For Ian MacDonald’s parents, who lived in Lourdes, Nova Scotia, the moment they had hoped to be spared arrived on 17 April 1943. The news was not borne for them (as it was for tens of thousands of other Canadians) by a telegraph boy, wearing the iconic blue cap and uniform, bicycling to the door of their house. Rather, it came via the familiar voice of Miss Mable MacLean, the town’s telegraphist, who immediately after transcribing the telegram from the War Office called the house that stood across the laneway from her own to tell her neighbours that “SERGEANT IAN ROSS MACDONALD IS REPORTED MISSING AIR OPERATION OVERSEAS APRIL FIFTEENTH STOP.”
Neither William nor Mary MacDonald had a military background so were unused to the peremptory orders. However, like everyone else on the east coast, they had seen posters with the words “Careless Words May Cause Disaster!” superimposed upon the track of a torpedo heading for a merchant ship. In fact, the posters had special meaning for them because their eldest son, Alexander, and Leo, the one after Ian, were both serving in the Royal Canadian Navy. Thus, the MacDonalds were not surprised that the telegram ended by saying that, to protect Ian, they were to “withhold information from press or radio until name appears official casualty list five weeks hence. Stop.”
A few days later, the MacDonalds received a letter from the commander of MacDonald’s Royal Canadian Air Force 408 Bomber Squadron. Mary and “Billy B.,” as William was known to his family, learned that Ian’s comrades “looked upon [him] as a good fellow” and that he did not return from a raid on Stuttgart on the night of 14/15 April. But they latched onto the possibility that Ian “may be a prisoner of war.” A subsequent letter explained the prohibition on speaking to the press: “It is possible that he has landed in enemy territory and[,] in that event, publicity at this time might imperil his chances of escape.”
The MacDonalds were not alone in their shock and grief: the next of kin of MacDonald’s six crewmates received identical letters. Indeed, after four and a half years of war, thousands of Canadian families with sons, husbands and brothers in the RCAF, Royal Air Force, RCN and merchant marine had received similar letters. So too had almost 4,000 families of soldiers captured at Hong Kong in December 1941 or at Dieppe in August 1942.
The MacDonalds’ extended family rallied to their support. Hoping that because he was a soldier his words carried the stamp of military reason, William’s nephew, John Keay, then stationed in Montreal, wrote that he believed Ian was “safe but possibl[y] a prisoner.” Keay then slipped easily into the venerable words of prayer recited, sometimes silently, by the thousands of men who, after bailing out of their aircraft, trusted their lives to the gossamer weave of silk—and, of course, by the hundreds of thousands more who faced battle on land and sea. From Yonkers, New York, William’s sister, Eunice wrote, “If it is ‘His Will’ that Ian shall survive—he will survive,” and arranged for her priest to say mass for Ian so that she could take communion for him.
The MacDonalds’ hope rose and fell, though not to the beat of the headlines, which in the second quarter of 1943 told of victory in North Africa, the Red Army’s push through the Caucuses, huge bombing raids on Germany, the joint American-Canadian victory in the Aleutians and victory in the Battle of the Atlantic. A letter written at the end of April by Mrs. M. Parkinson of Toronto (mother of “Parky” Parkinson, a crewmate of Ian’s) that told that a crewmate, Sergeant Walter Reed, was a prisoner of war was like a life preserver. But another, written that same day in London, England, darkened the mood in the small white house that still stands just before the first rise on Emmanuel Street, a street that in those days had no numbered addresses. The Air Council expressed “grave concern” about Sergeant MacDonald’s fate. Then came word that Harry Jay, the plane’s rear gunner, was also a prisoner.
As the last letter his mother had written Ian, now stamped “Reported Missing,” made its way back to Nova Scotia, other letters arrived. On 7 June, by which time the MacDonalds knew that a third crewmate, Sergeant R. Dressler, had been captured, Mrs. Parkinson wrote again, this time with the news that Pilot Officer Lee Usher had been seen at a POW camp. Her son, Parky; John Courtney, the plane’s navigator; and MacDonald were still unaccounted for.
Two weeks later, an envelope with a return address the MacDonalds had never seen arrived from Moncton, New Brunswick. Before Mrs. MacDonald even read the letter, tears streaked her face. For enclosed with the letter was a photograph of Ian and Ernest Moore, another RCAF NCO, taken a few days before MacDonald’s second and last mission. In September, Mrs. Parkinson wrote with the good news that her son was a POW and in good shape.
The letter the MacDonalds most feared was written on 19 October. Given the lapse of time since Ian had been shot down and in the absence of any further information, the “Air Ministry now propose[d] to take action to presume his death for official purposes” such as releasing his personal effects and bank account to his family. The letter did not, however, have the expected horrifying effect: two days earlier, Mrs. Parkinson had called with the news that she had heard from her son that Ian was indeed alive and a prisoner of war.
Three months later (on 10 January 1944), the mailman brought a postcard postmarked in Germany and in which MacDonald told his parents that he “was two months trying to escape, caught and held prisoner in —– Paris for four months” but that he was “feeling fine and entirely unwounded so that there was no need to worry.”1
Each airman, soldier, sailor and merchant mariner that we will meet below was a volunteer.* Some, like Pilot Officer Alfred Burke “Tommy” Thompson, who was shot down even before Canada formally declared war on Nazi Germany, flew in the RAF Royal Navy. Others, like MacDonald and Sergeant Edward Carter-Edwards, belonged to the RCAF. Among the 41 merchant mariners who survived the sinking of the Canadian freighter A.D. Huff were a number of Canadians, who, like their crewmates, spent four years in Milag Nord, the prisoner-of-war camp near Bremen run by the Kriegsmarine for merchant sailors. In May 1944, the survivors of HMCS Athabaskan, sunk off France the previous month, arrived at Marlag Nord, the navy camp adjacent to Milag Nord. The largest group of Canadians captured at one time were the almost 2,000 men who survived the cauldron of Dieppe but were unable to escape Hitler’s Europe on that fateful August 1942 afternoon. By the end of the war, in addition to these men, the Germans held some 2,290 men belonging to the RCAF, scores of Canadians flying for the RAF, and more than 5,016 captured in Italy, North Africa, Normandy and northwest Europe.
None of these men expected to hear the words “Für Sie ist der Krieg zu Ende” or its English equivalent, “For you, the war is over,” and then feel the wave of humiliation born of a profound sense of failure wash over them. Yet they expected that, were they to raise their hands in surrender, the Germans would accord them the protections laid out in the Geneva Convention. And many, including the men who surrendered with Lieutenant Colonel Douglas Catto on the hills above Dieppe, were. So too was Pilot Officer Brian Hodgkinson, who was so badly injured when he bailed out of his bomber in October 1941 that he was immediately taken to a well-equipped hospital.
By contrast, at Dieppe, some Germans refused to give the defeated Canadians water, and on the beach that Jack Poolton’s Royal Regiment of Canada attacked, one officer walked among the wounded, shooting them. Just under two years later, within hours of the Canadians landing at Juno Beach and storming ashore, SS-Brigadeführer Kurt Meyer’s men killed the first of more than 150 Canadians who would be murdered in Normandy.
Less lethal violations of Geneva included long train trips without food and water, the cessation of Red Cross parcel delivery and grossly inadequate rations of about 1,400 calories a day, about half of what a man of soldiering age required, and sometimes as few as 800. Leo Panatelo, who was captured at Dieppe, recalls one day what fats and protein the soup had had come from a “boiled horse’s cock.” The humiliation of being shackled did not violate Geneva, though being made to stand for hours with your nose against a wall and the rifle butts to the small of the back for those who moved did. The enforced labour—slave labour—extracted from men like RCAF Squadron Leader Edward Blenkinsop also violated Geneva.
The Geneva Convention applied to uniformed servicemen only. Thus, from the moment the six men who successfully escaped from trains taking the soldiers captured at Dieppe to POW camps donned civilian clothes, they placed themselves outside the convention’s famed protections—at least until the Gestapo recognized that they were, in fact, soldiers. By placing themselves in the hands of the Resistance and exchanging their uniforms for civilian clothes, evaders—like MacDonald, who was on the run after being shot down—also placed themselves outside Geneva, which explains why when they were captured they were held by the Gestapo until Heinrich Himmler’s minions had satisfied themselves that (1) these men were airmen and not secret agents and (2) they could get no more information about the Resistance cells that helped them evade capture.
As the Allies closed in on Paris in August 1944, the Gestapo moved 168 captured Allied airmen, including John Harvie and Edward Carter-Edwards and 25 other RCAF officers, from Fresnes Prison to a concentration camp, where the air was tinged with oily human smoke. Geneva did not, perforce, apply to Frank Pickersgill, Kenneth Macalister and Romeo Sabourin, three Canadians who were agents belonging to the Special Operations Executive and who were executed in Buchenwald, not far from the hut where their fellow Canadians suffered.
The Germans had no doubt that the 86 men captured after the Great Escape came under Geneva, which both allowed for escapes and laid down penalties for those men who were recaptured. Yet with the full knowledge that a year earlier Korvettenkapitän Wolfgang Heyda, who had escaped from the POW camp in Bowmanville, Ontario, was simply returned to the camp after being recaptured on the shores of the Baie des Chaleurs, the Germans on Hitler’s orders, executed 50 of the escapers, including six Canadians.
Central to my telling of the story of these men of the Second World War is another group of volunteers that has been completely forgotten. The sinking of the SS Zamzam in April 1941 delivered into German hands 17 Canadian civilians: 12 French-Canadian Oblate priests and brothers, and 5 Sacred Heart Brothers. Les religieux were missionaries on their way to South Africa and thence to Basutoland (the present-day Kingdom of Lesotho). Also on board and bound for Basutoland were some 150 American Protestant ministers and their families; some of these were Lutherans from the Midwest who were going to Africa to replace German Lutheran missionaries who had been interned by the British.2
Ironically, given that during the war the Germans repatriated a number of British padres and the Nazi state’s abjuration of Christianity, the Germans interned the priests and brothers because they were churchmen, though, as became clear, the Nazis did not understand the difference between a priest and a religious brother. While no records have been found in German archives to explain why the Canadian Catholics were held while the American missionaires were repatriated, an extraordinary (and hitherto all but unused) cache of letters, memoirs and other documents in the Archives Deschâtelets at Saint Paul University in Ottawa allows us to piece together the story.
Though the Nazis had neutered the Catholic Church in the 1930s, they did not trust Germany’s Catholic priests enough to allow them to minister in the Reich’s POW camps. However, the Germans were cognizant of Article 16 of the Geneva Convention, which states that POWs “shall be permitted complete freedom in performance of their religious duties, including attendance at the services of their faith,” for Catholics this requires the presence of a priest both for confession and communion.
Sent first to Stalag X-B and then to Milag und Marlag Nord (as the two camps were known together) before a number of them were sent on to other camps in Germany, Poland and Austria, the priests and brothers were not treated as regular POWs. Like the officers they were housed with, some were allowed parole walks—walks on one’s “word” or promise to return—outside the barbed wire. At Stalag Luft III, Father Philippe Goudreau had a private room. However, since les religieux were civilians, the Germans did not follow the Geneva requirement to pay them as either ordinary soldiers or officers (military padres hold honorary officer rank), though the priests were paid for conducting specific services. This money, along with their share of the money officers pooled from the pay provided by the Germans, went to purchasing materials for saying mass.
Early in their captivity, the priests and brothers were restricted to the same three letters and ten postcards that other POWs were allowed to write per month; in some camps later in the war, this number was doubled. At least three priests were allowed to use typewriters. Even more interestingly, alone among all POWs, les religieux were exempted from the rule that prevented prisoners in different camps from writing to each other; presumably their letters were transhipped via Stalag Luft III, where most of the censors were. These letters and memoirs allow us to chart much more than the succour the padres (for that is what the priests and brothers became) are supposed to provide for the men: the Oblates and Sacred Heart Brothers stood up to German authorities, risked their lives in secret religious meetings both inside and outside the camps; their experiences behind the barbed wire pushed at least two priests to question important parts of the Church doctrine, including the miracle of transubstantiation.
Also forgotten are the stories of the “home runs” by evaders, men who (at least for a while) avoided capture after being shot down, and men like Robert Prouse, who was captured at Dieppe and escaped a number of times. His career as an evader after being shot down in January 1943 may have lasted only a few hours, but that did not dampen RCAF Pilot Officer Andrew Carswell’s ardour to escape, which he too did more than once. Other home runs were more successful, taking men to freedom in Spain, through Vichy France or Sweden and, for at least one Canadian, the Vatican. Some men, MacDonald included, evaded for weeks before being captured; others slipped by Hitler’s noose entirely. Most of the evaders and a few of the escapers owed an unpayable debt to the civilians in the French Resistance and MI9 escape lines.
The triumph of the victory campaign has largely obscured the story of the Hunger Marches. For 45 days in one case, more than 60 in another, beginning just after New Year’s Day 1945, thousands of Canadians were among the hundreds of thousands of Western POWs being force-marched through a terribly cold and snowy winter. Weeks of sleeping in the open or in unheated barns, rations so poor that one man was reduced to stealing oats meant for horses, trudging through high snowdrifts and shivering in temperatures that reached -40°C combined to break spirits, and sicken and kill thousands. The ostensible reason for these marches that zigzagged away from the American, British, Canadian and Russian armies that by early 1945 were crushing the Reich was to protect the POWs from battle (and thus appeared to accord with Geneva). In reality, the Germans sought to hold on to the POWs for two reasons: to prevent them from adding their strength to the armies and air forces pummelling Germany, and to serve as bargaining chips for some imagined future peace treaty.
On the frozen roads and fields of Germany, men fought to retain what heat they could and to keep as dry as possible while they tended to the sick—and watched their comrades die, their bodies to be left in the snow. Even in their reduced state, they felt shame for their inability to do anything for those who were, incredibly, even more unfortunate than themselves. Private John Grogan’s elegy for an elderly man, this one with a Star of David sewn onto his threadbare coat and who “half lay, half sat on the tongue of an abandoned wagon, one naked foot stuck up from the snow, no bullet wasted on him—brown stains down his gray beard and on his striped pajamas, blood congealing and frozen from a jagged wound in his throat,” is but one of the many that testify to the human drama these men lived through in those terrible days.3
For most of the “Kriegies” (the name the men gave themselves, from the German word for prisoner of war, Kriegsgefangener) liberation did not resemble the end of battle, accompanied by unaccustomed silence or, as Sergeant Major Lucien Dumais recalled, on the beach before Dieppe with the throwing down of one’s gun. Rather, it came with the unexpected arrival of a small Russian, British, American or Canadian detachment at a POW camp or, in some cases, on a road or field in France, Poland or Germany.
* The stories that follow could have been organized thematically, with chapter headings such as “The Terror of Surrendering,” “I’ve Never Been So Homesick” or “The Stench of Death.” Such “silos” would have meant tracing the war years a number of times. Instead, I have opted for a longitudinal organization that begins on the second night of the war and carries through to its end. We meet each of these 45 men at a moment of high drama—when they are shot down, captured or on the run, or when they find themselves in a POW camp—and then follow them through to the end of the war. Issues such as hunger, fear, boredom, daring escapes or longing for mail appear as part of their daily lives rather than being summoned to the fore by this historian’s plan. Following these POWs, escapers and evaders through time and place enabled me to build up a picture of their experiences across the length and breadth of Europe and approximate their experience of time.