tubing nearby, which we put in his mouth,” Markowitz wrote. “He was given artificial respiration by the method used by Elijah the Tishbite when he resuscitated the widow’s child. The patient’s lips and nostrils were compressed and air was blown into his chest about twenty times a minute.”
A few whiffs of air later, the man’s heart began beating again. After forty minutes of artificial respiration, the man could breathe on his own. Markowitz then commenced the amputation. The operation was successful. The wound healed, the patient survived, and Markowitz even recorded the soldier’s first remarks upon learning about the artificial respiration: “I’m glad you guys don’t eat onions,” the Australian had said. “I don’t like onions.”
Initially their Japanese jailers did not allow any living quarters for Capt. Markowitz’s medical staff, so they slept in open ditches until they could lash together pillars and posts with coconut bark and cover their camp area with thatched roofing. Since the Japanese did not allow them to carry matches, the POWs maintained a perpetual fire. They dug freshwater wells by hand. Their rations consisted of rice and little else, although the medical team soon tried supplementing the prisoners’ diets with indigenous grass. To keep up his own strength, Markowitz drank an occasional sip of beer that was brewed from rice, with a rotten banana added to provide some yeast. In spite of their weakened physical state, Capt. Markowitz and his team worked up to eighteen and twenty hours a day for weeks at a time. “We lived under conditions such as might have existed 3,500 years ago,” he later told Canadian newspaper reporters.
The Japanese permitted no news from the outside world into either the railway construction camps or the jungle hospital. Sometime late in the summer of 1945, Markowitz was informed that he and his men were no longer prisoners of war. But none of the Japanese bothered to tell the POWs that Japan had surrendered (on August 15) until a squadron of Allied Dakota transport aircraft parachuted in supplies and a rescue party. Markowitz was finally repatriated to Canada in January 1946.
A decade later, the story gained international fame with the production and release of Columbia Pictures’ blockbuster movie The Bridge on the River Kwai. The movie grossed $33 million at the box office in 1958, had everybody whistling the “Colonel Bogey March,” and swept the Academy Awards. But amid all the hoopla, there was little or no mention of the unassuming doctor from Toronto who’d kept thousands of prisoners alive in the jungles of Siam, where their Japanese captors abused Allied POWs as forced labour building the railway bridge. Dr. Jacob Markowitz got no mention in the movie credits,* even though he received postwar accolades from King George and the British Army.
“[During his] service in prisoner-of-war camps in Siam,” read his citation for Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, “using the most primitive and improvised apparatus, Capt. Markowitz has shown skill and ability of an outstanding degree.”32
JUNE 7, 1944—ABBAYE D’ARDENNE, FRANCE
THE TREATMENT OF PRISONERS OF WAR on both sides during the first days of the Normandy invasion became the basis of both war diaries and court testimony. On D-Day, more than 15,000 Canadian troops landed in the Juno Beach sector. Among the 9th Brigade soldiers landing in front of Bernières-sur-Mer, Pte. Hollis McKeil and his North Nova Scotia Highlanders all carried collapsible bicycles; they had trained to race inland from beachheads secured by the first wave to capture the villages of Buron and Authie and the airfield at Carpiquet. While the Canadians penetrated German defences deeper than any other Allied units that day, neither the North Novas nor their armoured units, the Sherbrooke Fusiliers, reached the planned objectives. Miraculously, Pte. McKeil and members of his platoon had made it ashore without a scratch. The next day, June 7, would be altogether different.
After a false start at dawn, McKeil and his platoon mates hopped aboard the Sherman tanks of the 27th Armoured Regiment (the Sherbrooke Fusiliers), which carried them straight south on the road to Buron, Authie, and, ultimately, the airport at Carpiquet. The advance moved swiftly—knocking out enemy guns, capturing prisoners, and gobbling up German-occupied territory—until about midday. Suddenly the Canadian column of infantry and tanks came under fire from positions on their exposed left flank. Despite their quick dismount from the tanks, McKeil and his 12th Platoon sustained casualties, McKeil himself being hit with shrapnel in the chest and ankle. He and another wounded Highlander received medical assistance from a stretcher-bearer but were then left behind to be evacuated later.
Although no one knew it at the time, the entire 9th Brigade advance was under surveillance by Col. Kurt Meyer, commander of the 25th SS Panzer Grenadiers, a regiment whose rank and file consisted of Hitlerjugend, German youth (no more than eighteen years old) highly indoctrinated with Nazi ideology.33 From a steeple at the Abbaye d’Ardenne, about a mile to the east, Meyer directed his artillery, tank, and infantry counterattack so effectively that the entire 9th Brigade advance stalled and fell back, leaving some—including wounded North Nova Scotia Highlander Hollis McKeil—behind in an open grain field.
The day’s losses were heavy on both sides. The four companies of North Novas engaged in the battle had sustained 242 casualties—eighty-four fatal, and 128 becoming prisoners. The Sherbrooke Fusiliers had lost twenty-one tanks, with seven more damaged, and suffered sixty casualties, including twenty-six deaths. The 25th Panzers now had scores of Canadian POWs crowded within the walls of the Abbaye. Among those Sherbrooke tankmen wounded and held captive at the monastery was Hubert Thistle, a twenty-year-old wireless radio operator from St. John’s, Newfoundland. Manoeuvring a Sherman Firefly tank under fire, he and his crew had fought until their tank burst into flames; the crew barely managed to abandon the vehicle before its fuel ignited and exploded and Tpr. Thistle fell into enemy hands. “These young SS captured us and took our watches, cigarettes,” Thistle said. “And they took us to Abbaye d’Ardenne.”34
Thistle’s captors were members of the 12th SS Panzer Division under the command of Col. Meyer but, as Thistle soon learned, they had also been given carte blanche with their prisoners—wounded or otherwise. En route to the monastery, several of the Hitler Youth troops drew their weapons, shot individual captives on the spot, and in some cases tossed the bodies of the murdered men onto the roadways, where German vehicles pulverized their remains beyond recognition. At the Abbaye, SS officers confiscated the tags and pay books of surviving POWs and interrogated them for strategic information. Then they demanded volunteers, and North Novas and Sherbrookes were dragged away.
“They took us into this barn, five of us, and lined us up. We were next,” Thistle said. “They had a sniper in front of us ready to go. We shook hands, you know, like it was the end . . . when in came some high-ranking [German] officer and stopped him. Just a split second and another five of us would have been among the dead.”35
That night, the Hitlerjugend executed six of Tpr. Thistle’s comrades in the Sherbrooke Fusiliers, as well as five North Nova Scotia Highlanders. The next day, June 8, the SS troops killed eight more Novas, including the wounded Pte. Hollis McKeil, who was shot in the back of the head.* When the killing spree ended, the surviving prisoners were transported to POW camps.
In the same battle sector as the Canadian 9th Brigade advance south of Juno Beach on June 7 and 8, 1944, members of the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps struggled to get a toehold for their wounded. Near the town of Basly, about four miles inland from the beaches, S/Sgt. Henry Duffield had managed to find suitable natural shelter and set up a field hospital. Duffield had always known ways to improvise. When the skilled soccer player immigrated to Canada in the 1920s, the sanatorium in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, took him on as a medical orderly so he could play for the institution’s city soccer squad. Later, in British Columbia, he parlayed his position as an orderly into first-aid medic jobs with lumber companies on the Pacific Coast. In 1940, with medic work on his resumé, Duffield was allowed to enlist in the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps, first administering No. 11 Canadian General Hospital in England, and then running field hospitals as the invasion began.
Despite the relatively successful landings at the two British and one Canadian D-Day beaches, German counterattacks had left the actual front-line configuration, an east-west line about four miles inland, in flux. For S/Sgt. Duffield, however, the challenge of a growing number of wounded—both Canadians and Germans—required the immediate attention of first-aid medics and surgeons. There was no time to deliberate about whether or where to erect a marquee tent for the field hospital. Nevertheless, the decision to set up shop near Basly suddenly triggered an extraordinary encounter.
On June 8, as Col. Kurt Meyer was riding a motorcycle from his 25th Panzer headquarters at the Abbaye to several German battalion positions along the front line, more than once he was driven to ground by incoming artillery shells. During one barrage, shrapnel struck his motorcycle and Meyer was forced to abandon it beside the road. Momentarily on foot and with several SS troops accompanying him, Meyer came across a field position covered in canvas, and he raced inside. “In comes [Col.] Meyer with his SS guys, all with Schmeissers drawn,” Henry Duffield told his son Ray.36
At that stage of the Normandy campaign, S/Sgt. Duffield wore a 9 mm pistol on his belt. But the sudden realization that his field hospital had been invaded by the commanding officer of a panzer division left Duffield frozen on his feet. The field hospital housed scores of wounded men on cots, including Canadian and German casualties. Meyer broke the momentary pause, Ray Duffield said, and strode right up to several of the wounded, unarmed but clearly wearing German uniforms as well as bandage dressings and splints.
“Are you being treated the same as the Canadian wounded?” Meyer said in German to one of the German casualties on a cot. Duffield spoke the language, so he understood the question immediately. The next moments seemed eternal.
“Yes,” came the response.
Just as quickly as the incident had begun, it ended. Meyer turned, motioned those SS troops with him to leave, and without another word, they all disappeared through the canvas door.
More than a year later, as the German armies retreated across the River Meuse, local partisans discovered Kurt Meyer hiding in a barn and turned him over to American authorities. In December 1945, he was put on trial for war crimes in the German town of Aurich. Among the indictments was the murder of Canadian POWs at Abbaye d’Ardenne.
In a postwar memoir, as a retort to the accusations, Kurt Meyer recounted at least one action committed by Allied troops that he said violated the Geneva Convention. He wrote that on June 9, D-Day Plus Three, he’d found a group of German troops—from the 21st Panzers and 12th SS Panzers—south of the village of Rots in Normandy. Their bodies were lying beside the road “all shot through the head”; the colonel reported the killings back to his corps headquarters. Meyer further contended that the scene inside Abbaye d’Ardenne was quite the opposite of the account reconstructed by the Canadian War Crimes Investigation Unit.
“In the monastery orchard our wounded comrades are being tended, the young grenadiers are lying side by side cheering each other up,” Meyer wrote on June 7, 1944. “Canadian [POWs] lie next to German soldiers. The doctors and medical orderlies make no distinction between the uniforms, there is nothing separating the soldiers anymore. The only issue at stake here is the lives of human beings.”37
Despite his plea of not guilty, Meyer was found responsible for the deaths, but not guilty of directly ordering the killings. In his final statement before sentencing, he defended the record of his military unit and the innocence of his soldiers. In his diary he complained about the difficulty of transporting wounded away from the front lines during those early days in Normandy. He noted that Allied fighter-bombers routinely attacked ambulances and that German regimental doctors cited aircraft strafing and bombing of medical companies that were clearly marked with white paint and red crosses to distinguish them from military vehicles. “The red cross no longer offers any protection,” he wrote.
In 1946, Kurt Meyer began his imprisonment at Dorchester Penitentiary in New Brunswick; he petitioned for clemency in 1950, was transferred from Canada to a military prison in Werl, West Germany, in 1951, won his release for good behaviour in 1954, and died in Westphalia in 1961.
Henry Duffield’s momentary confrontation with the former panzer commander would prove to be his closest shave during his overseas service in the Second World War. The veteran medic rose in rank to warrant officer in postwar regular service, in part by maintaining a tough but fair attitude when dealing with people. And how did his son Jim describe his father’s demeanour at home?
“Stubborn,” he said without hesitating. “He was a take-no-prisoners kind of guy.”38