The original plan for this book called for it to tell the stories of the POWs, escapers and evaders, how their families dealt with their absence, and how the government in Ottawa and organizations such as the Red Cross responded to the ongoing needs of the soldiers, sailors, airmen and merchant mariners who had fallen into Germany’s hands. The richness of the POWs’, escapers’ and evaders’ stories combined to push most of the second and third parts of the book onto the “cutting-room floor.” For those interested in the mechanics of how the Canadian government responded to the legal and material needs of the POWs, I can do no better than point toward Jonathan Vance’s Objects of Concern and his “Men in Manacles: The Shackling of Prisoners of War, 1942–1943,” which explain the complicated diplomatic manoeuvring between Germany and Britain, and Britain and Canada vis-à-vis the shackling of the survivors of Dieppe. Of great interest also is Serge Durflinger’s Fighting from Home.
For ease of reading, I have rendered most telegrams in sentence case and time in as a.m. or p.m. form. Since the POW camps in areas that are now in Poland or Lithuania were then either annexed to the Reich or in conquered areas, I have used German spellings for towns: thus Posen and not Poznan, as it is properly known today. Since my focus is on these men’s experience as prisoners, I have not always indicated the names of the regiments or the numbers of their squadrons.
To keep from littering the pages with references, I have not cited quotations from official reports or unpublished memoirs. Quotations from men I interviewed are signalled by using the present tense—for example, “Reid remembers”—whereas those in past tense—“Prouse recalled”—come from either published or unpublished memoirs. Locutions such as “Father Goudreau wrote” signal that the words come from a memoir, letter or report. I have grouped together citations to published sources, usually following the first quote in the entry. Translations from French have been provided by my wife, Micheline R. Dubé.
I determined the dates in the subheadings in various ways. Some are the date a POW wrote the letter or when it was received in Canada; in the latter case, I have made that clear in the narrative. Some are the dates mentioned in published and unpublished memoirs. In a few cases, I have had to make an educated guess as to when the events occurred. Several of the memoirists write chapters that deal with life in the POW camps during the winter. I have assigned information, such as the first time a POW saw a Klim-tin blower, to the first winter he spent as a POW; any misassignment of generic events to the wrong year does not, I believe, materially affect these men’s stories.