“Yeah, well big bloody help we are,” he shot back. “Stuck in here in chains!”
One day the Germans plastered big posters all around the camp. The Escape from Prison Camps Is No Longer a Sport! ran the headline. England has opened up a non-military form of gangster war! was stated below it in bold red letters. The text further down announced that Escaping prisoners of war will almost certainly lose their lives.
That same day a rumour tore through the camp that we were being transferred to a work camp deep inside Poland. Escape from there would be very difficult, we knew — especially during winter, which was fast approaching.
Mackie was becoming more agitated by the day. Two FMRs were being readied for an escape. Everyone thought they might be the last men to get away from Stalag VIIIB through the tunnel. Soon the earth was removed from the shaft and stored in boxes. I became very afraid that Mackie was going to make a break for it on his own. When I quizzed him about it he’d just wave me away. I’d tell him how crazy and dangerous it would be to try it, but he’d simply give me an odd smile. He began to avoid me — I think he thought I was spying on him. The night after Bill Lee took the two FMRs through the tunnel, I lay awake, listening for any rustling sounds from the palliasse above me. The earth was still out of the tunnel in boxes.
When I awoke to the sound of the morning loudspeakers I realized I’d dozed off. I jumped up to check Mackie’s bunk. Empty! I ran through the washroom and then out to the latrine. I couldn’t find him anywhere. My heart was pounding crazily. I grabbed Wilf and asked him if he’d seen Mackie. He said he’d heard him get up in the night, but just figured he had to pee.
I asked Wilf to cover for me at Appell. I crawled into Mackie’s bunk and played sick when the goons came looking. The word soon got out that Mackie had escaped. Bill made sure the earth was put back in the tunnel in a hurry.
By the afternoon, the Germans realized there had been an escape and the barracks were torn apart once again. They never found the entrance from 19B, but they did find the trap door outside the wire. We watched as Russian prisoners poured excrement from the honey pit down into the tunnel. The escape shaft was then sealed with concrete.
In the days that followed, scarcely a minute went by when I didn’t think of Mackie. At night I’d have dreams about him sleeping in haystacks or stealing food from barns. “Please don’t shoot him,” I would silently pray. “Please don’t shoot him.”
But a week later I had to write a letter that would be etched on my memory forever.
Stalag VIIIB
November 11, 1943
Dear Mrs. McAllister:
By now you have probably heard that Mackie was killed after escaping from our POW camp. I can’t begin to tell you how sorry I am that he is dead. I miss him every day and so do all his mates here in the camp. He was the most popular soldier in our hut with his ready smile and big laugh. I keep hearing stories about Mackie’s kindnesses to others. And I have so many stories of my own.
At Camp Borden, where I was the worst soldier in our training platoon, Mackie helped me through every part of it. I wouldn’t have made it without him.
At Dieppe he was a very brave soldier, one of the few who made it off the beach. Here in prison camp, I felt very down in the dumps during our first months here. Mackie wouldn’t let me give in, and got me through another very tough period.
He was the bravest, kindest, most remarkable person I’ve ever known. I will think of him with gratitude every day for as long as I live.
I send my sincerest condolences to you and to all of Mackie’s sisters and brothers.
In great sadness and sympathy,
Alistair Morrison
CHAPTER 15
THE LONG MARCH
November 21, 1943
One day in late November the goons took our shackles away. But I barely noticed. I was almost beyond caring what happened to me. After Mackie was killed, I never smiled and rarely spoke to anyone. When I heard that some of us were being transferred to another camp, I simply shrugged. Nothing could be worse than Stalag VIIIB. And every miserable inch of Hut 19B reminded me of Mackie. At night I had endless dreams where I was trying to save him from being shot. And every morning I woke up to his empty bunk above mine.
On November 26, Harry Beesley led about three hundred of us to the Lamsdorf train station, where once again we were crammed into filthy boxcars. Our destination was another POW camp, Stalag IID, outside a town called Stargard near Stettin, a port on the Baltic Sea. After a day’s travel we entered Stalag IID’s gloomy gates. Harry Beesley lined us up and the camp commandant came to inspect us.
“Sie sollen hier arbeiten,” was his curt greeting. I knew enough German by then to make out that he was saying, “You are here to work!” He then harangued us about the dangers of escapes and concluded with the Heil Hitler salute. Boos and catcalls followed, though not from me.
Despite this chilly welcome, we soon found that the conditions at Stalag IID were generally better than at VIIIB. The guards were soldiers who had served in battle and they were much less harsh than Spitfire and his goons. The food was just as bad, but most of the POWs went out on work parties and brought back food that they had bartered for cigarettes. Before leaving VIIIB I had received a package from my mother with several cartons of cigarettes, so I was able to swap them for some extra food. But even a full stomach didn’t stop me from feeling like a dead man walking.
Harry Beesley noticed how withdrawn I’d become since Mackie’s death and suggested that I talk to Padre Foote. John Foote was the chaplain for the Hamilton Rileys. He had volunteered to come to Stargard from an officers’ POW camp. I’d heard a lot about him — how he had picked up wounded men under fire on the beach at Dieppe and carried them out to the boats. I’d been told that Foote was pulled into one of the boats as it was leaving, but he had jumped back into the water, saying, “My place is with the boys.” I remembered him walking with us on the way to Envermeu.
I didn’t feel like talking much to anybody, but I eventually agreed to see Padre Foote. I told him about my friendship with Mackie and how he had died. The padre told me that it was understandable that I felt guilty about Mackie’s death. “Those of us who survive always wonder, Why us and not them?” he said. “And we sometimes think that we should have died instead of them.” He told me that he still saw the bodies on the beach at Dieppe in his dreams almost every night.
I soon found that talking with him actually helped. I particularly liked the fact that he never tried to push God or religion on me. After a few meetings with him, I began to sleep better at night and to talk to others a little more often.
Near Stargard were large state-run farms where we were soon sent to work. In February 1944, after another group of Canadians from VIIIB arrived, we were sent away from the camp for weeks or even months at a time, usually in groups of twenty. On the farms, we would sleep in barns or sheds. The guards were generally quite old, as all the younger men were required at the Front. I remember one guard who had been a cavalry officer in the First World War, a kindly old gent who liked to read and would occasionally lend me some books in German. I would try to struggle through them in my off hours using a German–English dictionary provided to German soldiers.
There was little machinery on these farms and no gasoline to run it, since that was reserved for army trucks and tanks. Most of the work was done by hand — I remember many days of planting potatoes and later harvesting them, and learning how to guide a plough pulled by two old horses.
On some of the farms, groups of young German women would help out in the fields, though we were kept strictly away from them after work hours. We were told repeatedly that any POW caught fraternizing with a German woman would be shot. Many of the guys flirted with them anyway. One hot summer day some of us decided to take a swim in a farm pond. We drew a crowd of ogling young women and had to cover ourselves as quickly as we could!
Life on the farms was monotonous but bearable. After a day’s hard labour I
would generally fall into a deep, dreamless sleep. But never again did I feel the sheer joy of being alive. That seemed to have departed with Mackie’s death. And hunger constantly gnawed at me, since our rations were the familiar watery soup and black bread. From time to time, Red Cross parcels would find their way to us, and we would be able to get a few sausages or vegetables from some of the farm workers in exchange for soap or chocolate bars. For German civilians these luxury items were in short supply. As 1943 turned into 1944, they became even scarcer. By then we knew from the scraps of news we heard that the war was going badly for Germany. After the Allies landed in Normandy on D-Day — June 6, 1944 — word of the invasion quickly spread. Even the Germans knew about it, though one of the guards insisted, “They will be driven back into the sea. Just as you were.”
Before long, Allied planes flying overhead on bombing missions became a common sight. We also heard that the Russians were steadily advancing from the east towards the German border. After D-Day the Red Cross parcels began arriving more often. We also noticed that the nastier guards became a little more correct in their attitude towards us. We figured they were worried about how they would be treated if Germany lost the war.
By late January of 1945 we were back inside Stalag IID. We could hear the sound of big guns booming in the distance and knew that the Russians were advancing towards Stargard. On the morning of February 2, the camp’s loudspeakers crackled. We were told to return to our huts to await special orders. There was an excited buzz as rumours flew. Were we going to be handed over to the Russians?
Our mood was quickly dampened when the commandant announced that we were being marched out of the camp. The weather was blisteringly cold, with high winds and heavy snow. We were allowed to take only one blanket. Some of us used it to tie up our extra clothes and any food remaining from our Red Cross parcels. I saw one man packing up the shackles he’d saved from VIIIB as a souvenir. Others tore apart the bunks to made sleds to transport their belongings.
We were marched out of the camp into the howling wind. Men dragged their sleds over snowdrifts. Soon articles of clothing and other belongings were abandoned by the roadside. I saw Padre Foote limping along using a stick to support his one bad leg. I offered to help carry his knapsack but he waved me off. By nightfall we had reached the outskirts of the port of Stettin, where we were joined by thousands of German refugees fleeing the advancing Russians. Some of them were hoping to board boats leaving Stettin. Others were just trudging grimly westward pushing baby carriages, or dragging sleds piled with family belongings. I saw a teenage girl carrying a canary in a cage and a boy cradling a puppy. There were a few farm carts with some carrots or potatoes stowed in them, so bartering began in earnest. I swapped a chocolate bar for a handful of carrots. That night as we bedded down in a chilly barn, I shared the carrots with a muckers’ group I’d joined. They made a welcome addition to the watery soup.
Early the next morning to cries of “Raus! Raus!” from the guards we once again began our weary slog through the snow. I was grateful for the woollen balaclava my mother had sent me. I also had an extra pair of socks, so I could change the wet ones each night. Many of the other men suffered from frostbite on their ears and toes.
For twelve days we trudged onwards with frozen eyebrows and beards. At night we slept in farm buildings. Our food rations dwindled and bartering became ever harder, as the German civilians had so little food to spare. On one railway siding we saw a flatbed car piled with turnips. A group of us grabbed as many as we could and ate them raw — and got stomach cramps as a result.
On the thirteenth day we saw a sight that made our hearts race. On the road ahead of us stood four trucks with large Red Cross symbols on their sides. How had they found us? I wondered. The sergeants took charge of distributing the food parcels. There was only one for every eight men, but even that seemed like manna from heaven. The parcels had soap in them, which was of little use to us since washing was nearly impossible. Besides, the itching from fleas and body lice seemed the least of our problems. I remember one of my fellow muckers, Ron Reynolds, calling out “Seife! Seife!” and showing his bar of soap to people we would pass, and eventually getting a little food in exchange for it.
Ron’s foraging prowess was amazing. One day we entered an old medieval town where we saw rows of rabbit hutches filled with plump rabbits. As we passed by, Ron quickly opened the hutch of the largest rabbit and stuffed it under his jacket.
That night visions of rabbit stew danced in our heads as we sat in the hayloft of a barn. But none of us had the heart to kill it. Finally a farm boy from Saskatchewan did the deed for us and the rabbit went into our cooking tin. As the odour of rabbit stew wafted upwards a group of guards entered the barn looking for the missing animal. One of them shone his flashlight into our pot but Ron had cleverly put stones on top of the rabbit meat. A full packet of cigarettes was shoved into the goon’s palm and he left us to enjoy our rabbit stew.
For the next seven days we trudged onwards until we reached the train station in the town of Lübeck. There we were loaded into overcrowded boxcars, standing shoulder to shoulder without room for anyone to lie down. For six days and nights we were shunted across Germany, with only a little black bread to eat and very little water. When we eventually stumbled out into the sunshine, many of the men could barely walk. Nonetheless, we were marched on to a camp near a town called Sandbostel.
By now it was the first week of March and we were grateful for the warming sun and the melting snow by the roadside. But the camp at Sandbostel was worse than anything we had seen so far, a place for people the Nazis considered their political enemies. The prisoners had shaved heads and wore striped pajamas. Open sores covered their hands and faces. Huge, mournful eyes stared out at us from hollowed faces as we marched past them. We tossed them what little food we had.
The next morning we awoke to an even more shocking sight. A railway that ran through the camp passed right near our barracks. We watched in stunned silence as open boxcars packed with stiff, emaciated corpses slowly passed by the windows.
“I knew the Nazis were bad,” I heard one POW say quietly, “but this, this is just evil!”
I thought of Mackie and of how outraged he would have been at seeing this.
We knew, however, that we were witnessing the dying days of Hitler’s regime. On March 8 we heard that American troops had crossed the Rhine River. But our ordeal was not yet over. After only a few days in Sandbostel we were on the march again. And six weeks later, the Germans still had us on the move. Word was passed to us to hang on, that it would not be long before we were liberated. On April 26, as we walked along a road south of the city of Hamburg, an RAF squadron spotted us from the air. The planes swooped low and waggled their wings. The guards immediately forced us to turn around and march in the opposite direction. When the RAF planes returned they mistook us for German soldiers. Screaming downwards, they machine-gunned right along our column. We dived for the ditches, but eighty-nine men were killed by the strafing. We buried them by the side of the road, feeling utterly crushed. Several men near me were weeping, but I had become so accustomed to death I felt beyond tears. One of the dead men was from our muckers’ group, an engineer named Tommy from Winnipeg. It seemed particularly cruel for him to have been killed in this way, after having survived so much.
Three days later, as we trudged along a roadway, two British tanks and a motorcyle came around a corner ahead of us. We raised our arms and bellowed at the top of our lungs that we were Allied soldiers, that we were Canadians. The German guards immediately threw down their rifles and ran away. We crowded around the British tanks, cheering until we were hoarse. The British soldiers were shocked by how emaciated we were. The sickest POWs were put on trucks and then flown back to England. The rest of us were taken to the British headquarters in a town called Lüneberg. There we were deloused and given hot showers — our first in years. That evening we were fed royally, but we were cautioned not to eat too much, as this wa
s dangerous for men in our condition. I looked around the room at the shining faces of men who hadn’t smiled in months. But then I remembered how Mackie’s face used to light up when he smiled and I was suddenly struck with a desperate sadness.
On the first day of May an English soldier showed me a newspaper with the headline HITLER DEAD. The day before, the Führer had shot himself in the head in an underground bunker as Russian troops overran Berlin. The English soldier said that he wished the Russkies had captured him and hung him from a lamppost. But I couldn’t think of any punishment that would be sufficient for a man who had unleashed so much horror on the world.
Three days later, a group of us sat on a hillside outside Lüneberg to watch the commander of Nazi forces in northern Germany surrender to British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery. One or two former POWs noted the irony of Montgomery being there, since he had been one of the planners of the doomed Dieppe raid over two years and eight months before.
The next day I was shipped back to England, to Aldershot, where I was soon put into hospital with pneumonia. By mid-July I had recovered enough to be sent back to Canada. My mother and sisters met me at the train station, along with Elspeth’s new husband, a man I’d never met before.
On my first night home I slept upstairs in my old bedroom on Hiawatha Road. I woke to find my mother shaking me.
“What’s wrong?” I asked groggily.
“You were screaming, son,” she said. “Having a bad dream. But it’s over now, you’re home.”
“Over?” I asked with a croak.
“Yes,” she replied. “It’s over and you’re home.”
But she was wrong. It wasn’t over for me. It wouldn’t ever be over.
EPILOGUE
After Alistair Morrison’s death on September 9, 2009, this letter was found with his will. It was in a sealed envelope addressed to his grandson Lachlan. On it was written NOT TO BE OPENED UNTIL AFTER MY DEATH.
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