The first angel sounded, and there followed hail and fire mingled with blood, and they were cast upon the earth: the third part of the trees was burnt up, and all green grass was burnt up.
— REVELATION 8 : 7
Oberfeldwebel Hermann Glemnitz may have been rather dim, but he was dogged. And on 8 September, he was lucky. His hunch that something was up in Hut 128 seemed wrongheaded until, as he was leaving, a ferret dropped a tool that chipped off a piece of the thin cement camouflaging the trapdoor leading to “Tom.”
The disappointment of the men who had dug out more than 25 tons of earth was partly ameliorated when the explosion meant to destroy the 260-foot-long tunnel blew their hut from its foundations. Glemnitz may have “doubted that there would be another tunnel because all available wood [bed slats] had been used up,” but he was wrong.138 The digging of “Harry” and “Dick” continued apace, as did work in the workshops. In an attempt to lessen the chance of an escaper being taken for a spy, engraved into the the bottom of the compasses they made were the words “Made in Stalag Luft III—Pat Pend.”
STEWART COWAN IS ORDERED NOT TO ESCAPE
Upon hearing that Mussolini’s successor planned to surrender to the Allies, the Italian guards vanished. Then, after a night of eating as much Red Cross chocolate as they could, failing to make a quick batch of homebrew and singing ribald songs, the POWs found themselves on morning parade listening to Colonel Marshall, the camp’s Senior British Officer: “Every POW will remain in the camp. Anyone disobeying these orders is subject to court martial at a later date! You will be kept informed of any changes in my directive.”139 No one was happy with this order, though given the fluidity of the situation in the countryside, it had merit. What dismayed Stewart Cowan and the other men were armed NCOs now standing guard in the watchtowers and the implication that they’d shoot anyone attempting to escape.
AFTER WALKING ACROSS A MUD FLATS, ROBERT BROOKS IS BETRAYED
Skipper Hansen was willing to move Robert Brooks, whose presence had become an open secret to everyone except, somehow, the Germans who regularly walked by the farm where the Canadian had been taken after heavy rains began flooding the drainage ditch he was hiding in. However, on 28 August, Germany’s erstwhile Aryan allies in the Danish government stopped cooperating with Berlin, prompting a series of surprisingly mild reactions, one of which was the mandatory searching of boats plying the Danish coast.
In an attempt to get Brooks off the island, after dark on the night on 11 September, a night of exceptionally low tide, the village postman led him two-thirds of the way across the muddy flats of the Wadden Sea. To avoid minefields, Brooks followed a small brook inland. Near midnight, knowing how much the Danes had done for him, he approached a farmhouse to ask for help.
The farmer welcomed him. Only when the police arrived about a half hour later did Brooks realize that after three weeks on the run he’d been betrayed. Since he was in civilian clothes, Brooks was handed over to the SS. The officer who interrogated him was less interested in the RCAF-issue identity disks than with how Brooks came to be clean-shaven, presumably so the SS could unravel the Resistance circuit that had helped him. Thus the officer’s dismay at learning that a guard had lent Brooks a razor.
By the time Brooks arrived at Stalag IV-B, near Zeithain, in Lower Saxony, Roy McLernon was in Frederikshavn, on the east coast of Denmark, where he met Verner Jensen, who arranged for his passage to freedom in Sweden.140
ROBERT PROUSE SEES EVIDENCE OF THE HOLOCAUST
His first visit to the eye hospital in Haina was less painful, if no more successful, than his visit to the village doctor in Arnstadt had been a few weeks earlier. Herr Doktor treated Robert Prouse’s intense back pain by having two other POWs hold him upright while he smashed his educated fist on Prouse’s head, saying, “No blood, no swelling, back to work!”141 Prouse’s barracks mates were more understanding, covering his work shifts and surreptitiously moving him from bed to bed during the day so what was likely a herniated disk could heal. The eye doctor in Haina, at least, gave Prouse some drops.
On his second visit to the hospital, a doctor found a scratch on his eye. Despite being assured that he’d be able to leave the hospital as soon as the freezing came out of his eye, when it did, the doctors decided to keep Prouse; in total, he spent ten days in the hospital. There, night brought not the relief of sleep, during which a few more hours of incarceration slipped by, but rather the sickening sound of screams coming from the neighbouring “experimental hospital housing political prisoners,” most of whom, he’d been told, were Jewish.
His improved sight only heightened the horror. One morning, disbelieving that he’d actually seen a truck being piled high with dead bodies, Prouse closed his eyes. When he opened them, he saw still another load of naked bodies being hauled into the truck. The macabre scene elicited emotions beyond what even the terrible fighting and doleful sights on the beaches of Dieppe did. That early morning, horror “mingled with a touch of fear at the closeness of death.”
COWAN IS TAKEN PRISONER BY THE GERMANS
The Liberator bombers flying low over the prison camp were taken to mean that allied troops were close indeed. Then, as Cowan and the others stood at ease during an unexpected parade on the 20th, came the devastating news: the Germans were moving fast to consolidate their hold on Italy and were going to take possession of the camp the next day. Their arrival within an hour rendered the rescission of the No Escape order moot.
Two days later, Cowan and the others were loaded at bayonet point into trucks that took them to Sulmona, 80 miles east of Rome. The conditions were wretched, with the thousands of bedbugs providing the only diversion: checking for new bite patterns every morning.
Trying to help Father Goudreau bear his load, in either his April or July 1943 letter, both of which arrived in Sagan in late September, Father Ducharme recalled the regimen they willingly accepted as scholasticates and as Oblate missionaries: pre-dawn prayers, hours of contemplation and being apart from society and submission. Goudreau reacted strongly, noting the difference between the “overflowing life of the scholastics” and the “strange kind of winter sleep” of being a POW.
Goudreau knew enough about the Basutos to know that the women would be wearing only shifts. Still, during a recent heat wave, he found the POWs’ “biblical nudity” shocking. But thundering against it in his homily would cause his parishioners to go “cross-eyed” and earn him the reputation of being “narrow-minded.” Equally significant, it would put a distance between him and the men, who would stop coming to his courses in ethics, French and Latin, important for camp morale by giving some meaning to the time behind the barbed wire.
COWAN AND GEORGE ESCAPE AND ARE SURPRISED BY WHO HELPS THEM
It had been a close call but not because of the Shoot to Kill order. Rather, just before Cowan and his escape partner, a British soldier named George, were to jump from the top of a railcar carrying them to Germany, the train entered a tunnel. When they did jump, rifle shots into the darkness told them that at least one guard had seen something. Slowed by the knee Cowan twisted upon landing, they found a pile of hay into which they burrowed to hide and sleep.
In the morning, to make better time going south toward the Allied lines and knowing that since the Italian Army had disintegrated the countryside was filled with men making their way home, the two POWs risked using the roads. A couple of well-placed “Buona seras” bought the goodwill they needed from men obviously happy to be out of the war. Late on 1 October, they took shelter in a cave George had found some distance up a rise. The brisk air and early October snowfall they awoke to reminded Cowan of home.
Sometime after noon, just moments after the men heard the sound of breaking twigs, a boy about 12 years old, who they soon learned was named Egidio Gatta, spotted them as he stepped in front of the cave. George’s “Canadese, Canadese” meant nothing to the boy balanced between fear and wonder; “Inglese, Inglese,” by contrast, caused him to break out “into a friendly smile.”142 George soon learned that not only did an American woman and her daughters live in the boy’s village but, even more importantly, no Germans had come looking for escapees.
Their woollen Red Cross blankets hardly kept out the cold on the wet night of 4 October. And, during the day, the sight of Germans looking over the countryside scouting for food and wine was worrisome, but since Egidio told them that there was no path running from the road to the rise, they felt safe. Near dusk, Egidio appeared carrying fresh bread and wonderfully runny goat’s milk cheese.
The next day, even before she said “I’m Elda DiIanni” in an unmistakable New England accent, Cowan was smitten with the beautiful black-haired girl who flouted the warning that “anyone hiding POWs would be shot on the spot.” The girl from Massachusetts told them that she, her sister and mother had been vacationing in their ancestral village when Italy declared war on the United States. Elda also told them that before coming to meet them, she had spoken to the village’s mayor, both because she needed help finding a family to take them in and to preserve her honour—and their lives. Airmen like Cowan may have gone into battle on the wings of cutting-edge technology, but in remote European villages, people lived and died by harsh, though clear, codes: “In Villalago, a girl was expected to be a virgin for her marriage and anyone violating a young girl’s virginity deserved to be shot, or killed in some other ignominious manner.”
Egidio returned the following day with more food and a note saying that the next day a man would come with him to lead the men to a safe house belonging to Signora Iafolla. Elda quickly explained that Iafolla was risking her life and that of her two daughters to help the Canadian and his escape partner, George, because they regularly received letters from Iafolla’s son-in-law telling how well he was being treated in a POW camp in Alberta. Grateful to be able to offer their host something special, Cowan passed Elda a tin with a Red Cross sticker on it, and soon they were “sipping hot cocoa and conversing about far away Canada.”
PROUSE MISSES OUT ON BEING INCLUDED IN A PRISONER-OF-WAR EXCHANGE
A month earlier, his scratched eye would have resulted in Prouse being one of the 66 Canadians being repatriated after being declared Definitely Unfit for Service.143 By contrast, recovering resulted in his being one of hundreds of Kriegies herded into boxcars for transport to a makeshift camp at Langensalza.
The overcrowded camp was as far from the rules laid down by Geneva as was the transport, which was so overloaded that the men stood shoulder to shoulder on powered lime on the cars’ floors, their shuffling feet stirring it into a choking, eye-burning cloud. A hole with two long boards across it served as a latrine. Worse than the physical discomfort was the humiliation that came with trying to defecate while sitting on boards that were open to all sides, the natural function made all the more difficult by the poor diet that tended to constipate. Men who had to answer nature’s call weren’t shy about yelling for those who were struggling to hurry up.
CORPORAL GEORGE REID, MOTORCYCLE DISPATCH RIDER, IS CAPTURED
“He hadn’t been dead too long because he didn’t smell too bad,” recalled George Reid, the motorcycle dispatch rider who, like Reid and the other man in his patrol, wore the flash of the Seaforth Highlanders of Canada.144 As Sergeant McKee removed the dead rider’s .38, the gentleness of his doing so serving as a battlefield elegy, Reid, wracked by malaria-induced chills, hoped that the extra gun wouldn’t be needed on this, his last patrol before ten days’ rest. Charged with bringing back a German for interrogation, the Canadians found instead an Italian family that provided an excellent pot of spaghetti and word that the Germans had withdrawn across the narrow Biferno River, which Reid and McKee soon found themselves wading across.
The family in the farmhouse on the top of a hill told them the disquieting news that Germans were heading for Baranello, where the Seaforth’s “D” Company was supposed to be. Fed by the absence of even a single Canadian patrol challenging them on the road to Baranello and whiffs of Turkish tobacco smoke from German cigarettes, Reid and McKee’s concern heightened. The men inside what appeared to be a police station told them that the Canadians had taken cover when the Germans shelled the town. As if on cue, someone knocked on the door and said in an unmistakable English accent, “We are pulling out of the town. Come out or be left behind.” After opening the door a few inches, Reid found himself “looking down the barrels of automatic pistols and a Schmeisser machine gun,” unable to pull back because of the Italians pushing him out the door.
Determined to protect McKee, Reid stayed silent when asked where his companion was, which prompted the German to ignore Geneva’s prohibition on slapping prisoners. After the answer that he’d been looking for some wine brought still more blows, Reid tried saying he’d been looking for a “girl.” A moment later, he caught a break when someone, likely McKee, threw a number of small hand grenades into the street; their explosions caught the German by surprise and gave the Canadian just enough time to demonstrate why in Vancouver he’d earned the nickname “Speed Reid.”
It’s doubtful that Reid’s brigadier, Bert Hoffmeister, ever said that “Germans are lousy shots.” Yet, as he ran from two machine gunners, the flash of their traces showing that they were firing on fixed lines, and struggled to keep his balance in his hobnailed boots as they hit the cobblestones, it served Reid to think he had. He surely thought the Germans searching for him were a less than skillful group when, from his hiding place, 19 men rushed by him. Reid’s hope of playing possum ended when a sergeant saw him and kicked him in the ribs. Reid’s jump caused the German to say, in that surprisingly sportsmanlike tone that men who have just faced each other in battle sometimes use, “Ach, nicht kaputt. Komm. Komm raus!
IAN MACDONALD THINKS ABOUT THE LAST RITES
It seemed too much like a movie.
The guard ordering Ian MacDonald to take his few personal belongings, the walk down the white-and-black tiled corridor to the stairs that he’d taken before but which this time ended not at the door to the exercise yard but at another cell. After seeing its bloodless walls and bed with clean sheets, MacDonald asked why he’d been moved. “This is the cell that is kept for those who are condemned to die,” he answered.
MacDonald found it difficult to square this nicer cell with the prospect of being hanged or shot in the morning. “I spent the night with rosary beads praying and thinking about what this would do to my dear mother and father, and brothers and sisters. And of dying without being given the last rites.”
As the door opened, MacDonald readied himself for the inevitable. Instead, he was told, “We’re going to take you now into Germany.”
,!MACDONALD’S FIRST LETTERS HOME
“After the weeks I’d spent in the Gestapo’s hands, and the night in the cell when I thought I’d die in the morning, arriving in a real POW camp was a relief. I wouldn’t, of course, have my liberty, and I was still subject to German military law, but signing papers, being photographed and, especially, being given prisoner identity disks with POW number 3038 all meant that now I was a regular POW and therefore came under Geneva,” says MacDonald.
The Postkarte and blue aerogram sheet on which he wrote home a letter a few hours after being assigned to his barracks arrived on 10 and 15 January 1944 respectively. Both were censored, though it is not possible to determine if the words etched out by acid were removed by German censor Geprüft no. 37 or by British censor D.B. 643. In the postcard, the interrupted sentence reads:
I was 2 months trying to escape, caught & held prisoner——
Paris for four months.
I managed to escape as far as the Spanish border but was betrayed and sent to a prison in Paris for four months (7 June–Oct. 17)——.
MacDonald confirms that what alarmed the censor were the words “Fresnes Prison.” Censors on both sides would have wanted to keep secret that RCAF personnel were being held in civilian prisons and thus in the Gestapo’s hands. Neither censor noticed that in the letter MacDonald signalled this by writing that he’d “just received the privileges of a prisoner of war today so now I am doing quite nicely.”
MacDonald’s youngest brother, Leo, confirms that the family parsed the tone and even the handwriting, which was strong and regular and therefore supported the somewhat awkward sentence “I’m feeling fine & entirely unwounded” that appeared in the middle of the postcard’s message. The request in the letter for “a couple of shirts, a sweater and belt” was more important than it might seem on the surface of it. It indicated that, while MacDonald was physically well, he lacked basic material possessions. As well, it gave Mrs. MacDonald something to do—shopping for his clothes—that linked her in an immediate way to her son’s welfare.
The latter part of the letter was equally important. After asking for updates on the family, he inquired as to whether his parents had received the $240 he had asked J.C. MacDonald (no relation) in England “to look after” for him. Although the money no doubt helped the MacDonald family’s stretched finances, MacDonald’s question was even more significant as an indicator of his emotional state. It told his family that, despite all he’d been through, he continued to value his role in their welfare.
Two papers figured prominently in the hours before Cowan and George headed south toward the Allied lines in the company of eight former Italian soldiers making their way home. The first, placed in the pocket of Cowan’s jacket, now buried to keep the Germans from finding it, read: “The occupants of this house have given me food and shelter for a period of two weeks, during which time I was recovering from an injury” and asked the Allied soldiers to show “reciprocal consideration.”145 The second was a card with the picture of St. Domenico Abate, who died in 1031, the patron saint of Villalago, that Signora Iafolla pressed into Cowan’s hand just before he walked out of her house and endangered the entire village. Had the Germans discovered either paper, reprisals would have followed
The homeward-bound Italians provided some cover, though not enough to obscure the four or five inches the six-foot-tall Canadians had over them, as well as useful information—for example, the spotter plane that alarmed the Canadians was likely searching for cattle or sheep the locals hid up in the mountains. But the Italians’ loud arguing and expressive hand motions that Cowan feared would draw attention to them during their discussion on whether to cross the bare Piano della Cinquemiglia (a five-mile-wide, 4,000-foot-high plain in central Italy) during the day or at night, alarmed Cowan; the opening up of a previously unseen anti-aircraft battery on a Spitfire settled the question in favour of those advocating for a night crossing. Then there was the fact that their leader prepared two fewer corn shucks (which they were to hold so that they might look like peasant farmers) than necessary, with the result that a German patrol noticed George and Cowan and shot at them as they crossed a road. Luckily, in the gathering dusk, the Germans missed the zigzagging airmen. Thus Cowan’s relief when one morning they woke up to find that the Italians had pushed on without him and George.
After about a week of avoiding increasingly thick German patrols and memorizing landmarks near where anti-aircraft guns were located so that Allied forces could later bomb them, Cowan and George divided their last square of Red Cross chocolate. “Scarcely willing to swallow, I let it melt slowly on my tongue and savoured the last taste before allowing it to trickle into my starving stomach,” recalled Cowan. For days they’d travelled at night and avoided villagers and farmers; now, however, they had no choice but to risk revealing themselves. What struck Cowan about the family standing in their farmyard was their lack of “surprise or alarm” when the two shaved but filthy escapers stepped out of the wood. George explained that they were Canadese and asked for food. The farmer gave them bread and cheese but was too frightened to let them stay.
Like almost every other Canadian POW, Cowan was not a career soldier. He had stepped onto the stage of history yet remained at heart a civilian, willing if necessary to sacrifice himself to defeat the enemies of his way of life, though when sleeping on the cold, damp Italian ground more likely to dream of being in his sweetheart’s arms than of performing heroic deeds in battle. The ache he felt for her became all the more painful near noon on the next to last day of October when, shortly after the sun began to warm the air, he saw a young couple lingering by the well near a picturesque cottage.
George timorously approached them, but before he had uttered three Italian words, the young man interrupted, “So you are from England, British 8th Army, I reckon?” Nonplussed, George could only answer “Yes,” with Cowan quickly adding, “I’m a Canadian, RCAF pilot.” If anything, the young couple was in even greater danger than the escapers because the young woman was the daughter of Carlo Bergamini, the Italian admiral who was killed by a German air attack as he sought to surrender the Italian fleet to the Allies; the young man was a Vatican lawyer. He told Cowan that the Canadians had driven the Germans out of Campobasso, some 50 miles to the south, and were now somewhere north of that town.
The next day, Cowan and George learned that the Canadians weren’t as far north as the Sangro River, but the Germans were. Risking being declared a spy, Cowan made pinpricks on his map to mark the anchor of the Gustav Line. Built by Organisation Todt, this German defensive line cut across the peninsula anchored in the west by the mouth of the Sangro River, which on the night of 31 October, Cowan and George waded across, each holding their clothes above their heads, after they crawled away from a sentry who gave himself away by lighting a cigarette in the moonless night.
As he dressed, Cowan inexplicably heard in his head his father intoning the familiar line of the 23rd Psalm; the words “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death” never seeming more real to this son of the manse. After the war, Cowan learned that at about the same time as he heard his father’s voice, his father, the pastor of a Methodist church in Manitoba, was, as he was every day, on his knees in his study reciting the psalm “for the boys who went to war.”
MACDONALD KNOWS HE CANNOT WRITE ABOUT WHAT HE’D SEEN
If the person who stamped Geprüft 83 at Stalag Luft III, where the airmen’s mail was censored, had a sense of humour, the censor likely cracked a smile upon reading MacDonald’s 23 October postcard, on which he wrote that he was “on the permanent staff here [at the Dulag Luft] for a while.” In fact, what Ian was telling his parents, who wouldn’t receive the card until the following April, was that he had joined the sickbay staff at Dulag Luft.
Even after seeing at Fresnes Prison how the Gestapo could break a body, MacDonald was astonished at the injuries he saw and about which, of course, he could not write. “It’s the burns that stand out,” he says. “Even though these poor men had already been in hospital for some time, the burns and scars were heartbreaking. In their disfigured faces, many stretched and frozen by scar tissue, the absence of eyebrows and lashes made them seem almost alien.”
COWAN AND GEORGE MEET A FREELANCER FOR THE CANADIAN ARMY
At first, George was delighted to meet the two British 8th Army sergeants who had teamed up with several Italians heading for their homes further south. The soldier named “Red” convinced the Italians to allow Cowan and George to join them for the night. Neither their shared nationality nor the fact that the three were all captured at El Alamein was enough to make the two sergeants share their food with George, let alone Cowan. After finishing the little food they had, Cowan and George ate potatoes found in a field and roasted over an open fire. Cowan knew that the code that bound escapers together pertained only to men who had escaped together, so it wasn’t this that made him wary of the desire of Red and the other sergeant for Cowan and George to join them to reach Allied lines.
Rather, in addition to feeling that four men who didn’t look Italian were more conspicuous than two who didn’t, he was unimpressed with the Tommies’ vigour. Before asking to join him and George, they had decided to wait for the Allied line to come to them. When Cowan asked what Red and the other soldier would add, George answered, “Not a Tinker’s damn.”146 And in the pre-dawn darkness, Cowan and George slipped silently out of the camp.
Wracked by diarrhea, the acidic remains of which he cleaned as best he could with some of the thousands of surrender leaflets littering the ground, Cowan, who was also infested with fleas, leaned heavily on George and was thankful for his comrade’s willingness to share his water bottle after Cowan emptied his in an effort to ward off dehydration. Toward dusk, they spotted a group of Italians and wondered if they were the same group that had left Villalago with them. Driven by the need to refill their water bottles, George called out, “Inglese … Canadese,” and for the second time in a week was nonplussed by the response: “I am Giovanni; I am working with the Canadians at Campobasso.”
Had they known that the Germans were offering 1,800 lire for each downed airman (when the average factory worker earned 29 lire per day), the escapers would have been more reticent about trusting this man who said he’d been tasked with picking up escaped POWs and directing them to Canadian lines. But neither was in much shape to refuse Giovanni’s offer to lead them to a safe house. Fortunately, the offer turned out to be genuine, and the farmer and his wife at the house gave them hot soup, bread and clean hay to sleep on, in a loft.
The next morning they listened intently as Giovanni gave them directions that would take them around villages and German positions; since his directions were based on landmarks, they would have to travel during the day. After arranging for them to spend another night resting, Giovanni asked them for a favour. Cowan readied to write out a paper attesting to the help he’d given them. Instead, the Italian asked that they shave with the razor and basin of water the family had offered to provide. Their gaunt faces and bony cheeks revealed by their razor strokes didn’t surprise them. But neither man was prepared for the pallid skin he saw reflected back in the mirror, nor the deep shadows under his eyes.
Even though he’d washed the sores on his feet and covered the hole in the sole of his shoe with leather the farmer gave him, Cowan found walking agonizing. Only the promise that each step brought them closer to Canadian lines sustained him through the morning, during which they saw Germans destroy a bridge and even found themselves walking along a road following a German officer. Near midday, Cowan spotted a small white cigarette box on the ground. He didn’t care that it was empty; what mattered were the words “Sweet Caporal,” which told him a Canadian had been there. As dusk fell and Cowan’s strength ebbed, George started to lead him to a stand of trees a few hundred yards away, where they could shelter for the night.
They had taken only a few steps toward the trees before a voice called out, “Halt!” Recognizing the Canadian accent behind the words “Who are you guys?” Cowan answered “Canadian pilot—British officer.” After confirming their identities with a few random questions, the Canadian sergeant called to his commander some miles back in Campobasso. The officer who agreed to send a Jeep for them was named Captain Farley Mowat.147
REID TURNS DOWN A GERMAN OFFER
The two weeks in the hospital during which he slept between clean, white sheets recovering from malaria was now a memory all but obscured by the more recent experience of freezing in a cattle car filled with dysentery-ridden POWs going through the Brenner Pass into captivity in Germany.
At Stalag III-A, the intelligence officer who came into Reid’s small concrete cell provided the opportunity for Reid to crack a smile when he asked about a new Canadian tank. “How much do German generals tell their privates?” answered Reid. Even more amusing was what the German said after he explained that he spoke English so well because he’d lived in Canada before the war: “Win or lose, I’ll go back to Toronto. I have a corner lot there, and I’m going to build a gas station on it.”148
His bonhomie evaporated, however, when he threatened to have Reid shot if he didn’t start giving straight answers, and when he tried to entrap Reid by leaving his Luger on the table well within Reid’s reach. Bizarrely, the would-be entrepreneur’s friendliness returned when he offered Reid the opportunity to join in the Reich’s fight against the Russians after having two weeks of leave with good food and all the girls he might want.
LUCIEN DUMAIS AND RAYMOND LABROSSE RETURN TO FRANCE AS MI9 AGENTS
Raymond Labrosse’s first words after stepping onto French soil as “Marcel Desjardins” were “Laissez ça tranquille!” which warded off an overeager MI9 operative who had bent down to pick up the suitcase carrying the nascent Shelburn Line’s link to London.149 Like “Lucien Desbiens,” the erstwhile mortician from Amiens, Desjardins, whose documents attested to his career as an electronics salesman, had been to France before. The first time was as a student before the war, the second time as “Paul,” a radioman and then co-organizer of Oaktree, an escape line affiliated with the same Pat Line that spirited Lucien Dumais out of France not long before it was betrayed by Roger (Leneveu) Le Légionnaire. Because of this, the Gestapo had at least one picture of Labrosse and some information about “Paul,” who, after Oaktree was broken, narrowly avoided being captured in Paris before leading 27 “parcels” through France to Spain.
The Germans also had Dumais’s picture and name, though they were in the Wehrmacht’s Dieppe files. After returning to England from Dieppe, Dumais served a four-month stint in North Africa as an observer with the British Army before being recruited by MI9. Upon accepting the mission to return to France and establish the Shelburn Line, Dumais’s name joined Labrosse’s on the “Q-List,” servants of His Majesty the King about whom no information was available.
The former Fusiliers Mont-Royal sergeant major outranked the Ottawa-born Labrosse and would lead their mission, but in the month they had to get to know each other, Dumais had a lot of catching up to do. First, he needed to learn how to fold, then use, a parachute. And each man had to learn his new identity so that it fit like the old suit of clothes he wore when, after what would be three aborted flights, their Lysander touched down in a small field outside Paris on 16 November 1943.
FATHER DESNOYERS SURVIVES A MAJOR BOMBING RAID
The science of bombing was not taught at the Oblate colleges. Yet after years of newspaper reports of bombing raids pummelling German cities, Father Bernard Desnoyers’s beloved scholasticates likely knew more about what awaited him as he set out from Milag und Marlag Nord with a guard to replace Father Charbonneau (who had been in Poland for 14 months) than did Desnoyers himself. His guard would have told him that the trip would be long because Berlin had been paralyzed by a heavy bombing a few nights earlier. On the 20th, both English and French papers carried Associate Press news that “A record force of nearly 1,000 RAF and RCAF bombers ravaged Berlin and Ludwigshaven [sic] with 2,500 tons of bombs,” causing fires that raged for more than 12 hours. Despite wartime information-misdirection, the reporter was close to the mark; the actual number of bombers was 835 and he had intuited that “an all-out campaign to obliterate Berlin and smash Germany’s war sinews” had begun.
As Desnoyers’s train neared Berlin at 7:30 p.m. on 22 November, the clouds glowed from the thousands of searchlights that combed the night sky looking for the bomber. The staccato bursts of thousands of anti-aircraft guns and resulting flak in the 40-mile-wide arc around the city washed over Desnoyers’s train as it arrived in the station. Moments after climbing down to the platform, his guard hustled him into the crowd, making for the station’s bomb shelter. Meanwhile, bomb aimers in 750 planes, including those belonging to three Canadian squadrons—428, 429 and 434—counted down the seconds before releasing their payloads.
Earlier in the war, Desnoyers had been shocked by the power of one bomb exploding several hundred yards away. Now he found himself in a shelter filled with frightened men and women in a city that, in just over 20 minutes, 2,500 tons of high-explosive and incendiary bombs rained down upon. The well-designed shelters offered adequate protection against all but a direct hit, though nothing lessened the terror that began with the roar of the first explosions. Desnoyers emerged into a Berlin that was utterly changed. Some 1,750 people were dead or dying; 7,000 had been injured. Close to 200,000 were homeless, including those who had lived in a six-story building across from the station that, like the far end of the station, “burned like a torch.”150 Such famous areas as the Tiergarten, the fashionable Unter den Linden, the diplomatic quarter and important buildings including the Ministry for Weapons and Munitions and the Waffen-SS’s administrative building were smouldering rubble made darkly visible by the light from thousands of fires reflected down from the clouds. As they made their way through the shattered streets, the priest and millions of Berliners—who, despite a dozen years of Nazi rule, were in the main Lutherans—could not help thinking of the end time foretold in Revelation.
Told that the station in the eastern part of the city, where they were to board a train to Breslau, Poland, had been destroyed, Desnoyers’s guard decided they should spend the night at a public shelter, which was packed with hundreds of men, women and children, now refugees in their own city. Through the night, the cries of terrified people and the sounds of crumbling buildings filled the air.
The next morning, Desnoyers and his guard walked through the city. The devastation was so great that even Nazi Propaganda Minister Goebbels said, “Hell itself seems to have broken loose over us.”151 They passed knots of dazed people, many muffled in scarves and covered in grey dust from the collapsed masonry, standing among the ruins in the ravaged cityscape. As they made their way five miles outside the city to a working train station, here and there they saw amid the rubble a facade, its empty windows suggestive of a vulture and its blackened stone recalling the blasted remnants of trees in that place called No Man’s Land.
DUMAIS SETS UP THE SHELBURN LINE
After the exchange of passwords established their identities, Dumais and Christine got down to business. Dumais promised to pay the 40,000-franc debt she had run up working for MI9, and she put him in contact with Suzanne, who agreed that Dumais and Labrosse, who used still another set of names with her, could stay at her apartment. Two weeks later, when Dumais and Labrosse returned from a trip to Normandy (from where Labrosse had been able to contact London and inform MI9 that his radio could not pick up London from Paris), the two Canadians were stunned to discover a note (written in French) on the floor of Christine’s apartment:
Christine and Suzanne have been arrested; you’d better get out fast.
—A friend152
Dumais’s belief that Christine and Suzanne wouldn’t talk was well-founded. While neither Canadian’s training included briefings on what MI9 knew about the extent to which the Gestapo was willing to go to break les femmes de la Résistance, he knew of London’s deep respect for these women’s moral fibre.153 Still, his instructions were to assume that they would talk and thus he was to chart a path away from them and their contacts.
Warily, they approached Paul Campinchi, whom Labrosse knew from his days with Oaktree and, just as warily, he again threw in his lot with MI9, connecting Dumais and Labrosse to a woman named Guette. One can only guess how the vivacious 50-year-old woman, for whom events were “either sublime or tragic,” reacted when she heard that on the train from Normandy the two Canadians had entered a compartment filled with Wehrmacht officers and, after checking their papers, a military policeman had berated them for going into the wrong car.154 Dumais understood her heightened emotion, for after the gendarme left the car, the only soldier in the car who spoke French told the two “Frenchmen” that he hated army life. All the while, despite its absence, Dumais could feel the weight of his rifle in his hands and “imagine ramming it into his belly.”
The fate of Oaktree, Christine and Suzanne’s arrest, his MI9 training and his worries over the French penchant for “careless talk” led Dumais to insist on ten security rules for the Shelburn Line. To ensure against the entire network being rolled up, agents were to keep their addresses secret even from one another, and “evacuees [were] to be passed along the line without their guides meeting one another.” To guard against being infiltrated by fake evacuees, each one was to be interrogated as soon as possible after making contact with the escape line, which cast Dumais as the quizmaster asking RAF officers about cricket, and RCAF and USAAF officers about baseball.
Following his first rule, Dumais did not know where Labrosse rented a room. Nor did he know where he stored their radio equipment. The shortage of apartments forced Dumais to take a room in a hotel owned by one of Guette’s friends, which meant that were the police to stumble on the trail, they would have little difficulty connecting some of Shelburn’s dots. Dumais risked providing another dot when, contrary to his orders to behave like a monk, he took Guette’s friend, Marcelle, back to his hotel, where they became real-life lovers in a dangerous time.
DUMAIS’S COVER STORY LEADS HIM TO BECOME QUEASY
The Gestapo had recently broken both Jade-Fitzroy and Jade-Amicol escape lines, and Dumais’s handlers in London had reservations about Campinchi. Dumais had his own doubts, but about Campinchi’s decision to bring the “parcels” to Paris, where it was more expensive to hide and feed them, rather than about his trustworthiness. And although the first meeting he had with Henri Le Blais—a contact he’d been put in touch with by Dr. Le Blach (whom Labrosse knew), in the small village of Plouézec, on the Breton coast—went well, the next day Dumais was dismayed to find that Le Blais had ignored the order to keep Shelburn a secret; his brother and sister-in-law, he protested to Dumais, were trustworthy.
Duly chastened, Le Blais drove Dumais around (running his car part of the time on alcohol from a secreted tank), looking for the place London had indicated they could exfiltrate the evaders. Though Dumais’s (Desbiens’s) identity card said he was a mortician, Le Blais introduced him as a doctor, which resulted in several tense moments when, while visiting a farm, word came that a woman on another nearby farm was about to give birth and no one could find Le Blach. Keeping his cover meant attending the birth, even though the art of midwifery was not covered in his MI9 training. Le Blach’s timely arrival spared Dumais from having to play the part of monsieur le docteur, though to keep his cover, he had to assist, finding to his surprise that watching a baby being born made him feel more queasy than watching men die at Dieppe.
KINGSLEY BROWN HAS TROUBLE PROVING HE’S KINGSLEY BROWN
The last thing the swapovers wanted to hear was their real names being called over the camp’s loudspeakers, as Kingsley Brown’s and British Army Lieutenant Joe Ricks’s were four days after they arrived at Stalag VIII-B. Brown’s Canadian accent could easily have been hidden among Darch and the other Dieppe veterans and Ricks’s English among the other 45,000 Kriegies; indeed, several men already were being hidden. And that, the camp’s Man of Confidence told them, was the rub. If they hid them and the Germans started a major search, they might find a young POW who sabotaged a power plant’s turbine, and “if they find him, they’ll hang him.”155
The last thing the swapovers who had just turned themselves over to the Kommandant’s office wanted to be told is “You don’t fool me. You’re not Brown and Ricks”—and to stop wasting his time. Even after he finally arrested them a day later, the Kommandant said he didn’t believe they were Brown and Ricks: “They are still in the camp. But we’ll find them, we’ll find them.”
Equally curious was the camp’s cooler. The food and amenities at Stalag Luft III were better than at Stalag VIII-B, but the cooler at Göring’s “guest house for Allied officer air crew,” Brown knew from experience, was rather austere, quite unlike the one to which Brown and Ricks were consigned. Brown recalled it having “the disorderly charm of a stevedores’ poker club,” complete with late-night bull sessions with German guards anxious to share Red Cross cigarettes.
REID CITES THE “KING’S REGULATIONS, CANADA”
The Senior British Officer was an officious bastard.
Overlooking the evidence, including how Reid’s uniform hung off his sickly thin body following a two-week bout of malaria and ignoring the obvious fact that the Germans had not provided him with water to wash, as soon as he saw Reid, he upbraided him—for not having shaved. Unimpressed with British authority (and aware that the officer had surrendered his men in Greece without a fight), Reid answered that while fighting the enemy and scouting in the front, he didn’t carry his razor. The brigadier ordered him to borrow one. “Under K.R.Can., I can’t do that,” said the Canadian, which flummoxed the brigadier.
“Under what?”
“King’s Regulations, Canada,” said Reid, earning himself a loud dressing down and the threat to be placed on report once they were registered in a POW camp.156 The brigadier, however, was harmless, unlike the German guards who a few weeks earlier had beat Reid unconscious after they saw him watching them through a window beat an old man and young woman unconscious, then turn a hose on them and leave them on the cold November pavement to die. The beating violated Geneva, as did the blacking out of Reid’s cell, the removal of his cot and the denial of medical care when his malaria returned. As his temperature spiked dangerously high, the Germans provided him with a soup can’s amount of food and water per day. On the cold concrete floor in a darkened room, Reid lay curled up in his thin blanket, “shaking, freezing but sweating,” while waiting to die.
BROWN TRIES HIS HAND AT THE BAR
After about a week of being men with no names, Brown suggested to an intelligence officer that perhaps he might check their fingerprints. Two days later, Brown and Ricks found themselves before a court martial charged with Namentausch, name exchanging.
The trial was allowed by Geneva and, given everything Brown and Ricks had done to prove who they were, they had no defence. However, Brown, who had covered many trials for the Toronto Star and had no high opinion of the officer corps at the Stalag, shocked the court by asserting, “You have no jurisdiction, mein Herr.” The adjutant could only ask, “Why?” Neither he nor the Kommandant could answer Brown’s argument. “We are air force personnel. We are under the personal protection of Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring. The Wehrmacht has no jurisdiction to try us.”157 This generated a request for clarification from Berlin and another few days for Brown and Ricks to enjoy chess, poker and philosophical discussions enveloped in blue cigarette smoke.
That Berlin sided with the Kommandant was hardly a surprise; Brown had always known his point was as irrelevant as it was elegant. Thus, the guilty verdict, and the pro forma 15-day sentence in the cooler. Brown remained quick on his feet, however. For when the Kommandant added that they were going to serve their sentence in Stalag Luft III, Brown objected: “But mein Herr, we have already served eleven days of solitary here.” No doubt anxious to avoid another appeal to Berlin, the Kommandant shrugged his shoulders and told his adjutant, “Give them a receipt for eleven days.”
DUMAIS HAS TO HIDE 15 ESCAPERS AND EVADERS TILL THE NEW YEAR
At 6 p.m. on 15 December in François Le Cornec’s house, the man who had agreed to be the beachmaster at Bonaparte Beach turned his old radio to the BBC. At the end of the broadcast Les Français parlent aux Français, the announcer said, “Yvonne pense souvent à l’heureuse occasion,” confirming what Dumais and Le Cornec already suspected: because of the storm churning through the Channel, the Royal Navy’s pickup of the 15 “parcels” now in Brittany had been postponed 24 hours.158
Yvonne was still thinking of happy occasions the next night. And the next, and the one after that. Hopes rose when the sky lightened and fell when it darkened. Worries about keeping the men making home runs hidden from the prying eyes of the villagers of Plouha competed with personal discomfort generated by the fleas that infested the beds Dumais and Labrosse slept on at Le Cornec’s house. Day and night, the strong wind that blew the damp Breton cold under the door and through gaps in the window sashes was more than a match for Le Cornec’s small supply of firewood. As Christmas neared, Dumais wished for a break in the weather and “some good flea powder!” The lump of coal, which, it is said, Santa Claus leaves for naughty British children, would have been much more welcome than the message on Christmas Eve that the pickup operation had been postponed until the end of January. In the interim, Dumais and Labrosse returned to Paris, while Le Cornec hid the evaders on farms, where they posed as mute labourers.
JOHN GROGAN’S SURPRISE CHRISTMAS PRESENT
Three weeks earlier, an Australian POW arrived at Arbeitskommando E192 with a bundle of letters for John Grogan and some bad news. The real Frank Hickey was suffering from tuberculosis and was slated to be repatriated to Canada as “John Grogan.” Grogan had less trouble convincing the authorities that he was a swapover than did Kingsley Brown. Before being returned to Stalag VIII-B, however, he was transferred to Stalag Luft III for a punishment stint, which is why on Christmas Eve he was not far from Brown, who was serving out the last few days of his sentence in the camp’s cooler.
For reasons that are unclear, Grogan was put in a hut where, ironically, he became ill and developed jaundice. His second Christmas in Germany was lightened only slightly by the loudspeakers, which broadcast a German band playing “O Come, All Ye Faithful” and a song the German guards could sing, albeit with different words from those Grogan learned in his youth: “Stille Nacht”—“Silent Night.” Brown too heard the songs, as he remembered how on Christmas Eve the year before a truck had arrived in the camp compound with several kegs of beer sent with his “best wishes” from Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring.159
CHRISTMAS DAY
Despite the requirement laid down by Article 16 of the Geneva Convention, the Germans made no provisions for religious services at Dulag Luft. Ian MacDonald recalls, “In a very private way, I made sure to say my prayers. I thought of and, of course, prayed for my family back home. Even in the drab surrounding of the Dulag, I remembered what it was that was so important to me back home about Christmas—and that was the reason for the day, the birth of the Christ Child.”
The fresh snow of Christmas morning only heightened Brown’s forlorn feeling. Not only was he a prisoner far from home but also he was not allowed to partake in any of the Christmas masses read by Father Goudreau. Nor could he join in the conviviality of the barracks, which in some included full-dress dinners with table service and ornate menus. The dinner at Stalag Luft III promised Hors d’Ouevres Royaux, Potage Klim de Tomates, Viande d’Invasion Imagineé with Pomme de Terres Smashed à la Timoshenko (Timoshenko was a Soviet general), plum pudding and a number of other courses.
Since he hadn’t indicated he needed to go to the latrine and he’d already been given his breakfast of black bread, margarine and fake jam, Brown did not know why his guard was opening the door to the cell. His cellmate, Joe, stood closer to it, so he saw the guard put his finger to his lips, wink and motion them out of the cell. Brown followed, taking care to keep quiet and wondering why the guards, who were all NCOs, were lounging about with conspiratorial looks on their faces. Then he heard the familiar deep, sonorous chimes of Big Ben and the words “This is London calling …,” followed by King George VI’s studied voice coming over a radio as he read his Christmas message, a “gift of a half-dozen German soldiers to two other soldiers wearing a different uniform.”160