“I was in my position in the bomber’s sight. I felt the thud of the bullets and immediately felt the plane begin a sort of wallow. Usher gave the order to bail out, and I reached for my parachute that was stored in the bin at my right elbow,” recounts MacDonald. The bomb aimer’s position may be the most exposed in the plane, but it was closest to the hatch, which MacDonald opened a moment after clipping on his parachute. Then, as he eased his feet into the slipstream beneath the plane, he realized he was about to break his neck because he was still wearing the leather flying helmet’s connect to the intercom. After pulling his feet back into the plane, MacDonald yanked off his helmet. In the moment before he jumped, the creaking of the fuselage and the roar of the functioning and stuttering engines merged with “a rushing sound that can only be compared to a waterfall.”
As MacDonald fell at a rate of 36 feet per second (per second) and his plane, an ever-growing orange glow, flew on, he was enveloped in the most profound silence. After counting to seven and falling about 1,000 feet, he pulled the rip cord. “Suddenly I was floating,” he says, “and to my horror, the German made one circle around me, and I thought he was going to fire. But for the grace of God it didn’t happen.”
15 APRIL 1943, BEAUMONT-EN-BEINE, FRANCE
MACDONALD IS FED AND GIVEN A PLACE TO SLEEP
“Confusion,” recalls MacDonald, “stunned confusion that overrode everything, even what they tried to drill into our head in escape training back in England. I knew that as soon as I’d landed in the four inches of new grain, I had to uncouple my chute, bury it and get away because the German spotters would be watching for where I landed. But, for long moments, all I could hear was the gunfire that had doomed our plane, and hectic images of the bullets, the fire and rushing to the hatch crowded my mind until I sat down next to a tree and settled myself.”
Once his training kicked in, MacDonald threw some leaves over his chute, then cut off the sergeant swipes and epaulets he’d worked so hard to earn before crawling under a bush. Later, he heard farmers in the field speaking French and wondered about his crewmates. Since in its last moments the plane was flying a tight circle, they must have landed nearby.
That night, the hungry and extremely thirsty evader realized that walking to Spain was impossible. Across an open field, near the village of Beaumont-en-Beine, MacDonald saw a light, a rare sight that could indicate that the building was military. “There were few street lamps back home, so I was used to walking only by the light of the night sky,” says MacDonald. “But this night was dark, and I could not make out much about the building, which I approached from its rear, until I was very close. To satisfy myself that there weren’t any troops about, I went around to the front—and relaxed a little when I saw a large opened gate.” Then he looked up and saw through the lit window a woman and a little girl clinging to her nightgown. MacDonald summoned up his high school French for a strong whisper: “Je suis Anglais, and I am thirsty.”
The light disappeared and, a moment later, another shone from what he correctly guessed was the kitchen. In traditional French peasant fashion, the woman who opened the door offered MacDonald a glass of wine and had trouble understanding not MacDonald’s words—“Pas d’vin, d’eau”—but why he would want water. Nevertheless, Madame Dutilleul gave him a cup and pointed toward the pantry. A short time later, while he was eating toast and eggs and drinking a cup of coffee, the dog started barking. MacDonald’s blood froze.
“She saw my fright and immediately said, ‘Mon mari. Pas les Allemands’ [My husband. Not the Germans]. I had only a moment to wonder what this French farmer would say when he walked into his house in the middle of the night and found his wife feeding a downed Canadian airman. His eyes opened wide when he heard my story and said that I could sleep there that night.”
18 APRIL 1943, IN THE SUDETEN MOUNTAINS, CZECHOSLOVAKIA
CARSWELL AND DONALDSON PASS AS GOOD GERMANS
They were hiding in what “Down East” is called a two-holer, wearing the heavy coats, breathing the stench of shit and hoping that Herman the German’s replacement wouldn’t feel nature’s call. After hearing the guard hop on his bicycle to go see the Fräulein who had shared her favours with Hermann, Carswell and Donaldson slipped away from the Arbeitskommando.
By 3 a.m., they were well clear of the graphite mine. As the eastern sky lightened, they crawled under some bushes. Woken hours later by a barking dog, Carswell peered through the bushes and saw a lone farmer driving an ox forward, prompting the men to move to a nearby wood. As the hours passed and insects tormented them, they realized they had made a basic error: forgetting a filled water bottle. Even in the shade, thirst soon tormented them, as it would until well after dark, when they left the forest and found water. By midnight on the 18th, they were crossing a high ridge somewhere in the Sudetenland, heading west.
The Hollywood version of the Third Reich—that the Hitlerian state was a well-oiled machine—is overstated. At its height in 1944, the SS had some 32,000 agents, fewer than today’s New York Police Department. Still, to lessen the chance of arousing suspicions, while still up on the ridge, they practised giving the Nazi salute and convincing renditions of “Heil Hitler!” Near a village, they saw two men approaching, and despite hearing his own heart pounding, Carswell was determined to act natural. The two POWs raised their arms in the fascist salute and shouted “Heil Hitler!” The startled farmhands quickly returned the salute.
22 APRIL 1943, THE SUDETENLAND, CZECHOSLOVAKIA
CARSWELL AND DONALDSON GET ON THE WRONG TRAIN
A few more Heil Hitler’s greased their way across a bridge leading to a road that allowed Carswell and Donaldson to put 30 miles between them and the work camp. And while the bushes they crawled under near dawn a few days after they’d escaped provided a reasonable amount of cover from prying eyes, the copse of trees they were in now did little to protect them from the cold drizzle. The freight train struggling up a nearby hill offered both shelter from the elements and a more speedy way of heading southwest. Carswell, who, like many Canadian teens, had hopped freight trains for the fun of it, led the way—running in time with the train, then veering closer to it until he grasped the ladder between two cars. Donaldson tripped on his first try but then clambered aboard. As the train chugged through the night, they hid under the tarp covering a lumber car, enjoying the thought that they’d be near the Swiss border by evening.
Instead, as the sun set, they found themselves in a marshalling yard, which put them too close for comfort to the guards protecting the yard and also possibly in the crosshairs of Allied bombers. Their immediate concern, however, was the cold, which by midnight forced them to risk running to a hay wagon, where they hoped to cover themselves to keep warm. The hay, however, was frozen, and it took two hours to cut away enough to hide under the tightly tied tarp. Although warmed by their labours and now hidden, they continued suffering for having forgotten a water bottle. Eventually, sometime before dawn, they fell asleep.
Woken by the clanks and screeches of railcars being shunted about, the men felt their spirits rise when their car was attached to a train, only to plummet when the train started back in the direction from which they had come. Through the long day, as they snapped at each other or lapsed into angry silence, their tongues growing ever larger and their throats more scratchy, the train took them deeper into Germany. Late in the afternoon, the train stopped. As workmen unloaded a nearby car, they slipped off the train and hid under a nearby building that was raised on pylons.
A short time later, a workman walked under the building to urinate. As he did so, he looked up and saw Carswell and Donaldson and froze, then began to back his way out of the open basement. Donaldson called out softly to him in German, telling him that he and Carswell were escaped POWs. For a few moments it appeared that they’d been lucky and that the man wasn’t a Sudeten German but a Czech. Then came the sound of running, blowing whistles and orders barked out in German.
16–20 APRIL 1943, PICARDY, FRA
NCE
MADAME ZANNIE TAKES MACDONALD ON AN IMPORTANT BICYCLE RIDE
Shortly after MacDonald woke up, a man arrived at the Dutilleuls’ asking if he wanted to escape. “I was anxious as hell. Here I was, somewhere in France. I could have found a policeman, shown him my dog tags and surrendered. I was pretty sure I’d get the Geneva protections. But, strangely, doing so never crossed my mind. Here were strangers, men, a father and mother who were willing to risk everything for me, a stranger, who had [literally] dropped in from the sky,” says MacDonald. He had been given civilian clothes that fit reasonably well and breakfast. Shortly after, a woman who he later learned was Madame Zannie arrived with two bicycles, and soon he was pedalling after her “at a respectable distance” to her wooden house, which doubled as a seed store. “No one came to the house and there was no telephone, so I assumed that the time Zannie arrived had all been arranged in advance,” he says.
The next day, Zannie led him to Chauny, a small town nestled between the Oise River and the St. Quentin Canal. The low rolling hills covered in new shoots of grain and wildflowers reminded MacDonald of home. At a safe house, a Resistance leader unrolled a map and pointed to a location he wanted bombed. “He wanted me to take the coordinates in my pocket but, since I was already running a great risk by being out of uniform, I thought better of this because it would give the Germans another excuse to execute me for being a spy. Instead, I memorized the coordinates,” says MacDonald.
That night, a bomber stream passing over Chauny was especially noticeable. “I was in the bedroom on the second floor of the stone house. I was used to saying grace at meals, but this wasn’t done by these Resistance people. Before I climbed into bed, I took out my rosary and began praying, knowing that in just a few hours, when it was near 10 p.m. in New Glasgow, my parents and sister too would be on their knees praying for me. I hadn’t been in bed long when I heard bombers. There were a lot of them and they were awfully low,” says MacDonald.
About a quarter of an hour after the last of the bombers slipped deeper over Festung Europa, MacDonald heard a commotion downstairs. “Concerned that the Germans knew I was there, I quietly climbed out of bed, opened the door and went to the stairs. From the top of the stairs, I could see the front door, and through it I saw a number of bloodied men in RAF blue walk into the house. Just as I was about to say something, one of the French underground men who had brought the RAF men to the house shushed me and motioned me back to my room,” says MacDonald. Whether the plane had malfunctioned or been shot down, in his mind’s eye MacDonald saw the crew’s terror-filled faces as their plane gyrated wildly in the sky and could almost hear the thuds of their bodies tossed against unyielding bulkheads. Knowing the fear that one might have only moments to live, he once again thanked the Lord that he had survived.
25 APRIL 1943, STALAG VIII-B, LAMSDORF, GERMANY
EASTER SUNDAY
The pain of Easter was both different from and the same as that of Christmas. The POWs were still separated from their families and had to make do with a meal prepared from supplies saved from Red Cross parcels.
The story of Jesus’s arrest, trial, scourging, death on the Cross and Resurrection had special significance for the airmen who had escaped from their burning airborne trenches and for the soldiers who had been through the fires of Dieppe. Yet, Darch says, they felt an additional pain. The Canadian Corps went over the top on 9 April 1917 on their way to defeat the Germans on Vimy Ridge; nevertheless, for men like Darch, that great victory was more associated with Easter Monday than with the actual dates of the Battle of Arras. At Eastertide, therefore, the memory of the humiliation of the surrender on the beaches of Dieppe and the ongoing humiliation of being shackled, combined to deepen their feeling of having failed to live up to the standard set by their fathers.
The end of Easter vigil signifies the most joyous event in the Christian calendar, the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. As they did for Christmas, Darch and hundreds of his comrades, irrespective of their being Catholic or Protestant, went to hear Padre John Foote say mass. “It didn’t matter to us who conducted the Easter service,” explains Darch. “Two things were important. The first was that we were together saying prayers and celebrating the holiday. The second was that the service was one of the few times we knew that we were doing something in the same way we had done at home and that our families were doing that day.”
Father Boulanger in Stalag XXI-A, in Schildberg, Poland, was perhaps the best equipped to celebrate Easter. Boulanger’s congregants celebrated the Resurrection both in deed—the removal of the shroud that symbolized Christ’s death from the Cross—and by chocolate and other sweets paid for with money donated by the children of the diocese of Grenoble.
LATE APRIL-MID-MAY 1943, FLAVY-LE-MARTEL, FRANCE
MACDONALD HIDES AT DR. LUPANOV’S
Two days after returning to Madame Zannie’s house, the two were once again on bicycles and pedalling toward Flavy-le-Martel: “She led me to a fine two-story red-brick house that was much more substantial than her wooden house and even the one I grew up in in Nova Scotia. The house I had stopped at the night before had a gate, but it was an old one. This house was surrounded by a wrought-iron fence set into brick supports. Behind the house was a large backyard that was surrounded by a brick wall about seven feet high that afforded reasonably good protection, so I could go outside. Unlike both of the other houses I’d been in, this one had indoor plumbing.”
MacDonald was welcomed by Dr. Lupanov, a Bulgarian who was also in hiding; his wife, Lucien; and her brother Felix. They were friendly, gave MacDonald a room to sleep in and food but did not, to his surprise, ask any questions about Canada.
“The house fronted onto the town’s main street, and I was told to be careful about showing myself there. About three days after I arrived, I was walking through the living room and stopped to look outside. The sound of a truck arriving made me more than a little apprehensive, but I continued to watch as the passenger door opened, and who should come out but ‘Parky’ our navigator,” recalls MacDonald. For the next month and a half, MacDonald and Parkinson remained with the Lupanov family, sometimes taking bicycle rides to keep from getting cabin fever, and listening intently to Felix’s stories of sabotage.
26 APRIL 1943, VATICAN CITY
MCAULEY’S AUDIENCE WITH POPE PIUS XII
Nothing in Royalton, New Brunswick, McAuley’s hometown or in the cramped apartment buildings around Eglinton and Yonge, in Toronto, where he had lived before the war had prepared McAuley for the sweeping marble-floored hallways that led to the papal apartments. McAuley’s trained engineer’s eye could not have helped noting the foreshortening and other tricks of perspective in the 16th- and 17th-century frescoes adorning the walls.
As they would have for their king, George VI, all three knelt when they entered Pope Pius XII’s study and saw the thin, bookish man sitting on the ornate chair, in front of which was a small stool for Catholics to kneel on when receiving the pope’s blessing. Though controversy rages about Pius’s actions (or inactions) vis-à-vis the Holocaust, there is no doubt about his commitment to protect Allied escapers who reached Vatican City; he refused an official request that the three escapers be turned over to the Italian police. Pius gave each escaper rosary beads and his benediction, and ended their meeting with the invocation “Benedicat vos omnipotens Deus, Pater et Filius et Spiritus Sanctus,” some of which, thanks to his high school Latin, McAuley understood: “May almighty God bless you, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.”
26 APRIL 1943, LOURDES, NOVA SCOTIA
MR. AND MRS. MACDONALD HAVE A MOMENT OF HOPE
About the time the pope blessed a Protestant Canadian airman, Pius’s co-religionists in Lourdes, Nova Scotia, were in church praying for their son, Ian. The blue aerogram that had arrived on the 24th seemed to have answered earlier prayers: it suggested that RCAF officials in London had made a ghastly mistake. For before them in Ian’s flowing hand was his home address—and on the inside
of the folded flimsy paper was his note written in the same, almost carefree tone they’d grown used to: “I just received your box of chocolates a couple of days ago…. Thanks a lot. They disappeared like wildfire.”
Moments after reading Ian’s words telling them that he’d written to Father Miller thanking him for the cigarettes (and pointing out that, since he didn’t smoke, chocolate bars were preferable), the MacDonalds’ elation dissolved. For while the Stellarton, Nova Scotia, post office stamped the letter on 24 April, the squadron’s stamp read 30 March. The date in Ian’s hand inside the letter, 28-3-43 (28 March 1943), erased all doubt. Mr. and Mrs. MacDonald’s boy had written the letter three weeks before he climbed into his Halifax on 14 April.
28 APRIL 1943, KASSEL, GERMANY
PROUSE AND HIS ESCAPE PARTNERS DO SOME SIGHTSEEING
Prouse, carrying papers saying he was a Czech labourer named Janek Mrachek, and two other Kriegies took advantage of the half-light to slip out of the line of POWs heading for a factory. They dropped into the ditch between the inner and outer fence, where they dug up escape gear that had been previously hidden. Behind the boilerhouse they tore off their uniforms and put on their washed-out red civilian clothes, dyed with a brew that the cauldron master convinced a guard was a soup made from rotten cabbage. As their comrades frustrated the morning Appell by moving about, they joined the column of civilian night workers leaving the camp. Prouse’s heart sank as he neared the main gate: “Rat Face” was checking identity cards, and he knew Prouse’s face well enough to see that it didn’t quite match the one on his card. Prouse’s “Heil Hitler,” however, seemed to do the trick, as Rat Face broke off looking at him, allowing Prouse and the two other Kriegies to take a few more steps toward freedom.
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