Wearying too were the long months of inactivity. “If you have never experienced it,” wrote one veteran of the Colditz POW camp, “you can never imagine what it is like to get up in the morning to face a long empty day with nothing whatever to do except what you do yourself.”50
The POWs suffered psychologically from the indeterminacy of their sentence. Unlike prisoners who have been convicted and sentenced, prisoners of war have no idea when their incarceration—by an unfriendly power, it must always be remembered—will end. Through clandestine radios and the camps’ jungle telegraphs, the Kriegies knew that in February Gneisenau and two other capital ships had humiliated the Royal Navy by dashing through the Channel to the North Sea and thence to Germany and that the Wehrmacht stood at the gates of Moscow and was closing in on Stalingrad. They also knew of the military disasters in the Far East.
Yet in a real sense, the POWs were out of time, living with images of the past made present by acts of memory or via the fleeting joy of a letter, which, because it could be six months old, often raised more questions than it answered: “Has a favourite cousin recovered from an illness?” “Does my young son or daughter even remember me?” “Do you remember the feel of my arms around you?” Or, as Father Goudreau wonders in a letter written that August, has that problem in James Bay been solved? In a letter he wrote in June, Father Bernard Desnoyers shifted the time scheme forward by asking his parents to send him his brother’s and sister’s final grades.
Les religieux at Milag Nord were surprised to find that their communal life did not transfer well to life in the camps. Indeed, given the differences between their sense of propriety and the crudeness of camp life, their community may have been under special pressures. “Eight, ten, twelve men eat, sleep, read, write, think and suffer inside the same four walls,” wrote Brother Cournoyer. At times they suffered from insomnia and depression, which became worse during periods of bombings. While their faith never broke, bad news, hunger and the “insalubrity of the barracks” affected them as it did other POWs. “It was miraculous that in these conditions … men of the cloth were not tempted to come to blows.”51
On 14 June, Goudreau assured his superior in Ottawa that despite having been separated from his brothers for the past six months, he was well in body and mind. In addition to ministering to 150 Catholics, he filled his days by teaching philosophy, French and Greek to three officers, including one from Mont-Joli, Quebec. What lay behind his note of concern about Father Charbonneau remains unclear, but he clearly was worried about the priest who had been ordained only a year before they set sail for Africa.
17 JUNE 1942, STALAG XXI-D, POSEN, POLAND
FATHER CHARBONNEAU SPENDS THE NIGHT AT AN OBLATE RESIDENCE
The letter Father Charbonneau wrote the Provincial in Ottawa three days later would scarcely have assuaged Father Goudreau’s worries.
The red flag wasn’t Charbonneau’s decision to use the powers Pope Pius XII gave priests in war zones to give general absolution but, rather, the letter’s distressed tone. The assertion that God has shown him that it is a man’s “personality that is the one thing that allows him to overcome the obstacles of life” shows his anguish. Even more worrisome is the letter’s close: “May I repeat myself, it takes a great deal of prayer by us and for us because ours is a hard experience. And when we think of the millions of prisoners who are in continuous moral danger.”
Neither the German nor the Canadian censors could guess the whole truth behind this sentence in the middle of the letter: “German authorities are very good to me.” It is impossible to pin down how much the Kommandant learned of the clandestine correspondence Charbonneau was by then conducting with Oblates outside the camp. Shortly before the Gestapo arrested Father Woziwodski, whom they would murder, he put Charbonneau in touch with Father Théodore Nandzik, who, because of his advanced age, was left alone by the Gestapo. One day, after visiting another camp (with the Kommandant’s knowledge), Charbonneau’s guard led him to the small Oblate residence where Nandzik lived. After spending the evening speaking with the old Oblate, who reminisced about being a missionary in Keewatin, as much of northwestern Ontario was once known, Charbonneau slept in a real bed in a private room.
In the morning, after Charbonneau experienced the joy of celebrating mass in a consecrated chapel, the guard returned and escorted him back to his camp, where once, in the middle of the night, the Kommandant, who “opposed the Nazis … did not fear to come on his knees in his uniform and with medals hanging on his chest before a British prisoner to celebrate the Mass.”52
17 JULY 1942
IAN MACDONALD FLIES OVER NIAGARA FALLS
Ian MacDonald had already travelled a long way from smalltown Nova Scotia since shipping out for flight-training school six months earlier.
Six weeks training in Lachine, Quebec, was followed by six more in Montreal East, and then he was off to Belleville, Ontario, before going to Jarvis, Ontario, where he learned how to be a bomb aimer. Through days filled with geometry and gunnery classes, learning emergency evacuation procedures and target-identification drills, he looked forward both to going into action and to weekends when a friend invited him off base for a home-cooked meal.
MacDonald knew his family wanted to hear his voice, so he told them he’d just received the picture of Kathleen in the lilac tree, and of his memory of his father and uncle painting the garage. He had not, he assured his father, forgotten his birthday, though admitted to failing to find the gift he was looking for in “the little one-horse town” in which he was stationed.
Having written the words parents wanted to read, he then told them about “not doing so hot” on his first bomb-sighting exercise because the pilot, who was on his first bomb training run, had difficulty levelling off the Fairey Battle trainer, and also MacDonald had forgotten to engage the bomb selector switch. Concerned about him though they were, his parents knew Ian had always wanted to fly and, thus, when they read his letter could hear the relish in his voice as he told them the following day that the pilot let him take control of an Avro Anson for a few minutes. For a couple whose idea of excitement was taking the train to New Glasgow, their Ian circling over Niagara Falls at 2,000 feet seemed like something out of a Hollywood movie.
26 JULY 1942, STALAG LUFT III, SAGAN, POLAND
FATHER GOUDREAU LOSES HOPE
The reason Father Goudreau was still at Stalag Luft III impressed RCAF bomber pilot Kingsley Brown, who had arrived there in early July after being shot down over northwest Holland. Not long after the priest arrived at the camp, arrangements were made for the repatriation of several British chaplains captured in North Africa. On the appointed day, Goudreau refused to pack his bags, telling the Kommandant, “I have no instructions from the superior of my order…. I must obey my own conscience. I shall remain here to serve my fellow prisoners.”53 Perhaps unsurprisingly, though surely unbureaucratically, Friedrich Wilhelm von Lindeiner-Wildau accepted the Oblate’s decision.
The pilot was equally impressed with the thin, dark-eyed priest’s common touch and “intellectual honesty.” Despite never having fired a shot, dropped a bomb or worn a uniform, Goudreau spent endless hours “sitting in on bull sessions,” a phrase the priest never would have used. Goudreau welcomed questions about Catholicism from the largely Anglican and Protestant officers. He refused, however, to conduct conversions, telling prospective communicants that their lives in the POW camp were “abnormal and artificial” and thus the camp was not the milieu in which a reasoned decision to accept the doctrines of the Catholic Church could be made.
If Goudreau wrote of his decision to refuse to leave the camp for a train to Sweden, the letter is lost. Yet it is impossible that he did not replay this scene in his mind when he wrote in a late July letter, “I am always alone, sans espoir [without hope] de délivrance.”
CHAPTER FOUR
August–September 1942
Wir haben viele Verwundete, wir kommen mit zurück, bringen Sie Ihren Feldwebel (We have many w
ounded, we are bringing them back, get your sergeant.)
— COMPANY SERGEANT MAJOR LUCIEN DUMAIS TO THE GERMAN WHO TOOK HIS SURRENDER AT DIEPPE
19 AUGUST 1942, MID-MORNING, PUYS, FRANGE
PRIVATE JACK POOLTON SURRENDERS AND SEES WAR CRIMES
The fighting continued a mile or so to the east, on the beaches before Dieppe and a half mile further east at Pourville. At Puys, where 606 men belonging to Lieutenant Colonel Douglas Catto’s Royal Regiment of Canada had landed at 5:35 a.m., the battle was over almost before it began; most, Jack Poolton included, never got off what was code-named “Blue Beach.” A stream of lead poured into Poolton’s boat before its ramp even touched down, killing several men but missing the mortar operator, weighed down by his pack, a mortar launcher, a dozen mortar bombs, hand grenades and hundreds of rounds of ammunition in addition to his rifle.
The sergeant major who taught Poolton how to handle a mortar would have been pleased that, even though caught in a brutal maelstrom that shocked veteran CBC journalist Ross Munro “almost to insensibility,” the recruit with no battle experience noted the pattern the German mortar operators used.54 One bomb exploded near the seawall, knocking out stretcher-bearer Bill McLennan and tearing the head off another soldier, whose body, still pumping blood, fell on McLennan. Poolton heard the dull thump of bullets hitting bodies around him and counted himself lucky that one only knocked the rim of his helmet, for scant inches away lay his haversack filled with a dozen mortar bombs. Closer to Dieppe, a bullet hit a sapper’s backpack, turning the man into a human torch.
At 9:50 a.m., as hand grenades fell from the cliff above, and others that failed to reach the top of the cliff fell back and blew up among the Canadians who had thrown them, Poolton saw the landing craft sent to withdraw them driven back by a terrible fusillade.
The 31-year-old would never forget the wave of humiliation that swept over him, having dreamt from boyhood of being a soldier. “You can train a soldier to fight and you can train a soldier to accept death,” he later wrote, “but there is no way to prepare a soldier to be taken prisoner.” As one of the few unwounded men on Blue Beach, Poolton was set to work by the Germans as a stretcher-bearer. Three times he thread his way over sand turned brown and blood-slickened stones to pick up men, most of them buddies, some with arms and legs blown away, others with their intestines hanging out. Each time, he passed “corpses with the whites of their eyes transfixed on the heavens.” On one trip, as he knelt to speak to a man who could not move, he saw “a German officer walking from place to place shooting the worst of the wounded in the head.”55
19 AUGUST 1942, EARLY AFTERNOON, DIEPPE
THE GERMANS TAKE COMPANY SERGEANT MAJOR LUCIEN DUMAIS’S SURRENDER CORRECTLY
The forlorn sight of tanks, their tracks thrown, and pockmarked by mortar explosions on the beach before Dieppe was framed by the burned-out landing craft shoved onto the shore at oblique angles or drifting lifeless on the tide. Scores drowned in capsized landing craft. To Private Al Richards, who swam for shore after being thrown from a landing craft, the steel helmets still attached to bodies that floated upright looked “like turtles on the water.”56 In one sector of the beach lay a group of Fusiliers Mont-Royal that Major René Painchaud railed at for hitting the dirt—before he realized that every one of them was dead or wounded. Even as the cutting smell of cordite blew away where the blood was fresh, the air was sickeningly sweet and, where men’s abdomens had been ripped open, the thick stench of shit hung heavy.
Just after 1 p.m., the destroyer that held the headquarters for Operation Jubilee, HMS Calpe, her decks slick with the blood of hundreds of wounded, hove into view. Braving mortar fire, she sped toward the beach, getting close enough that some men ripped off their boots and stripped off their pants to increase their odds of swimming the 250 yards to the ship. Sergeant Major Lucien Dumais was not a strong swimmer and had already cheated the sea once (when the wash from the propellers of the landing craft he’d been attempting to board drove him, unconscious but alive, onto the beach), so he remained on shore and watched Calpe steam away.
Small white flags fluttered above tanks that sheltered wounded men to their lee. Neither Dumais and the men with him behind a landing craft beached some distance up the beach nor the Germans took these flags as a sign of general surrender. Thus, when a medical officer told Dumais that the incoming tide had begun lapping at the wounded down the strand, the Montrealer gave greater weight to the possibility that, since the landing craft was on fire and the ammunition within it was exploding, the Germans thought his command was larger than it was and was firing at them, than he did to the moon’s effect on the oceans. A short time later, the medical officer said, “Well, Sergeant Major? It’ll soon be too late.” The proud soldier, who later, in describing a standoff that had occurred a few hours earlier in the old casino that dominated the beach, wrote, “I drew faster than he did, so I was alive and he was dead,” reluctantly agreed to lay down his arms.57
The formal structure of the Geneva Convention suggests that the moment a soldier raises his hands or waves a white flag, the victorious side, in the manner of a battlefield accountant, records his surrender according to established rules; on the battlefield, reality is much more complicated. The soldier who surrenders is torn by the desire to keep fighting and washed over by humiliation, while the soldier who is asked to accept the surrender is torn by fear that he is being duped (once he lowers his rifle would some unseen shooter do him in?); fuelled by the adrenaline of battle augmented by the exhilaration of victory and, we must never forget, driven by blood lust. Thus, it is not surprising that the first reaction to Dumais’s surrender flag was a burst of rifle fire, which almost caused him to pull his rifle back to his shoulder and begin shooting.
A nearby German motioned to Dumais to drop his rifle and raise his arms. He slowly lowered his gun, untied the yellowed flag he’d waved and threw the rifle down toward the shingle. “The bayonet dug itself in and the rifle stuck, butt end up: the way we mark the spot where a soldier lies wounded or dead,” Dumais later wrote. “It seemed to symbolize the fact that my military life was over.”58
19 AUGUST 1942, AFTERNOON, DIEPPE
CANADIAN PRISONERS MARCH THROUGH DIEPPE, AND THE GERMANS DENY THEM WATER
Three hours after Calpe slipped over the horizon, Captain George A. Browne, a Forward Observation Officer attached to the Royal Regiment of Canada, followed Catto out of a small wood they and some 20 other men had taken shelter in after destroying six machine guns on a hill above the beach. After almost 11 hours, Operation Jubilee was over, some 1,400 men were dead or wounded and 1,975 Canadians were prisoners of war.
How the prisoners were treated varied greatly. Hauptmann Richard Schnösenberg recalled the moment of Catto’s surrender as “the last knightly encounter with the enemy on the field of battle.” Those who took his surrender of the South Saskatchewans and the Cameron Highlanders behaved correctly. Once the Germans who had fired at Dumais realized how many wounded men he had, they provided medical care. And even on Blue Beach, a medical officer gave Captain Robert Robertson, a Royal Regiment doctor, dressings to bind up wounds.59
In places, the victors gave the vanquished water and, in at least one case, some beer. In others, in contravention of Geneva, the Germans did more than refuse to give the exhausted, shocked and desperately thirsty men water. While les dieppoises did not spirit men away under their skirts, they were an enterprising bunch. Some placed buckets of water on the streets on which the POWs, some singing “La Marseillaise” or whistling “The Maple Leaf Forever,” Canada’s unofficial anthem (and a surprisingly martial tune), were marched into captivity. Others ignored the Germans on horseback; one woman ran up to one man and whispered that the POWs should start cursing in French and shaking their fists at her. Word quickly spread down the line, and when they did as she said, she feigned anger and threw tomatoes at them. By laughing and congratulating the woman for “flinging tomatoes at the Engländer Schweine,” the Germans en
joyed what appeared to be a violation of Geneva’s prohibition against public insults and missed the fact that the woman provided the Canadians with some much-needed food.60
Other violations of Geneva occurred, including the pilfering of watches, pens and money. Luckily, the Germans didn’t find Dumais’s penknife, which he soon used to cut up his and other POWs’ Mae Wests to fashion foot coverings for the many men who had lost their boots.
19 AUGUST 1942, LATE AFTERNOON, NEAR DIEPPE
JUST-MARRIED MADAME DUPUIS CRIES UPON SEEING THE DEFEATED CANADIAN SOLDIERS
She woke early, near 3 a.m., but not because she was nervous that after the church service that day would come her first night with her husband. Since the French Revolution, civil weddings had preceded church weddings, which meant she was already Madame Paul Dupuis, and he lay sleeping beside her in their marital bed. Rather, what woke her was the roar of German and Royal Navy guns, the rumble of which could still be heard during the church ceremony. In the late afternoon, as the wedding party made its way back toward Dieppe under skies no longer stained by anti-aircraft fire and the condensation trails of fighter planes, the revellers met with a column of Canadians being marched from Dieppe to Envermeu, where the officers were herded into the very church in which the Dupuises’ marriage had been solemnized.
To Madame Dupuis, resplendent in her white wedding dress, and Monsieur Dupuis, dressed in his finest suit, and the other members of the wedding party, the halting column of haggard men must have seemed like a gruesome scene out of a medieval fresco. The hobbled were not allegories of moral failings, however, but real men, soldiers from across the sea, some now held up by shaking legs or by the near failed strength of a comrade’s shoulder. For the barefoot, each step on the rocky road was a physical reminder of their defeat. All were thirsty and hungry.
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