The Forgotten

by Nathan M. Greenfield

  1 OR 2 JUNE 1943, PARIS

  MACDONALD’S TRAIN IS CANCELLED

  MacDonald, Parkinson and a Scotsman named David McKinnon, who had joined them earlier that morning, followed the Vions into Montparnasse train station, famed for the train that smashed through one of the station’s walls in 1896. “The Germans in the station drove home the danger we were in,” MacDonald recalls. “We were out of uniform, and we knew that if we were caught not only would it be terrible for the people trying to help us but we couldn’t be sure that our dog tags would bring us under Geneva.”

  Despite being surrounded by enemy soldiers, MacDonald was not especially anxious. At one point, one of their guides discreetly signalled that the train had been cancelled. After bailing out of a burning bomber and being on the run for more than month, a cancelled train seemed small beer indeed. More important was making sure that they didn’t lose sight of their guides, who led them northwest from the station to the Seine, across Pont de Grenelle, and to an apartment house overlooking the river in one of Paris’s most exclusive areas, the 16th arrondissement. Out the fourth-floor window of the room he was given in this “swank apartment,” MacDonald had a stunning views of the Seine, bisected by the narrow Île de Cygnes, the trees of which seem like an Impressionist splash of light green against the shifting greys and dark greens of the river and the grey sandstone blocks of its bank.

  What grabbed MacDonald’s eye as he looked out from the apartment owned by the same Andrée de Jongh—Tante Dédée—who had helped Smith escape, however, was what he saw on the on the southern tip of the island: a one-quarter-sized replica of the Statue of Liberty.

  SPRING 1943, BRESLAU, POLAND

  GROGAN MAKES A FRIEND AND DRINKS A BEER

  Frank Hickey’s eye infection was real. And, as far as the guard named Ludwig knew, so too was the name of the POW he was escorting to an eye clinic in Breslau, Poland. Ludwig puffed himself up by calling Hickey—John Grogan—a Schweinehund Engländer and making him walk in the gutter.

  In the waiting room of the eye clinic, a boy asked Grogan, “Are you a soldier?” A little girl asked her mother, “Is that the uniform of the Spanish Blue [Division]?” Ludwig replied, “He is an English Prisoner of War. I am his guard.” The boy broke the hush that followed. “My name is Rudi. I like you.” The other patients were taken aback when Grogan answered in German that he liked Rudi too.126

  Do all POWs speak German, someone asked. “No, they don’t,” said Ludwig. “This one is a trouble-maker.” An old man swiftly put Ludwig in his place. “Is one a trouble-maker because he speaks German? He looks no different from you except his uniform fits better.” Grogan caused everyone, including Ludwig, to laugh by saying, “I’ll bet you killed more of your men with your soup, than you did English with your rifle” after the man said that in the last war he’d been a cook and had shot “Englanders” while stirring his soup.

  On a return trip to the clinic two weeks later, an old woman on the train did not realize Grogan was a POW and asked him to read a letter from her son, then fighting on the Eastern Front. The words “I will be home on leave soon and look forward to sleeping in my own room” made Grogan choke up and think of his own mother. After he told the woman that he was captured at Dieppe, she grasped his hand and, with tears in her eyes, wished him well.

  5 JUNE 1943, PAU, FRANCE

  MACDONALD CROSSES HIMSELF

  As their train neared the Restricted Zone, MacDonald knew that German soldiers would soon be examining their papers.

  “We were living on the edge,” says MacDonald. One slip in the printing, an untoward show of nerves or too-studied insouciance and they’d be unmasked. “The soldier who took my carte d’identité looked at it for what seemed a long time, then at me, then back at it. I waited for him to say something, hoping I’d be able to answer in passable French. Then he passed it back to me and moved on.”

  A short time before the train reached Pau, MacDonald, whose sandy hair was quite out of place in southern France, saw something familiar through the window. “I had a general idea of where we were but did not know the train’s exact route. But I had no doubt that I was looking at the famous Grotte de Lourdes, which I recognized from pictures at school and the church in the Lourdes I’d grown up in,” says MacDonald.

  The woman at the small hotel about 25 miles from the Spanish border was friendly enough and fed them. A short time after the three escapers were back in their room, however, she knocked on their door. “She was very agitated and said that while we could spend the night, we had to leave early in the morning. We guessed from what she said that some of the staff were asking uncomfortable questions about us,” says MacDonald.

  Pau’s old cobblestone streets provided enough sights so that evaders could wander for the day without drawing undue attention. With narrow windows, sharply angled roofs and support timbers standing out starkly from the white stucco, many of the two- and three-story houses recalled those from Shakespeare’s time (and later Victorian versions) sprinkled across the towns and villages of England. Amid German soldiers also taking in the sights, MacDonald marvelled at the Château de Pau, the brick keep of which dated back seven centuries and where Henri IV was born—Henri IV being the king celebrated in MacDonald’s Catholic school books for converting from Protestantism to Catholicism after uttering the famous line, “Paris is worth a mass.”

  As planned, late in the afternoon they started walking south from Pau on avenue Rauski, a road known to cycling enthusiasts because it leads the Tour de France into the Pyrenees. Shortly after turning on to a road going east, they stopped for a short rest. “It may not have been the best place to stop,” says MacDonald, “because, soon after, a group of German soldiers came toward us and we thought we’d been discovered. But then I realized they were asking directions and were not asking for our papers.” By saying nothing, they risked being taken for vagrants and being demanded to show their papers. “It looked better to simply say ‘Je ne sais pas’ and hope for the best than to risk another examination of our papers.” Used to such taciturn answers from the people whose country his army occupied, the soldier simply turned away. A short time later, a truck pulled up and the two Canadians and McKinnon climbed in for the ride to Oloron-Sainte-Marie, four miles from the Spanish border.

  9 JUNE 1943, LIEBENAU, GERMANY

  PROUSE AND TOMMY GLIDDEN ESCAPE AND ARE CAPTURED

  The threat to shoot them if they were caught trying to escape couldn’t be discounted, but that’s the kind of things Kommandants said. But what rankled Prouse in the days before his and Tommy Glidden’s second escape attempt was the Kommandant’s gall in presenting them with a bill for 140 reichsmarks for the uniforms lost during their first attempt a month earlier.

  In the early hours of 9 June,127 however, as they sweat bullets in a space they had prepared inside a pile of logs, they regretted not noticing the nearby pipes that fed hot water into the large vat that boiled the logs. Stripping off their uniforms brought some relief, albeit at the cost of an extremely itchy covering of fine sawdust.

  A log that wouldn’t budge momentarily held up their escape; when it did, the sound seemed to broadcast their plans. As a flashlight lit first this, then that part of the yard, the two escapers inched their way toward the barbed-wire fence. The fence snagged their clothing, and when they stepped off its final strand, it pinged loud enough to alert the guards to where they had just been. Nevertheless, the fence had become their ally, for to follow them, the Germans would have to run to the gate, giving the escapers a precious head start in reaching the rail yard two miles away. Reaching it safely, the two men snuck aboard a flat car loaded with tanks heading east toward Russia.

  The next morning, a sign told them they were in Kassel. The reason the workers seemed interested in them when they climbed down from the boxcar became clear when they realized the workers were dragooned Serbs and Poles. A short time later, Prouse and Glidden found a beer parlour, and while the “guest workers” seemed to understand
Prouse’s request, they were too frightened to give the escapers civilian clothes.

  Thinking that a home run was impossible dressed as British soldiers, they decided to give themselves up. Surprisingly, given the German officer corps’ reputation for rectitude, several officers ignored their British battle dress and answered the Kriegies’ “Heil Churchills” with the more orthodox reply. “How dumb can these guys be?” they wondered as they reconsidered their decision to surrender and walked through Kassel to a field, where they slept in some tall grass.128

  Later that day, they climbed aboard a slow-moving freight train, taking shelter from the rain in its unmanned guard box. About an hour later, the train stopped and a civilian guard opened the door. He was as ignorant of Prouse’s slang “Hi there, square head” as the Canadian was of his German. After recovering from a case of the giggles, Glidden told Prouse that in the series of jas, he’d confirmed they were escaped prisoners. At the next stop, Liebenau, the village’s police chief, wearing a spiked Pickelhaube dating from the last war, took them into custody.

  9 JUNE 1943, PAU, FRANCE

  MACDONALD AND PARKINSON’S HOME RUN ENDS

  They were alive. They were slapped and threatened by bayonets. They were disgusted and frightened by the blood-spattered cells they’d been shoved into. But they were alive.

  Two days earlier, just as the eastern sky lightened, a small man in his late 40s carrying a rucksack filled with bread and cheese entered the barn and woke MacDonald, Parkinson and McKinnon. Soon the party was heading for the foothills of the Pyrenees. “From a distance, they looked like the hills back home. But soon it became a very sharp climb. Some of the points were almost vertical, and we had to pull ourselves up from tree to tree,” recalls MacDonald.

  “Sitting for a moment and having some water, and bread and cheese, we watched our guide look around. Then we got up and followed him a short distance. He stopped and went in a different direction. It slowly dawned on us that he was not sure of the way. But then he started again and we followed, believing we were heading into Spain.”

  The climb down was more difficult because of the need to find handholds. Partway down the mountain, the guide stopped and said he’d made a mistake, and they were not descending into Spain but were still in France, not far from where they’d started out. MacDonald and the others struggled to control their emotions. “But we knew from our own experience on the mountain how disorienting it was,” says MacDonald. “And, as we had since we’d been with the underground, we trusted the guide.” He took them to a yellow stucco barn. There were no animals, though their smell was plainly evident. The guide promised to find another who knew the mountains better, and that he would have a farmer drop off food.

  As the following day, 8 June, wore on, they began getting nervous. “What’s taking him so long?” the evaders wondered. At one point, they ventured out beyond the trees that surrounded the barn and into a field. “Suddenly, we heard the sound of bloodhounds. We ran across the field and into a stream, which we ran through for about 150 feet, and then crossed into a small wood,” says MacDonald. A few minutes later, MacDonald saw three German soldiers, each holding tightly to a leashed bloodhound, which had lost their scent in the water of the stream. The Germans searched for about an hour. “We waited in the wood until nightfall and then made our way back to the barn,” adds MacDonald.

  Early the next morning, a truck drove up. “The driver told us that he was going to drive us to another spot where it would be easier to climb into the mountains.” With freedom beckoning, they clambered into the truck. At a bend in the road that ran between a swift-flowing river and a cliff, the truck slowed. “Then,” recalls MacDonald, “three German soldiers with rifles stepped out from behind a clump of trees ahead of us, and I said to Parky, ‘Well, that’s the end of the road for us.’”

  The soldiers spoke neither English nor French, and none of the Allied servicemen spoke German, but the rifles trained on them spoke clearly as they climbed out of the truck with their hands up and then lay prone on the ground. “When Germans started treating the driver rather amicably, we realized we’d been betrayed,” recalls MacDonald.

  When bailing out of a burning plane, survival depends on immediate actions and the immutable laws of physics and chemistry. Now, however, MacDonald and the others were subject to the whims of the enemy pointing rifles at the backs of their heads. Their identity disks were sewn into their pants, but they were enemy servicemen in civilian clothes hundreds of miles from where they’d been shot down, which meant they had information about the Resistance that the Germans wanted.

  Given the silent testimony of blood splattering his cell, MacDonald expected the worst when he was interrogated in Gestapo headquarters in Pau. Asked who had helped him, MacDonald demurred, giving only his name, rank and service number as stamped into his indentity disks, which he handed over to the German, who ordered him to empty his pockets. Upon seeing MacDonald’s rosary, the Gestapo officer insulted it. After parachuting from his bomber, MacDonald had checked to make sure that the rosary he’d been given years ago was still with him, and in the barn he’d used it to pray each night. Without thinking, MacDonald clenched fists, ready to defend the physical manifestation of his faith. The Gestapo officer noticed and slapped MacDonald hard across the face.

  As he turned back to look the Gestapo officer in the eye, MacDonald’s legs tightened in preparation for a lunge forward; seeing this, the soldier who had been behind the officer stepped forward, bayonet at the ready. “Even when I saw the flash of the bayonet I was almost beyond caring. It took every ounce of willpower I had not to move, as I realized he’d run me through before I could reach the arrogant German. I forced myself to unclench my fists and resumed a regular standing position,” recounts MacDonald. Having got nowhere with the angry Canadian, the Gestapo officer ordered him back to his cell, where he spent two nights before he, Parkinson and McKinnon were transferred to a jail in Bordeaux.

  MID-JUNE 1943, STALAG LUFT III, SAGAN, POLAND

  RCAF FLIGHT LIEUTENANT TED KIPP HELPS SET UP FOODACCO

  The German guards, who served a state that knew its last free election more than a decade earlier, must have looked on with wry amusement at the spirited debate over Foodacco that took place during that exceptionally hot June. Foodacco was a trading company that bought and sold Red Cross supplies such as canned fruit, salmon and condensed milk, as well as soap. Unlike the bazaars in other camps, Foodacco was centrally organized, using cigarettes or chocolate to purchase items that it then sold at a profit. Day in, day out, Foodacco could “make a profit of ten or twenty cigarettes on the sale of condensed milk,” which Ted Kipp, an RCAF officer from Winnipeg, and his RAF pilot business partner then used to purchase other items to sell before “paying” themselves.129

  Men who were willing to spend their cigarettes were able to “keep themselves in comparative luxury.”130 To do so, Brown wasn’t above doing another officer’s laundry: a shirt brought in ten fags, while a pair of socks netted him five.

  Prices rose and fell, though not always according to the law of supply and demand. The price of soap, say, did not necessarily fall even after a shipment of Red Cross parcels arrived and supply went up. For those same parcels brought thousands of cigarettes into the camp, in effect increasing the money supply, thus creating inflation.131 Accordingly, prices for desired goods could remain high even when there was no shortage of the item, which enriched Foodacco because it made a greater profit that could then be used to buy other items that could be stored until the shortages began.

  Critics argued that the POWs were all servicemen and were owed support more or less equally. This principle lay behind the decision in some camps to pool all officers’ pay and to use it to purchase what amenities the Germans from time to time allowed.

  The vigorous campaign played out even on the latrine’s walls. As expected, the capitalist side won. However, Wing Commander Harry Day, the camp’s Senior British Officer, overruled the plebiscite and d
ecreed that Foodacco was part of “the war economy,” and thus, while it could continue to operate, its profits had to be given to the camp kitchen.132

  The debate about Foodacco may have been the noisiest but it was not the only one that added to the June heat. The other was occasioned by the news from a suborned guard that the Americans were going to be moved to a new compound. Since they had provided much of the muscle that dug the tunnels, the Escape Committee felt they were owed a decent chance to escape, but none of the tunnels was yet beyond the fence. The committee easily agreed to close two and concentrate on “Tom.” What caused all the heat was the suggestion to angle the tunnel upward to obviate the need for a full exit shaft. In the end, this idea was turned down.

  20–21 JUNE 1943, MILAG UND MARLAG NORD, NEAR BREMEN, GERMANY

  THE FATHERS AND BROTHERS WRITE DIFFERENT TYPES OF LETTERS HOME

  As did the other POWs, the fathers and brothers wrote home to family and friends, at times keeping up a brave, even playful, front, others showing the strains of imprisonment. In early January, Father Desnoyers mocked himself for being kitted out in a military uniform and told his parents that he “cheated,” making the bag filled with his Christmas presents and their wrappings serve double duty as his pillow. The following day, he wrote his sister a very different letter. After telling her that the Germans were now doubling the missionaries’ allotment of letters and postcards, he paints her a picture of his daily life living with at least 10 other fathers and brothers in a small room. At any one moment, one was doing his laundry while another “hums or sings loudly. Half are smoking…. some read, some draw, play cards or sew…. on several clotheslines are spread our rags, men clog the shelves overloaded with bags stuffed with clothes, hats, pictures, books, boxes.”