Wir haben viele Verwundete, wir kommen mit zurück, bringen Sie Ihren Feldwebel (We have many wounded, we are bringing them back, get your sergeant.)
— COMPANY SERGEANT MAJOR LUCIEN DUMAIS TO THE GERMAN WHO TOOK HIS SURRENDER AT DIEPPE
The fighting continued a mile or so to the east, on the beaches before Dieppe and a half mile further east at Pourville. At Puys, where 606 men belonging to Lieutenant Colonel Douglas Catto’s Royal Regiment of Canada had landed at 5:35 a.m., the battle was over almost before it began; most, Jack Poolton included, never got off what was code-named “Blue Beach.” A stream of lead poured into Poolton’s boat before its ramp even touched down, killing several men but missing the mortar operator, weighed down by his pack, a mortar launcher, a dozen mortar bombs, hand grenades and hundreds of rounds of ammunition in addition to his rifle.
The sergeant major who taught Poolton how to handle a mortar would have been pleased that, even though caught in a brutal maelstrom that shocked veteran CBC journalist Ross Munro “almost to insensibility,” the recruit with no battle experience noted the pattern the German mortar operators used.54 One bomb exploded near the seawall, knocking out stretcher-bearer Bill McLennan and tearing the head off another soldier, whose body, still pumping blood, fell on McLennan. Poolton heard the dull thump of bullets hitting bodies around him and counted himself lucky that one only knocked the rim of his helmet, for scant inches away lay his haversack filled with a dozen mortar bombs. Closer to Dieppe, a bullet hit a sapper’s backpack, turning the man into a human torch.
At 9:50 a.m., as hand grenades fell from the cliff above, and others that failed to reach the top of the cliff fell back and blew up among the Canadians who had thrown them, Poolton saw the landing craft sent to withdraw them driven back by a terrible fusillade.
The 31-year-old would never forget the wave of humiliation that swept over him, having dreamt from boyhood of being a soldier. “You can train a soldier to fight and you can train a soldier to accept death,” he later wrote, “but there is no way to prepare a soldier to be taken prisoner.” As one of the few unwounded men on Blue Beach, Poolton was set to work by the Germans as a stretcher-bearer. Three times he thread his way over sand turned brown and blood-slickened stones to pick up men, most of them buddies, some with arms and legs blown away, others with their intestines hanging out. Each time, he passed “corpses with the whites of their eyes transfixed on the heavens.” On one trip, as he knelt to speak to a man who could not move, he saw “a German officer walking from place to place shooting the worst of the wounded in the head.”55
THE GERMANS TAKE COMPANY SERGEANT MAJOR LUCIEN DUMAIS’S SURRENDER CORRECTLY
The forlorn sight of tanks, their tracks thrown, and pockmarked by mortar explosions on the beach before Dieppe was framed by the burned-out landing craft shoved onto the shore at oblique angles or drifting lifeless on the tide. Scores drowned in capsized landing craft. To Private Al Richards, who swam for shore after being thrown from a landing craft, the steel helmets still attached to bodies that floated upright looked “like turtles on the water.”56 In one sector of the beach lay a group of Fusiliers Mont-Royal that Major René Painchaud railed at for hitting the dirt—before he realized that every one of them was dead or wounded. Even as the cutting smell of cordite blew away where the blood was fresh, the air was sickeningly sweet and, where men’s abdomens had been ripped open, the thick stench of shit hung heavy.
Just after 1 p.m., the destroyer that held the headquarters for Operation Jubilee, HMS Calpe, her decks slick with the blood of hundreds of wounded, hove into view. Braving mortar fire, she sped toward the beach, getting close enough that some men ripped off their boots and stripped off their pants to increase their odds of swimming the 250 yards to the ship. Sergeant Major Lucien Dumais was not a strong swimmer and had already cheated the sea once (when the wash from the propellers of the landing craft he’d been attempting to board drove him, unconscious but alive, onto the beach), so he remained on shore and watched Calpe steam away.
Small white flags fluttered above tanks that sheltered wounded men to their lee. Neither Dumais and the men with him behind a landing craft beached some distance up the beach nor the Germans took these flags as a sign of general surrender. Thus, when a medical officer told Dumais that the incoming tide had begun lapping at the wounded down the strand, the Montrealer gave greater weight to the possibility that, since the landing craft was on fire and the ammunition within it was exploding, the Germans thought his command was larger than it was and was firing at them, than he did to the moon’s effect on the oceans. A short time later, the medical officer said, “Well, Sergeant Major? It’ll soon be too late.” The proud soldier, who later, in describing a standoff that had occurred a few hours earlier in the old casino that dominated the beach, wrote, “I drew faster than he did, so I was alive and he was dead,” reluctantly agreed to lay down his arms.57
The formal structure of the Geneva Convention suggests that the moment a soldier raises his hands or waves a white flag, the victorious side, in the manner of a battlefield accountant, records his surrender according to established rules; on the battlefield, reality is much more complicated. The soldier who surrenders is torn by the desire to keep fighting and washed over by humiliation, while the soldier who is asked to accept the surrender is torn by fear that he is being duped (once he lowers his rifle would some unseen shooter do him in?); fuelled by the adrenaline of battle augmented by the exhilaration of victory and, we must never forget, driven by blood lust. Thus, it is not surprising that the first reaction to Dumais’s surrender flag was a burst of rifle fire, which almost caused him to pull his rifle back to his shoulder and begin shooting.
A nearby German motioned to Dumais to drop his rifle and raise his arms. He slowly lowered his gun, untied the yellowed flag he’d waved and threw the rifle down toward the shingle. “The bayonet dug itself in and the rifle stuck, butt end up: the way we mark the spot where a soldier lies wounded or dead,” Dumais later wrote. “It seemed to symbolize the fact that my military life was over.”58
CANADIAN PRISONERS MARCH THROUGH DIEPPE, AND THE GERMANS DENY THEM WATER
Three hours after Calpe slipped over the horizon, Captain George A. Browne, a Forward Observation Officer attached to the Royal Regiment of Canada, followed Catto out of a small wood they and some 20 other men had taken shelter in after destroying six machine guns on a hill above the beach. After almost 11 hours, Operation Jubilee was over, some 1,400 men were dead or wounded and 1,975 Canadians were prisoners of war.
How the prisoners were treated varied greatly. Hauptmann Richard Schnösenberg recalled the moment of Catto’s surrender as “the last knightly encounter with the enemy on the field of battle.” Those who took his surrender of the South Saskatchewans and the Cameron Highlanders behaved correctly. Once the Germans who had fired at Dumais realized how many wounded men he had, they provided medical care. And even on Blue Beach, a medical officer gave Captain Robert Robertson, a Royal Regiment doctor, dressings to bind up wounds.59
In places, the victors gave the vanquished water and, in at least one case, some beer. In others, in contravention of Geneva, the Germans did more than refuse to give the exhausted, shocked and desperately thirsty men water. While les dieppoises did not spirit men away under their skirts, they were an enterprising bunch. Some placed buckets of water on the streets on which the POWs, some singing “La Marseillaise” or whistling “The Maple Leaf Forever,” Canada’s unofficial anthem (and a surprisingly martial tune), were marched into captivity. Others ignored the Germans on horseback; one woman ran up to one man and whispered that the POWs should start cursing in French and shaking their fists at her. Word quickly spread down the line, and when they did as she said, she feigned anger and threw tomatoes at them. By laughing and congratulating the woman for “flinging tomatoes at the Engländer Schweine,” the Germans enjoyed what appeared to be a violation of Geneva’s prohibition against public insults and missed the fact that the woman provided the Canadians with some much-needed food.60
Other violations of Geneva occurred, including the pilfering of watches, pens and money. Luckily, the Germans didn’t find Dumais’s penknife, which he soon used to cut up his and other POWs’ Mae Wests to fashion foot coverings for the many men who had lost their boots.
JUST-MARRIED MADAME DUPUIS CRIES UPON SEEING THE DEFEATED CANADIAN SOLDIERS
She woke early, near 3 a.m., but not because she was nervous that after the church service that day would come her first night with her husband. Since the French Revolution, civil weddings had preceded church weddings, which meant she was already Madame Paul Dupuis, and he lay sleeping beside her in their marital bed. Rather, what woke her was the roar of German and Royal Navy guns, the rumble of which could still be heard during the church ceremony. In the late afternoon, as the wedding party made its way back toward Dieppe under skies no longer stained by anti-aircraft fire and the condensation trails of fighter planes, the revellers met with a column of Canadians being marched from Dieppe to Envermeu, where the officers were herded into the very church in which the Dupuises’ marriage had been solemnized.
To Madame Dupuis, resplendent in her white wedding dress, and Monsieur Dupuis, dressed in his finest suit, and the other members of the wedding party, the halting column of haggard men must have seemed like a gruesome scene out of a medieval fresco. The hobbled were not allegories of moral failings, however, but real men, soldiers from across the sea, some now held up by shaking legs or by the near failed strength of a comrade’s shoulder. For the barefoot, each step on the rocky road was a physical reminder of their defeat. All were thirsty and hungry.
They were a beaten army, but to the Germans’ surprise, when they saw the wedding party, the Canadians showed that loss in battle did not equal defeat of spirit. Some who had hidden money from the Germans’ sticky fingers threw it to Madame Dupuis, causing her to cry. The shout “Long live the lovely bride” both saluted her and thumbed the POWs’ noses at the Germans because it echoed the toast to King George VI, “Long Live the King.” She ignored the bills fluttering to her feet, picking up only a single bronze penny to hold as a tribute to them.61
As Private Stan Darch drew close to young Jean-Claude Robillard, who was holding his father’s hand as he watched the procession of the lame, the private realized that this would be the last time for who knew how long that he’d be able to hug a child. Jean-Claude sensed something of this and held his father’s hand tighter. What grabbed his father’s attention, however, was Darch’s bloody feet. As the rest of the wedding party threw cigarettes, Robillard quickly bent down, unlaced his shoes and handed them to the Canadian from Hamilton, Ontario, who knew only one word of French: “Merci.”
GERMAN SOLDIERS DENY THE POWS WATER, AGAIN
At the church, the officers were separated from their men, who were marched some miles further to a disused brick factory. The priest, who had earlier presided over the Dupuises’ marriage, was surprised at the number of French-speaking Canadians and provided straw to soften the pews and floor the exhausted men were to sleep on. Before collapsing into sleep, Major Brian McCool realized that although he had surrendered his revolver, he had forgotten about the cartridges in his pocket. Risking sacrilege, but to keep the Germans from finding them, McCool removed the plug from the baptismal font and dropped the cartridges down the drain.
Captains John Foote and Wes Clare also spent the night in the church. Because of the insignia on their shoulders, they’d been picked up to be interrogated by intelligence officers. Clare, a Royal Regiment medical officer, knew little and said less. Foote, his Presbyterian ministry notwithstanding, had used a Lewis gun on the beaches of Dieppe, and dissembled more than a padre should when he told his interlocutor that as a chaplain he “didn’t know anything about the technical part of the war.” Foote, who ignored one order by going to Dieppe and who earned a Victoria Cross for refusing another by staying with the wounded men on the beach, enjoyed saying that morale in England was “just fine.”62
At the brick factory, some men were fed, Dumais receiving a hunk of German black bread that even in his famished state he found revolting. The disgusting smell and taste of rubber Kaffe heartened him. For, he reasoned, if this “is what they were reduced to for coffee, they must be in a poor way.”63 Others, like Darch, had had nothing to drink since the morning and did not get water until the next day because by the time it was their turn to go to the water pipe, Hitlerjugend, who ignored Geneva and shut the valve, had replaced the Wehrmacht troops standing guard. Poolton was so desperate to relieve his thirst that he scraped a hole in the factory’s hard dirt floor and pressed his tongue and parched lips to the damp earth.
As he drifted off to sleep on the floor, Darch had no way of knowing that Monsieur Robillard was passing his first night in a dank prison cell in Envermeu, punishment for his act of kindness.
DUMAIS ESCAPES AND WHISTLES “UN CANADIEN ERRANT”
The ever-decreasing rumble of the train and sound of shots told him two things: the train carrying the bulk of the Canadians to a POW camp was heading into the gathering night, and the guards suspected that someone had jumped from it. Then he recognized the French voice calling out “Sergeant Major Dumais.” He was about to call back when he saw a railway patrol. Some minutes later, as he walked along the embankment hoping to find his countryman, Dumais whistled a song he knew that no German or Frenchman would know but any French Canadian would: “Un Canadien Errant,” one of the songs the Oblates sang aboard the Dresden.
CANADIANS CAPTURED AT DIEPPE SUFFER NUMEROUS VIOLATIONS OF THEIR GENEVA CONVENTION RIGHTS
On the 20th, ever the sticklers for rank, the Germans put the officers in third-class compartments. Poolton and Darch were two of the more than 1,000 “ordinary ranks” shoved, 70 at a time, into cattle cars, but at least they’d been given some water and a hunk of black bread, which, they noticed, had been augmented by sawdust. Whatever fillip the Canadians got from seeing peasants flash furtive V signs vanished when they reached Verneulles, an old military base 100 miles from Paris, and saw the gallows adjacent to the railway siding.
Nothing at Verneulles evinced the Germans’ reputation for order or concern for their Geneva responsibilities. The huts provided protection from the elements—and dirty floors on which to sleep without blankets. Worse, despite knowing that scores of men were wounded, some with suppurating wounds, the Germans provided no medical services. The best efforts of the Canadian doctors could not save several men from dying in the five days they were at Verneulles.
What interested the Germans was information. Impressed with the maps they’d seized and remembering the Canadian Corps’ prowess in the final hundred days of the last war, when it defeated the Germans at several battles, the Germans wanted to know how Canadian generals could think that a single division lacking even field artillery, let alone the support of heavy naval guns, could make a lodgement against a well-defended port. The obvious senselessness of the raid led to the question, which bemused Captain John Runcie, “Had [it] been ordered by Stalin?”
Hitler sent Dr. Paul Schmidt, who in 1937 had translated at his meeting with Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, to interview the Canadians.64 Blocked by military intelligence from asking probing questions, Schmidt lapsed into clichés about “huge, hearty backwoodsmen with … jolly laughs which revealed their perfect teeth.”65
In his memoir, Schmidt inadvertently promoted Captain Antoine Masson two ranks, but he remembered the gist of the conversation in which le canadien ignored what he and his men were going through and took the occasion to complain about Germany’s treatment of the Polish Catholics, which prompted Schmidt to say, “Nazism and Christianity could not be reconciled.” After admitting that many Germans listened to the BBC, Schmidt predicted that Stalingrad would soon fall, a point Masson disputed. With ultimate cheek, Masson told Schmidt not only that he would soon escape but also that he would “answer Dr. Schmidt on the radio.”
Perhaps because before the First World War, Germany’s foreign minister, Joachim Von Ribbentrop, had lived in Canada, working first on the Quebec Bridge and later as a dealer in fine wines in Ottawa, the Germans knew enough about Canada to try to suborn the hundreds of French Canadians. First they told them that, since they were French and Germany was not at war with France, they were not at war with Germany and offered them the opportunity to broadcast home via Radio Calais. Knowing how important letting families in Canada know that their loved ones were alive, the officers told their men to record the broadcasts and include as many names as they could.
The second effort to suborn the French Canadians involved food, and goes some distance in proving that the decision to provide scant rations at Verneulles had nothing to do with being surprised by having “so many ‘guests.’” Rather, the Canadians understood their poor rations as an attempt to soften them up. After three days of only two bowls of watery soup each a day and a small ration of hard bread (augmented by some handfuls of grass), the Fusiliers Mont-Royal were ordered to gather round a truck, where an official from Vichy France called them “brothers” and offered them fresh fruit, cigarettes and chocolate. At first, the fusiliers refused, but then their officers told them to accept the gifts. The Vichy and German authorities were shocked when les Canadiens français turned around and shared their largesse with their English compatriots, saying to their captors, “We are one nation of Canadians and that is why we fought so well.”66
DUMAIS FINDS HELP ON HIS HOME RUN
Among the 400 or so people filing out of the church in Le Mans, 130 miles south of Dieppe, following Sunday mass on 22 August, some would help, others might turn him in. Perhaps the old woman over there would be like the lone woman who, turning pale when she saw the Canada patches on Dumais’s shoulders and being unable to help herself, pointed to another house, saying, “Try her.” Or maybe that couple would be like the Collais, who ignored the freshly posted notices threatening death for anyone “who helps, shelters or fails to reveal the presence of an Allied soldier.” While Madame Collai fed him, her husband, Robert, replaced the nails in his boots (which would have given him away) with cement before leading him to a shelter in a clay quarry, where Dumais spent a dry night despite the heavy rain. The next morning, Madame Collai brought him food, civilian clothes, a map of France ripped from a school book and some money, then walked him to the train station. Even the presence of a German soldier a short way down the corridor could not prevent Dumais from waving a discreet goodbye to this helpful and courageous woman.
Some in the crowd leaving church may have already seen him, for he’d arrived in Le Mans the day before. Then, the need for food forced his hand and, after walking some distance out of town, he approached a farmer and explained who he was. The farmer was gruff and suspicious but, perhaps because Dumais’s accent, which for reasons the farmer and Dumais almost certainly did not know seemed more familiar than the French of either Paris or Vichy, the farmer gambled that the man in front of him was not an agent provocateur.67 The farmer and his wife gave him food and let him sleep in their stable. The next morning, Sunday, they again fed the mysterious stranger, then gave him a bacon sandwich and some hard-boiled eggs before ushering him on his way.
When he’d approached the Collai farmhouse and spoke to the farmer, Dumais risked being recaptured. But at least, had an alarm gone up from the house, he could run, and if the farmer had turned on him … well, Dumais was a trained soldier. Neither option was feasible in the crowd that, after church, gathered in the market area of the town famous for its 24-hour motor race. Risking being noticed because he was not known, Dumais listened for any stray word that would reveal the speaker’s allegiance. Amid the gossip and jabber about shopping, he heard a woman complain to a man about yet another German requisition of foodstuffs and, even more importantly, say a few words “on the possible meaning of the Dieppe raid.”68 When, a few minutes later, the man was alone, Dumais went up to him and asked for his help.
The man took Dumais to a restaurant, the owner of which was suspicious of Dumais until he was unable to give her the correct number of meal tickets for a glass of cognac. Before he left, she gave him 500 francs. At the train station, Dumais hid himself in plain sight by carrying a woman’s heavy luggage onto the train. Several hours later, he arrived in Poitiers at 3:30 a.m.
“CHURCHILL’S SECOND FRONT”
It was more than another train made up of stinking cattle cars crammed with men. It was a propaganda statement.
Aware of the clamour for a Second Front by such unlikely allies as Stalin and Lord Beaverbrook, not to mention rallies in London, New York and Toronto calling for one, the Germans painted “Churchill’s Second Front” on the sides of the cars carrying the remnants of the 2nd Canadian Division to Stalag VIII-B in Lamsdorf, in Upper Silesia. At some stops and railway crossings, the men heard soft cheers. At a stop outside Brussels, the schoolgirls the Germans had brought to see the sad state of the girls’ hoped-for deliverers refused their part in the drama by singing “Will ye no come back again,” until they were silenced by rifle butts.
DUMAIS CROSSES THE DEMARCATION LINE
The Promised Land lay on the other side of the railway line. Holding in check the impulse to run across it, Dumais stealthily moved a 100 yards first to his right, then to the left of his original position, all the while sniffing the air for a whiff of a guard’s cigarette. Only when he was sure that there was “no movement, sound or smell” did he jump over the fence, cross the tracks and leap another fence before diving into some bushes.69
The relief of being in Vichy France almost did him in. While walking down a road as if he “hadn’t a care in the world,” he suddenly heard the dread word “Halt!” and saw through the darkness a guard raising his rifle. In the few seconds it took the guard to pull back the bolt of the rifle and call out “Halt” again, Dumais had taken a few steps backwards, putting just enough distance between them that when the guard fired and missed, Dumais could jump into the ditch on his right and start running down it. He disappeared into a copse of trees and then ran into the thick undergrowth on the other side of the road. After running through a field heavy with ripe artichokes and across another field, Dumais found a haystack in which he “bedded down, warm and safe.”70
Woken at 8 a.m. by the sound of a truck, Dumais started down the road. Under bright sunshine, he slipped into a reverie in which the sound of an RAF plane coming to pick him up drowned out the sound of the very real car that slowed down just as it reached him. Though ready to run for it, Dumais tried to look unconcerned as the driver asked if he was going to Lussac-les-Châteaux. “Yes, I’m going there,” he replied and, when offered a lift, warily climbed into the car.
Though the woman in the car was chatty, Dumais could see the driver keeping watch on him in the rear-view mirror. Keeping the conversation going became difficult when the woman’s questions became personal. The tension lessened when Dumais saw the sign for the village and the car slowed down in front of a garage. It rocketed up when the man asked, “Would you be going to the Hôtel de la Gare?”—the hotel the old blacksmith who had given him directions on where to cross the demarcation line had told him to go and ask for Père La Classe. Trying to sound nonchalant, Dumais replied, “Not particularly, unless the cooking is good.” The driver said, “The cooking is exceptionally good; you should try it,” and pointed down the road to the hotel. It took Dumais a moment to realize that the woman and driver were part of a “conspiracy” orchestrated by the blacksmith who had helped him a few days earlier to ensure that the Canadian soldier ended up in the hands of a Resistance cell that would, three weeks later, bring him to Marseilles.71
PRIVATES ROBERT VANIER, CONRAD LAFLEUR AND GUY JOLY REACH PARIS
None of the three French Canadians knew which Resistance cell they lucked into on 25 August, the day after they too leaped from the train carrying the Dieppe survivors. Whichever it was, it was efficient. After feeding and giving them clothing, the farmer they revealed themselves to went to get a doctor to dress their wounds and photograph them so that fake identity papers could be produced.
The next day, armed with bogus work passes signed by the mayor of another town, they were driven to Amiens by the doctor, who took the time to point out an ammunition dump so that the Allies could bomb it. By 4 p.m., accompanied by a member of the doctor’s family and carrying more than 2,000 francs and knapsacks filled with food, they were on a train for Paris.
For months after the war started, feeling safe behind the Maginot Line, the three French Canadians found Paris to still be the “City of Light.” Then came the disaster of May 1940. By 23 June, Hitler himself was there. At noon each day, German troops goose-stepped down Champs Élysées, while Parisians learned to fear the knock on the door in the middle of the night. More important even than the humiliation of the swastika hanging from the Arc de Triomphe was the requisitioning of huge quantities of food, including almost all the food available in Paris, and 80 per cent of the country’s cattle. In 1941, hungry Parisians turned to their cats, causing the authorities to issue warnings about eating cat stew. By 1942, malnutrition led to a 41 per cent rise in deaths in Paris; the 13.5 million food parcels sent by families elsewhere in France allowed the 2.5 million Parisians to stave off starvation.
Paris had been “reduced to a sham,” wrote Jean-Paul Sartre, the streets of the famed Latin Quarter, which had bustled with students since the Middle Ages, empty, while the Folies Bergère and cafés were filled with German soldiers.72 The cacophony of the Parisian night, with its motorcycles and horns, had been replaced by “rifle shots; the sudden pepper of a machine-gun” and the sound of powerful cars in which, it was always feared, was another Parisian arrested by the Gestapo.73 Still, for the three French Canadians, the names were almost enough: Gare du Nord, Montparnasse, Notre Dame, the Métro, the Louvre (which, they did not know, was empty). The little hotel their guide took them to stood next to the rambling, art deco department store Samaritaine, its shelves and cases uncommonly bare. And, even though the presence of German patrols meant that at any moment they might hear the dread words “Eins, zwei, drei, halt!” privates Robert Vanier, Conrad Lafleur and Guy Joly “did a little discreet sightseeing.”
CAPTAINS BROWNE AND MASSON ARE FED AND GIVEN A PLACE TO SLEEP
Conditions aboard the train carrying the Dieppe survivors to Germany had deteriorated greatly. The few medical supplies Ron Beal and other stretcher-bearers had saved had long since run out. So had the food. The sleep-deprived, cold men, still struggling with the ignominy of surrender, felt also the degradation of their reeking filthy bodies, which hadn’t seen water, save for perhaps the bloody saltwater at Dieppe, in more than ten days.
The link between cleanliness and a soldier’s self-esteem, the spit and polish for which company sergeant majors are so derided by their charges, demonstrates an army’s organization and is a physical manifestation of esprit de corps as well as, of course, protection against diseases like typhus. By depriving the survivors of Dieppe of the opportunity to clean the terrible marks of battle and their own filth from their bodies, the Germans struck directly at the Canadians’ pride as free men. Primo Levi, who survived Auschwitz, wrote that a prisoner must do anything possible “to stay clean in order not to debase yourself in your own eyes” and thereby do the dirty work of the Germans for them.74
In one cattle car, exhaustion, hunger and thirst unhinged at least one Canadian. Lieutenant Frederick Woodcock hallucinated that the Germans had bent him “backwards over this pile of barbed wire and they were wrapping wire all around [his] right shoulder.”75
The third-class compartments in which the officers rode were more comfortable, but since their windows were nailed shut, they were stifling. Near 1 a.m., Masson left his compartment and, after bribing a guard with a cigarette, stood near an open window. Just east of Paris when the train slowed in a tunnel, Masson jumped out the window. The side of the tunnel was closer than he realized, and he hit his head on the wall, luckily falling between the train and the wall. By the time the train had left the tunnel, Masson could see four figures—in fact other Canadians who had also jumped from the train—leave the tunnel in the direction from which it had come. Then, the flash of a light, a challenge in French and the sound of the men being arrested.
About an hour later, as he neared a small village, Masson passed a man whose decidedly un-French “Bonsoir” caused Masson to look back over his shoulder. Only then did he notice what he’d missed in the darkness: the man’s Canadian battle dress. It took only a moment for Masson and Captain George A. Browne, who had also jumped from the train, to establish their identities and decide to start walking away from Paris.
About a half mile down a small path, they saw some workers’ houses. As Browne hid in the shadows waiting to see how Masson was received, the French-speaking officer knocked on the door of a house. When a man came to the window, Masson explained that he and another soldier had been on the raid on Dieppe and had just escaped from a German POW train. Their rank smell, dirty faces and greasy hair notwithstanding, the family fed them and, after giving them water to wash, put them to bed.
Once the train entered the Reich, the Canadians had little idea where they were, but not because they couldn’t read German. Rather, the names of the stations had been removed. At one station, the SS kicked to the ground the food and water civilians tried pushing through the slats of the befouled cattle cars. In Private Danny MacDonald’s legs, the bacteria that had seeped into the wounds caused by machine-gun bullets bred uncontrollably, producing copious amounts of foul-smelling puss. “Churchill’s Second Front” completed its journey when it reached the railway siding on the road that led to the prison camp near Lamsdorf, in far eastern Germany.
As the gaunt, exhausted, famished and desperately thirsty men climbed down from the train and, as gently as they could, took their wounded comrades down on stretchers, they noticed the beautiful day and the thousands of plump cherries hanging from the trees, within easy reach on either side of the road. The guards barked that they’d shoot any man who touched one.
Unbeknownst to the Germans, as they arranged the POWs in four columns for the march to the camp a mile away, Regimental Sergeant Major Harry Beesley, the senior officer present, prepared a bit of theatre that signalled the Canadians’ implacable resistance. Given what they’d been through on the beaches of Dieppe, at Verneulles and on the train, Ron Beal and the others could hardly believe Beesley when he said, “You’ve had it pretty good. You’ve had one action. You’re prisoners of war now [but] there are men in that camp that have been prisoners for two and a half to three years who were taken at Dunkirk, some in North Africa, some in Crete, some in Greece … their spirits are broken. We’ve got to show them that there is still a British army and an Allied force.”
To the guards’ dismay, the men, many of whom were so stiff and weak when they climbed off the train that they stumbled around like drunkards, formed up and began marching as if on parade. The NCOs lifted their heads and swung their arms. Barefoot or not, and irrespective of the condition of their uniforms or whether they even still wore one, the men marched in step. Not even the sight of a cemetery in which they saw maple leaves etched into grave stones, indicating that Canadians had died in that very prison camp during the First World War, broke their march. As they neared the gates, the British POWs, who looked relatively healthy, responded with cheers and shouted, “Good old Canada!”76
After days without food, the Canadians expected to be fed when they were stopped between the camp’s inner and outer wire. Paperwork, however, took precedence and, instead, each man was photographed, fingerprinted and given a disk with his Kriegsgefangenennummer (POW number) stamped into it: “Mine was zwei, fünf, zwei, drei, acht—25238,” recalls Darch. So many men answered the question about their occupation the same way that one German officer was heard saying, “My, they have an awful lot of farmers in Canada.”77
Although the Canadians had been expected for at least a week and the camp was already feeding thousands of POWs, no excuse was offered by the Germans for failing to fulfill the Geneva requirement to feed POWs the same rations as garrison troops. Accordingly, the men saw the German failure to feed them as psychological warfare designed to break their spirit. Indeed, even when they were finally given food—which, they later found out, came not from the camp larder but from the British POWs who gave up their daily ration of watery cabbage soup—the Germans ensured that the very act of eating underlined the POWs’ subservient status. Instead of handing them cups and spoons, the Canadians were allowed to go to a garbage pit to retrieve dirty cans. Poolton ate the putrid soup from his boot.
Their papers were good, but the gendarmes in the small town in the south of France where Lafleur, Joly and Vanier got off the train were better.
Had Lafleur and Joly (Vanier, still troubled by a wound, remained in the train station) known that the small town’s most famous resident was Maurice Papon, who since July had been responsible for deporting Jews from Vichy and seizing their property, the two Canadian soldiers might have gone through with their plan to overpower the gendarmes who stopped them on the street and make a run for it. Instead, after diplomatically bringing up Dieppe and seeing the gendarmes’ favourable response, Lafleur and Joly told the gendarmes who they were.
To their relief, the gendarmes said that the police commissioner would be sympathetic. Aware that the Deuxième Bureau regularly tested local officials’ rectitude, the commissioner carefully questioned the three Canadians (Vanier having been picked up) before loading them into his car and driving them to the home of a wealthy American, who hid them until MI9 spirited them to safety via Marseilles and then Toulouse, eventually taking them to Perpignan, where the Royal Navy picked them up.
THE CANADIANS LEARN THE KRIEGIE LIFE
“After five days in a cattle car, even barracks seemed almost human—at least there was place to lie down and sleep,” recalls Darch, who occupied the middle of a three-tier bunk bed on the right side of the almost 200-foot-long clapboard building. “When you walked in to it from each end, there was an area where there were two tables that sat about eight men, a washstand and a stove. It was still warm in September, so we did not notice that this stove would provide precious little heat when the winter winds began to blow. There were three sets of bunks down the length of the hall. Twelve men to a section, bunks around a central post … six on one side and six on the other. The paillasses were infested with lice and bedbugs, and so were we.”
The men washed in the barracks. “We had soap,” says Darch, “but it was hard and full of pumice. It allowed us to clean our hand and faces and take a sponge bath, which, at least for a short time, did something about the lice. [But] the cold water and hard soup were no match for the lice in the seams of our uniforms. Nor could the cold water and foamless soap clean the blood stains off our uniforms.” Each man’s uniform was a memento mori of sorts, a symbol of their defeat.
Few Canadians spoke German, but it didn’t take them long to learn the essential words. Each day started with a guard slamming open the barracks’ door and yelling, “Raus! Raus!” meaning “Get up and out of the barracks!” Rain or shine, at 8 a.m. and again at 5 p.m., the Kriegies made their way to the camp’s Appellplatz, where they were counted. Like Poolton and Beal, Darch still wore his uniform. “Others didn’t. They came off the beach with nothing.” Although the men did not know the extent of Germany’s requisitions of the countries it had conquered, the well-kept German towns they had seen through the slats of the cattle car told them something of Germany’s resources. They were therefore surprised—and enraged—that the Germans left the men without clean clothes until Red Cross supplies arrived some weeks later.
The stench of the 40-holer that served 1,500 men was overwhelming. “From time to time a horse-drawn wagon—the ‘Honey Wagon’—came to pump out the latrine, which made shit go down but did nothing about the population of rats. Seeing their eyes peering up at you before you sat down to do your business gave you added incentive to be quick about it,” recalls Darch.
Of even greater concern were the rations. They came near noon, but there was never enough to fill the POWs’ stomachs. A pint or so of cabbage soup that was supposed to contain their meat ration almost never did, unless worms and bugs counted. “Dividing the solid food was more complicated. Groups of ten men were given a bunch of potatoes, which were boiled with skins on. Then they were placed in rows according to size, and then we drew cards to see which you got,” says Darch. A group of ten divided into two groups of five for the division of the hard loaf of sour black bread, which was often covered in green mould. “Cutting the loaf was a ritual each of us watched eagerly,” recalls Darch. “Every crumb mattered.” Each man was supposed to receive 350 grams, or just over 12 ounces. “Normally, this worked out to six pieces for each of us ‘muckers’—‘muckers’ was the name for the men in a food group. Two for lunch, two for dinner, and you had to save two for breakfast, which, if you were lucky, you smeared with some ersatz jam. If you didn’t save your pieces for breakfast, you went hungry.” They would have starved were it not for the Red Cross parcels that started arriving in early October. John Grogan and three other members of the Royal Regiment shared two parcels twice a week.
CAPTAIN JOHN RUNCIE’S HOME RUN BEGINS
For the last four days, he’d had it pretty good.
Before that, he’d been at Verneulles. Then, with the connivance of Canadian medical officers, Captain John Runcie convinced a German medical officer that he was suffering from acute appendicitis and that he should be sent to Paris for an X-ray. Perhaps because the staff at the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière were French, they placed him in a private room, the ward on the other side of the wall being filled with Germans wounded on the Russian Front. Runcie was a decent actor, for while the X-ray showed nothing, the German doctor prescribed a special diet and a few more days’ hospital rest, days the Canadian put to good use.
Just over two weeks earlier he’d put his faith in machine guns, mortars, radios, 6-inch naval guns, fighter planes and the other accoutrements of modern warfare. Now, late on the night of 5 September, he put his faith in 17th-century aesthetics, specifically, the French window (that opened outward like two doors) and the low wall that enclosed the grounds of the hospital designed by one of Louis XIV’s favourite architects. The window opened, and the healthy Runcie quickly climbed the rain-slickened stone wall. He found the Resistance fighter who’d promised to be there waiting in the shadows of a nearby church, holding civilian clothes and shoes for the pyjama-clad, barefoot army officer. Because of the curfew, he had about an hour to get Runcie to a safe house.
Unlike Dumais, Lafleur and the other fusiliers on home runs, the English-speaking Runcie had to be even more careful about being overheard. Still, for the ten days that he stayed with a family in Montmartre, accompanied by the man who had met him by the church, Runcie “moved freely about Paris during the daytime, mingling with parties of German sightseers in the streets and entering cafés and places of entertainment.”
Runcie does not say and likely did not know how his hosts procured the food they gave him, or the ration tickets needed in restaurants. Given the limited official rations available, it’s almost certain that his allotment came from the flourishing black market. A month earlier, the police officials prosecuted 42 cases of trading on le marché noir, a phrase that appeared for the first time in the Larousse dictionary published that year.
Led by a 12-year-old boy carrying a fishing rod, Browne and Masson neared the Allier River, on the other side of which lay Vichy France. Stuffed in Masson’s pockets were forged demobilization papers and an identity card with a believable photograph that stated he was Alsatian, which, he and Browne hoped, would explain Masson’s accent. Browne also carried demobilization papers; to explain why he didn’t speak, he was listed as being deaf.
The presence of German guards forced Masson’s party to walk further down the river than originally planned. After fording it, they found a taxi that took them to the town of Sancoins. The two Canadians and their young guide were shocked when the taxi driver stopped at the police station and told them that because he picked them up so close to the Demarcation Line, they had to report to the police.
It took only a moment for the gendarme who interviewed Masson to know that he was not an Alsatian, for he was, and Masson couldn’t understand a word of his. Masson countered the accusation that he was a Polish Jew by saying he was from Toulouse and was travelling alone to visit his sick mother. The suspicious official then called in Browne, who played deaf while the official accused him of having a false photo on his identity card, which was ironic, since it was the one true part of their cover story.
With their stories in tatters, Masson went for broke and told the official they were Canadian officers and promised that if they were let through, 100,000 francs would be forwarded to him as soon as they reached England. The officer’s demeanour changed and after telephoning his superior indicated that he would help them. Keeping most of their money and papers in his possession, the official ordered another policeman to take them to a hotel.
The boy smelled a rat and, once they were alone in the hotel, persuaded the Canadians to take advantage of the cover of night to push on, by foot, toward Saint-Amand-Montrond. Assuming that the police were now looking for them, every time they heard a car, all three dove into the nearest ditch. Toward morning, near the village of Saint-Pierre-les-Étieux, the poor condition of Browne’s feet (he had been walking barefoot for days because the shoes given to him in Paris were too small) forced them to board a gasoline trolley, only to find themselves face to face with the policeman who had taken them to the hotel.
According to Browne, the policeman told them that by running away from the hotel they “had complicated things” and must now be kept out of sight until arrangements could be made for them to continue their journey. Masson recalled a more frightening moment: the flashing of a revolver and the policeman saying “he would handle the whole thing unofficially.”
For the next few days, they believed this promise. True, they were in a cell in the gendarmerie in Châteauroux. However, the men there who claimed to be Deuxième Bureau agents were friendly, as were the guards who brought them their food. And, always a hopeful sign, cigarettes were plentiful. They assumed that their handcuffing before going to the train station was part of an agitprop drama designed to pre-empt questions from any official they might meet along the way, an assumption seemingly confirmed when they were on the train. Even having to spend the night of 14 September in a cell in the gendarmerie in Lyons did not alarm them, for again they were very well-treated, and timing their disappearance, they knew, was a delicate operation.
Their hopes were dashed the next morning when the truck they’d been hustled onto stopped at the forbidding Fort de la Duchère.
THE IMPORTANCE OF CRIBBAGE
Pictures of poorly shaven, dishevelled soldiers playing cards while smoking an endless number of cigarettes paint a decidedly unmartial portrait of POWs, who, though ever more hungry, remained, after recovering from the shock of defeat and the Germans’ treatment of them, fit men in their prime. In the years to come, a number of men would experience depression or, as they called it, fall victim to “wire happiness,” the most obvious sign of which was a vacant stare. The greatest enemy was boredom. To fight it, hundreds bashed the circuit—that is, walked endless times around the inside perimeter of the barbed-wire fence, which both kept them in shape and familiarized them with the camp’s layout and security, as well as with areas beyond the camp—essential information for a successful escape.
Games like bridge and, for Darch, cribbage, were vital ways to keep their spirits up and their competitive instincts honed. And the games did more than simply take up time, as important as that was. In a world where they were powerless, where a guard nicknamed “Ukrainian Joe” sadistically bullied and physically pushed around men who could not respond, card games and cribbage reminded the Kriegies that, elsewhere, rules governed everyone equally. The games provided and transported players from the drab surroundings of the prison camp to a place that all knew from before the war. “You forgot you were in a miserable hut in Germany when you were playing; you had to concentrate on the cards and think about strategy,” explains Darch, who found that, as did writing and receiving letters, cribbage took him out of the prison camp.