Poolton recalls a more ominous aspect of the showers. The German guards in the shower room pointed toward their penises. Not knowing that circumcision was rather more common in Canada than Europe, “if they spotted one who had been circumcised, they would shout ‘Juden.’”
MID-FEBRUARY 1943, STALAG VIII-B, LAMSDORF, GERMANY
CARSWELL MEETS AN OLD FRIEND
“Hey, Andy! What are you doing here?” The question seemed absurd. After all, Carswell had just arrived at the gate of Stalag VIII-B in the middle of Germany; who could know him here? At first he didn’t see anyone familiar in the crowd of POWs; then he spotted a bearded man calling out “Jack Lyall” and “Malvern,” the name of their Toronto high school. A few moments later while being marched through the Dieppe compound, during which Carswell saw his compatriots in chains, a Canadian officer walked up and started marching in step with Carswell. “Hi, Andy!” Now it was Carswell’s turn to ask an absurd question. “What the hell are you doing here, George?” he asked George Barless, who had grown up one house away from Carswell’s boyhood home at 26 Spadina Avenue.105
The sight of his countrymen in shackles shocked Carswell, as did the drabness of the barracks, the stench of the 40-holer and the bone-chilling temperatures that mocked the barracks’ walls. An experienced Kriegie told him that sleeping in one’s clothes did not keep one warmer during the night or in the morning. Hard experience had taught him it was better to lay the clothes on top of the thin blanket, thus providing a few more layers of covering and giving them a chance to dry out.
Within days, the crushing boredom set in. Carswell took some comfort in the outcome of the English lessons that a fellow Kriegie had given an Unteroffizier. At Appell one morning, the proud German officer announced to the recalcitrant airmen, “I know that you people think I know fuck nothing! But you are wrong! I know fuck all!”106
WINTER 1943, ARBEITSKOMMANDO 1049, NIEDERORSCHEL, GERMANY
ROBERT PROUSE WEARS A GRASS SKIRT IN PLAY
In larger camps, the Kriegies had theatres and even repertoires. But even in small work camps like the one Robert Prouse shivered through during the winter, the men took pride in their theatrical skills. Whether the plays were by the Bard or others, they were a throwback to Elizabethan theatre, for young, slight men played the women’s parts. In one particular play, Prouse was not only especially proud of working out the dance steps for the South Sea island “women” in grass skirts but of his own dancing and costume, made of shredded paper and a bra, this last producing a “a lot of good-natured ‘cat-calls’ from the audience, along with a few lewd suggestions.”107
The catcalls were both good-natured fun and indicative of the kind of nervousness generated by dances, but not by boxing and hockey matches, French and German classes and orchestras like the one Father Barsalou formed. It was, recalled Canadian Private Geoffrey Ellwood, “one thing for guys to dance together because there’s nobody else to dance with. But when you start dancing together and likin’ it, and start snuggling up, it became very, very obvious” what was happening.108 The flippant line “Home or homo by Christmas,” which seemed at odds with the opprobrium attached to homosexuals back in Canada (not to mention the military regulations used to punish homosexual behaviour) even as it set up a hierarchy that clearly placed “straight” above homosexual sex and touched on the men’s concern about both their sexuality and libidos.109 It also underscores how starved the men were for physical affection.
Attitudes toward the homoerotic acts varied greatly.110 Fisher, who found that the only examples of flagrant homosexuality occurred among medical personnel, believed that it was “abhorred by other prisoners.”111 Prouse, who records an incident where he shoved a man coming on to him against the wall, was even more disturbed by the possibility of where, “if the war went on endlessly,” the human need for emotional support and physical affection would lead.112 Ellwood took a more sanguine view: homosexual relationships were formed, “but nobody seemed to take it as serious, you know. They’d look at it and discuss it amongst ourselves, and that was it. It was accepted that some people are that way.”113
MARCH 1943, STALAG VIII-B, LAMSDORF, GERMANY
CARSWELL LEARNS THE MEANING OF “TROUBLE AND STRIFE”
The final decision for Carswell’s plan to swap over with a British private so that he could try to escape with another British soldier lay not with the Escape Committee but with Carswell’s barracks mates and muckers, for they would have to live and share meals with Dennis Reeves. Carswell’s doppelgänger likely got on better with his new mates than Carswell did with John Donaldson, who disliked both Canadians and air force men with equal ardour.
Swapping over may have been easier than digging tunnels but it still required work. Reeves had the simpler job. Carswell had said nothing during his interrogation, was new to the camp and his letters home had been perfunctory, so the Germans knew little about him. Reeves, by contrast, was an open book thanks to the rifle butts and boots used on him when he was captured, as was Donaldson, just before Dunkirk three years earlier. Accordingly, Carswell had spent the early part of March learning the details of Reeves’s life. Carswell’s dress rehearsal occurred in the British Army compound. Since his accent would give him away, though he learned the ways of cockney rhyming slang, in which “trouble and strife” means “wife,” he spoke as little as possible. What words that did pass his lips were affected Briticisms such as “blimey” and “foocking Jerries!”114
While Red Cross parcels never contained escape equipment, their contents still aided escapers. Carswell saved some chocolate bars, biscuits and cans of bully beef. His former barracks mates chipped in more chocolate and the all-important cigarettes. Some of this largesse never left the camp. To entice the guards into being less than thorough in their search of “Reeves,” Carswell placed a cache of chocolate, cigarettes and soap on the top of his pack.
31 MARCH 1943, ON GERMAN TRAINS
RCAF PILOT OFFICER KINGSLEY BROWN LEARNS THE WAR NEWS FROM A TALKATIVE SS SOLDIER
“It’s a scandal! They get all these poor Italians and Slovaks and Bulgarians in the country and let them wander around like lost sheep! … Here’s two more. Look at them! Bulgarians. Steelworkers. And nobody had sense enough to tell them how to get to Strasbourg!”115 The outburst by the elderly policeman in the Chemnitz train station told Kingsley Brown and his British escape partner, Gordon Brettell, that their cover was working.
The policeman’s annoyance at the functionary who had sent the two tramp workers didn’t stop him from helping them. When he saw that they were heading to Strasbourg via Nürnberg, he told them that they’d have to return to Leipzig and get a train from there, travelling to Nürnberg being impossible because the city had been heavily bombed. He then bought them tickets and told them to go have beer while they waited for the late-night train.
More than four decades later, Brown recalled the frisson of sitting in a train compartment with several German soldiers and a member of the SS. With millions of dragooned foreign workers in the Reich, the soldiers took no notice of two poorly dressed men but openly envied the uniform of the Hermann Göring Division. The SS’s view of itself as the elite and the poster in the carriage that read “Beware the Third Person! The Enemy has Ears!” notwithstanding, the SS soldier let his comrades—and, unwittingly, two Allied officers—in on a little secret: his division was “being posted to the front to face the Anglo-Americans in Tunisia.”
1 APRIL 1943, OUTSIDE A VILLAGE IN EASTERN GERMANY
CARSWELL AND HIS ESCAPE PARTNER REMIND SOME KRIEGIES OF THEIR DUTY
Neither Carswell nor Donaldson was impressed with the POWs they met at the brewery where they stopped for a night on the way to a work camp at a graphite mine. Nor were they impressed by the Kriegies they met at the mine. At the brewery, when Donaldson asked if anyone had tried to escape, as the window had only two bars and there was only one guard, he was stunned by the answer: “Don’t be a bloody fool…. This is the best fucking job in Germ
any! Why would we want to ruin everything by some silly bugger trying to escape?” One of the men then turned on Carswell, accusing him of being a “fucking Yank or Canadian” and probably an air force swapover to boot.116
Donaldson defended Carswell, quickly adding that he had been shot down three months before, which lowered the temperature in the room. One soldier asked, “What’s it like in England now, mate?” As they told him how they’d been half-starved and -frozen during the winter of 1940–41, Carswell understood why the fight had gone out of them, save for the times they urinated into the beer barrels destined for the SS.
The 15 POWs at the graphite mine had a tacit agreement with their guard, “Hermann the German.” He’d go easy on them if they didn’t try to escape (thus allowing him to spend time with his girlfriend). Donaldson angrily scotched their objections to their escape plans. “There is still a fucking war on. We are all British. The Jerries are the enemy, not us. It is our duty to try to escape, and it is your duty to try to help us. And remember one thing, this war will be over some day, and we are going to fucking well win it. After that, there’ll be a fucking reckoning!”
2 APRIL 1943, PRISON, GROBHARTMANNSDORF, SAXONY, GERMANY
BROWN’S IMPROMPTU BIRTHDAY PARTY
He was now 32 years and one day old, and the party the night before hadn’t been half bad. Some New Yorkers, captured a few months earlier in Tunisia and then recaptured after escaping from a POW camp, attended, as did French POWs who brought cakes, cookies and strong Gauloises cigarettes; the jovial German guards brought extra-large canisters of steaming chicory “coffee.” Still, as Kingsley Brown savoured the memory of the party, the question lingered: would he and Gordon Brettell have gotten farther had Sir Arthur Harris sent his bombers elsewhere a few nights earlier?
Had he, they would never have had to decamp to the air-raid shelter crammed with people who had nothing better to do but “notice the amateurish needlework that had transformed our bed blankets into civilian suits.”117 For a short time after the “All Clear” sounded, and while Brown and his partner enjoyed a beer, he thought they’d escaped—until two uniformed men stormed into the beer parlour and pointed directly at them.
Their only hope lay with their papers, which had passed muster with the old policeman, and Brown saying in heavily accented German that they were Bulgarian steelworkers. After seeing that their travel passes said they were going to Leipzig, the inspector left the room and made a phone call. When he returned, he said to the guards that they weren’t Bulgarian but French, and again examined their papers. Brown tried to keep the story going, and the inspector played along for a moment, then told Brown that in Leipzig the steel company had only a sales office. Brown was crestfallen because the information for the papers came from the very database he himself had compiled. When the inspector dropped the word “Gestapo,” the jig was up and they pulled out their dog tags. Fifteen days of solitary, what the Germans called “sharp arrest,” followed when they were returned to Stalag Luft III.
14 APRIL 1943, ROME
RCAF FLIGHT LIEUTENANT VINCENT MCAULEY MEETS A VERY-WELL-DRESSED SOLDIER
Since enlisting in the RCAF on 26 June 1940 in Moncton, New Brunswick, Vincent McAuley had seen many colour of uniforms: the blue of the Commonwealth’s air forces, the green of the US Army Air Forces and the GIs, and Canadian and British khaki. After being shot down on 11 December on his 45th mission after bombing Turin, Italy, he saw the green of the Italian soldiers and black of the Hugo Boss–designed uniforms of the Italian intelligence service. But neither he; his flight sergeant, Frederick Nightingale; nor British quartermaster sergeant William Cook, who had escaped with him from the Celio Military Hospital in Rome, had ever seen a uniform like this.
Before them stood a Catholic soldier belonging to the oldest standing army in the world, Pontificia Cohors Helvetica, the pope’s Swiss Guard. He wore billowing britches with alternating wide red, orange and blue stripes that tapered to tights below the knee, the blue signalling the royal pretensions of the Medici family of Renaissance Florence. Where the airmen clipped on their parachutes, this soldier had buckled on armour, above which sat a white ruff collar, like those worn by Her Majesty and courtiers in the paintings of the only Queen Elizabeth England had yet had. On his head sat a shiny morion helmet, like the ones worn by the Spanish conquistadors. He carried a sword and a halberd, a six-foot pole topped with a pike and axe blade designed in the 14th century to use against mounted knights.
After climbing the wall that surrounded the hospital, the escapers turned northwest and past the Colosseum, which glowed a ghostly white under the light of the quarter moon, before turning down the Via dei Fori Imperiali, which runs by the Roman Forum. Not far from the northeast corner of the forum, across the Piazza Venezia, stood the 230-foot-high and more than 400-foot-long monument to King Victor Emmanuel II. To avoid attracting attention from the guards around the monument, they likely turned left after the forum, which took them by the famous bronze statue of Marcus Aurelius and into the Jewish Ghetto before they crossed over the Ponte Sant’Angelo, at around 3:45 a.m.
Once across the Tiber, they avoided the quickest way to the Vatican, Via della Conciliazione, named for the Lateran Accords, which ensured the independence of the Holy See from Italy, the legal point upon which McAuley and his companions staked their freedom. The street ran straight from behind the Castel Sant’Angelo (Hadrian’s Mausoleum) to the Piazza del Popolo where Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s sweeping colonnades embrace St. Peter’s Square (and, symbolically, the world). Even at that early hour, the street was too filled with people to be safe. Instead, the escapers trusted themselves to the ancient streets of the Borgo.
As McAuley and Nightingale followed at a safe distance, Cook asked a man in German to direct him to the Vatican. When, after following his directions, they remained within the cramped, narrow streets of the Borgo, unable to see even Michelangelo’s famed dome, Cook asked a second man for help. Warily, he led Cook through the Porta Angelica on the eastern side of the colonnade and into St. Peter’s Square itself. After the man vanished, Cook left the safety of the square and rejoined McAuley and Nightingale. Worried that the man who had guided him might have whispered a word or two to a carabiniere, Cook led his comrades into the square through another entrance. A few moments later they stood before the ornately dressed Swiss Guard, who mistook them for generals.
15 APRIL 1943, OVER PICARDY, FRANCE
MACDONALD JOINS THE “CATERPILLER CLUB”
The first whiff didn’t quite register.
Then it strengthened to an undeniable smell of smoke. The instruments told Pilot Officer Lee Usher that the bomber’s engines were operating normally, but standard operating procedure called for him to abort the mission. “We had just got turned round,” recalls bomb aimer MacDonald, “when I realized that the smoke was coming from the elements that heated the bombs in the bomb bay. I told Usher that I’d forgotten I’d turned the heater on. Now that we knew where the burning smell came from, he decided to turn around to continue our mission despite the fact that we were no longer part of the bomber stream and would be flying alone.”
As he neared the target, lying prone in the bomb aimer’s glass-enclosed position in the plane’s nose, lit up by searchlights, MacDonald thought, “I’m never going to live through this wall of flak and tracer bullets,” which had already torn apart the plane’s inner starboard engine. He fought to keep his eyes from being blinded by the searchlights and called “Right, Right, Steady, Steady, Left, Right” into the intercom to direct the plane over its target. In spite of his training, MacDonald found himself unable to keep looking through the bomb sight to watch the bombs fall.
Freed from the six tons of bombs, the damaged Halifax bomber leaped higher. That, combined with the extra speed Usher now had because the plane was lighter, allowed him to break out of the cone of light. “I wasn’t a pilot, but I knew enough that Lee would have to feather the dead engine on the way back home. But we’d all seen much m
ore heavily damaged planes land, so we thought we had a pretty good chance,” says MacDonald.
A half hour later, Walter Reed, the plane’s mid-upper gunner, called out that there was another Halifax not far below them. Harry Jay, the plane’s rear gunner, leaned over his four .303 machine guns and saw to his horror not a Halifax but a Messerschmitt 110 night fighter shadowing them in what essentially was the gunner’s blind spot. In an attempt to get Jay the angle he needed, Usher tried accelerating and decelerating. Desperate, Jay depressed his guns as far as he could and fired, only to see his tracers fall harmlessly behind the German plane.
The German pilot pulled back on his joystick and within seconds was flying more or less level with the Canadian bomber and firing. The stream of bullets caused, Jay later recalled, the senseless reflex of drawing his stomach in and “as far away as possible from the incoming shells that surely had no place else to go.” Closer to the nose cone, MacDonald had the same reflex, cringing and pulling back from the starboard window as the bullets destroyed another engine. A moment later, through the intercom Jay called out, “I got ‘im, I got ‘im!”118
Even without its bombs and about half of its 7,500 tons of fuel already burned off, with two engines destroyed, the Halifax was an ungainly beast. But as long as Usher could maintain about 100 miles per hour, he could keep it in the air. Everything changed a half hour later, when another German plane fired and destroyed a third engine and set the plane on fire.
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