Over the course of 40 bombing missions, Norman Reid’s training in astral navigation and map reading had served his crews well. On their 28th mission, the sum total of the triangles and lines he drew ensured that when they had to bail out of their Wellington bomber after being hit while bombing German positions north of Anzio, they were close enough to the Allied lines to walk to safety. These same skills ensured that they’d find the bridge at Turnu Severin and, later, allow him to radio his coordinates to Allied forces in Italy. In between, when judging whether to reveal himself to the four rough-looking men, knowing how to use a sextant and about sines and cosines was useless. In a strange and foreign land, peopled by figures that even then seemed to him as coming from a B-grade western, Reid relied on gut instincts. His escape from the maize field seemed the kind of story he’d read in Boy’s Own Annual.
At Dieppe, six hours of battle exhausted everything learned in two years of training, which included neither how to suborn guards with cigarettes nor the art of jumping from a moving train. The Fusiliers Mont-Royal who jumped from the trains destined for POW camps in Germany trusted that their mother tongue would ease their way through Occupied France. Neither the reading of civilians nor the intrepid confidence needed to reveal themselves to those who would have been handsomely paid to betray them was taught in the drill halls of Montreal or the training camps of Britain.
Ian MacDonald’s high school French helped, but, as Edward Carter-Edwards’s story shows, it alone doesn’t explain how an evader could survive for weeks on the run. Nor does what the Air Ministry called Escape and Evasion training, which consisted mainly of being told how to put on a parachute and count to ten before pulling the rip cord, and of an explanation of the contents of the Escape and Evasion kit. Evading the Gestapo required the dauntlessness that, perhaps, only men still in or barely out of their teens can have. It also required a sixth sense, luck, and the imagination to see one’s self as a latter day Scarlet Pimpernel, the era’s James Bond, whom they knew from the film starring Raymond Massey.
Not even years of garrison duty in England could prepare men like Stan Darch—who in the moments before raising his arms in surrender experienced the exhilaration and terror of battle—for the sheer boredom of life in a POW camp. Coming to terms with the humiliation of being defeated, the degradation of being kept filthy, hunger and the enforced idleness vexed Lieutenant Colonel Cecil Merritt, who earned Victoria Cross before being captured at Dieppe, to the point that after being liberated he spat that being a POW “cannot be translated into virtue.”281 And yet, as shown by his own career, which included an escape attempt that earned him assignment to the forbidding Colditz Castle, being a POW—or better, surviving being a POW—required its own type of mettle. For men like John Grogan and Andrew Cox, that mettle included the sang-froid to swap over.
None of the members of the Escape Committee at Stalag Luft III could have known that the Great Escape would tie up some 70,000 men or that the Germans would murder 50 escapers in cold blood. But, like similar committees in other camps, they knew that escapes cost the Germans something and that trying to thwart them was also a drain on the Reich’s resources. Wally Floody and his comrades had no doubt that even had they never been used, the digging of tunnels and the making of compasses and other escape gear maintained morale, and thus acted like a thumb in the eye of the goons. Despite their shock and humiliation, the survivors of Dieppe did what they could to mock the Germans for shackling them and so reaffirmed their status as free men, something the German guards were not.
Soldiers, sailors and airmen may not have believed they would end up “rotting in a POW camp,” but at least intellectually they knew it was a possibility. By contrast, whatever concerns the Oblates and Sacred Heart Brothers may have had as they boarded the SS Zamzam, spending years behind les barbelés was not one of their imagined futures. Their evangelical calling gave les religieux a mission, albeit one very far from Basutoland. Alone among the Kriegies, the fathers and brothers were able to openly apply their training to their lives in the barren lands of Stalag VIII-B, Milag und Marlag Nord, Stalag Luft III and a dozen other camps. Yet, as Father Charbonneau’s secret communication with Oblates in Posen and Father Goudreau’s smuggling of letters shows, theirs was not “a cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed”; rather, the Oblates sallied out, albeit in secret, against their adversary, to paraphrase John Milton.282
King and country mattered. Andrew Carswell, Russ Burrows and Stuart Kettles may not have known about the Nazis’ worst sins when they climbed onto their plane, landing craft or warship, but they knew the answer to the question posed by a wounded flyer on Brian Hodgkinson’s ward during the airmen’s debate with Dr. Meinhoff: “How long before you try to gobble up North and South America and the rest of Africa and Australia?”283 As the war continued and the Canadians saw Germany’s disregard for the Geneva Convention, so starkly evident in the Reich’s murder of more than 150 Canadians in Normandy, the inhumane treatment of the Russians, and the indications of the killings of millions of Jews, Roma, Poles and others, it took on greater meaning. Forced to watch from the sidelines, Kriegies sabotaged when they could. One of the few arrows in their quiver stung: Canadians would light a Sweet Caporal or a Player’s cigarette, smoke it halfway and then, in front of the guards who had access to much inferior cigarettes, throw the half-smoked fag on the ground and ostentatiously grind it into the dirt.
Central to both to servicemen and les religieux were their ties to their families. Especially because of the delay of ten or so weeks, if it brought news of illness, mail could raise concerns. The absence of mail, however, threatened to undermine the men’s equilibrium. Reading that one’s mother had made jam, father and uncle had painted a garage, or wife or girlfriend had cried upon receiving one’s letter rebalanced the men. Giving advice, as Father Bergeron did; jesting with his mother, as MacDonald did; telling Jacqueline how much he loved her, as Jacques Nadeau did hardly appear as defiant acts. Yet they were. For each time a soldier, sailor, airmen, priest or brother did so, he affirmed his independence from the German carceral, and his life back in Canada.
Merritt was right to honour the men who fought from the “landings in Sicily to the very end.” The vice formed by the Canadian, British and US Armies (and air forces and navies), and the Russian army in the field, crushed Nazi Germany. However, the officer who earned a VC at Dieppe was too hard on himself—and by extension the thousands of other POWs—when he said that his “war lasted six hours.” Whether or not they evaded for weeks or swapped over and escaped (only to be recaptured), the Kriegies remained men at war. For them, the derring-do of battle was replaced by perseverance. Like the character of Mankind in the 15th-century morality play The Castle of Perseverance, men like Ian MacDonald, Edward Carter-Edwards, Andrew Carswell, George Reid, Russ Burrows, Stuart Kettles, Stan Darch, John Grogan, Stan Dutka, Tommy Thompson and Jack Poolton; Fathers Goudreau, Charbonneau, Juneau, Paquet, Desroyers and Barsalou; and Brothers Georges-Aimée, Antoine Lavallée and Roland Counayer … defended themselves daily against despair brought on by insults, violations of their Geneva rights, debilitating hunger and, in the winter of 1944–45, the misery of the Hunger Marches. Their resoluteness in the face all that their Nazi overlords meted out, and their love for each other—and the Allied cause—should not be forgotten.