[Courage] is a cold choice between two alternatives, the fixed resolve not to quit; an act of renunciation which must be made not once but many times by the power of the will.
— LORD MORAN, THE ANATOMY OF COURAGE
THE RETURN OF THE DIEPPE PRISONERS’ RED CROSS PARCELS
The decision to again distribute Red Cross parcels to the Dieppe POWs provided more than desperately needed calories and nutrients via the familiar tastes of Spam, chocolate, condensed milk, raisins and canned peaches. They provided a sensory experience that took the POWs out of their drab surroundings. “It felt real good to have those tastes again. They brought back the good times, of life back in Canada,” says Stan Darch, who still remembers the sizzle of Spam and hot tea cooked on the Klim-tin blower.
In contrast to the huts’ stoves, in which the fuel was placed at the bottom, the result being that much of the heat radiated out of the bottom and sides of the stoves, the Klim-tin blowers worked like a forge. A stream of air, generated by a blower cut from a cookie tin or can, linked by a belt made from shoelaces or strips of leather, supercharged the air in the small combustion chamber at the bottom of the Klim can. A few wood chips or a bit of coal sufficed to boil a pot of tea. “We learned how to make [the Klim-tin blowers] from the men who were already in Lamsdorf,” recalls Darch. “They were wonderful. Just a few bits of wood or charcoal and we could brew up tea, cook the few potatoes they gave us or even the little bit of bacon we got every now and then.”99
The parcels also provided fodder for some much-needed entertainment in the form of what amounted to a bazaar. Some exchanges were relatively straightforward: bramble jelly from a Canadian parcel for marmalade from a British one. Muslim British soldiers held in another compound at Lamsdorf were eager to exchange cans of bacon for tea (which, like cigarettes, served the purpose of currency) or cans of salmon. Canadian Klim was highly prized, as were soap and sugar.
Charles Fisher recalled Stalag X-B as having a thriving black market, in which the law of supply and demand was nakedly apparent. “Two ounces of coffee bought two eggs one day, three the next.” The eggs, like white bread, sausage and even whisky, came from Germans who were willing to risk execution for real coffee and cigarettes. Cigarettes, the default currency, differed from real currency in that, over time, they literally went up in smoke, causing the black market economy to seize up. Unfreezing it required the injection of more cigarettes. At times this new “currency” came from newly arrived Red Cross parcels. Other times, to entice those men who’d held on to their cigarettes to part with them, men wrote IOUs on their banks in England, sometimes at the price of five dollars per cigarette. Letters home recorded these IOUs and “relatives transferred money to the home accounts of prison sellers,” wrote Fisher.
From both a psychological and a nutritional point of view, it would have been better for the POWs to have husbanded the Red Cross supplies. When Fisher was at Stalag X-B and later Milag Nord, the staples were held in common and doled out by the kitchen to every member of the mess. Most of the time, the Dieppe POWs were given one parcel per two or four men, which provided needed nutrients but undercut the Red Cross’s nutritional scheme. Each parcel provided a man with 2,070 calories per day, for seven days; this added to the German rations would have equalled sufficient calories to prevent the men from losing weight. However, to prevent Darch and his comrades from stockpiling canned goods that could be used while escaping, the Germans punctured the cans of Klim, Spam and bacon. The men would gorge themselves before the food turned rancid.100
RCAF SERGEANT ANDREW CARSWELL BAILS OUT OF A BURNING BOMBER
“Your Lancaster bomber is a very good plan, ja? It is better than the B-17, ja?” asked Oberleutenant Schmidt. So as not to be tricked into divulging any information other than his name, rank and service number, Andrew Carswell, following his training, stayed silent.
A day earlier over Magdeburg, 100 miles southeast of Berlin, as the flames from his flak-damaged starboard engine burned toward the high-octane aviation fuel held in the wing, Carswell managed to level off his stricken plane. The fierce fire lit the fuselage enough so that he could see the maps and other papers being sucked out of it into the black night convulsed by exploding shells and the roar of the plane’s three remaining Rolls-Royce Merlin engines. Within moments, the plane had dropped thousands of feet and all but Carswell and his navigator, John Galbraith, had jumped from the burning “kite.”
Arguing that they could still make it home, Galbraith refused to jump. “Look at that fire, you fucking idiot!” screamed Carswell. “Get the hell out! The controls are shot and I can’t hold it any longer.”101 Like most RCAF aircrew, Carswell had never practised a parachute drop. And, while he missed the river, until he punched the quick-release button, he suffered the indignity of dangling 20 feet above the ground after a tree snagged his chute. A few hours later, cold and wet from trudging through the snow, and shaken by the sure knowledge Galbraith was dead, Carswell knocked on a farmhouse door.
The old man who opened the door would have fired his rifle, Carswell believed, had the motherly-looking farm wife not intervened. Moments later, after sitting on a couch, he collapsed into unconsciousness. When he came to, he made it clear via the ten-year-old boy who was fascinated by his RCAF wings that he was from “Kanada.” A few minutes later, the police arrived and whisked Carswell to a holding cell in Zerbst’s town hall, where he was fed and asked about the relative merits of the American and British bombers.
RCAF SERGEANT IAN MACDONALD’S PARENTS READ A LETTER FROM LONDON
It would take another fortnight for the MacDonalds to learn it, but in early January, their son had been to London. Because of the blackout, he hadn’t seen much, but to his parents, who had never been past Halifax, just being at Waterloo Station, in Trafalgar Square and seeing the dome of St. Paul’s underlined how far he’d travelled and how close he was to danger. For hundreds of thousands of Canadian parents, pride in their son’s uniform was accompanied by fear, both for their safety and in the knowledge that the further they advanced into the war, the less they resembled the man who had left home.102 That night when he wrote home, to show that he was still their Ian, MacDonald wasted little time before telling of going to Canada House, where he had glanced over the headlines of the New Glasgow Evening News.
On 20 January, a letter from Great-West Life Assurance, an insurance adjuster, informed Mr. MacDonald that Ian’s life insurance policy was a month in arrears because, “for some reason or other,” the papers that authorized the assignment of $4 per pay were “late coming through.” It was a polite request that Mr. MacDonald bring the policy up to date.
CARSWELL ENDURES SEVERAL ROUNDS OF PSYCH-OPS AND COVERS UP HIS ONLY MISTAKE
Since Carswell had been shot down only two days earlier and was a pilot, the intelligence machinery at Dulag Luft went to work right after he arrived there. The order to strip off his uniform had less to do with ensuring that he did not have access to escape equipment (the Germans did not yet know that he had a knife, saw and map hidden in his uniform) than with softening him up by removing the outward sign of his military status. Though it might be difficult for civilians to grasp the importance of a uniform, the intelligence agents knew that it was the outward sign of status and, for a serviceman, something approaching a legal document that brought Carswell under the Geneva Convention.
During the night, his small, bare cell was first so hot that he had to strip off his grey, shapeless clothes, thus infantilizing the Canadian pilot, and then so cold that he banged on the cell’s steel door to implore the guard to turn the heat back on. Not until later the next day did he eat thin turnip soup and a small piece of close-to-inedible black bread. A day later, having seen only the guard who walked him to the toilet, he was happy when a guard threw his uniform, but not his flying boots, into his cell.
Knowing that the return of his uniform would make Carswell feel “like a human being again,” the Luftwaffe moved its next piece on the chessboard in the person of a friendly-looking officer who, after opening the door to Carswell’s cell, said “Good morning” and then asked, “Are you feeling better after your harrowing experience?” His friendly words and hearty handshake were designed to elide Carswell’s three days in solitary, the dehumanizing effect of taking Carswell’s clothes and the wretched food and return Carswell to the emotional trauma of the crash. The intelligence officer outranked Carswell but told him to sit down before asking, “Where do you live in Canada? … Vancouver? Toronto? Montreal?”103
The strain was intense. Before him sat an apparently friendly German speaking in unaccented English who had just asked a question of no obvious military import. The officer erred, however, by pausing long enough for Carswell to recall a British intelligence officer telling him that even harmless information could be “used to convince a prisoner that the captors already knew everything about him…. even the amounts and places of leave, all had their place in filling in the big picture for German intelligence.” Fortified, Carswell demurred when the German asked, “Well, … what is your home address? I have spent some time in Canada myself. It is a beautiful country.” When asked, “What possible difference could it make to anybody if you told us your home address?” Carswell admitted that he didn’t know but that he was under orders to give nothing other than his name, rank and service number. The intelligence officer’s bonhomie evaporated. “If you do not cooperate with us, you will be here for the rest of the war!”
The next day the officer was back, asking courteously if the Canadian would like a shave and a book to read. Carswell enjoyed the shave and wondered if he’d been given A Tale of Two Cities because of Mr. Manette’s story of being a prisoner in the Bastille for 18 years. The following day, accompanied by another English-speaking officer, Carswell’s interlocutor was back asking a series of seemingly innocuous questions about life in Canada. Again, Carswell refused to take the bait.
A day later, as promised, a man sporting several red crosses on his tunic and claiming to be Swiss official entered Carswell’s cell, saying in a heavy German accent, “Ve are glad to see zat you are not voondet or anysink like zat!” What he didn’t know was that airmen had been warned to expect fake Red Cross officials. Given the Canadian’s previous refusal to say anything about his plane, the official must not have been surprised that Carswell did not fill out the form that asked for his address, type of aircraft, point of departure, squadron, bomb load and other sensitive information. Carswell stifled a laugh when the “Red Cross” official screamed, “You are a heartless brute!”—the same words the German official had used a day earlier.
The Canadian slipped only once during the pas de deux with the Luftwaffe. The day after his encounter with the “Red Cross” official, the two German officers returned and complained that Carswell had not been cooperative. Barely were the words “He’s no Red Cross officer…. He’s a phony!” out of his mouth when Carswell realized that he’d broken the rule about not getting drawn into a debate. “How do you know that?” they responded, and he realized he’d just given the officers an insight into what the Allies knew about Luftwaffe interrogation procedures.
Carswell moved quickly to cover his tracks. “He doesn’t look like a Red Cross man … He looks like a German and he talks with a German accent!” The officer tut-tutted the poor, ignorant Canadian. “A lot of Swiss speak German.” Their condescending acceptance of Carswell’s response “Oh, … I thought they all spoke Swiss!” indicated that for all their training, the intelligence officers did not have a grasp of that Canadian speciality: dumb insolence.
On Carswell’s fifth day in solitary, the Luftwaffe officer tried again, this time asking about navigator John Galbraith. Carswell, who figured that they found his name on his parachute pack, knew nothing of his whereabouts, of course, and threw the question back at them: “Okay, … where is he, then?” “We don’t know. We’re still looking for him. But we’ll find him.” The next day Carswell was released into the general camp population and a few days later transported first to Stalag Luft I and then, with several other POWs, including fellow RCAF Officer Bill Jackson, to Stalag VIII-B.
On 8 February, Jack Poolton received his first letter from home. “It didn’t matter what the letter said,” recalls Darch. “Any news or what today we would call gossip reached into us and made us feel warm.” At this point in the war, it took between 12 and 16 weeks for a letter to get from Lamsdorf to Canada and for the return letter to arrive back at the POW camp. “That first letter that referred to a letter I wrote meant so much. I don’t remember now what it was about. But I remember what it did. It told me that I was back in contact with my family, that even though I was stuck rotting in a POW camp in Germany, a part of me was back with the people I loved, that I was part of their everyday life and them, mine.”104
Though they were warmed by greatcoats sent by the Red Cross and insulated from the cold ground and floors by wooden clogs that, for a few cigarettes, Remi Leroux made more comfortable with leggings made from greatcoat material, by the winter of 1942–43 the Dieppe survivors’ clothes were wearing out. “I mended my own clothes, but some men didn’t and daily wear meant that soon their clothes were getting pretty thin,” says Darch. “Some other men were good with the needle, so for a few cigarettes they’d patch up the shirt or pants. Because no one had proper patches, we were soon a very motley bunch.”
Keeping clean was a constant challenge. “Dignity demanded we shave and, rather than shave in cold water, after taking one or two mouthfuls of it to drink, we used the mint tea that was given to us in the morning to shave. They allowed us to shower every couple of months. We had three minutes of hot water and the rest was cold. The German soap wouldn’t lather up, so we saved the soap from our Red Cross parcels and used it,” explains Darch, chuckling at the memory of men smelling like Lux soap, which advertised itself as the choice of nine out of ten Hollywood starlets.
Poolton recalls a more ominous aspect of the showers. The German guards in the shower room pointed toward their penises. Not knowing that circumcision was rather more common in Canada than Europe, “if they spotted one who had been circumcised, they would shout ‘Juden.’”
CARSWELL MEETS AN OLD FRIEND
“Hey, Andy! What are you doing here?” The question seemed absurd. After all, Carswell had just arrived at the gate of Stalag VIII-B in the middle of Germany; who could know him here? At first he didn’t see anyone familiar in the crowd of POWs; then he spotted a bearded man calling out “Jack Lyall” and “Malvern,” the name of their Toronto high school. A few moments later while being marched through the Dieppe compound, during which Carswell saw his compatriots in chains, a Canadian officer walked up and started marching in step with Carswell. “Hi, Andy!” Now it was Carswell’s turn to ask an absurd question. “What the hell are you doing here, George?” he asked George Barless, who had grown up one house away from Carswell’s boyhood home at 26 Spadina Avenue.105
The sight of his countrymen in shackles shocked Carswell, as did the drabness of the barracks, the stench of the 40-holer and the bone-chilling temperatures that mocked the barracks’ walls. An experienced Kriegie told him that sleeping in one’s clothes did not keep one warmer during the night or in the morning. Hard experience had taught him it was better to lay the clothes on top of the thin blanket, thus providing a few more layers of covering and giving them a chance to dry out.
Within days, the crushing boredom set in. Carswell took some comfort in the outcome of the English lessons that a fellow Kriegie had given an Unteroffizier. At Appell one morning, the proud German officer announced to the recalcitrant airmen, “I know that you people think I know fuck nothing! But you are wrong! I know fuck all!”106
ROBERT PROUSE WEARS A GRASS SKIRT IN PLAY
In larger camps, the Kriegies had theatres and even repertoires. But even in small work camps like the one Robert Prouse shivered through during the winter, the men took pride in their theatrical skills. Whether the plays were by the Bard or others, they were a throwback to Elizabethan theatre, for young, slight men played the women’s parts. In one particular play, Prouse was not only especially proud of working out the dance steps for the South Sea island “women” in grass skirts but of his own dancing and costume, made of shredded paper and a bra, this last producing a “a lot of good-natured ‘cat-calls’ from the audience, along with a few lewd suggestions.”107
The catcalls were both good-natured fun and indicative of the kind of nervousness generated by dances, but not by boxing and hockey matches, French and German classes and orchestras like the one Father Barsalou formed. It was, recalled Canadian Private Geoffrey Ellwood, “one thing for guys to dance together because there’s nobody else to dance with. But when you start dancing together and likin’ it, and start snuggling up, it became very, very obvious” what was happening.108 The flippant line “Home or homo by Christmas,” which seemed at odds with the opprobrium attached to homosexuals back in Canada (not to mention the military regulations used to punish homosexual behaviour) even as it set up a hierarchy that clearly placed “straight” above homosexual sex and touched on the men’s concern about both their sexuality and libidos.109 It also underscores how starved the men were for physical affection.
Attitudes toward the homoerotic acts varied greatly.110 Fisher, who found that the only examples of flagrant homosexuality occurred among medical personnel, believed that it was “abhorred by other prisoners.”111 Prouse, who records an incident where he shoved a man coming on to him against the wall, was even more disturbed by the possibility of where, “if the war went on endlessly,” the human need for emotional support and physical affection would lead.112 Ellwood took a more sanguine view: homosexual relationships were formed, “but nobody seemed to take it as serious, you know. They’d look at it and discuss it amongst ourselves, and that was it. It was accepted that some people are that way.”113
CARSWELL LEARNS THE MEANING OF “TROUBLE AND STRIFE”
The final decision for Carswell’s plan to swap over with a British private so that he could try to escape with another British soldier lay not with the Escape Committee but with Carswell’s barracks mates and muckers, for they would have to live and share meals with Dennis Reeves. Carswell’s doppelgänger likely got on better with his new mates than Carswell did with John Donaldson, who disliked both Canadians and air force men with equal ardour.
Swapping over may have been easier than digging tunnels but it still required work. Reeves had the simpler job. Carswell had said nothing during his interrogation, was new to the camp and his letters home had been perfunctory, so the Germans knew little about him. Reeves, by contrast, was an open book thanks to the rifle butts and boots used on him when he was captured, as was Donaldson, just before Dunkirk three years earlier. Accordingly, Carswell had spent the early part of March learning the details of Reeves’s life. Carswell’s dress rehearsal occurred in the British Army compound. Since his accent would give him away, though he learned the ways of cockney rhyming slang, in which “trouble and strife” means “wife,” he spoke as little as possible. What words that did pass his lips were affected Briticisms such as “blimey” and “foocking Jerries!”114
While Red Cross parcels never contained escape equipment, their contents still aided escapers. Carswell saved some chocolate bars, biscuits and cans of bully beef. His former barracks mates chipped in more chocolate and the all-important cigarettes. Some of this largesse never left the camp. To entice the guards into being less than thorough in their search of “Reeves,” Carswell placed a cache of chocolate, cigarettes and soap on the top of his pack.
RCAF PILOT OFFICER KINGSLEY BROWN LEARNS THE WAR NEWS FROM A TALKATIVE SS SOLDIER
“It’s a scandal! They get all these poor Italians and Slovaks and Bulgarians in the country and let them wander around like lost sheep! … Here’s two more. Look at them! Bulgarians. Steelworkers. And nobody had sense enough to tell them how to get to Strasbourg!”115 The outburst by the elderly policeman in the Chemnitz train station told Kingsley Brown and his British escape partner, Gordon Brettell, that their cover was working.
The policeman’s annoyance at the functionary who had sent the two tramp workers didn’t stop him from helping them. When he saw that they were heading to Strasbourg via Nürnberg, he told them that they’d have to return to Leipzig and get a train from there, travelling to Nürnberg being impossible because the city had been heavily bombed. He then bought them tickets and told them to go have beer while they waited for the late-night train.
More than four decades later, Brown recalled the frisson of sitting in a train compartment with several German soldiers and a member of the SS. With millions of dragooned foreign workers in the Reich, the soldiers took no notice of two poorly dressed men but openly envied the uniform of the Hermann Göring Division. The SS’s view of itself as the elite and the poster in the carriage that read “Beware the Third Person! The Enemy has Ears!” notwithstanding, the SS soldier let his comrades—and, unwittingly, two Allied officers—in on a little secret: his division was “being posted to the front to face the Anglo-Americans in Tunisia.”
CARSWELL AND HIS ESCAPE PARTNER REMIND SOME KRIEGIES OF THEIR DUTY
Neither Carswell nor Donaldson was impressed with the POWs they met at the brewery where they stopped for a night on the way to a work camp at a graphite mine. Nor were they impressed by the Kriegies they met at the mine. At the brewery, when Donaldson asked if anyone had tried to escape, as the window had only two bars and there was only one guard, he was stunned by the answer: “Don’t be a bloody fool…. This is the best fucking job in Germany! Why would we want to ruin everything by some silly bugger trying to escape?” One of the men then turned on Carswell, accusing him of being a “fucking Yank or Canadian” and probably an air force swapover to boot.116
Donaldson defended Carswell, quickly adding that he had been shot down three months before, which lowered the temperature in the room. One soldier asked, “What’s it like in England now, mate?” As they told him how they’d been half-starved and -frozen during the winter of 1940–41, Carswell understood why the fight had gone out of them, save for the times they urinated into the beer barrels destined for the SS.
The 15 POWs at the graphite mine had a tacit agreement with their guard, “Hermann the German.” He’d go easy on them if they didn’t try to escape (thus allowing him to spend time with his girlfriend). Donaldson angrily scotched their objections to their escape plans. “There is still a fucking war on. We are all British. The Jerries are the enemy, not us. It is our duty to try to escape, and it is your duty to try to help us. And remember one thing, this war will be over some day, and we are going to fucking well win it. After that, there’ll be a fucking reckoning!”
BROWN’S IMPROMPTU BIRTHDAY PARTY
He was now 32 years and one day old, and the party the night before hadn’t been half bad. Some New Yorkers, captured a few months earlier in Tunisia and then recaptured after escaping from a POW camp, attended, as did French POWs who brought cakes, cookies and strong Gauloises cigarettes; the jovial German guards brought extra-large canisters of steaming chicory “coffee.” Still, as Kingsley Brown savoured the memory of the party, the question lingered: would he and Gordon Brettell have gotten farther had Sir Arthur Harris sent his bombers elsewhere a few nights earlier?
Had he, they would never have had to decamp to the air-raid shelter crammed with people who had nothing better to do but “notice the amateurish needlework that had transformed our bed blankets into civilian suits.”117 For a short time after the “All Clear” sounded, and while Brown and his partner enjoyed a beer, he thought they’d escaped—until two uniformed men stormed into the beer parlour and pointed directly at them.
Their only hope lay with their papers, which had passed muster with the old policeman, and Brown saying in heavily accented German that they were Bulgarian steelworkers. After seeing that their travel passes said they were going to Leipzig, the inspector left the room and made a phone call. When he returned, he said to the guards that they weren’t Bulgarian but French, and again examined their papers. Brown tried to keep the story going, and the inspector played along for a moment, then told Brown that in Leipzig the steel company had only a sales office. Brown was crestfallen because the information for the papers came from the very database he himself had compiled. When the inspector dropped the word “Gestapo,” the jig was up and they pulled out their dog tags. Fifteen days of solitary, what the Germans called “sharp arrest,” followed when they were returned to Stalag Luft III.
RCAF FLIGHT LIEUTENANT VINCENT MCAULEY MEETS A VERY-WELL-DRESSED SOLDIER
Since enlisting in the RCAF on 26 June 1940 in Moncton, New Brunswick, Vincent McAuley had seen many colour of uniforms: the blue of the Commonwealth’s air forces, the green of the US Army Air Forces and the GIs, and Canadian and British khaki. After being shot down on 11 December on his 45th mission after bombing Turin, Italy, he saw the green of the Italian soldiers and black of the Hugo Boss–designed uniforms of the Italian intelligence service. But neither he; his flight sergeant, Frederick Nightingale; nor British quartermaster sergeant William Cook, who had escaped with him from the Celio Military Hospital in Rome, had ever seen a uniform like this.
Before them stood a Catholic soldier belonging to the oldest standing army in the world, Pontificia Cohors Helvetica, the pope’s Swiss Guard. He wore billowing britches with alternating wide red, orange and blue stripes that tapered to tights below the knee, the blue signalling the royal pretensions of the Medici family of Renaissance Florence. Where the airmen clipped on their parachutes, this soldier had buckled on armour, above which sat a white ruff collar, like those worn by Her Majesty and courtiers in the paintings of the only Queen Elizabeth England had yet had. On his head sat a shiny morion helmet, like the ones worn by the Spanish conquistadors. He carried a sword and a halberd, a six-foot pole topped with a pike and axe blade designed in the 14th century to use against mounted knights.
After climbing the wall that surrounded the hospital, the escapers turned northwest and past the Colosseum, which glowed a ghostly white under the light of the quarter moon, before turning down the Via dei Fori Imperiali, which runs by the Roman Forum. Not far from the northeast corner of the forum, across the Piazza Venezia, stood the 230-foot-high and more than 400-foot-long monument to King Victor Emmanuel II. To avoid attracting attention from the guards around the monument, they likely turned left after the forum, which took them by the famous bronze statue of Marcus Aurelius and into the Jewish Ghetto before they crossed over the Ponte Sant’Angelo, at around 3:45 a.m.
Once across the Tiber, they avoided the quickest way to the Vatican, Via della Conciliazione, named for the Lateran Accords, which ensured the independence of the Holy See from Italy, the legal point upon which McAuley and his companions staked their freedom. The street ran straight from behind the Castel Sant’Angelo (Hadrian’s Mausoleum) to the Piazza del Popolo where Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s sweeping colonnades embrace St. Peter’s Square (and, symbolically, the world). Even at that early hour, the street was too filled with people to be safe. Instead, the escapers trusted themselves to the ancient streets of the Borgo.
As McAuley and Nightingale followed at a safe distance, Cook asked a man in German to direct him to the Vatican. When, after following his directions, they remained within the cramped, narrow streets of the Borgo, unable to see even Michelangelo’s famed dome, Cook asked a second man for help. Warily, he led Cook through the Porta Angelica on the eastern side of the colonnade and into St. Peter’s Square itself. After the man vanished, Cook left the safety of the square and rejoined McAuley and Nightingale. Worried that the man who had guided him might have whispered a word or two to a carabiniere, Cook led his comrades into the square through another entrance. A few moments later they stood before the ornately dressed Swiss Guard, who mistook them for generals.
MACDONALD JOINS THE “CATERPILLER CLUB”
The first whiff didn’t quite register.
Then it strengthened to an undeniable smell of smoke. The instruments told Pilot Officer Lee Usher that the bomber’s engines were operating normally, but standard operating procedure called for him to abort the mission. “We had just got turned round,” recalls bomb aimer MacDonald, “when I realized that the smoke was coming from the elements that heated the bombs in the bomb bay. I told Usher that I’d forgotten I’d turned the heater on. Now that we knew where the burning smell came from, he decided to turn around to continue our mission despite the fact that we were no longer part of the bomber stream and would be flying alone.”
As he neared the target, lying prone in the bomb aimer’s glass-enclosed position in the plane’s nose, lit up by searchlights, MacDonald thought, “I’m never going to live through this wall of flak and tracer bullets,” which had already torn apart the plane’s inner starboard engine. He fought to keep his eyes from being blinded by the searchlights and called “Right, Right, Steady, Steady, Left, Right” into the intercom to direct the plane over its target. In spite of his training, MacDonald found himself unable to keep looking through the bomb sight to watch the bombs fall.
Freed from the six tons of bombs, the damaged Halifax bomber leaped higher. That, combined with the extra speed Usher now had because the plane was lighter, allowed him to break out of the cone of light. “I wasn’t a pilot, but I knew enough that Lee would have to feather the dead engine on the way back home. But we’d all seen much more heavily damaged planes land, so we thought we had a pretty good chance,” says MacDonald.
A half hour later, Walter Reed, the plane’s mid-upper gunner, called out that there was another Halifax not far below them. Harry Jay, the plane’s rear gunner, leaned over his four .303 machine guns and saw to his horror not a Halifax but a Messerschmitt 110 night fighter shadowing them in what essentially was the gunner’s blind spot. In an attempt to get Jay the angle he needed, Usher tried accelerating and decelerating. Desperate, Jay depressed his guns as far as he could and fired, only to see his tracers fall harmlessly behind the German plane.
The German pilot pulled back on his joystick and within seconds was flying more or less level with the Canadian bomber and firing. The stream of bullets caused, Jay later recalled, the senseless reflex of drawing his stomach in and “as far away as possible from the incoming shells that surely had no place else to go.” Closer to the nose cone, MacDonald had the same reflex, cringing and pulling back from the starboard window as the bullets destroyed another engine. A moment later, through the intercom Jay called out, “I got ‘im, I got ‘im!”118
Even without its bombs and about half of its 7,500 tons of fuel already burned off, with two engines destroyed, the Halifax was an ungainly beast. But as long as Usher could maintain about 100 miles per hour, he could keep it in the air. Everything changed a half hour later, when another German plane fired and destroyed a third engine and set the plane on fire.
“I was in my position in the bomber’s sight. I felt the thud of the bullets and immediately felt the plane begin a sort of wallow. Usher gave the order to bail out, and I reached for my parachute that was stored in the bin at my right elbow,” recounts MacDonald. The bomb aimer’s position may be the most exposed in the plane, but it was closest to the hatch, which MacDonald opened a moment after clipping on his parachute. Then, as he eased his feet into the slipstream beneath the plane, he realized he was about to break his neck because he was still wearing the leather flying helmet’s connect to the intercom. After pulling his feet back into the plane, MacDonald yanked off his helmet. In the moment before he jumped, the creaking of the fuselage and the roar of the functioning and stuttering engines merged with “a rushing sound that can only be compared to a waterfall.”
As MacDonald fell at a rate of 36 feet per second (per second) and his plane, an ever-growing orange glow, flew on, he was enveloped in the most profound silence. After counting to seven and falling about 1,000 feet, he pulled the rip cord. “Suddenly I was floating,” he says, “and to my horror, the German made one circle around me, and I thought he was going to fire. But for the grace of God it didn’t happen.”
MACDONALD IS FED AND GIVEN A PLACE TO SLEEP
“Confusion,” recalls MacDonald, “stunned confusion that overrode everything, even what they tried to drill into our head in escape training back in England. I knew that as soon as I’d landed in the four inches of new grain, I had to uncouple my chute, bury it and get away because the German spotters would be watching for where I landed. But, for long moments, all I could hear was the gunfire that had doomed our plane, and hectic images of the bullets, the fire and rushing to the hatch crowded my mind until I sat down next to a tree and settled myself.”
Once his training kicked in, MacDonald threw some leaves over his chute, then cut off the sergeant swipes and epaulets he’d worked so hard to earn before crawling under a bush. Later, he heard farmers in the field speaking French and wondered about his crewmates. Since in its last moments the plane was flying a tight circle, they must have landed nearby.
That night, the hungry and extremely thirsty evader realized that walking to Spain was impossible. Across an open field, near the village of Beaumont-en-Beine, MacDonald saw a light, a rare sight that could indicate that the building was military. “There were few street lamps back home, so I was used to walking only by the light of the night sky,” says MacDonald. “But this night was dark, and I could not make out much about the building, which I approached from its rear, until I was very close. To satisfy myself that there weren’t any troops about, I went around to the front—and relaxed a little when I saw a large opened gate.” Then he looked up and saw through the lit window a woman and a little girl clinging to her nightgown. MacDonald summoned up his high school French for a strong whisper: “Je suis Anglais, and I am thirsty.”
The light disappeared and, a moment later, another shone from what he correctly guessed was the kitchen. In traditional French peasant fashion, the woman who opened the door offered MacDonald a glass of wine and had trouble understanding not MacDonald’s words—“Pas d’vin, d’eau”—but why he would want water. Nevertheless, Madame Dutilleul gave him a cup and pointed toward the pantry. A short time later, while he was eating toast and eggs and drinking a cup of coffee, the dog started barking. MacDonald’s blood froze.
“She saw my fright and immediately said, ‘Mon mari. Pas les Allemands’ [My husband. Not the Germans]. I had only a moment to wonder what this French farmer would say when he walked into his house in the middle of the night and found his wife feeding a downed Canadian airman. His eyes opened wide when he heard my story and said that I could sleep there that night.”
CARSWELL AND DONALDSON PASS AS GOOD GERMANS
They were hiding in what “Down East” is called a two-holer, wearing the heavy coats, breathing the stench of shit and hoping that Herman the German’s replacement wouldn’t feel nature’s call. After hearing the guard hop on his bicycle to go see the Fräulein who had shared her favours with Hermann, Carswell and Donaldson slipped away from the Arbeitskommando.
By 3 a.m., they were well clear of the graphite mine. As the eastern sky lightened, they crawled under some bushes. Woken hours later by a barking dog, Carswell peered through the bushes and saw a lone farmer driving an ox forward, prompting the men to move to a nearby wood. As the hours passed and insects tormented them, they realized they had made a basic error: forgetting a filled water bottle. Even in the shade, thirst soon tormented them, as it would until well after dark, when they left the forest and found water. By midnight on the 18th, they were crossing a high ridge somewhere in the Sudetenland, heading west.
The Hollywood version of the Third Reich—that the Hitlerian state was a well-oiled machine—is overstated. At its height in 1944, the SS had some 32,000 agents, fewer than today’s New York Police Department. Still, to lessen the chance of arousing suspicions, while still up on the ridge, they practised giving the Nazi salute and convincing renditions of “Heil Hitler!” Near a village, they saw two men approaching, and despite hearing his own heart pounding, Carswell was determined to act natural. The two POWs raised their arms in the fascist salute and shouted “Heil Hitler!” The startled farmhands quickly returned the salute.
CARSWELL AND DONALDSON GET ON THE WRONG TRAIN
A few more Heil Hitler’s greased their way across a bridge leading to a road that allowed Carswell and Donaldson to put 30 miles between them and the work camp. And while the bushes they crawled under near dawn a few days after they’d escaped provided a reasonable amount of cover from prying eyes, the copse of trees they were in now did little to protect them from the cold drizzle. The freight train struggling up a nearby hill offered both shelter from the elements and a more speedy way of heading southwest. Carswell, who, like many Canadian teens, had hopped freight trains for the fun of it, led the way—running in time with the train, then veering closer to it until he grasped the ladder between two cars. Donaldson tripped on his first try but then clambered aboard. As the train chugged through the night, they hid under the tarp covering a lumber car, enjoying the thought that they’d be near the Swiss border by evening.
Instead, as the sun set, they found themselves in a marshalling yard, which put them too close for comfort to the guards protecting the yard and also possibly in the crosshairs of Allied bombers. Their immediate concern, however, was the cold, which by midnight forced them to risk running to a hay wagon, where they hoped to cover themselves to keep warm. The hay, however, was frozen, and it took two hours to cut away enough to hide under the tightly tied tarp. Although warmed by their labours and now hidden, they continued suffering for having forgotten a water bottle. Eventually, sometime before dawn, they fell asleep.
Woken by the clanks and screeches of railcars being shunted about, the men felt their spirits rise when their car was attached to a train, only to plummet when the train started back in the direction from which they had come. Through the long day, as they snapped at each other or lapsed into angry silence, their tongues growing ever larger and their throats more scratchy, the train took them deeper into Germany. Late in the afternoon, the train stopped. As workmen unloaded a nearby car, they slipped off the train and hid under a nearby building that was raised on pylons.
A short time later, a workman walked under the building to urinate. As he did so, he looked up and saw Carswell and Donaldson and froze, then began to back his way out of the open basement. Donaldson called out softly to him in German, telling him that he and Carswell were escaped POWs. For a few moments it appeared that they’d been lucky and that the man wasn’t a Sudeten German but a Czech. Then came the sound of running, blowing whistles and orders barked out in German.
MADAME ZANNIE TAKES MACDONALD ON AN IMPORTANT BICYCLE RIDE
Shortly after MacDonald woke up, a man arrived at the Dutilleuls’ asking if he wanted to escape. “I was anxious as hell. Here I was, somewhere in France. I could have found a policeman, shown him my dog tags and surrendered. I was pretty sure I’d get the Geneva protections. But, strangely, doing so never crossed my mind. Here were strangers, men, a father and mother who were willing to risk everything for me, a stranger, who had [literally] dropped in from the sky,” says MacDonald. He had been given civilian clothes that fit reasonably well and breakfast. Shortly after, a woman who he later learned was Madame Zannie arrived with two bicycles, and soon he was pedalling after her “at a respectable distance” to her wooden house, which doubled as a seed store. “No one came to the house and there was no telephone, so I assumed that the time Zannie arrived had all been arranged in advance,” he says.
The next day, Zannie led him to Chauny, a small town nestled between the Oise River and the St. Quentin Canal. The low rolling hills covered in new shoots of grain and wildflowers reminded MacDonald of home. At a safe house, a Resistance leader unrolled a map and pointed to a location he wanted bombed. “He wanted me to take the coordinates in my pocket but, since I was already running a great risk by being out of uniform, I thought better of this because it would give the Germans another excuse to execute me for being a spy. Instead, I memorized the coordinates,” says MacDonald.
That night, a bomber stream passing over Chauny was especially noticeable. “I was in the bedroom on the second floor of the stone house. I was used to saying grace at meals, but this wasn’t done by these Resistance people. Before I climbed into bed, I took out my rosary and began praying, knowing that in just a few hours, when it was near 10 p.m. in New Glasgow, my parents and sister too would be on their knees praying for me. I hadn’t been in bed long when I heard bombers. There were a lot of them and they were awfully low,” says MacDonald.
About a quarter of an hour after the last of the bombers slipped deeper over Festung Europa, MacDonald heard a commotion downstairs. “Concerned that the Germans knew I was there, I quietly climbed out of bed, opened the door and went to the stairs. From the top of the stairs, I could see the front door, and through it I saw a number of bloodied men in RAF blue walk into the house. Just as I was about to say something, one of the French underground men who had brought the RAF men to the house shushed me and motioned me back to my room,” says MacDonald. Whether the plane had malfunctioned or been shot down, in his mind’s eye MacDonald saw the crew’s terror-filled faces as their plane gyrated wildly in the sky and could almost hear the thuds of their bodies tossed against unyielding bulkheads. Knowing the fear that one might have only moments to live, he once again thanked the Lord that he had survived.
EASTER SUNDAY
The pain of Easter was both different from and the same as that of Christmas. The POWs were still separated from their families and had to make do with a meal prepared from supplies saved from Red Cross parcels.
The story of Jesus’s arrest, trial, scourging, death on the Cross and Resurrection had special significance for the airmen who had escaped from their burning airborne trenches and for the soldiers who had been through the fires of Dieppe. Yet, Darch says, they felt an additional pain. The Canadian Corps went over the top on 9 April 1917 on their way to defeat the Germans on Vimy Ridge; nevertheless, for men like Darch, that great victory was more associated with Easter Monday than with the actual dates of the Battle of Arras. At Eastertide, therefore, the memory of the humiliation of the surrender on the beaches of Dieppe and the ongoing humiliation of being shackled, combined to deepen their feeling of having failed to live up to the standard set by their fathers.
The end of Easter vigil signifies the most joyous event in the Christian calendar, the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. As they did for Christmas, Darch and hundreds of his comrades, irrespective of their being Catholic or Protestant, went to hear Padre John Foote say mass. “It didn’t matter to us who conducted the Easter service,” explains Darch. “Two things were important. The first was that we were together saying prayers and celebrating the holiday. The second was that the service was one of the few times we knew that we were doing something in the same way we had done at home and that our families were doing that day.”
Father Boulanger in Stalag XXI-A, in Schildberg, Poland, was perhaps the best equipped to celebrate Easter. Boulanger’s congregants celebrated the Resurrection both in deed—the removal of the shroud that symbolized Christ’s death from the Cross—and by chocolate and other sweets paid for with money donated by the children of the diocese of Grenoble.
MACDONALD HIDES AT DR. LUPANOV’S
Two days after returning to Madame Zannie’s house, the two were once again on bicycles and pedalling toward Flavy-le-Martel: “She led me to a fine two-story red-brick house that was much more substantial than her wooden house and even the one I grew up in in Nova Scotia. The house I had stopped at the night before had a gate, but it was an old one. This house was surrounded by a wrought-iron fence set into brick supports. Behind the house was a large backyard that was surrounded by a brick wall about seven feet high that afforded reasonably good protection, so I could go outside. Unlike both of the other houses I’d been in, this one had indoor plumbing.”
MacDonald was welcomed by Dr. Lupanov, a Bulgarian who was also in hiding; his wife, Lucien; and her brother Felix. They were friendly, gave MacDonald a room to sleep in and food but did not, to his surprise, ask any questions about Canada.
“The house fronted onto the town’s main street, and I was told to be careful about showing myself there. About three days after I arrived, I was walking through the living room and stopped to look outside. The sound of a truck arriving made me more than a little apprehensive, but I continued to watch as the passenger door opened, and who should come out but ‘Parky’ our navigator,” recalls MacDonald. For the next month and a half, MacDonald and Parkinson remained with the Lupanov family, sometimes taking bicycle rides to keep from getting cabin fever, and listening intently to Felix’s stories of sabotage.
MCAULEY’S AUDIENCE WITH POPE PIUS XII
Nothing in Royalton, New Brunswick, McAuley’s hometown or in the cramped apartment buildings around Eglinton and Yonge, in Toronto, where he had lived before the war had prepared McAuley for the sweeping marble-floored hallways that led to the papal apartments. McAuley’s trained engineer’s eye could not have helped noting the foreshortening and other tricks of perspective in the 16th- and 17th-century frescoes adorning the walls.
As they would have for their king, George VI, all three knelt when they entered Pope Pius XII’s study and saw the thin, bookish man sitting on the ornate chair, in front of which was a small stool for Catholics to kneel on when receiving the pope’s blessing. Though controversy rages about Pius’s actions (or inactions) vis-à-vis the Holocaust, there is no doubt about his commitment to protect Allied escapers who reached Vatican City; he refused an official request that the three escapers be turned over to the Italian police. Pius gave each escaper rosary beads and his benediction, and ended their meeting with the invocation “Benedicat vos omnipotens Deus, Pater et Filius et Spiritus Sanctus,” some of which, thanks to his high school Latin, McAuley understood: “May almighty God bless you, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.”
MR. AND MRS. MACDONALD HAVE A MOMENT OF HOPE
About the time the pope blessed a Protestant Canadian airman, Pius’s co-religionists in Lourdes, Nova Scotia, were in church praying for their son, Ian. The blue aerogram that had arrived on the 24th seemed to have answered earlier prayers: it suggested that RCAF officials in London had made a ghastly mistake. For before them in Ian’s flowing hand was his home address—and on the inside of the folded flimsy paper was his note written in the same, almost carefree tone they’d grown used to: “I just received your box of chocolates a couple of days ago…. Thanks a lot. They disappeared like wildfire.”
Moments after reading Ian’s words telling them that he’d written to Father Miller thanking him for the cigarettes (and pointing out that, since he didn’t smoke, chocolate bars were preferable), the MacDonalds’ elation dissolved. For while the Stellarton, Nova Scotia, post office stamped the letter on 24 April, the squadron’s stamp read 30 March. The date in Ian’s hand inside the letter, 28-3-43 (28 March 1943), erased all doubt. Mr. and Mrs. MacDonald’s boy had written the letter three weeks before he climbed into his Halifax on 14 April.
PROUSE AND HIS ESCAPE PARTNERS DO SOME SIGHTSEEING
Prouse, carrying papers saying he was a Czech labourer named Janek Mrachek, and two other Kriegies took advantage of the half-light to slip out of the line of POWs heading for a factory. They dropped into the ditch between the inner and outer fence, where they dug up escape gear that had been previously hidden. Behind the boilerhouse they tore off their uniforms and put on their washed-out red civilian clothes, dyed with a brew that the cauldron master convinced a guard was a soup made from rotten cabbage. As their comrades frustrated the morning Appell by moving about, they joined the column of civilian night workers leaving the camp. Prouse’s heart sank as he neared the main gate: “Rat Face” was checking identity cards, and he knew Prouse’s face well enough to see that it didn’t quite match the one on his card. Prouse’s “Heil Hitler,” however, seemed to do the trick, as Rat Face broke off looking at him, allowing Prouse and the two other Kriegies to take a few more steps toward freedom.
Then came the sirens, and the three escapers pushed their way through the civilian workers in front of them before jumping a fence and running across a scrub field. Beyond it was a railway embankment, which the escapers climbed up. As they fought to catch their breath, 20 guards with police dogs approached, prompting Prouse and his comrades to slide down the other side of the embankment and run into a dense evergreen forest.
Since the dogs weren’t bloodhounds and couldn’t pick up the scent, the guards fired shots in the hope of flushing out the escapers. Over the course of his six long hours in hiding, Prouse, misremembering his high school Shakespeare, imagined, “a thousand deaths.”119 By mid-afternoon the searchers had given up, but the escapers didn’t leave the wood until near 10 p.m., when they walked through an unusually cold late-April night to a freight yard, where they climbed onto a boxcar. Sometime before dawn they jumped from the moving train, and found a deserted shack in which they grabbed a few hours’ sleep, then a shave.
This last was important, because Kassel, the town they walked to upon waking, was a good size and still undamaged, and its residents prided themselves on their propriety. The escapers’ appearance and Kriegie Tom Glassey’s German passed muster at the ticket counter and on the train to Warburg—and in the Warburg station’s restaurant, where he ordered a round of beers. Before long, they were sleeping, their heads resting on the table.
When he awoke, Prouse didn’t have time to worry about his bruised pride at having been put under by a single beer; of more concern were the German soldiers who had bedded down on the large round table. After slinking away to the toilets, where the escapers again shaved, Prouse nearly blew their cover by asking a station agent if the train pulling out of the station was going to Warburg. Prouse realized that in his poor German he’d asked if the train was going to the town he was already in. He ran to the train that was then boarding passengers for Arnsberg. A few moments later he spotted his companions, who had just boarded the train. Prouse sat next to a German soldier so enamoured with his own voice that, for the entire two-hour trip, he didn’t notice that all the Canadian ever said was “ja” or “nein.”
When they climbed down from the train in Arnsberg, Prouse was so focused on looking out for police and soldiers that he didn’t notice a woman. After knocking into him, the motherly-looking Frau whispered “Aufpassen!” (Watch out!), signalling that his disguise was anything but perfect. A short while later, after several worrisome looks from soldiers in the beer parlour, the escapers quietly got up and left. Years later, Prouse joked that when, once back on the street, they saw a troop of German soldiers walking toward them, and “cowardice being the better part of valour” they turned into a side street.
The side street ended at the foot of a hill, at the top of which they saw the ruins of the town’s castle. An “apparition in the shape of a very old man seemed to emerge from the ground,” Prouse recalled. The man, it turned out, was the caretaker of the castle, parts of which dated back 900 years. Napoleon had visited the castle during his bid to conquer Europe. The caretaker gave them something to eat and drink, and then a tour, never asking who they were, what they were doing there, “nor commenting on Tommy’s quiet translations of the commentary.”120