Farley Mowat Goes behind German Lines
Farley Mowat, who would become one of Canada’s most noted and best-selling authors, was in April 1945 a baby-faced, twenty-four-year-old captain in the Canadian army and the survivor of bloody campaigns in the Italian theater of war. The son of a librarian, Mowat had grown up in a series of small Canadian towns in a number of provinces, joining the army in Toronto in 1940. Prior to being transferred to northwestern Europe in the spring of 1945, he had fought in Sicily and Italy through 1943 and 1944, latterly serving as a battalion intelligence officer with the 8th Army. In March 1945, Mowat, now a part of the 1st Canadian Army, had sailed for Belgium and was transferred to a small, specialized intelligence unit operating from the liberated sector of Holland. Mowat was given a new title—technical intelligence officer (material)—and an intriguing new job involving secret weapons.
In the last months and weeks of the war, driven by desperation, German technical ingenuity was showing no bounds as all sorts of new mines, bombs and rockets, or new variations on existing weapons, were produced. The Germans were the first side to put jet aircraft into operational use during the war, while some of the weird, wondrous and wacky German weapons experiments included development of a sonic gun that was supposed to knock aircraft from the sky—it was a failure. There was even a German attempt to produce a rifle that could shoot around corners—another failure. But some of the new German weaponry that Mowat was assigned to look for was much more effective—and deadly.
Captain Farley Mowat was given a half-track truck, a jeep, a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, a team of soldiers and a Dutch liaison officer, and orders to find German secret weapons, assess them and recommend countermeasures. This often meant sneaking behind German lines, or being the first to arrive at depots only recently abandoned by retreating German forces in search of the secret weapons. At one German arms bunker, Mowat had recently discovered a new rocket. Bringing it back to his headquarters at Eindhoven, he had begun to disassemble it only to succeed in setting it off. He, and the men with him, had just managed to get out of the basement room before the rocket exploded. The room was wrecked and the senior officers upstairs alarmed. But the only thing to be hurt was Mowat’s pride.
On joining his intelligence unit, Mowat found to his delight that his immediate commanding officer was a close friend, Major Ken Cottam, who, Mowat suspected, had engineered his appointment to his staff. Major Cottam had a wide-ranging intelligence role. Apart from being Mowat’s chief, Cottam had an open brief to do pretty much what he pleased—from looking for German war criminals to mounting daring raids behind enemy lines in search of military intelligence. Cottam’s superiors let him do whatever he liked now that the 1st Canadian Army was in Holland. Mowat discovered that this had a lot to do with the fact that Cottam was well in with “the palace”—the Dutch royal palace. In reality, this meant that Cottam had the confidence and the ear of Prince Bernhard.
Mowat considered his friend Cottam a latter-day Sir Francis Drake. The full-of-surprises, colorful, unconventional and fearless Cottam never did things by the book. In fact, he threw the book away. And he had a fresh surprise for Mowat. At 4:30 p.m. on April 25, daredevil Cottam walked into Mowat’s office in Eindhoven and informed him that the two of them, accompanied by Sergeant “Doc” MacDonald, Mowat’s longtime orderly and assistant, would embark the next day on a mission to meet with Generaloberst Johannes Blaskowitz, the German military commander in occupied Holland, to talk truce.
It was a mission entirely of Cottam’s conception and had no connection with the complex web of negotiations then going on in Holland involving General Blaskowitz, Reichskommissar Seyss-Inquart, and the Allies. Mowat, as a member of the military intelligence community—and, like Cottam—was aware that Seyss-Inquart was in contact with SHAEF and was discussing highly sensitive issues with them. What he didn’t know was that Cottam’s little private venture had the potential to derail the plan for the relief of the millions of starving Dutch.
Just after midday on April 26, the same day that Andrew Geddes was heading for Achterveld in Holland to meet with Reichskommissar Seyss-Inquart’s representatives to finalize SHAEF’s food-drop plan, Farley Mowat was sitting in a jeep driven by his friend Cottam as they passed through the frontline positions of the Canadian army’s Princess Louise’s Dragoon Guards, north of Nijmegen. In Mowat’s hand was the transcript of a radio message from the commander of one of the disparate Dutch Resistance groups in Amsterdam. In that message the Resistance man had expressed the view that General Blaskowitz was open to talks about a separate armistice in Holland. Major Cottam had taken this vague message to his superiors at the HQ of the 1st Canadian Army and, on the strength of it, convinced them that he should be permitted to go behind German lines to open a peace dialogue with Blaskowitz face to face.
The radio message from Amsterdam was, to Cottam’s mind, as good as a safe conduct through German lines. Farley Mowat wasn’t so sure. To him, this whole idea was harebrained. As their jeep sped down the road, leaving the protection of their own forces behind, Mowat hunched down low beside the erect Cottam, expecting a fusillade of German bullets to come their way at any moment. In the back, Doc MacDonald was likewise ducking for cover. From the wire cutter on the jeep’s front bumper hung a white flag the size of a bed sheet, but Mowat felt that to be about as useful a form of protection as the piece of paper in his hand.
For long minutes they drove fast across the flat farmland that was the deserted no-man’s-land lying between the Canadian front line and the German front line. Ahead, a tree line loomed large. In their path appeared German outposts manned by Luftwaffe paratroopers in camouflage jackets, all with submachine guns and assault rifles leveled and with very wary looks on their faces. The sight of the American-made jeep itself was not enough for the Germans to open fire—jeeps and weapons captured from the British in the Battle of Arnhem were now being used by German servicemen in Holland.
Cottam drew the jeep to a halt and jumped out. A large, imposing man, he spoke perfect German, and he now proceeded to lambast the paratroopers and demand that they let his jeep pass on a mission of highest importance to both sides. Cottam was able to convince the junior German officer in charge to take them to his battalion headquarters, and the paratroop officer climbed into the jeep and joined them for the drive there. Dealing with more senior officers at the headquarters, the Canadian was also able to convince them that his mission was legitimate and of vital importance.
The German battalion commander assigned an escort to guide Cottam and Mowat to the headquarters of General Blaskowitz’s 25th Army. A pair of motorcycles, each with two paratroopers on board, took the jeep on the next leg of the journey with one motorcycle in front, the other behind. With Mowat now at the wheel of the jeep, they drove for twenty-five miles along a road that was soon alive with German SS troops on the march, together with Wehrmacht transport lumbering along carrying ammunition and supplies.
That German transport was horse-drawn. Mowat put this down to the German shortage of gasoline. In great part that was true, but, throughout the war, up to half of the Wehrmacht’s transport was horse-drawn. To project an image of the Nazi war machine as a mechanical juggernaut, German military cameramen shooting footage for newsreels were forbidden by their superiors to film any horse-drawn vehicles.
When the SS troops blocked their way, Ken Cottam didn’t hesitate to stand up in the jeep and bellow orders in guttural German for them to make way—which they did, although grudgingly. Eventually, the jeep and its escort arrived at the 25th Army HQ at Hilversum. The German military headquarters for occupied Holland was spread through a complex of massive concrete bunkers, dug deep into the earth on the outskirts of the town and well camouflaged to hide them from Allied aircraft. The complex was heavily defended, being surrounded by masses of barbed wire, machine-gun emplacements and tanks that had been dug in.
There was a brief delay at the main gate when the German sentry on duty disregarded the so-called safe conduct clutched by Mowat. A tall German captain appeared, and it turned out that he was expecting the Canadians after being forewarned of their mission by the officer commanding the paratroopers at the front line. Instructing Doc to remain with the jeep, but telling Cottam and Mowat to follow him, the captain led the pair of Allied officers down into the bunker complex. In the main bunker, Mowat was separated from Cottam and made to wait while his superior was taken to General Blaskowitz.
Long hours passed for Mowat; come nightfall, he was escorted to the German officers’ mess in the underground complex. Numerous polite German officers introduced themselves with salutes, bowing and much clicking of heels. To Mowat’s astonishment he was served dinner—German army stew—and was joined for the meal by General Blaskowitz’s chief of staff, the tall, thin Lieutenant General Paul Reichelt. The highly decorated German general, a veteran of the Russian Front, apologized to Mowat for the quality of the meat they were eating, which, he said, was mostly horse. Reichelt then proceeded to ply Mowat with Slivovitz, an eastern European plum brandy, of which there seemed to be an endless supply.
To Mowat, this entire situation was unreal, and he was ill at ease as the German officers treated him like an honored guest. He guessed from their attitude that these officers knew all too well that their war would soon be over and that they would become the prisoners of the Allies; they were treating the Canadian captain as they hoped to be treated by his colleagues once hostilities came to an end.
At 11:15 that evening, Ken Cottam reappeared. Bearing what Mowat was to describe as a Cheshire cat smile, Cottam informed his friend that he had succeeded in getting General Blaskowitz to nominally agree to the provision of a truce along the present front line between the 25th Army and the 1st Canadian Army in eastern Holland. Mowat was shocked that Cottam had so blithely inserted himself—and Mowat—into the highly political situation that confronted the Allies over German-occupied Holland. He dreaded to think what problems they might have created for the negotiations between Arthur Seyss-Inquart and SHAEF. And he feared retribution for Cottam and himself for involving themselves in the process once their commanding general got wind of Cottam’s lone-wolf venture.
When Mowat expressed his fears to his friend, Cottam was not the slightest bit concerned. He beamed with self-satisfaction at the provisional truce he claimed to have negotiated with General Blaskowitz. “Would have taken those silly SHAEF effers in Paris days to get it all laid on,” Cottam declared to Mowat. Cottam was convinced that General H. D. G. “Harry” Crerar, commander of the 1st Canadian Army, would promote him to colonel for his exploit.
“If he doesn’t court martial you . . .” Mowat remarked. “And me too!” he added unhappily.
“Absolute nonsense, chummie. He’ll be tickled pink. Now shift your ass! We’re off!” Cottam declared.1
Cottam’s original plan had been to hightail it back to Allied lines with news of his truce, but his success so far convinced him that more adventures lay north, not south, deep inside German-occupied Holland. With Mowat and MacDonald as reluctant passengers, Cottam set off behind the wheel of their jeep, driving at breakneck speed through the night toward Amsterdam. In Amsterdam, Cottam was sure, they could link up with the Dutch Resistance, after which he planned to use the Resistance’s radio to send word to SHAEF of Cottam’s truce “triumph” with General Blaskowitz.2
Sitting beside his manic commander as the jeep sped along, Mowat was left hoping that Cottam’s intrusion into the negotiation process had not conflicted with or damaged the official negotiations being carried on elsewhere with Nazi governor Seyss-Inquart. Time would tell.