Murder in the murderer is no such ruinous thought as poets and romancers will have it; it does not unsettle him, or fright him from his ordinary notice of trifles.
— RALPH WALDO EMERSON
The tapping on his boot wasn’t random, nor did it transmit the kind of intelligence officers had in mind when they told downed airmen to use Morse code to communicate with each other when in public. Andrew Carswell didn’t need Mac’s message, “Did you ever see such a gorgeous ass?” or the sequences of taps to tell him that the buxom girl whose body swayed with the movement of the train, had lovely -. .- . .. Because of the crowding of their train compartment, her boot-clad legs straddled his as she held onto an overhead strap, which put her “tits” all but in Carswell’s face.188
Fearing that if they made eye contact the beauty would read his mind, Carswell resolutely kept from doing so, concentrating instead on their escape, the planning for which had begun weeks earlier. First, they had to reverse the 76 bolts on the door that locked them into the cellblock, a feat accomplished over a number of nights while the guard was distracted by a friendly chat or hot cocoa, a rare commodity in Germany at that point in the war. The songs the other Kriegies belted out to cover the sound of removing the door the night Carswell and Mac escaped were so loud that the guard threatened that if they didn’t shut up, he’d shoot someone. The two hours it took “Paddy” to file down the duplicate key until it opened the stubborn second door passed to the tattoo of the guard’s snoring, which also hid the clamber of Mac and Carswell climbing the fence.
At four o’clock in the morning, their “Ile ‘eetlah” fooled a man on the bicycle. Mac’s weak German garnered them the two tickets for Breslau and the ticket agent’s contemptuous look. To add to their posed status as uncouth foreign workers, they puffed away on cigarette butts and sat while old ladies stood. At Breslau, they nearly gave themselves away by heading for the exit marked “Soldaten.” On Track 9 in Frankfurt, they could hear their heartbeats as they waited amid German soldiers.
In Küstrin, after a trainman upbraided them for giving him the wrong fare, they decided it tempted fate to wait six hours in the station for the 4:30 a.m. train. The remains of the haystack just outside town that they’d burrowed into still clung to them, making them look even more like tramps, when they boarded the train for Stettin a few stops before the girl who fired the Kriegies’ imagination climbed aboard.
IAN MACDONALD KNOWS MORE THAN HE CAN ASK
The vagaries of the POW postal system that Ian MacDonald catalogued—his parents’ first letter of 12 January arriving almost a month after their third and fourth, and his 12 January letter not being postmarked by the military authorities for almost two weeks—bewildered even as it entertained his family. They were less happy to read that he had taken up the “vice” of smoking. “The Red Cross supplied us with 50 cigarettes a week. And one of my friends suggested I start smoking them as a way to pass the time. They sure helped do so,” recalls MacDonald.
MacDonald knew his parents would have to search through his old letters to find the addresses of Mrs. Parkinson in Toronto and John Courtney’s family in Liverpool, and that having lived for so long without word of Ian’s fate, the MacDonalds would feel for the Courtneys. “We enquired again sometime in February, I believe, about John Courtney’s fate, but the Germans have no record of him at all,” MacDonald wrote. He also knew that they’d long ponder his next sentence: “There’s a lot of questions I’d like to ask but just can’t.”
In fact, MacDonald knew a great deal. At Dulag Luft, he had asked a superior officer to make an official inquiry. When the German replied that they had no record of him, MacDonald wasn’t completely surprised. “I knew from the Resistance that Courtney left the plane alive,” he says. “But he landed in a canal, became tangled in his parachute and drowned. What I didn’t know is what became of his body. Together with the German’s answer, I surmised that the Resistance secretly buried it.” MacDonald kept his counsel, for to ask specifically about Courtney’s body risked endangering the people who had helped him.
FATHER DESNOYERS WORRIES ABOUT THE STRAIN OF LONG-TERM CAPTIVITY
It wasn’t every day that an Oblate priest admitted to being perplexed by a statement from the bishops. Father Desnoyers’s confusion was not, however, the first sign of a crisis in faith. Rather, Father Ferragne realized as he continued reading Desnoyers’s letter written in April, the POW’s confusion stemmed from the fact that he did not know that in February the Quebec bishops had called for special prayers for les religieux.
The rest of the letter, by contrast, was alarming, made even more so by the onrush of events that began a few hours after Desnoyers deposited the letter in the camp’s mailbox. Since 6 June, Canadians had been caught up in the drama, first of D-Day, when 160,000 Allied troops stormed ashore at five Normandy beaches, including almost 21,500 Canadians at Juno Beach; the bloody fight for Caen, which cost almost 1,200 casualties; the daring escape of the Germans at the Falaise Pocket; the breakout from Normandy by US General Omar Bradley’s Fifth Army; and the race toward Paris. What, if anything, the imprisoned priest knew of these events and how this knowledge affected the psychological picture Desnoyers sketched, Ferragne could not know. Instead, though the reality in the camp 5,000 miles away may have completely changed, words on the flimsy paper before him created—as all letters do—what might be thought of as the “epistolary present tense” (wherein the past is present for the reader)—and that present was deeply troubling.
Desnoyers’s observation that captivity “produces a curious psychological effect among most of us. In the absence of other elements, accidental details of life [in the camps] are often blown out of proportion” signalled that the camp’s psychology had moved beyond the strains that Ferragne might guess at. That on particularly rainy days they had to treat certain Kriegies with “extrême délicatesse” spoke for itself.
D-DAY
By nightfall, several hundred Canadians lay dead on Juno Beach, but the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division had made a lodgement in France. Sergeant C.B. Morris of the North Nova Scotia Highlanders and his men were in a field about three miles from Saint-Aubin-sur-Mer. True, the Canadians had not reached their first day’s objective, Caen (and wouldn’t for weeks), but neither had the British at Gold or Sword Beaches, or the Americans at Utah and Omaha. Indeed, the forward elements of the Canadian force were deeper into France than those of any other division that attacked Hitler’s vaunted Western Wall that famous day.
None of the POWs knew these details, of course. But across the length and breadth of Hitler’s empire, hundreds of thousands of POWs knew that the long-awaited Second Front had finally been opened. At Heydekrug, in Lithuania, Andrew Cox (who had arrived there a few months earlier) and MacDonald learned about it when it was broadcast over the camp’s loudspeaker: “There has been an attempted landing on the Cherbourg Peninsula. And it has been repulsed.” MacDonald, who, had been bashing the circuit recalls laughing at the idea that the Germans would throw the Allies back into the sea. Near Stargard, Germany, Jacques Nadeau, who, as his landing craft approached Dieppe almost two years earlier had seen two dozen of his Fusiliers Mont-Royal comrades blown apart when a mortar bomb exploded in their landing craft, heard about the landing in Normandy from a radio that belonged to German civilians working on the farm.
In Yugoslavia, where he was one of many supplying prison labour, Norman Reid heard about the invasion while listening to the Chetniks’ radio. Though they didn’t speak English like MI9 and SOE agents scattered throughout Europe, the Chetniks tuned to the BBC to hear coded messages. Reid’s joy at learning of the invasion competed with his worry about his parents; he knew that they would have received word that his plane was missing and wouldn’t be able to stop worrying that he had died before this, his 21st birthday.
From the quantity and type of stores being landed with each Bonaparte and the increased bombing of rail yards, Lucien Dumais had guessed the invasion was near. Yet excitement shot through him when, at 11 a.m., he heard the radio announcer state: “Early this morning the Allies landed in Normandy.”189 Stuart Kettles and the other survivors of HMCS Athabaskan were still in solitary confinement and didn’t learn of the invasion for 11 days.
Carswell and Mac did not hear about the invasion until they were returned to Stalag VIII-B almost a month later. After arriving in Stettin on D-Day, they survived Carswell’s dropping of his POW identity disk right in front of two German guards—who missed the glint of metal because they were frogmarching two British POWs. Mac and Carswell were less lucky a few hours later when a local policeman enforced the laws against foreign workers being away from work during work hours. Their admission at the police station that they were “English prisoners of war” caused one officer to pull his gun and another to call the Gestapo.
The two SS men who burst into the room looked and acted as if sent from central casting, brandishing Lugers, with one yelling, “Move it! Fast, you English pig-dogs!” as they pushed Mac and Carswell down the hall into a black Mercedes.190 The men in the building, which, to Carswell, was reminiscent of the buildings on Toronto’s University Avenue, sported Schmeisser machine pistols. Carswell’s offer of a Sweet Caporal cigarette to the Charlie Chaplin lookalike brought another round of “Schweinehund Engländer,” which didn’t violate Geneva, and a blow to the side of his head, knocking him down, which did. Both Carswell and Mac had given the police their POW identity disks. After an interrogation, during which the interpreter’s poor English was exceeded only by their poor German, the two were marched down a hallway. When they didn’t move fast enough, each was kicked so hard he landed face first on the floor.
Worse was to follow: being left to shiver while naked and being crammed with 18 other men into a 10-by-20-foot cell lit by one dim bulb. “The idea of dying scared the hell out of me,” recalled Carswell, “but what really frightened me was the idea of dying under someone else’s name. If I died, I wanted at least my parents, friends, and relatives to know what had happened to me.”
Canadian Sergeant C.B. Morris Sees the Hitlerjugend Murder Other Canadians
“Live fire” exercises barely approximate battle. Still, the pre-invasion training gave Morris and his men some idea of what they’d face when they waded through the Normandy surf, as they did at 10:30 a.m. on 6 June under the protective fire of three Royal Navy cruisers and fighter bombers rocketing and strafing German positions. However much Private Lorne Browne and his comrades in the North Nova’s 7 Platoon cursed the planners of training exercises, those exercises did teach them how to avoid shrapnel and the deadly splintered remains of trees blown apart, like those in the orchard they’d just run into on the outskirts of the village of Authie. Those exercises also taught them to use their Browning automatics, which took a toll on Oberstleutnant Karl-Heinz Milius’s 3rd Battalion, which was part of the 12th of the 25th SS-Panzergrenadier Regiment Hitlerjugend. No training regimen could have ensured that all of the men who, near 2 p.m., ran back through the narrow streets of Authie would zig, zag or hit the dirt in time to avoid the vectors of death created by German guns in a village the North Novas thought they’d cleared a few hours earlier. Yet like Captain Frederick Fraser and the tank officer whom Morris saw being blown up while trying to get their tank out of the orchard, his comrades who died on Authie’s dusty streets died soldiers’ deaths.
Even before seeing the stylized lightning bolts of the SS on their shoulders—or that some of soldiers to whom he and his comrades were surrendering were too young to shave—Morris realized that these Germans were nothing like regular soldiers, whom he expected to conduct themselves like battlefield bookkeepers, interested only in names, ranks and service numbers. Instead, the Hitlerjugend “behaved like a crazy bunch of fiends,” wounding several Canadians in the legs with gratuitous automatic weapons’ fire. In shock from being hit in the face and arm, another North Nova, Corporal W.L. MacKay, who had already seen a victory-drunk teen shove Browne to the ground, step on his head and repeatedly bayonet him, witnessed killing after killing—none of which could be attributed to the blood-dimmed tide of battle.191
In an alley off Authie’s main street, MacKay saw Privates John Murray, Anthony Julian, James Webster and five other Canadian POWs sitting on the street being ordered to take off their steel helmets, and watched helplessly as an SS man shot each in the head. Then, in an act that hearkened back to the barbarity Sophocles decried in Antigone more than two millennia earlier, the killers dragged two of the bodies into the middle of the street, where they revelled in the sight of a tank running over them. What remained of them “could be collected in a shovel,” recalled Authie resident Constance Raymond Guilbert, who a few minutes earlier had seen another SS trooper use his rifle butt to bash in Private William Nichol’s skull as he tried to surrender.192 Other SS soldiers took a Canadian corpse, propped it against a wall, placed an old hat on its shattered head and shoved a cigarette into its mouth.
Private John Metcalfe, another North Nova, paid for being unable to pull the small metal box containing his emergency chocolate out of his tunic fast enough with four bullets in his abdomen, minutes of agony and then three shots to his head. If Lance Corporal Joseph Arsenault thought that answering an SS commander’s question in his Summerside, PEI, French might soften the German’s demeanour, he was mistaken; the SS officer killed Arsenault with one pistol shot to his neck. Private Jeffrey Hargreaves was murdered because with a wounded leg he had trouble keeping up with the POWs being marched from the village of Buron, while a blast from a machine pistol killed one POW and mortally wounded another some distance up the column.
The six Canadians an SS officer shoved into Madame Godet’s house knew that its thin roof and stone walls wouldn’t provide much protection if one of the heavy shells British warships were firing at the defences of nearby Caen fell short, but at least it would protect them from shrapnel, like that which wounded another North Nova’s leg so badly he fell out of the line of march. Nothing could protect them from the SS officer who shot each of King George’s Canadian soldiers in the head. Not far away, the SS man who pushed Louis Alaperrin, a brave Normandian, away from the wounded North Nova was no less imbued with his Führer’s cause; he fired two shots that destroyed the Canadian’s head. About the same time, an SS NCO in nearby Authie ignored the Red Cross brassard on the arm of a Canadian who was tending to still another North Nova and shot the medic dead. The SS reinforcements rushing to the front barely broke step when they met up with the column of Canadian POWs being marched toward Caen but slowed down long enough to shoot nine men in cold blood.
As they neared the outskirts of Caen toward dusk, the injured Private J. MacDonald, in a horse cart being pulled by other exhausted and battle-shocked men, was at the end of the line of men who had been told, “For you, the war is over.” Since the road was wide, at first MacDonald thought nothing of the oncoming truck. But as it neared, the driver swerved and drove into the column of defeated men, killing privates Douglas Tobin and Roderick McCrae outright and wounding two other Canadians before swerving back to the other side of the road.
This time, the Germans did not leave the dead on the road. Instead, they ordered Morris and a few other men to carry the bodies behind a schoolhouse. Oddly, given the sheer bravado of these and other killings, the guard tried to cover up the driver’s crime by marking the graves with the killed soldiers’ steel helmets, the way battle deaths are marked. As well, reported Lance Sergeant Stanley Dutka, “the officers in the [captured] group were forced to sign a paper saying that the men died of wounds.”
The burst of gunfire that killed Lance Corporal J.H. Greenwood and wounded Lieutenant W.F. Grainger, after they and Captain Walter Brown of the Sherbrooke Fusiliers raised their hands in surrender when their Jeep was spotted by a German patrol, left Brown untouched. The young SS trooper who thrust his bayonet into Brown’s body could not have missed seeing the Anglican padre’s clerical collar.
MURDERS IN THE ABBEY
During the day, the German commander on the scene in the Caen sector watched as his troops contained the Canadians around Authie and Buron. But under the cover of darkness, enraged that he hadn’t driven the Canadian “small fry” back into the sea, SS-Brigadeführer Kurt Meyer lashed out at the impudent invaders. Near 8 p.m., he ordered the bulk of the Canadian prisoners to be marched to Bretteville-sur-Odon, a village about a mile away, while a group of randomly selected POWs were marched from his headquarters at L’Abbaye d’Ardenne to an adjacent château. According to historian Howard Margolian, there, six Canadians were first slapped and then killed “by crushing blows to the head” when they refused to indicate the location of their battalion’s headquarters.193 Another five Canadians were soon executed with a single shot each to the head.
By mid-morning the next day, 8 June, when seven Canadians were brought before him, Meyer’s exasperation burst forth: “In the future, no more prisoners are to be taken.” This became a key piece of evidence in Meyer’s war crimes trial.194 According to SS-Private Jan Jesionek, after the first man was killed by a machine pistol shot to the head, in their remaining moments alive, each man saw the pile of Canadian corpses and the spreading pool of blood. These seven deaths brought the total of Canadians executed in cold blood since the Canadians had touched down on Juno Beach to 55. Over the next 24 hours, another 25 would be murdered, some with a shot to the head, some by machine guns.
As Dumais and Raymond Labrosse made their way to Chartres, where they would spend the night in a safe house keeping mum while their hostess, a talkative woman from Quebec, expounded on the glories of Canada, still more of their countrymen breathed their last breath, most having seen the faces of their murderers.
Six were tank troopers. The first to die was Lee Peston, who was shot in the back by the SS men who had taken him and two of his comrades prisoner near the hamlet of Le Mesnil-Patry. Four other tank troopers were executed by an SS soldier named Mischke in a field covered with clover. The NCO escorting four other tank troopers yelled “Run, run” before pulling the trigger on his machine pistol.195 At least one of the stream of bullets ripped through Trooper Lawrence Sutton’s head; others mortally wounded Trooper John Dumont, who groaned in agony for several minutes before dying.
While the deaths of sappers John Ionel and George Benner were recorded in the Royal Canadian Engineers’ war diary and Rifleman Allan Owens’s in the war diary of the Winnipeg Rifles, they died together. A few minutes after a military policeman ripped off their identity disks, a burst of machine pistol fire tore through their backs and pushed their dying bodies into a bomb crater a couple of hundred yards from the grey stone farmhouse that housed SS-Brigadeführer Wilhelm Mohnke’s headquarters. As Mohnke looked on to make sure they were dead, more bullets were fired at their bleeding, broken bodies. In total, Mohnke’s men were responsible for 41 murders; neither he nor any of his men were tried for their war crimes.
Just as four days earlier the Red Cross brassard didn’t protect the Canadian medic tending to a wounded North Nova, the Red Cross flag flying from Dr. Shütt’s first-aid station on 11 June did not protect Major J. Forbes of the Queen’s Own Rifles, nor did the proximity of the first-aid station to SS-Obersturmbannführer Bernhard Siebken’s headquarters, just steps away. Sometime after nightfall, Forbes and tank troopers Arnold Bowes and Glibert Scriven were taken from the German first-aid station and killed. In total, in the ten days starting with D-Day, 156 Canadians were murdered in cold blood.
NORMAN REID CONVINCES THE CHETNIKS THAT THE AMERICAN AIRMEN NEED A DOCTOR
Their uniforms told him that they were Americans, perhaps some of the very men who dangled from the parachutes Norman Reid had seen blossom beneath planes with smoking engines. Or were they from planes whose absence was marked by the holes in the ragged bomber stream making its way home? Wherever they were from, upon hearing one singing a song he couldn’t understand, Reid was amazed at the speed with which the Yank in the yard they were approaching had picked up Serbo-Croatian. “It was a real treat to be able to speak English. But imagine my surprise when I was told that the song he was singing wasn’t Serbian but, rather, top of the Hit Parade. The words I couldn’t make out were, ‘Mairz doats [Mares eat oats] and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy.’”
Not every American was in shape to sing. Four had broken legs. Reid’s St. John Ambulance training could have dealt with three, but Lieutenant Estop had a compound fracture that was already showing signs of gangrene. Using hand signs, Reid explained to the Chetniks that Estop needed medical help. “At first they shrugged their shoulders and then made clear the difficulty of getting a doctor. I don’t know exactly what convinced them, but something did, and soon they sent for a doctor,” says Reid.
While they waited, peasants dressed in baggy woollen pants and tops, and many with goatskin hats three inches tall arrived carrying cheese, sheep’s milk and unleavened bread. To Reid’s delight, he saw someone light a fire, set up two forked sticks and begin cooking a freshly slaughtered lamb. “I never smelled anything so good in my life,” he recalls. “When it was finished, we sat around a great wooden table and ate chunks of meat off the bone.”
Sometime later, the doctor arrived; he, like Reid, spoke some French. Slivovitz—plum brandy—was all they had to help numb the men’s pain, and it didn’t do much. “Their screams were awful, but I simply had to hold on, stretching each man’s leg, until the doctor managed to get the splints into place and then bind them with twine.”
MACDONALD HOPES THE RUMOUR OF A PRIEST COMING SOON IS TRUE
It is a measure of how the military situation had changed that on D-Day plus 11, when the Americans were still slogging through the Normandy bocage and the Canadians were stymied outside Caen, the censor let pass the sentence “News of the invasion has cheered us up quite a bit.” But this was not, MacDonald knew, what would most interest his parents, who hardly needed to be told what effect news of the invasion would have had on their son. Nor were they overly interested in the weather, which, of course, had long passed by the time they would be reading about it. What would really matter to them, especially after his recent admission of having taken up smoking, was that he maintained his faith. They hoped that a padre had, in fact, arrived at MacDonald’s camp. But they took solace in the fact that even without one, MacDonald, who had been an altar boy, continued to say a “service of Rosary and Prayers.”
The intense beatings had stopped. Yet whenever Mac and Carswell were marched from one part of the prison to another, if they didn’t move fast enough, guards kicked them and hit them with their rifle butts. Even given their diet of one bowl of thin soup and a piece of sour black bread a day, they were made to stand throughout the day, except when they were taken out for “exercise.” In the yard, an SS guard with a long leather stick ensured that the malnourished men ran around a track and performed long stretches of calisthenics. The tormentors amused themselves by making the soldiers crawl—so often that Carswell’s knees were raw and bruised.
The screams of male and female prisoners being tortured were, if anything, even harder to bear.
FATHER LOUIS LARIVIèRE FINDS THAT WAR LEADS TO QUESTIONS ABOUT CATHOLIC DOCTRINE
Given the substance of the letter to Father Ducharme, it’s likely that the German censor had an easier time with the Latin close “Tibi in Sapientia!” (Onwards to wisdom!) than with Father Larivière’s complex theological arguments. We can be certain of two things, however; the censor did not enforce the rule that POWs were to write in English or French only and, probably because Larivière hid it in Latin, missed the Oblate’s riff on the title of the collection of Churchill’s speeches (that men captured after 1943 would have known), “Onwards to Victory!”
Larivière’s concerns grew directly out of his wartime experience tending to huge flocks and flocks in widely separate camps. For years he had exempted himself from the rule of Eucharist Fasting for practical reasons. Now, the priest raised in the village of Saint-Zacharie de Beauce, Quebec, went further and told his brother in Christ that the rule made sense only if transubstantiation was the miraculous conversion of the Host and wine into the body and blood of Christ and not symbolic, as believed by the Protestants whom Larivière had come to know well for the first time in his life.
After years of close contact with men who were so different from the devout rural Catholics he grew up with, the Oblate asked in his letter if the mass itself “could be generalized for the workers.” The question, let alone the answer, placed him some distance from the Quebec Church’s embrace of corporatism, which saw workers as a subservient group in society, and especially from Abbé Lionel Groulx, who called for les Canadiens français to return to the land where they would be insulated from industrialism, Anglo-Saxon individualism and socialism in equal measure.
Earlier in the war, Larivière’s letters emphasized the uniqueness of the priesthood. Pushed by the strain of having to travel hundreds of miles to and from different camps without priests (and his recent extensive reading of European history, including, it would seem for the first time, of the Reformation), Larivière asks whether “sacerdotal power” (the ability to give communion and give absolution) should be given to deacons, the minor orders and even “the laity,” who were the “faithful living in the world.”196 Such questions display an openness of mind that is inverse to the reality of his imprisonment.
REID MEETS GENERAL DRA
Reid understood the reasoning, but the Chetniks’ decision to divide the group of evaders into smaller groups so that the Germans could not recapture all at once disturbed him. He knew he’d been well-treated and that Draža Mihailovic’s men had done what they could for them. Still, he couldn’t shake the doubt left by the RAF intelligence officers who advised seeking out Tito’s forces. The safety Reid had felt when with the Americans (whose intelligence officers had told the evaders that the Chetniks would cut off their ears) vanished when he once again found himself the lone Westerner with five or so Chetniks, moving in a generally northwest direction.
“I knew showing that I was nervous would only arouse their suspicions, so I tried to remain indifferent,” remembers Reid. “I was able to compare the silk map from my escape kit with the terrain I was moving through and knew generally where I was. Each day, we met peasants who supplied us with unleavened bread, cheese and sometimes beans and occasionally hard-boiled eggs.” Though an Albertan who had ridden working farm horses, Reid had little experience on a saddled horse.
The same could not be said of the group that Reid saw riding toward him and the others when one day they had stopped in a village for food. “Though they wore British battle dress, they were a ramshackle lot, but they rode like experts. Then the peasants called out ‘checha,’ which I later learned means ‘uncle’ in Serbian.”
This bearded man who resembled a university professor spoke some English, but Reid found it easier to converse with Mihailovic in French. “He seemed to recognize my uniform, and we exchanged a few words. But what stands out was the obvious esteem with which the peasants and his men held him,” says Reid. “Later I learned about his military prowess and expert knowledge of Yugoslavia’s forbidding topography. But there, in the lightly wooded area where peasant huts were scattered, what I saw was an almost medieval fiduciary relationship between him and these people who revered him.”
FATHER CHARBONNEAU CONSIDERS THE “SCHOOL OF DARWIN”
Father Desnoyers’s letter showed none of the joy that coursed through Father Pellerin’s a week earlier, only part of which was due to Pellerin’s receipt just prior to his birthday of a parcel that included clerical robes that fit him perfectly. Feeding Pellerin’s mood was the “joyous news on the breeze bringing us hope that we might soon find liberty,” a manifestation of the post–D-Day optimism.
The military situation, about which they had only the haziest idea, was not what weighed on Desnoyers, nor on Father Charbonneau. Neither regretted doing missionary work in the POW camps, yet after three years, they found the numbers of their flocks and their apostolic influence disappointing. In a time and place when it could be expected that men would turn to religion for hope and support, Charbonneau estimated that only 5 per cent of Catholics came to mass of their own volition and that 90 per cent of Catholics were hostile to their faith. The Catholics were so poorly educated that, like the polite Anglicans Charbonneau lived with, they embraced the “school of Darwin.” According to Desnoyers, this “pseudo-scientific materialism” did more than simply draw a false division between science and religion; it determined on which side of the divide each man stood. Compared with the Basutos, who were hungry for the Word, even the Catholic Kriegies were practically atheists all but indifferent to the religion of their forefathers.
Charbonneau was not wrong to summarize the difference between the curates and the other POWs with the term “Darwinism,” though the divide actually had less to do with different views on evolution (which had been rejected by Pope Leo XIII in 1880) than it did with differences between fathers’ and brothers’ education and view of agency in the world and that of the other POWs.197 Having passed through the collège classique system in Quebec, taking bachelor’s and then master’s degrees, the brothers and fathers not only were the best-educated prisoners (they were fluent in Latin and read Greek) but they also had areas of specialization—for example, theology, holy scripture and canon law—that were nothing like what even other university-educated prisoners studied: accounting, engineering, law.
The gap yawned even wider between les religieux and the thousands of tradesmen. Moreover, despite superficial similarities between the monastic life and that of the sailors at the camp—such as the regulation of the day by bells—the seamen were concerned with load balancing, pipe fitting, navigation and engineering. The green dots on the radar officer’s cathode ray tube could peer almost into the future, while an asdic (sonar) operator listened for pings that revealed the deadly U-boats in the deep. Even as religious a man as MacDonald, who wrote home telling of his great joy that he’d gone to his first full mass since being shot down and asking for a missal, saw himself as active in the world in a practical way different from les religieux, for his tool was the bomb sight.
CARSWELL AND MAC ARE RECOGNIZED AS POWS AGAIN
After weeks of mistreatment and hearing the screams of other prisoners being beaten senseless, Carswell and Mac found themselves being hustled down a windowless hallway by an SS man with a machine gun at the ready, and thinking, “Please, God, don’t let it end here!”198 The moment of greatest terror—rounding a corner—ended not with the rattle of the machine gun but with the sight of a short, fat, ordinary German soldier leaning on his rifle, waiting to pick up his charges.
After weeks of walking through the rugged mountains of southwest Serbia, bathing in streams and experiencing the extreme temperature changes of day and night, Reid had a new appreciation of the poor bloody infantry’s lot in life. One day, as the Chetnik-led party approached a town, he got to put into practice some of what his father had learned as an infantryman in the First World War: “One of the Chetniks went ahead until he saw a light in the window, and then we advanced that far. Then, in a repeated leapfrog-like manner, we came to the centre of the small town.
“It had been a hard day, and when the sun went down the temperature dropped quickly, so the chairs, hot food and especially the slivovitz [at the restaurant we stopped at] were welcome,” says Reid, his voice quickening as he recalls the almost theatrical moment when, after hearing some commotion outside, the fat restaurant owner came rushing into the backroom and spoke to Reid and his comrades in an excited yet low voice. “I didn’t understand a word he said. But from his face and hand motions, even before I saw the others jump to their feet I knew we were going to have to make a run for it.”
Reid and the Chetniks slipped out the back door before the Germans came in the front, but the Germans too could read the restaurateur’s face. By the time the Germans had run back to their trucks, started the engines and turned on the headlights, Reid and the Chetniks were on their stomachs, each crawling through a different row in a maize field. “I hadn’t got very far into my row when, thanks to the headlights and inspection light, I saw a German soldier in the next row.” As his heart pounded so hard that he could hear his blood flow, Reid doubted that the thin stalks of the animal feed corn would keep him hidden. But the stalks produced just enough shadow for the German to pass him by. “A few moments later, he turned around, and we could hear the others walking back toward the restaurant. I guess they were more interested in getting some food and a good drink than in searching for us,” says Reid, who followed the Chetniks to the northeast corner of the field, where they climbed aboard a wood-burning truck, something the Canadian airman had not known existed.
LANCE SERGEANT STAN DUTKA IS INTERROGATED
Stan Dutka was one of a group of 15 North Novas to surrender to Oberstleutnant Karl-Heinz Milius’s teenaged thugs. He saw the bodies of the eight Canadians shot in Authie, the remnants of the body the tank ran over, the two men murdered by the truck driver and the murdered body of Tom Davidson, whom he’d grown up with and worked with in a mine in Stellarton, Nova Scotia. The Germans’ handling of the POWs they captured and let live in Normandy was eerily similar to how they treated the survivors of Dieppe. Rooms so full of men—in one more than 40, like Dutka, wounded when an American pilot unable to distinguish between a column of POWs and German troops swooped down in a strafing run—that they could not sit or lie down. No matter what Geneva said, hour followed hour without food or, more importantly, water appearing, until 7 June turned to the 8th and then the 9th.
Two Canadians died on the six-day march from Caen to the hospital at Rennes, during which the Wehrmacht refused to supply bandages and medical aid, though French civilians did what they could. After spending ten days in the hospital, which was so denuded of supplies that the French medical personnel believed the soldiers would be better off in German hands, Dutka and several other men were turned over to the Germans, who promptly crammed as many as they could into a truck bound for a POW camp. Once there, when asked how many troops had landed, Dutka answered, “Fifteen million,” adding helpfully that for every man there was also one tank.
REID AND SOME AMERICANS TRY TO MAKE A HOME RUN ON THEIR OWN
They’d been travelling for about three days, since the pre-dawn darkness when they’d crept silently away from the Chetniks, who had been leading Reid and a few downed American flyers further and further from the part of western Yugoslavia controlled by Tito. “We were a pretty sorry-looking lot,” recalls Reid, whose RCAF battle dress was dirty and torn, “which was good, since it allowed us to make it look like we were peasants tilling the land when German patrols came by.” Difficult as these moments were for his American friends, they were even more nail-biting for Reid: he realized after they’d struck out on their own that the cord around his neck had broken and he’d lost his identity disks. “Without the flashes on my uniform or my identity disks, the Germans would have been able to ignore my claims to falling under the Geneva Convention and turn me over to the SS instead of sending me to a regular POW camp,” he says.
Reid had used some of the money in his escape kit to buy bread, cheese and Turkish delight, so it wasn’t hunger that prompted the evaders to approach a peasant wearing homespun clothes. “Rather,” says Reid, “we realized that while we had no trouble determining which way was west, the rugged land made actually going west extremely difficult and we would need help.” The peasant was friendly but to Reid’s dismay led them back to Ravna Gora, from where they had just come. Fortunately, none of the Chetniks he turned them over to realized that Reid or the other men had slipped away from another group of Chetniks and, rather, simply assumed that they too were recently downed airmen.
MACDONALD EXPLAINS “UNCLE JOE’S” ROLE IN HOW HE CAME TO BE AT A NEW CAMP
Neither Ian MacDonald nor Andrew Cox knew the name of the Russian offensive, Operation Bagration, or the numbers involved, which would have shocked them: more than 1 million Russian troops; 24,000 artillery pieces and mortars and more than 4,080 tanks and 6,334 aircraft, divided into a number of armies attacking across a front that ranged from the Baltic to the Black Sea. By early July, however, they could hear the guns of the 3rd Belorussian Front, which their families back home in Canada knew from the newspaper headlines had already pushed the Germans back 300 miles, and from Smolensk and Minsk. The Soviet advance was so quick that MacDonald, Cox and the other POWs were moved from Heydekrug in Lithuania first to Torun, in north-central Poland, and a few weeks later to Stalag XI-B, near Fallingbostel, in Lower Saxony, with the result that the postcard MacDonald wrote on 21 July does not have a censor’s stamp.199
MacDonald chose his words carefully, including “As you can see, we’ve changed camps for military reasons,” which likely would have passed muster with his usual censor, Geprüft 3, as would rote lines about hoping that the war would end soon. MacDonald was uncharacteristically daring, however, when he explained in a parenthetical comment what the military reason was: “old Joe was getting too close”—“old Joe” being a reference to “Uncle Joe Stalin.”
REID HAS A STRANGE CONVERSATION WITH GENERAL MIHAILOVIC
“It was obvious that all of this had to do with someone important,” says Reid, referring to the long table laid with plates and fine cutlery that had been set up in the field by a small house not far from Ravna Gora. “Eating is an extremely important communal activity for the Serbs, so I wasn’t surprised that I was invited to this picnic, though I was embarrassed by the ragged flea- and lice-infested remains of my uniform, especially when a Chetnik officer directed me toward one of the two vacant seats at the middle of the table.”
A short time later, to Reid’s great surprise, General Mihailovic strode up to the table and sat down next to him. In more than passable English, he started discussing Canadian constitutional arrangements, of all things. “I was astonished that he knew the difference between the governor-general and the lieutenant-governors. The discussion was surreal. In front of me were people who lived by a blood code and who fought their war on horseback. And there I was, an airman from half a world away, discussing the reserve power of the British and Canadian monarchies,” says Reid.
After they’d finished eating, the general asked Reid if he would stand at the end of the table so that, as an honoured guest, he could take the salute of the Chetnik platoons. Having had three shots of slivovitz, Reid was a little concerned about how steady his hand would be while saluting. He needn’t have been, though diplomacy demanded that Reid not let on that he realized that, just as Confederate General Magruder had famously done in 1861, Mihailovic made his force look larger than it was by having the men march by Reid several times. Before Mihailovic rode off with his detachment, he signed and gave the Canadian a 500-dinar note, on which he had also written in Serbian: “May Godspeed find you safely home.” Reid still has it.
ROBERT PROUSE IS IN “THE COOLER”
Amid hope and rumours generated by D-Day, the fact that he was due a 21-day stint in the cooler for having escaped slipped Robert Prouse’s but not his Kommandant’s mind. When it came time to serve his spell, he was better prepared for the sensory deprivation of sour, sawdust-filled black bread and water than he had been during his previous spell in the cooler; as long as his eyes were closed, a few grains of salt allowed Prouse to imagine that the tasteless, cold black bread was a pork chop or a piece of steak.
Each day, having awoken with sore hips from sleeping on bare boards and a stiff neck (his neck having been propped up on a couple of paperbacks, the stories of which were interrupted by missing pages), Prouse kept his mind busy by planning more and more audacious escapes, composing doggerel and computing how many minutes and seconds remained to his punishment. Although well aware that if he lost, his time in the cooler would be extended, Prouse couldn’t help enjoying the game of cat and mouse he played with the guard known as “Plank-face,” who never did catch Prouse smoking his contraband cigarettes.200