“The Germans were human after all,” Poolton wrote acidly decades later about the order that allowed the Canadians to remain unshackled for two days, beginning on Christmas Eve.95 Prime Minister Mackenzie King’s Christmas message neither inspired nor warmed the hearts of men like Fusilier Jacques Nadeau, who had been captured at Dieppe and desperately wanted word from his family, not Ottawa. The delivery of British Red Cross parcels, albeit one for every four instead of two men, was, however, welcomed.
After weeks of living on filthy food—the Germans didn’t waste water washing the cabbage before making the weak soup, which caused hundreds of cases of dysentery—chocolate, Spam, sugar, tea and coffee made for a feast. “The making of sauce for Christmas pudding from the butter in the can took us out of the moment and transported us back to … to our mother’s kitchens or where we first tasted it,” says Darch.
It is difficult to overstate the importance of the Christmas services organized at Stalag VIII-B by Chaplain John Foote, and by the Oblates in seven different camps. Armies grant padres special powers; for example, they can conduct funeral rites in religions other than their own. On this holy night, Foote conducted a joint service with the Anglican padre. A week earlier, Father Juneau had celebrated the Feast of the Immaculate Conception with “pomp” and assisted by several Protestants.
The year before, les religieux conducted Christmas services in a makeshift chapel. This year would be different. Just a few weeks earlier, Father Bergeron rejoiced in telling his Provincial that the very letter he was writing was “from the feet of Jesus-Hostie. Because, thank the Lord, our camp now has its own modest chapel.”96 Les religieux credited Mary with ensuring that they received the materials necessary to build the chapel, Étoile de la mer or Stella Maris (Star of the Sea), which they dedicated to the Virgin Mother. Bergeron told his family that the toil with tools and brushes was worth it, for it provided them with a holy place to host Milag Nord’s Catholics for services during the year and, especially, the commemoration of Jesus’s birth.
In a letter written home after Christmas, Juneau told of celebrating Christmas mass in Stalag XVIII-A’s theatre. That midnight mass was held five hours early mattered less than the gathering of the faithful in the chapel, complete with a crèche, the statues of Mary, Joseph, the three kings and the shepherd boy made from plaster of Paris.
At the POW camp near Blechhammer, in south-central Poland, Father Charbonneau conducted mass in a sanctuary that was a feast for the eyes. With the help of materials smuggled into the camp, he turned a 25-by-12-foot corner of the barracks into what a Red Cross official called “the most beautiful chapel in a prison camp.”97 A Gothic arch, made from Red Cross boxes, framed the altar. Both were painted to look like stone. On each side of the arch were pieces of stained glass, one with Mary’s monogram framed in flowers and one with Joseph’s, a sleigh handmade of paper and cardboard by an English soldier.
Mass began with the familiar Latin words that not only told the believers that their faith and Church lived on but also connected them to their families back home, as they too soon would be hearing the same words and praying the same prayers. The two paintings and a memorial that decorated Charbonneau’s humble chapel were the manifestation of the Church in the milieu of the prison camp. “One is of Calvary, the other of Christ coming to the prisoners, with this inscription: ‘I will refresh you (sic), je vous referai.’”98 To the left of the altar, in another Gothic arch, was a memorial for the soldiers who had disappeared.
CHAPTER SIX
January–April 1943
[Courage] is a cold choice between two alternatives, the fixed resolve not to quit; an act of renunciation which must be made not once but many times by the power of the will.
— LORD MORAN, THE ANATOMY OF COURAGE
MID-JANUARY 1943, STALAG VIII-B, LAMSDORF, GERMANY
THE RETURN OF THE DIEPPE PRISONERS’ RED CROSS PARCELS
The decision to again distribute Red Cross parcels to the Dieppe POWs provided more than desperately needed calories and nutrients via the familiar tastes of Spam, chocolate, condensed milk, raisins and canned peaches. They provided a sensory experience that took the POWs out of their drab surroundings. “It felt real good to have those tastes again. They brought back the good times, of life back in Canada,” says Stan Darch, who still remembers the sizzle of Spam and hot tea cooked on the Klim-tin blower.
In contrast to the huts’ stoves, in which the fuel was placed at the bottom, the result being that much of the heat radiated out of the bottom and sides of the stoves, the Klim-tin blowers worked like a forge. A stream of air, generated by a blower cut from a cookie tin or can, linked by a belt made from shoelaces or strips of leather, supercharged the air in the small combustion chamber at the bottom of the Klim can. A few wood chips or a bit of coal sufficed to boil a pot of tea. “We learned how to make [the Klim-tin blowers] from the men who were already in Lamsdorf,” recalls Darch. “They were wonderful. Just a few bits of wood or charcoal and we could brew up tea, cook the few potatoes they gave us or even the little bit of bacon we got every now and then.”99
The parcels also provided fodder for some much-needed entertainment in the form of what amounted to a bazaar. Some exchanges were relatively straightforward: bramble jelly from a Canadian parcel for marmalade from a British one. Muslim British soldiers held in another compound at Lamsdorf were eager to exchange cans of bacon for tea (which, like cigarettes, served the purpose of currency) or cans of salmon. Canadian Klim was highly prized, as were soap and sugar.
Charles Fisher recalled Stalag X-B as having a thriving black market, in which the law of supply and demand was nakedly apparent. “Two ounces of coffee bought two eggs one day, three the next.” The eggs, like white bread, sausage and even whisky, came from Germans who were willing to risk execution for real coffee and cigarettes. Cigarettes, the default currency, differed from real currency in that, over time, they literally went up in smoke, causing the black market economy to seize up. Unfreezing it required the injection of more cigarettes. At times this new “currency” came from newly arrived Red Cross parcels. Other times, to entice those men who’d held on to their cigarettes to part with them, men wrote IOUs on their banks in England, sometimes at the price of five dollars per cigarette. Letters home recorded these IOUs and “relatives transferred money to the home accounts of prison sellers,” wrote Fisher.
From both a psychological and a nutritional point of view, it would have been better for the POWs to have husbanded the Red Cross supplies. When Fisher was at Stalag X-B and later Milag Nord, the staples were held in common and doled out by the kitchen to every member of the mess. Most of the time, the Dieppe POWs were given one parcel per two or four men, which provided needed nutrients but undercut the Red Cross’s nutritional scheme. Each parcel provided a man with 2,070 calories per day, for seven days; this added to the German rations would have equalled sufficient calories to prevent the men from losing weight. However, to prevent Darch and his comrades from stockpiling canned goods that could be used while escaping, the Germans punctured the cans of Klim, Spam and bacon. The men would gorge themselves before the food turned rancid.100
19 JANUARY 1943, ZERBST, GERMANY
RCAF SERGEANT ANDREW CARSWELL BAILS OUT OF A BURNING BOMBER
“Your Lancaster bomber is a very good plan, ja? It is better than the B-17, ja?” asked Oberleutenant Schmidt. So as not to be tricked into divulging any information other than his name, rank and service number, Andrew Carswell, following his training, stayed silent.
A day earlier over Magdeburg, 100 miles southeast of Berlin, as the flames from his flak-damaged starboard engine burned toward the high-octane aviation fuel held in the wing, Carswell managed to level off his stricken plane. The fierce fire lit the fuselage enough so that he could see the maps and other papers being sucked out of it into the black night convulsed by exploding shells and the roar of the plane’s three remaining Rolls-Royce Merlin engines. Within moments, the plane had dropped thous
ands of feet and all but Carswell and his navigator, John Galbraith, had jumped from the burning “kite.”
Arguing that they could still make it home, Galbraith refused to jump. “Look at that fire, you fucking idiot!” screamed Carswell. “Get the hell out! The controls are shot and I can’t hold it any longer.”101 Like most RCAF aircrew, Carswell had never practised a parachute drop. And, while he missed the river, until he punched the quick-release button, he suffered the indignity of dangling 20 feet above the ground after a tree snagged his chute. A few hours later, cold and wet from trudging through the snow, and shaken by the sure knowledge Galbraith was dead, Carswell knocked on a farmhouse door.
The old man who opened the door would have fired his rifle, Carswell believed, had the motherly-looking farm wife not intervened. Moments later, after sitting on a couch, he collapsed into unconsciousness. When he came to, he made it clear via the ten-year-old boy who was fascinated by his RCAF wings that he was from “Kanada.” A few minutes later, the police arrived and whisked Carswell to a holding cell in Zerbst’s town hall, where he was fed and asked about the relative merits of the American and British bombers.
20 JANUARY 1943, LOURDES, NOVA SCOTIA
RCAF SERGEANT IAN MACDONALD’S PARENTS READ A LETTER FROM LONDON
It would take another fortnight for the MacDonalds to learn it, but in early January, their son had been to London. Because of the blackout, he hadn’t seen much, but to his parents, who had never been past Halifax, just being at Waterloo Station, in Trafalgar Square and seeing the dome of St. Paul’s underlined how far he’d travelled and how close he was to danger. For hundreds of thousands of Canadian parents, pride in their son’s uniform was accompanied by fear, both for their safety and in the knowledge that the further they advanced into the war, the less they resembled the man who had left home.102 That night when he wrote home, to show that he was still their Ian, MacDonald wasted little time before telling of going to Canada House, where he had glanced over the headlines of the New Glasgow Evening News.
On 20 January, a letter from Great-West Life Assurance, an insurance adjuster, informed Mr. MacDonald that Ian’s life insurance policy was a month in arrears because, “for some reason or other,” the papers that authorized the assignment of $4 per pay were “late coming through.” It was a polite request that Mr. MacDonald bring the policy up to date.
27–31 JANUARY 1943, DULAG LUFT, FRANKFURT
CARSWELL ENDURES SEVERAL ROUNDS OF PSYCH-OPS AND COVERS UP HIS ONLY MISTAKE
Since Carswell had been shot down only two days earlier and was a pilot, the intelligence machinery at Dulag Luft went to work right after he arrived there. The order to strip off his uniform had less to do with ensuring that he did not have access to escape equipment (the Germans did not yet know that he had a knife, saw and map hidden in his uniform) than with softening him up by removing the outward sign of his military status. Though it might be difficult for civilians to grasp the importance of a uniform, the intelligence agents knew that it was the outward sign of status and, for a serviceman, something approaching a legal document that brought Carswell under the Geneva Convention.
During the night, his small, bare cell was first so hot that he had to strip off his grey, shapeless clothes, thus infantilizing the Canadian pilot, and then so cold that he banged on the cell’s steel door to implore the guard to turn the heat back on. Not until later the next day did he eat thin turnip soup and a small piece of close-to-inedible black bread. A day later, having seen only the guard who walked him to the toilet, he was happy when a guard threw his uniform, but not his flying boots, into his cell.
Knowing that the return of his uniform would make Carswell feel “like a human being again,” the Luftwaffe moved its next piece on the chessboard in the person of a friendly-looking officer who, after opening the door to Carswell’s cell, said “Good morning” and then asked, “Are you feeling better after your harrowing experience?” His friendly words and hearty handshake were designed to elide Carswell’s three days in solitary, the dehumanizing effect of taking Carswell’s clothes and the wretched food and return Carswell to the emotional trauma of the crash. The intelligence officer outranked Carswell but told him to sit down before asking, “Where do you live in Canada? … Vancouver? Toronto? Montreal?”103
The strain was intense. Before him sat an apparently friendly German speaking in unaccented English who had just asked a question of no obvious military import. The officer erred, however, by pausing long enough for Carswell to recall a British intelligence officer telling him that even harmless information could be “used to convince a prisoner that the captors already knew everything about him…. even the amounts and places of leave, all had their place in filling in the big picture for German intelligence.” Fortified, Carswell demurred when the German asked, “Well, … what is your home address? I have spent some time in Canada myself. It is a beautiful country.” When asked, “What possible difference could it make to anybody if you told us your home address?” Carswell admitted that he didn’t know but that he was under orders to give nothing other than his name, rank and service number. The intelligence officer’s bonhomie evaporated. “If you do not cooperate with us, you will be here for the rest of the war!”
The next day the officer was back, asking courteously if the Canadian would like a shave and a book to read. Carswell enjoyed the shave and wondered if he’d been given A Tale of Two Cities because of Mr. Manette’s story of being a prisoner in the Bastille for 18 years. The following day, accompanied by another English-speaking officer, Carswell’s interlocutor was back asking a series of seemingly innocuous questions about life in Canada. Again, Carswell refused to take the bait.
A day later, as promised, a man sporting several red crosses on his tunic and claiming to be Swiss official entered Carswell’s cell, saying in a heavy German accent, “Ve are glad to see zat you are not voondet or anysink like zat!” What he didn’t know was that airmen had been warned to expect fake Red Cross officials. Given the Canadian’s previous refusal to say anything about his plane, the official must not have been surprised that Carswell did not fill out the form that asked for his address, type of aircraft, point of departure, squadron, bomb load and other sensitive information. Carswell stifled a laugh when the “Red Cross” official screamed, “You are a heartless brute!”—the same words the German official had used a day earlier.
The Canadian slipped only once during the pas de deux with the Luftwaffe. The day after his encounter with the “Red Cross” official, the two German officers returned and complained that Carswell had not been cooperative. Barely were the words “He’s no Red Cross officer…. He’s a phony!” out of his mouth when Carswell realized that he’d broken the rule about not getting drawn into a debate. “How do you know that?” they responded, and he realized he’d just given the officers an insight into what the Allies knew about Luftwaffe interrogation procedures.
Carswell moved quickly to cover his tracks. “He doesn’t look like a Red Cross man … He looks like a German and he talks with a German accent!” The officer tut-tutted the poor, ignorant Canadian. “A lot of Swiss speak German.” Their condescending acceptance of Carswell’s response “Oh, … I thought they all spoke Swiss!” indicated that for all their training, the intelligence officers did not have a grasp of that Canadian speciality: dumb insolence.
On Carswell’s fifth day in solitary, the Luftwaffe officer tried again, this time asking about navigator John Galbraith. Carswell, who figured that they found his name on his parachute pack, knew nothing of his whereabouts, of course, and threw the question back at them: “Okay, … where is he, then?” “We don’t know. We’re still looking for him. But we’ll find him.” The next day Carswell was released into the general camp population and a few days later transported first to Stalag Luft I and then, with several other POWs, including fellow RCAF Officer Bill Jackson, to Stalag VIII-B.
8 FEBRUARY 1943, ARBEITSKOMMANDO 1049, NIEDERORSCHEL, GERMANY
LETT
ERS FROM HOME AND HOUSEKEEPING
On 8 February, Jack Poolton received his first letter from home. “It didn’t matter what the letter said,” recalls Darch. “Any news or what today we would call gossip reached into us and made us feel warm.” At this point in the war, it took between 12 and 16 weeks for a letter to get from Lamsdorf to Canada and for the return letter to arrive back at the POW camp. “That first letter that referred to a letter I wrote meant so much. I don’t remember now what it was about. But I remember what it did. It told me that I was back in contact with my family, that even though I was stuck rotting in a POW camp in Germany, a part of me was back with the people I loved, that I was part of their everyday life and them, mine.”104
Though they were warmed by greatcoats sent by the Red Cross and insulated from the cold ground and floors by wooden clogs that, for a few cigarettes, Remi Leroux made more comfortable with leggings made from greatcoat material, by the winter of 1942–43 the Dieppe survivors’ clothes were wearing out. “I mended my own clothes, but some men didn’t and daily wear meant that soon their clothes were getting pretty thin,” says Darch. “Some other men were good with the needle, so for a few cigarettes they’d patch up the shirt or pants. Because no one had proper patches, we were soon a very motley bunch.”
Keeping clean was a constant challenge. “Dignity demanded we shave and, rather than shave in cold water, after taking one or two mouthfuls of it to drink, we used the mint tea that was given to us in the morning to shave. They allowed us to shower every couple of months. We had three minutes of hot water and the rest was cold. The German soap wouldn’t lather up, so we saved the soap from our Red Cross parcels and used it,” explains Darch, chuckling at the memory of men smelling like Lux soap, which advertised itself as the choice of nine out of ten Hollywood starlets.
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