1. It is not possible to determine whether the words “Pau, Bourdeaux and Fresnes Prison in Paris” were obliterated by a German or a Canadian censor.
2. In addition to the Oblates, the Sacred Heart Brothers and the American missionaries and their families, Zamzam carried some 20 members of a shadowy group called the British-American Ambulance Corps; and seven Canadian women, one of whom, Mrs. Kathleen Levitt, was travelling with her children, Wendy and Peter.
3. Grogan, 92.
4. Vance, Gallant Company, 4.
5. Thompson’s postwar account actually says “sumptuous report.” However, the context makes clear that “report” should have been “repast.”
6. At that meeting, Göring thanked Mackenzie King for the two bison that Canada had sent the Berlin Zoo, before turning to more substantive matters, including how much wheat Canada could export to Germany and Germany’s complaint that it felt constricted by Great Britain.
7. Cox, 28–29. By the time Cox was captured, the Germans held some two dozen Canadian POWs.
8. North, 202.
9. Cox, 32.
10. As translated by G.-A. Lavallée.
11. Quoted in Parker, 297.
12. E. Nadeau, 57, 61.
13. The translation “Wandering missionaries of the Atlantic” does not do justice to the line written by Father Gérard Pâquet. As we will see below, the word “errant” (lost/wanderer) had a special meaning for French Canadians.
14. Murray, “The Sinking of the ‘Zamzam,’” Life 10, 25: 70.
15. Quoted in E. Nadeau, 40.
16. See Vance, Objects of Concern, 103–25, for a discussion of the halting development of Canada’s POW apparatus.
17. The Canadian Ernest Shackleton (no relation to the Antarctic explorer) and Briton Sebastian Coe (father of Lord Coe, organizer of the 2012 London Olympics) escaped from the train. The details of their adventure-filled trip to Spain are lost because the report they filed with the Admiralty upon reaching England has gone missing and the article Shackleton published in the Toronto Star on 4 October 1941 was doctored so as to prevent the Germans from following their route. All that is certain is that the two intrepid men escaped and reported what they had seen to British authorities.
18. Cox, 49. One novel that caused so much interest that it had to be divided into ten-page segments was D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which had been banned in Britain and the United States for obscenity.
19. David Shavit, “‘The Greatest Morale Factor Next to the Red Army’: Books and Libraries in American and British Prisoners of War Camps in Germany during World War II,” Libraries & Culture 34, 2 (Spring 1999), http://sentra.ischool. utexas.edu/~lcr/archive/fulltext/LandC_34_2_Shavit.pdf.
20. By the end of the war, more than 6,000 Allied soldiers had taken final exams, with a pass rate of almost 80 per cent. In Canada, not only did professors from Queen’s University proctor exams for U-boat officers held in Fort Henry and Bowmanville, Ontario, but on at least one occasion a U-boat officer in full uniform crossed the stage at Queen’s to pick up his BA diploma.
21. Cox, 56–58.
22. As we will see below, such baiting of their German captors was not always popular. For many, however, small acts of rebellion were vital to Kriegies’ sense of themselves as men at war.
23. The term “Babylonian captivity” refers two periods. In 597 B.C., after winning the siege of Jerusalem, King Nebuchadnezzar II deported tens of thousands of Jews to Babylon (modern-day Iraq). They were held captive there for 80 years, until Cyrus the Great defeated the Babylonians and allowed willing Jews to return to Jerusalem. The term was then applied to the period during the fourteenth century when the papacy resided in France. In 1309, to avoid political turmoil in Rome, the French pope Clement V moved the papacy from Rome to Avignon, where it remained until 1378.
24. Quoted in E. Nadeau, 134.
25. Ibid., 136. It is a measure of the brothers’ erudition and Lavalée’s sense of humour that the poem is a dithyramb, which, according to Plato, originated in the cult of Dionysus, the god of wine, fertility and ecstacy.
26. Ibid., 146.
27. Ibid., 171.
28. Goudreau’s confrere and fellow Canadian, Father Luc Miville, who was stranded at an Oblate seminary near La Brosse-Montceaux after the fall of France in June 1940, also risked his life for the Allied cause. Because he was bilingual, he was able to run a clandestine radio station, which was used to plan drops of guns and munitions destined for the Resistance. Miville was one of the few at the seminary to survive a massacre of priests and brothers perpetrated by the Germans on 24 July 1944.
29. Quoted in Hodgkinson, 31, 34, 56.
30. Hodgkinson, 39, 61.
31. Ibid., 36, 63.
32. Ibid., quoted in 64–65.
33. The General Roman Calendar (of the Saints) in use today is not the same one that was in place in the 1940s. Then, the Fête de Saint Jean de la Croix fell on 24 November.
34. St. John of the Cross, “Dark Night of the Soul.”
35. Cox, 63.
36. Quoted in Hodgkinson, 47, 48, 83.
37. Ibid., 98.
38. The Kriegies erroneously took this to mean that the United States was at war against Nazi Germany. In fact, the United States did not declare war against Germany until after Hitler declared war against the United States on 11 December. Interestingly, none of the POWs’ letters, diaries or memoirs that I have read record this fact.
39. Since neither Cox’s nor any of the other POWs’ memoirs I’ve read mention it, none appeared to know that, with the attack on Hong Kong, almost 2,000 of their countrymen belonging to the Royal Rifles of Canada and the Winnipeg Grenadiers were now fighting Canada’s first land battle of the Second World War.
40. E. Nadeau, 114.
41. Hodgkinson and quoted in 107–8.
42. Quoted in Hodgkinson, 117.
43. Cox, 71.
44. Allister, 76.
45. “Canadian Missionaries Behind Barbed Wire,” part 1, P.O.W. Journal, April, May, June 1980: 41.
46. Quoted in E. Nadeau, 168.
47. Hodgkinson, 130.
48. Quoted in Hodgkinson, 132.
49. Another 88 German Oblates were imprisoned in regular prisons for varying periods.
50. A.J. Barker, quoted in Mackenzie, 176.
51. Quoted in E. Nadeau, 164–65.
52. Charbonneau, “Fraternité oblate en pays de captivité,” 14.
53. Quoted in Brown, 108.
54. Quoted in Atkin, 118.
55. Poolton, 43.
56. Atkin, 231.
57. Quoted in and Dumais, 46, 27.
58. Ibid., 47.
59. The most seriously wounded—and there were hundreds—were taken first to Hôtel-Dieu Hospital in Dieppe. The casual way the Germans treated the wounded Canadians shocked the nuns. The wounded were then sent to the Dieppe train station and on to Rouen.
60. Poolton, 45.
61. Quoted in Atkin, 247.
62. Ibid., 249.
63. Dumais, 51.
64. Although Mackenzie King told Hitler that, were Britain to be attacked, Canada would come to its aid, it cannot be said that Mackenzie King’s diary entry for 29 June 1937 was his finest hour. The following quote comes from page 10 of King’s entry for this day: “His [Schmidt’s] eyes impressed me most of all. There was a liquid quality about them which indicated keen perception and profound sympathy…. He was very nice, sweet and, one could see, how particularly humble folk would come to have a profound love for the man. He never once became the least bit restless during the talk of an hour and a quarter which we had together…. It seems to me that in this he was eminently wise…. As I talked to him, I could not but think of Joan of Arc. He is distinctly a mystic. He was telling me that the German people, many of them, begin to feel that he was on a mission from God, and some of them would seek to reverence him almost as a God. He said Hitler himself tries to avoid that kind of thing. He dislikes any of them thinking of him as anything but a humble citizen who is trying to serve his country well.”
Mackenzie King’s reaction to Hitler is perhaps even more surprising given that (though neither Hitler nor Schmidt seemed to be aware of it) the prime minister spoke fluent German; he owed his first electoral victory to the fact that he could speak the language of the farmers around his home town of Berlin (Kitchener), Ontario. Available at www.collectionscanada.ca.
65. Schmidt, 250.
66. Mellor, 98, 99.
67. Since immigration from France was cut off after the British defeated the French at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in 1759, Dumais’s Quebec dialect did not develop the way the dialect of the French of Île-de-France (Paris) did. Dumais’s accent and many of the words he would have used bore similarities to the regional French of Upper Normandy. In addition, French farmers in the provinces tended to hold the governments in Paris or Vichy with equal disdain.
68. Dumais, 70.
69. Ibid., 76.
70. Ibid., 77, 78.
71. Quoted in and Dumais, 79.
72. Quoted in Ousby, 161.
73. Ninetta Jucker, quoted in Glass, 218.
74. Quoted in Todorov, 66.
75. Quoted in Roland, 13.
76. Mellor, 102.
77. Poolton, 55.
78. Apologia Pro Vita Sua is Cardinal John Henry Newman’s autobiography, which charts his spiritual journey from Anglicanism to Catholicism.
79. Larivière’s use of “conscript” is incorrect and likely stems from the fact that French Canadians had traditionally opposed conscription (as they did in the 1917 Conscription Crisis and again in the Conscription Referendum in April 1942) as well as service in the armed forces. There is no indication that Larivière knew of the Conscription Referendum.
80. Quoted in Dumais, 88.
81. Quoted in and Dumais, 87, 87–88.
82. Quoted in Grogan, 23.
83. Quoted in Mellor, 112.
84. Quoted in Grogan, 27. The next morning, Canadian officers at Oflag VII-B, in Eichstätt, were shackled, as they were the following day and the one after that. Subsequently, each day, guards choose 20 officers to shackle. As Jonathan Vance explains in “Men in Manacles,” as soon as the British started arranging with Canada for a retaliatory shackling of German POWs in the Dominion, the Germans upped the ante by shackling an additional 4,128 prisoners, a third of whom were Canadian.
85. Dumais, 92, 93.
86. Ibid., 95.
87. Prouse, 31.
88. The debate about retaliatory shacklings also involved the government of Australia, which was alarmed, lest its own POWs be shackled. Such luminaries as the 87-year-old George Bernard Shaw and famed classicist Dr. Gilbert Murray, both of whose works were sent by the Red Cross and other organizations to the men in the camps, also opposed Churchill’s request that Canada increase the number of Germans being shackled.
89. Poolton, 60, 61.
90. Quoted in S.P. Smith, 119.
91. S.P. Smith, 132.
92. Quoted in ibid., 147.
93. Prouse, 41.
94. S.P. Smith, 147.
95. Poolton, 61.
96. Quoted in E. Nadeau, 236.
97. Ibid.
98. E. Nadeau, 236.
99. None of the Kriegies knew that as their stomachs growled and they lived from Red Cross parcel to Red Cross parcel, German POWs in Canada were fed so well that some Canadians complained that the prisoners ate better than they did.
100. Over the course of the war, more than 40 million Red Cross parcels were sent to Europe, 16.5 million from Canada. Since the parcels were sent to a central distribution point, the men could receive either an American, a Canadian or a British parcel. Although Geneva and the Red Cross intended for each man to receive one parcel per week, or 2,070 calories per day, very few POWs received parcels this often. Unlike American and British parcels, Canadian ones did not contain cigarettes; these were sent by families and various patriotic funds. Les religieux received cigarettes from such diverse groups as the Order of the Daughters of the Empire and the Ontario Chinese Patriotic Fund.
101. Carswell, 12.
102. This same mixture of pride and concern was felt by the families of the thousands of women who served in war zones with the Canadian Women’s Army Corps (CWACs), the Women’s Royal Canadian Naval Service (WRENS) and the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) Women’s Division.
103. Carswell, 39, 41, 43–46.
104. Recent work by neuroscientists using MRI to study the brain while reading shows that Darch and other POWs were not being hyperbolic when they said that reading transported them back home. Reading always involves two parts of the brain: the language centre and, depending on what is being read, another part of the brain. Reading the word “kick,” for example, activates the part of the brain associated with the leg muscles in conjunction with the language centre. This means, says Professor Raymond Mar of York University, that “in a very real sense, especially given the extreme situation they were in, when prisoners read letters from home they were transported into a familiar zone created by their minds that was in an emotional sense tied to being ‘home.’” Personal interview with the author and email, 13 April 2013.
105. Carswell, 58.
106. Quoted in ibid., 67. Other POWs report similar outbursts, as did Errol Flynn and David Niven recalling a particularly upset director named Michael Curtiz; see TCM.com, “Michael Curtiz,” http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/person/42547%7C111394/Michael-Curtiz/notes.html.
107. Prouse, 44.
108. Quoted in Dancocks, 107.
109. Interestingly, rather than name homosexuality as an offence, the regulations governing the RCAF, RCN and Canadian Army spoke of “bringing scandal on the service” or “any other disgraceful conduct of a cruel, indecent or unnatural kind.” However, according to Paul Jackson, the notes to the Manual of Military Law “made it clear that the legislation was intended to prosecute” homosexuals. P. Jackson, 81.
110. Determining the rate of either homosexual longing or activity is at this late stage impossible. One Australian pilot at Stalag Luft III estimated the occurrence at 0.33 per cent. Many who wrote about it—Geoffrey Broom, a merchant mariner at Milag Nord, wrote that by end of 1944, a “hell of a lot of men seem to be affected here … some of them were quite obvious…. and quite out of control”—were outraged at the idea. Roger Coward, who was at an Arbeitskommando connected to Stalag Luft VIII, claims that Senior British Officers and padres “did everything possible to keep youngsters from the older perverts” and that the POWs themselves asked the Germans to break up couples.
The fact that other men, including les religieux, did not refer to homosexuality does not testify to its absence, for most men did not mention it in their postwar interviews, memoirs or even in interviews undertaken more recently by the Imperial War Museums. Others, like A.D. St. Clair, a British soldier captured at Tobruk who moved to Canada after the war, notes that although the Kriegies were for the most part at the age which under normal circumstances would have seen “the height of our sexual energies,” food was usually much more important. Whether he is correct about sexuality in civilian prisons is less important than the cautionary note: “Do not make the mistake of comparing a POW camp with a modern maximum-security prison where, I understand, homosexual rape by ‘boss’ prisoners of young newcomers is quite common. We … were all under military discipline.” Brown and Coward quoted in Mackenzie, 213; St. Clair, 255. These angry denunciations are, however, exceptions to the general silence about homosexual activity in the camps. This silence itself is, perhaps, a better indicator of a general tolerance that also went all but uncommented upon in memoirs.
111. Presumably the medical corpsmen to whom Fisher refers were able to engage in homosexual acts more easily because they had access to more private locations. As Eric Newby, a British soldier in an Italian POW camp, wrote of masturbation, or, as it was derisively known at the time, “self-abuse,” it was difficult to “perform the operation while lying cheek by jowl with 26 other people in a room illuminated by searchlights, [it] required a degree of stealth which had deserted most of us since leaving school,” referring, of course, to British boarding schools. Quoted in Gilbert, 119.
112. Prouse, 113. Toward the end of his study of homosexuality in the military during the Second World War, Paul Jackson notes that the phenomenon of “male marriages” that Pierre Berton wrote about in his memoir Starting Out also occurred in POW camps, where men became emotionally dependent on each other for years. These “marriages,” which were recognized by camp argot, were seen by some as violating the notion that men should be strong and independent, and as interfering “with the looser relationships that were transferable from comrade to comrade.” Nevertheless, they were prevalent enough to develop a nomenclature. Further, the close emotional attachments, Jackson concludes, were not always sexual (nor, of course, were assignations necessarily emotional). P. Jackson, 263–64.
113. Quoted in Dancocks, 107.
114. Carswell, 77.
115. Quoted in Brown, 68, 67.
116. Carswell, 84, 88.
117. Brown, 69.
118. Harry Jay in Britain at War, 41 (September 2010): 65.
119. The line from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (Act 2, Scene 2) is Caesar’s: “Cowards die many times before their deaths; / The valiant never taste of death but once.” If anything, the escaper is an avatar of the valiance. Later, Prouse appears to misremember Falstaff’s famous line (Henry VI, Part 1: Act 5, Scene 4) “The better part of valour is discretion,” which is more popularly remembered as “Discretion is the better part of valour.” No one can remotely consider Prouse and his companions as acting cowardly.
120. Prouse, 60, 61.
121. Grogan, 38, 39, 40.
122. Prouse, 67.
123. Grogan, 41, 42, 49.
124. Carswell, 113, 115.
125. Quoted in Glass, 311.
126. Grogan, 46, 53.
127. Earlier that day, Vincent McAuley and his escape partners landed in Barcelona, in neutral Spain. To travel from Vatican City to Ciampino airport—that is, through Rome, an enemy capital—they were likely taken in cars registered to the Holy See onto the tarmac. Once aboard the Spanish plane, they were technically on Spanish soil.
Also on a home run were nine Canadian officers who, along with 47 others, had climbed out of a tunnel that ended in a chicken coop a short distance from Oflag VII-B, in Eichstätt, Germany. Most of the escapers, including Lieutenant Colonel Cecil Merritt, who commanded the South Saskatchewan Regiment and earned a Victoria Cross at Dieppe, headed southeast toward Switzerland, 150 miles away. All nine were recaptured but, as historian Jonathan Vance notes, “unchastened by the experience; a few weeks later, two of the Canadians escaped from their punishment cell by cutting the window bars and lowering themselves on stolen ropes to the ground below” (Objects of Concern, 158–59). For their troubles, the Canadians were sent to the forbidding POW camp in Colditz Castle.
128. Prouse, 77.
129. Brown, 142. One can only imagine what Kipp and his partner would have said had they known that German POWs being held in Canada had access to the Eaton’s catalogue and were able to send such items as stockings and underwear back to Germany in parcels paid for by the Canadian government.
130. Brown, 143.
131. Later in the year, inflation almost ruined Brian Hodgkinson’s distillery business. When he started it, a box of prunes cost 7 cigarettes and one of raisins 20. After two other combines joined the moonshine-making business, demand for “raw materials” doubled their prices. One of his competitors dismissed the Canadian’s complaint blithely: “The market is simply responding to demand.” Quoted in Hodgkinson, 161.
132. Brown, 144.
133. G. Smith, 27.
134. Ibid., 59.
135. According to Church historian Professor Michael Attridge at St. Michael’s College at the University of Toronto, “Father Juneau’s actions would have certainly shocked most present and would have symbolized important theological and pastoral considerations. Theologically, in this period, the Church was understood to be represented in its hierarchy, especially in its priesthood. Having the priest face the congregants in this most solemn encounter between Church and people—indeed, for many, between God and people—would have shown them that the Church is with them in these horrific times. Instead of feeling isolated and detached from the Church, people would have felt themselves to be a part of a single community.” Personal interview with the author and email, 20 November 2012.
136. Søren C. Flensted, “Halifax V DK261 crashed near the island of Mandø on 24/8 1943,” Airwar over Denmark, www.flensted.eu.com/19430084.shtml.
137. G. Smith, 70, 69, 70.
138. Quoted in Vance, Gallant Company, 164.
139. Quoted in G. Smith, 84.
140. Plenderleith and Welters, who were captured almost immediately, were already at Stalag IV-B. Unlike most pilots who escaped after being shot down over Europe, McLernon went on to fly over Occupied Europe again, completing 31 missions, earning a Distinguished Flying Cross and promotion to wing commander of RCAF’s 408 “Goose” Squadron.
141. Prouse, 86, 89.
142. G. Smith, 105, 108, 109, 111.
143. Because of the shackling of the Dieppe POWs, there were no repatriations in 1942 and most of 1943. Two groups, one of 42, the other of 48, were repatriated in 1944. In early 1945, 81 prisoners (not including, as will be seen below, les religieux) were repatriated.
144. Reid, 30, 33, 35, 36.
145. G. Smith, 115, 135, 140, 154.
146. Ibid., 167, 172, 182, 184.
147. In And No Birds Sang, Mowat writes admiringly of Giovanni’s skills and honour: “If he could not find one of our people to rescue, he would bring a captured German instead…. He asked nothing from us and would accept nothing except food, most of which I suspected he gave away to needy peasants behind the German lines” (188–89).
148. Reid, 45.
149. Quoted in Dumais, 116.
150. Quoted in E. Nadeau, 186.
151. Quoted in Greenhous et al., 737.
152. Dumais, 126.
153. Aided by two members of the Resistance he’d turned, Pierre Napoleon Poinsot, the commissioner of the Paris police, spent 1942 patiently putting together a file of what to do to break les femmes dans la Résistance. In early 1943, 180 (including, it seems likely, the women in the Pat Line who had helped Dumais 15 months earlier) were arrested. Beatings did not elicit the desired information, nor did months of imprisonment or malnutrition that caused their stomachs to balloon. In 1943, the women were transferred to Auschwitz, where a number died almost immediately in a forced race through the January snows. Others died as a result of forced labour in draining marshes. By mid-April, only 80 of these brave women were left alive.
154. Dumais, 129, 132, 133.
155. Quoted in and Brown, 157, 159, 158. “Joe Ricks” was a Czech officer named Josef Bryks, who served in the British Army.
156. Reid, 49, 48.
157. Quoted in and Brown, 162, 163, 164.
158. Quoted in and Dumais, 144, 145.
159. Brown, 172.
160. Ibid., 173.
161. Parole tools included saws, hammers and other building equipment that would be given to the POWs on their “word of honour” (parole) that they would not be used in escape attempts.
162. Dumais, 147, 149.
163. Ibid., 156.
164. Barsalou did not know that, since May 1942, when the first U-boats entered the St. Lawrence River, a “dim-out” regimen (which everyone called a “blackout”) had been in place for Canada’s east coast, including Quebec’s North Shore and Gaspé coast.
165. Dumais, 159, 160.
166. Quoted in Mellor, 137–8.
167. Dumais, 165.
168. Quoted in Lavender and Sheffe, 98, 99, 101.
169. Ibid., 107.
170. Ibid., 109. Unless Dumais sent two reports, there is some confusion about when this report was sent to MI9. Dumais recalls sending it with Bonaparte I, while Woodhouse recalls it being sent with him on what was Bonaparte III or IV, though the details about having to sink it rather than letting it fall into German hands are the same. Unfortunately, a search of the British National Archives at Kew has produced only the file folder in which the report should have been; the folder does not indicate the date the missing report was written.
171. From a Canadian point of view, the film’s greatest offence is not Steve McQueen’s famed motorcycle ride but the total absence of Canadians. Wally Floody, who served as a consultant on the film, is transmuted into American Danny Velinski, played by Charles Bronson.
172. Quoted in Vance, Gallant Company, 231.
173. Bullet Decree and keeping numbers. De Bello, “The Bullet Decree,” http://ww2.debello.ca/library/440304.html.
174. Quoted in Vance, Gallant Company, 195.
175. Ibid., 246.
176. Ibid., 247.
177. Quoted in Vance, Objects of Concern, 157.
178. Quoted in Vance, Gallant Company, 261.
179. Ibid., 255, 264, 265.
180. Ibid., 286.
181. From 1793 until 1919, Posen, as the city is known to Germans, was part of Germany. Despite the Treaty of Versailles, which granted the region called Greater Poland to the newly reformed Polish state, many Germans never stopped considering Posen as part of Germany. After defeating Poland in September 1939, Hitler incorporated Pozna1Ĕ, as it is known to Poles, into the Reich. Companies such as Telefunken and Focke-Wulf, whose famous Condor dive bomber terrorized Spain and Warsaw, rushed to take advantage of the well-educated—and largely German-speaking—workforce. In November 1942, Heinrich Himmler told a select crowd of SS officials gathered in Posen about the “Extermination of the Jewish People” and crowed about working 10,000 Russian women to death if it meant one more anti-tank trap.
182. Quoted in Vance, Gallant Company, 288.
183. Quoted in Carswell, 177.
184. The Nazis were nothing if not consistent, as can be seen from the decree that Germans could not accept blood donations from POWs, “since the possibility of a prisoner of war of Jewish origin being used as a donor cannot be excluded with certainty.” Cohen, Soldiers and Slaves, 71–72.
185. Quoted in E. Nadeau, 234.
186. Quoted in The Enterprise, Iroquois Falls, 2 November 1988, B1.
187. Poolton, 93.
188. Carswell, 209.
189. Quoted in Dumais, 185. The invasion of Normandy brought with it the order to suspend the Shelburn Line and the instructions to await the Allied advance. Dumais did the former but ignored the latter when he joined with a Maquis who attacked Germans and bombed German positions in what was still Occupied France. Shortly after the Allies liberated Paris, Dumais, who was still officially attached to MI9, returned to his apartment to find a British officer, a Canadian provost marshal and a number of other well-armed men intent on arresting the man the concierge had reported as an imposter and black market operator. Even though Dumais’s belt buckle read “Gott mit uns” (God is with us) and he wore a mishmash of French, American, British and Canadian uniforms, the Canadian lieutenant believed Dumais’s story. He returned to England a few days later.
190. Carswell, 218, 226.
191. Soldiers in battle are not Boy Scouts. While admittedly slight, the difference between the Hitlerjugend’s actions and those of the Canadians who, during the bitter fight for Caen, fired on “the Jerries [who] came in with their hands up shouting ‘Kamerad’” (quoted in Stafford, 126) is due to the fact that the battle was still raging around the Canadians and their blood was still up.
192. Quoted in Margolian, 60.
193. Ibid., 69.
194. Ibid., 72. Meyer was convicted and sentenced to death. The sentence was commuted by Canadian major general Christopher Vokes, who said while considering Meyer’s request for clemency, “There isn’t a general or colonel on the allied side that I know of who hasn’t said, ‘Well, this time we don’t want any prisoners’” (quoted in Brode, 105). Meyer served a five-year sentence in Dorchester Penitentiary before being transferred to a British military prison in West Germany. He was released in September 1954. He became a major figure in HIAG, the Waffen-SS’s veteran’s organization and in 1957 published a memoir entitled Grenadier that praised the SS’s—and his—role in the war. For a full discussion of Kurt Meyer’s trial see Brode.
195. Ibid., 114.
196. Today, in countries like Canada, where there are not enough priests, Larivière’s question has taken on a new urgency. In some places, such as in the far north, deacons are allowed to administer (previously blessed) communion wafers. Both Larivière and Ducharme would have recognized the revolutionary aspect of an affirmative answer to the question about distributing the priests’ sacerdotal power. If being a member of the “faithful living in the world” is enough to qualify someone to give the sacraments, then the entire structure of the Catholic Church from the priest up to the pope can be called into question. Indeed, it is not going too far to suggest the trajectory of Larivière points to something resembling Lutheranism.
197. During the war, Pope Pius XII had other concerns, but he and his theological advisors must have begun considering the “school of Darwin” in a way that would have surprised Charbonneau. In 1950 the pope issued the encyclical Humani Generis, which says that the “Church does not forbid that … research and discussions, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter.” In his 1996 address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Pope John Paul II added, “New findings lead us toward the recognition of evolution as more than a hypothesis.” http://www.ewtn.com/library/papaldoc/jp961022.htm.
198. Carswell, 231.
199. Stalag IX-B is also known as Stalag 357.
200. In late July, a month after Dr. Peter Brownless, who worked with Charles Fisher, offered the Canadian surgeon lieutenant his place on a repatriation list (because Fisher was married and had a young daughter, while Brownless was a bachelor), Fisher boarded a train that took him from Milag Nord onto a ferry bound for Göteborg, Sweden. A few days later, he arrived in Liverpool on the SS Gripsholm, which soon sailed for New York, where he and a number of wounded Canadian soldiers boarded a train for Montreal.
201. The censor who stamped Geprüft 67 almost certainly did not catch MacDonald’s irony here. In Britain, the Senior Service is the Royal Navy. The Royal Canadian Navy, by contrast, dated only to 1910; the Dominion’s “senior service” is the militia.
202. Harvie, 39.
203. Quoted in ibid., 40.
204. Ibid., 52.
205. Childers, 239.
206. With the help of the Maquis, Stevenson reached England on 4 September 1944. His report was the first by a Canadian detailing the airmen’s treatment in Fresnes Prison.
207. Quoted in Childers, 244.
208. Harvie, 65.
209. Quoted in Childers, 247.
210. Harvie, 67.
211. Quoted in Prouse, 124.
212. Just after Christmas 1943, when Jack Pickersgill was in London with Prime Minister Mackenzie King, he arranged for a message to be sent to Frank saying, “Jack says mother is well.” The fake “Pickersgill” answered, “Thank Uncle Jack for his message,” which Kay Moore, a junior member of the SOE communications staff who knew Frank Pickersgill well disbelieved, since she’d never heard of an “Uncle Jack.” SOE missed, therefore, a central piece of evidence showing that Pickersgill and Macalister had been arrested and, curiously, forwarded the following message to the Pickersgill family: “All the best to Jack. Thanks for the personal message from mother. Please send her all my love and tell her I hope to be back soon.” Quoted in Vance, Unlikely Soldiers, 230.
213. Vance, Unlikely Soldiers, 247.
214. Harvie, 83.
215. Kogon, 116.
216. Harvie, 99.
217. Ibid., 106.
218. http://www.lyricsmania.com/peat_bog_soldiers_lyrics_pete_seeger.html
219. There is some controversy about the dates the SOE men were executed. I am following Jonathan Vance’s Unlikely Soldiers here.
220. In a visit a few years ago to Buchenwald, Edward Carter-Edwards and other surviving members of the KLB (Konzentrationslager Buchenwald) Buchenwald Concentration Camp Club were taken on a tour of this factory. “The visit was sombre,” he told me. “But the hair on the back of my neck stood on end when we entered the director’s office, and we saw that all the director had to do was look out his window to see the smokestack above the ovens he made—and the smoke from the fires that burned men and women.”
221. In Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying; The Secret WWII Transcripts of German POWs, Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer go beyond the well-rehearsed argument that the Germans on the Eastern Front fought tooth and nail because they feared (correctly) that the Russians would wreak terrible revenge for the rape and rapine that the Wehrmacht unleashed on Russia. The transcripts of conversations that were surreptitiously recorded show that while the average soldier may not have been “Nazified,” he was certainly “Hitlerfied,” having invested an inordinate amount of his self-identity in the idea of the Führer and his notion of struggle (Kampf).
222. Quoted in Herzog, 173.
223. Such are the fortunes of war that, but for taking a right at a fork in the road instead of a left, like his comrades who had also bailed out, Carter-Edwards would have soon fallen in with a Maquis cell that connected them to MI9, which arranged for his crewmates to return to Britain.
224. Quoted in Kogon, 138.
225. Harvie, 114. On their first day in Buchenwald, Squadron Leader Phil Lamason, the Senior British Officer present, who had been shot down on 8 June while on a bombing raid near Paris, told the airmen, “Gentlemen, we have ourselves a very fine fix indeed. The goons have completely violated the Geneva Convention and are treating us as common thieves and criminals. However, we are soldiers! From this time on, we will also conduct ourselves as our training has taught us and as our countries would expect from us.” Quoted in Moser.
226. Reid, 69, 75.
227. J. Nadeau, 111.
228. The survivors of Buchenwald resented both what they saw as the comfort of Stalag Luft III and the fact that the men there were uninterested in hearing about the horrors of Buchenwald.
229. Quoted in Celis, 230.
230. Harvie, 163, 166.
231. Prouse, 128.
232. Harvie, 175.
233. Quoted in E. Nadeau, 252.
234. Harvie, 176. At New Year’s, Harvie gave way to a certain bitterness for those back in Canada with “safe cushy war jobs” who would never have to face enemy fire or know what it was to serve their country when hungry, cold and without prospects for shelter, and who could enjoy the night by getting drunk (177).
235. Quoted in Leasor, 115.
236. None knew, of course, that the Germans wanted to hold on to their prisoners for two reasons. Since the Reich was being crushed between millions of Russians coming from the east and the Americans, British and Canadians coming from the west, to say nothing of the thousands of bombers laying waste to German towns, cities and transportation infrastructure, the first reason, to deny some 250,000 men to the Western Allies, makes little sense. Given the POWs’ condition, they would not be battle-ready for many months. The second reason, to use POWs as bargaining chips for some future negotiation, was hopelessly naïve and violated Geneva.
237. Grogan, 95
238. Carswell, 247.
239. As it happens, there was another Canadian at Neuengamme Concentration Camp. George Rodrigues, who had been born in Montreal and had served in the Canadian Army’s Corps of Signals before joining MI9, had arrived there in May 1944. He had been inserted into France in August 1943 and captured two months later. Rodrigues was evacuated to Ravensbrück Concentration Camp in April 1944. He survived the war only to die two weeks after it ended from tuberculosis. Rodrigues’s MI9 records in the British Archives remain sealed.
240. J. Nadeau, 114.
241. Quoted in Brown, 197.
242. Harvie, 192.
243. Carswell, 250.
244. Poolton, 107.
245. Harvie, 193.
246. Buckham’s group won the lottery this time, being billeted in a château in Muskau, where there was food, water to heat and a bath, along with a well-equipped woodworking shop, where the POWs repaired their jury-rigged sleds and wagons.
247. Grogan, 96.
248. Poolton, 105.
249. Prouse, 129.
250. Quoted in E. Nadeau, 275.
251. Quoted in ibid., 276.
252. Carswell, 254, 255.
253. Buckham, 52.
254. The Twelve Articles: The Just and Fundamental Articles of All the Peasantry and Tenants of Spiritual and Temporal Powers by Whom They Think Themselves Oppressed.
255. Prouse, 145.
256. Brown, 213. Ironically, the one group in England that Milton did not believe should have freedom of speech was Brown’s Catholic co-religionists.
257. Harvie, 210.
258. Cox, 103.
259. Prouse, 148.
260. Poolton, 112, 116.
261. Harvie, 212–13.
262. Quoted in E. Nadeau, 288.
263. Reid, 80, 84–85.
264. Carswell, 258, 261.
265. Quoted in E. Nadeau, 287.
266. Brown, 224, 225
267. Jim Lankford, “Stalag VII: The Liberation,” Moosburg online, http://www.moosburg.org/info/stalag/14theng/html.
268. Grogan, 108–9.
269. Ian Brown, “Prisoner of War,” http://www.stalag18a.org.uk.
270. Hodgkinson, p. 235.
271. Carswell, 265.
272. Poolton, 117, 120.
273. Ibid., 121.
274. Quoted in E. Nadeau, 281, 282,
275. Quoted in E. Nadeau, 283.
276. Once returned to Russia, most of these thousands of Russians were promptly sent to penal colonies.
277. Brown, p. 248.
278. Quoted in E. Nadeau, p. 302.
279. Poolton, 139.
280. BTS stands for British Thoracic Society.
281. Quoted in London Times, 17 July 2000, Merritt obituary.
282. “Aeropagitica: A Speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing,” http://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/areopagitica/text.shtml.
283. Quoted in Hodgkinson, 48.