The Forgotten
Page 11
While camp authorities could and did issue orders directly to POWs, most of the time orders were transmitted through a chain of command, at the top of which was the camp’s Man of Confidence, who was either elected by the POWs or chosen by the senior officer to liaise with the Kommandant or the Senior British Officer. At the work camp, the factory’s manager and effectively its Kommandant had been well-treated during his stint as a POW in England during the last war and was amenable to the Man of Confidence’s requests for wood and other supplies to winterize the drafty bunkhouse.
POWs, however, have their own code of honour. Thus, as they lined their bunkhouse’s walls, ceiling and floor, they built in secret trapdoors, providing secret storage spaces. The Germans knew Prouse built a small suitcase but not that it had a secret bottom. Not until a stool pigeon inserted into the barracks reported it did the Germans know that bunkhouse boards were being used to shore up an escape tunnel.
22 NOVEMBER 1942, ON THE ROADS OF FRANCE
JOHN RUNCIE ESCAPES
After a few nights of dodging patrols and skirting roadblocks, Runcie decided to risk travelling by day. On the roads from Paris through Fontainebleau to Orléans, Blois, Tours and beyond, he found to his surprise bridges and other natural places for roadblocks unguarded. His beret and heavily accented French provided enough cover for two German truck drivers to each give the “Basque worker” a lift. The French were not fooled but were willing to help, though some farms were so stripped of food that all the farmer could offer was his barn to sleep in.
Some 500 miles from Paris, the very terrain of France seemed to turn against the escaper. In the forest of Landes, between Bordeaux and Bayonne, he could find neither people to help him nor shelter from the cold of night. Though hunger made him light-headed, he knew he could go weeks without eating. Water, however, was vital, and as his thirst worsened, he looked desperately for any sign of water where once the ground was once so wet peasants used stilts to get around. But the French hydrologists and agronomists who designed the man-made pine barrens did their job well, and as each breath expelled more water, Runcie’s thirst gave way to dry mouth, headaches and exhaustion.
Runcie’s report does not say where he found water. But he did, for he made it through the forest and into Biarritz, where a friendly waiter sketched out the map of the French-Spanish frontier, which he crossed on 22 November. The intelligence officer who briefed Runcie after he arrived in Britain wrote how impressed he was with Runcie’s solo home run.
2 DECEMBER 1942, STALAG VIII-B, LAMSDORF, GERMANY
THE IMPORTANCE OF SARDINE-CAN KEYS
The Canadians at Stalag VIII-B did not know that, after he had been “selected for ‘escape’” by a pliable Vichy official in Fort de la Duchère, Captain Masson had reached freedom in Spain. Nor did they know of the public debate that exploded after word of their shackling reached Canada. After a few days of calls to shackle the 16,000 German POWs in Canada, cooler heads prevailed, with the Globe and Mail ultimately declaring on 14 October, “Let us not … embark upon a contest which we cannot hope to win.” Still less did the Canadians POWs know of the toing and froing between Ottawa and the Dominion Office in London, of Churchill’s direct appeal to Mackenzie King to approve shackling German POWs or of the riot that ensued when Canadian guards tied to shackle U-boat men in Bowmanville, Ontario.88
What they did know was that the guards in front of them were carrying handcuffs to replace the rope that had been used to tie their hands. Though heavier, the handcuffs were somewhat more comfortable than the ropes, though many found the stamp “Made in Birmingham, England” rudely ironic.
Just before Appell, the cry “Chains Up!” would ring out and the men would line up, a guard putting the handcuffs on them. They did not, however, stay on long. For the men realized that the key that opened a Klim (powdered milk) or sardine can did the same for the handcuffs, which meant that the cuffs could be surreptitiously taken off when in the barracks.
One day, the men in Jack Poolton’s barracks used their ability to open the handcuffs to get back at their Blockführer, the hated “Spitfire” who once kicked a pot of water Poolton was boiling for tea over onto a prisoner, scalding him. After being shackled, each man would unlock the cuffs, place them back in their box, go to the back of the line, and then appear again in front of Spitfire for cuffing. After some four hours, a not-too-happy officer arrived and asked what Spitfire had been doing. His sputtered answer, “Chaining up the prisoners,” amused the Canadians but not Spitfire’s superior officer. Another time, Spitfire saw a man washing himself outside the barracks unchained and naked. “How did this man remove his clothing?” the hapless guard demanded. “He’s a magician,” someone called out.89
Spitfire, however, got his revenge. The penalty if caught without your hands cuffed was having them cuffed behind your back and being made to stand with your nose and toes against an outside wall for eight hours, no matter what the weather. “If you moved,” says Darch, “you got a rifle butt in the back.”
7 DECEMBER 1942, NEAR L’ALBENC, VICHY FRANCE
GEORGE BROWNE WONDERS WHOM HE CAN TRUST
Fifteen days in solitary confinement after an unsuccessful attempt to break out of Fort de la Duchère did little to dull George Browne’s ardour to escape.
He had Operation Torch to thank for the fact that the guards on the buses taking him and the other internees to Grenoble were Italian and not French; in response to the Allied invasion of North Africa, Germany occupied Vichy, though Hitler allowed Mussolini to grab a piece of southeast France. The guards may have been insensitive to the POWs’ bladders, but they couldn’t ignore the need to fill the buses’ radiators and so stopped on a bridge in a village about 40 miles northwest of Grenoble to do so. To provide light, the drivers arranged the buses in a semicircle, which gave Browne his chance to slip out the back door of his bus.
A guard noticed something, for just moments after Browne bolted into a nearby street, he heard yelling and saw flashlights. The street turned out to be a cul-de-sac, and upon reaching the dead end, Browne turned right. After jumping two fences, he reached the river, which he ran through for about 30 yards before climbing back onto the same side of the bank he’d started from, then hid in a row of hops. Twice, flashlight beams shone mere inches away. When the searchers moved on, he crossed the river and went through some parkland to the main road so that he was now behind the convoy.
Browne was by no means the only man on the roads of southern France. But demobilized Vichy soldiers and even tramp workers had papers; Browne didn’t. And they weren’t wearing RAF battle dress under their civilian clothes, which he was. Nor did they speak French with an English accent. Browne could do nothing about this last, but with some help, he might cover the other two bases.
Had he known that the man who would answer the door was the engineer of the local power station, Browne might have sought help elsewhere. Despite being a civil servant, the engineer accepted Browne’s battle dress in exchange for food and a much-needed pair of dry socks before sending him off with explicit directions on how to pass checkpoints on his way to Sassenge, where he could expect to find sympathetic railwaymen.
In the darkness, Browne erred by staying to the right at a fork in the road and near dawn found himself near the village of l’Albenc, once again not knowing whom he could trust.
10 DECEMBER 1942, PARIS
RCAF PILOT OFFICER SYDNEY SMITH HIDES AMONG GERMAN UNIFORMS
The farmer’s dog sniffed around the haystack Sydney Smith had burrowed into around at 5 a.m., after parachuting from his Vickers Wellington bomber. The farmer looked kind, but Smith decided to wait before revealing himself. By dusk, thirst and hunger forced his hand, and when the farmer again came close to the haystack, Smith slid down from the top. The unexpected appearance of a man in flying dress stunned the farmer, but he quickly recovered, asking, “Anglais? RAF?”90 before taking Smith’s arm and walking him briskly to his house, where he was fed and given a clean bed.
Smith, whose idea of excitement when he was growing up was going to Sudbury for a movie and a lunch at Woolworths, was smitten by the radiant Parisian blonde with an aquiline nose and smouldering eyes who arrived the next day. Janot’s accented English as she repeated his name, “Sydney Percival Smith,” enchanted him.
The next day, after dropping into the river his watch, the metal buttons from his uniform (which had been burned) and anything else that would tell the Germans that a Canadian airman had been near the village 20 miles southwest of Paris, Janot and he boarded a train for the city. During the 45-minute ride, he ached to ask why she was ignoring the sign that stated women who helped downed Allied airmen would be sent to concentration camps in Germany. Later, he learned that Janot’s husband had suffered the fate she was determined to keep Smith from: being a prisoner in Germany.
In Janot’s apartment, Smith found himself, as if in a dream, looking out the window at the Seine, the Eiffel Tower and the rest of Paris, defaced as it was by the huge swastikas. At about the same time that the RCAF casualties officer in Ottawa sent a telegram telling Smith’s family that he was missing, Janot got Smith past a row of Waffen-SS troops by the simple expedient of walking haughtily, as if she were reviewing the troops. Later he joined Janot, who played her cover as an haute bourgeoise to the hilt, at a performance of Macbeth in French, in an audience studded with German officers in dress uniform.
16–22 DECEMBER 1942, IN THE PYRENEES
BROWNE ENTRUSTS HIMSELF TO SMUGGLERS
A century earlier, escaped slaves knew to “follow the drinking gourd,” for the Big Dipper pointed to the North Star and freedom in Upper Canada. For Browne, who was freezing while walking above Pic de Peyrot’s snow line of 8,500 feet, on the French-Spanish border, seeing Polaris in front of him beckoned disaster. He had taken a wrong turn and was heading north, away from Spain.
Five days earlier, after missing the turn to Sassenge, he’d been lucky. The farm family he gambled on fed him, gave him a bed and put him in contact with a Gaullist, who took him to Grenoble, where he was given money, an identity card and a train ticket to Toulouse. Through six more towns and villages, one person after another helped him. The man on the road to Auzat warned Browne that the village he planned to stop in before making his way into the Pyrenees was full of Germans and suggested another, where a farmer fed him and urged him to find a guide to lead him over the mountains. Browne didn’t miss his watch or the 3,000 francs he paid the three young men he met on the road to Goulier-et-Olbier to lead him to the top of the mountain. As the sub-zero wind whisked away precious body heat, Browne regretted having paid his guide with his extra set of clothes.
By the light of the quarter moon, he saw a half-constructed dam and a deserted hut. His boots soaking by this time, he entered the hut. But since neither the building waste he crawled under nor the little bit of dry and cold bread he ate could break what he recognized to be a dangerous shivering, Browne soon left the hut. A few minutes later he saw another cabin, its lights signalling both the promise of not freezing to death and the threat of being captured.
The benumbed Canadian didn’t feel the sting of knocking on the door. Through chattering teeth, he told the engineers who opened it that he was an escaped POW, and with blue fingers took out his fake identity card. Recognizing his desperate state, they gave Browne food and hot red wine, then covered him with blankets.
The next morning, the engineers placed Browne’s life in the hands of smugglers who carried contraband wireless sets to a village about two miles from the border of the postage stamp–sized principality of Andorra. A few days later, a second group of smugglers took him from the neutral principality’s capital, Andorra la Vella, to the village of Martinet, five miles north of the Spanish border, from where he contacted the British consul in Barcelona. The consul arranged for Browne’s transport to Madrid and thence to Gibraltar; Browne reached London on 26 January 1943.
20–22 DECEMBER 1942, ON FRENCH TRAINS
SMITH REACHES BORDEAUX
As he boarded the train from Paris to Bordeaux, accompanied by the pretty Janine De Greef and Tante Dédée, the nom de guerre of Andrée de Jongh, co-organizer of the famed Comet Line, Smith could not help but note the irony of an officer and a gentleman putting his life in the hands of women between 18 and 25. Yet despite numerous warnings from German officers about feminine wiles, Wehrmacht soldiers were routinely befuddled by these women. As their train clattered toward the southwest, Smith’s home run unfolded with cinematic order. Smith, Janine, Dédée, two Belgian soldiers and a British one had their own compartment; the British soldier was forbidden to speak and Smith, the mute grocer, “couldn’t.” At Bordeaux, they transferred to the train to Bayonne.
When they stepped onto the platform in Bayonne, a young woman came running up to Dédée and kissed her on the cheeks. Like her father, the teenaged Lucienne was part of the Comet Line, and that afternoon her task was to bring word of German movements in the town. German boots were on the bridge they had to cross, she whispered to Dédée, which prompted Dédée to play the envy card. She took one man in each arm, sent one with Janine and Smith with Lucienne, telling the two other women, as she was going, to make a show of intimacy with their “parcels.” Just before starting off, Dédée told the escapers that, since they were taller than the average Bayonnoise, they should bend a bit, one of the many examples Smith remembered of her life-saving attention to detail. This was in stark contrast to his momentary lapse on the Paris Métro when after jostling a woman he said “Excuse me” instead of “Excuse-moi”—and just feet away from two SS guards who mercifully didn’t notice.91 Like other “parcels,” he surely would have been told as well to, when in a restaurant, keep his fork in his left hand even when lifting food to his mouth.
A few hours later, after a short train ride to a town ten miles southwest of Bayonne, Smith’s party was met by a couple of women who replaced Janine and Lucienne. As the sun began to set, the four Allied servicemen and their three guides reached a large white farmhouse, where Madame Usandizaga welcomed them warmly. Smith’s question of how the escapers were going to climb the rugged Pyrenees was lost in the excitement generated by the arrival of the guide, Floretino Goicoechea, a smuggler who had turned his skills over to the Allies. A short while later, Dédée said her goodbye and, despite her “ever-present intensity,” Smith heard in her voice the emotion of the moment in her words: “Prenez garde”—Be careful—“my brave boys.”92
LATE DECEMBER 1942, STALAG VIII-B, LAMSDORF, GERMANY
THE LEAD UP TO CHRISTMAS
The days before Christmas were especially difficult, recalls Darch. “We put up some silver paper that our cigarettes had been wrapped in, but it didn’t help much. The barracks were dismal and lit only by a few weak bulbs, so the silver paper didn’t twinkle much.” Memories of Christmas dinners amid the warmth of families and roaring fires made the ever-present cold and gnawing hunger all the more difficult. Nor did singing Christmas carols help; the absence of women’s and children’s voices underlined the men’s distance from home.
At his Arbeitskommando, Prouse too found Christmas depressing because it “started me thinking too much of loved ones and home.”93 The arrival of Christmas crackers brightened the mood. Prouse doesn’t record if anyone thought it strange that these crackers came from an organization other than the Red Cross, but once they started eating them, they quickly realized that the crackers were not their only Christmas present. Because the food contained in Red Cross parcels was so important for survival, MI9 never used those parcels to send escape gear such as the rice-pape
r maps of Germany and adjoining countries that were baked into the Christmas crackers.
22–23 DECEMBER 1942, IN THE PYRENEES
SMITH REACHES ANDORRA
None of the four evaders had any doubt what their guide, Goicoechea, meant when he “pressed his slab of a hand over his mouth” moments after they walked out the door and started toward the Pyrenees. A short time later, as they climbed in almost pitch blackness “over narrow overgrown paths and at an almost vertical incline,” and made their way along ledges just a few inches from drops several hundred feet high, the Canadian from Ontario’s mining country found the cold bearable.94 As the sky to the east began to lighten, they began climbing down, which required finding handholds to keep from falling down the mountain.
Goicoechea didn’t allow any rest until they staggered into a safe house several hours from the border. Yet Smith breathed easier as he shivered while wading across the river Bidassa, during which he could not help comparing the former smuggler to Moses leading his people out of bondage.
25 DECEMBER 1942, THE POW CAMPS
CHRISTMAS DAY