CHAPTER EIGHT
September–December 1943
The first angel sounded, and there followed hail and fire mingled with blood, and they were cast upon the earth: the third part of the trees was burnt up, and all green grass was burnt up.
— REVELATION 8 : 7
8 SEPTEMBER 1943, STALAG LUFT III, SAGAN, POLAND
“TOM” IS FOUND
Oberfeldwebel Hermann Glemnitz may have been rather dim, but he was dogged. And on 8 September, he was lucky. His hunch that something was up in Hut 128 seemed wrongheaded until, as he was leaving, a ferret dropped a tool that chipped off a piece of the thin cement camouflaging the trapdoor leading to “Tom.”
The disappointment of the men who had dug out more than 25 tons of earth was partly ameliorated when the explosion meant to destroy the 260-foot-long tunnel blew their hut from its foundations. Glemnitz may have “doubted that there would be another tunnel because all available wood [bed slats] had been used up,” but he was wrong.138 The digging of “Harry” and “Dick” continued apace, as did work in the workshops. In an attempt to lessen the chance of an escaper being taken for a spy, engraved into the the bottom of the compasses they made were the words “Made in Stalag Luft III—Pat Pend.”
9 SEPTEMBER 1943, CAMPO DI CONCENTRAMENTO PER PRIGIONIERI DI GUERRA NO. 21, CHIETI, ITALY
STEWART COWAN IS ORDERED NOT TO ESCAPE
Upon hearing that Mussolini’s successor planned to surrender to the Allies, the Italian guards vanished. Then, after a night of eating as much Red Cross chocolate as they could, failing to make a quick batch of homebrew and singing ribald songs, the POWs found themselves on morning parade listening to Colonel Marshall, the camp’s Senior British Officer: “Every POW will remain in the camp. Anyone disobeying these orders is subject to court martial at a later date! You will be kept informed of any changes in my directive.”139 No one was happy with this order, though given the fluidity of the situation in the countryside, it had merit. What dismayed Stewart Cowan and the other men were armed NCOs now standing guard in the watchtowers and the implication that they’d shoot anyone attempting to escape.
12 SEPTEMBER 1943, NEAR VESTER VEDSTED, EASTERN DENMARK
AFTER WALKING ACROSS A MUD FLATS, ROBERT BROOKS IS BETRAYED
Skipper Hansen was willing to move Robert Brooks, whose presence had become an open secret to everyone except, somehow, the Germans who regularly walked by the farm where the Canadian had been taken after heavy rains began flooding the drainage ditch he was hiding in. However, on 28 August, Germany’s erstwhile Aryan allies in the Danish government stopped cooperating with Berlin, prompting a series of surprisingly mild reactions, one of which was the mandatory searching of boats plying the Danish coast.
In an attempt to get Brooks off the island, after dark on the night on 11 September, a night of exceptionally low tide, the village postman led him two-thirds of the way across the muddy flats of the Wadden Sea. To avoid minefields, Brooks followed a small brook inland. Near midnight, knowing how much the Danes had done for him, he approached a farmhouse to ask for help.
The farmer welcomed him. Only when the police arrived about a half hour later did Brooks realize that after three weeks on the run he’d been betrayed. Since he was in civilian clothes, Brooks was handed over to the SS. The officer who interrogated him was less interested in the RCAF-issue identity disks than with how Brooks came to be clean-shaven, presumably so the SS could unravel the Resistance circuit that had helped him. Thus the officer’s dismay at learning that a guard had lent Brooks a razor.
By the time Brooks arrived at Stalag IV-B, near Zeithain, in Lower Saxony, Roy McLernon was in Frederikshavn, on the east coast of Denmark, where he met Verner Jensen, who arranged for his passage to freedom in Sweden.140
EARLY SEPTEMBER 1943, HAINA, GERMANY
ROBERT PROUSE SEES EVIDENCE OF THE HOLOCAUST
His first visit to the eye hospital in Haina was less painful, if no more successful, than his visit to the village doctor in Arnstadt had been a few weeks earlier. Herr Doktor treated Robert Prouse’s intense back pain by having two other POWs hold him upright while he smashed his educated fist on Prouse’s head, saying, “No blood, no swelling, back to work!”141 Prouse’s barracks mates were more understanding, covering his work shifts and surreptitiously moving him from bed to bed during the day so what was likely a herniated disk could heal. The eye doctor in Haina, at least, gave Prouse some drops.
On his second visit to the hospital, a doctor found a scratch on his eye. Despite being assured that he’d be able to leave the hospital as soon as the freezing came out of his eye, when it did, the doctors decided to keep Prouse; in total, he spent ten days in the hospital. There, night brought not the relief of sleep, during which a few more hours of incarceration slipped by, but rather the sickening sound of screams coming from the neighbouring “experimental hospital housing political prisoners,” most of whom, he’d been told, were Jewish.
His improved sight only heightened the horror. One morning, disbelieving that he’d actually seen a truck being piled high with dead bodies, Prouse closed his eyes. When he opened them, he saw still another load of naked bodies being hauled into the truck. The macabre scene elicited emotions beyond what even the terrible fighting and doleful sights on the beaches of Dieppe did. That early morning, horror “mingled with a touch of fear at the closeness of death.”
23 SEPTEMBER 1943, CAMPO DI CONCENTRAMENTO PER PRIGIONIERI DI GUERRA NO. 78, SULMONA, ITALY
COWAN IS TAKEN PRISONER BY THE GERMANS
The Liberator bombers flying low over the prison camp were taken to mean that allied troops were close indeed. Then, as Cowan and the others stood at ease during an unexpected parade on the 20th, came the devastating news: the Germans were moving fast to consolidate their hold on Italy and were going to take possession of the camp the next day. Their arrival within an hour rendered the rescission of the No Escape order moot.
Two days later, Cowan and the others were loaded at bayonet point into trucks that took them to Sulmona, 80 miles east of Rome. The conditions were wretched, with the thousands of bedbugs providing the only diversion: checking for new bite patterns every morning.
28 SEPTEMBER 1943, STALAG LUFT III, SAGAN, POLAND
FATHER GOUDREAU KEEPS AN OPEN MIND
Trying to help Father Goudreau bear his load, in either his April or July 1943 letter, both of which arrived in Sagan in late September, Father Ducharme recalled the regimen they willingly accepted as scholasticates and as Oblate missionaries: pre-dawn prayers, hours of contemplation and being apart from society and submission. Goudreau reacted strongly, noting the difference between the “overflowing life of the scholastics” and the “strange kind of winter sleep” of being a POW.
Goudreau knew enough about the Basutos to know that the women would be wearing only shifts. Still, during a recent heat wave, he found the POWs’ “biblical nudity” shocking. But thundering against it in his homily would cause his parishioners to go “cross-eyed” and earn him the reputation of being “narrow-minded.” Equally significant, it would put a distance between him and the men, who would stop coming to his courses in ethics, French and Latin, important for camp morale by giving some meaning to the time behind the barbed wire.
LATE SEPTEMBER TO 8 OCTOBER 1943, VILLALAGO, 80 MILES EAST OF ROME, ITALY
COWAN AND GEORGE ESCAPE AND ARE SURPRISED BY WHO HELPS THEM
It had been a close call but not because of the Shoot to Kill order. Rather, just before Cowan and his escape partner, a British soldier named George, were to jump from the top of a railcar carrying them to Germany, the train entered a tunnel. When they did jump, rifle shots into the darkness told them that at least one guard had seen something. Slowed by the knee Cowan twisted upon landing, they found a pile of hay into which they burrowed to hide and sleep.
In the morning, to make better time going south toward the Allied lines and knowing that since the Italian Army had disintegrated the countryside was fill
ed with men making their way home, the two POWs risked using the roads. A couple of well-placed “Buona seras” bought the goodwill they needed from men obviously happy to be out of the war. Late on 1 October, they took shelter in a cave George had found some distance up a rise. The brisk air and early October snowfall they awoke to reminded Cowan of home.
Sometime after noon, just moments after the men heard the sound of breaking twigs, a boy about 12 years old, who they soon learned was named Egidio Gatta, spotted them as he stepped in front of the cave. George’s “Canadese, Canadese” meant nothing to the boy balanced between fear and wonder; “Inglese, Inglese,” by contrast, caused him to break out “into a friendly smile.”142 George soon learned that not only did an American woman and her daughters live in the boy’s village but, even more importantly, no Germans had come looking for escapees.
Their woollen Red Cross blankets hardly kept out the cold on the wet night of 4 October. And, during the day, the sight of Germans looking over the countryside scouting for food and wine was worrisome, but since Egidio told them that there was no path running from the road to the rise, they felt safe. Near dusk, Egidio appeared carrying fresh bread and wonderfully runny goat’s milk cheese.
The next day, even before she said “I’m Elda DiIanni” in an unmistakable New England accent, Cowan was smitten with the beautiful black-haired girl who flouted the warning that “anyone hiding POWs would be shot on the spot.” The girl from Massachusetts told them that she, her sister and mother had been vacationing in their ancestral village when Italy declared war on the United States. Elda also told them that before coming to meet them, she had spoken to the village’s mayor, both because she needed help finding a family to take them in and to preserve her honour—and their lives. Airmen like Cowan may have gone into battle on the wings of cutting-edge technology, but in remote European villages, people lived and died by harsh, though clear, codes: “In Villalago, a girl was expected to be a virgin for her marriage and anyone violating a young girl’s virginity deserved to be shot, or killed in some other ignominious manner.”
Egidio returned the following day with more food and a note saying that the next day a man would come with him to lead the men to a safe house belonging to Signora Iafolla. Elda quickly explained that Iafolla was risking her life and that of her two daughters to help the Canadian and his escape partner, George, because they regularly received letters from Iafolla’s son-in-law telling how well he was being treated in a POW camp in Alberta. Grateful to be able to offer their host something special, Cowan passed Elda a tin with a Red Cross sticker on it, and soon they were “sipping hot cocoa and conversing about far away Canada.”
12 OCTOBER 1943, POW CAMP, LANGENSALZA, NEAR ERFURT, GERMANY
PROUSE MISSES OUT ON BEING INCLUDED IN A PRISONER-OF-WAR EXCHANGE
A month earlier, his scratched eye would have resulted in Prouse being one of the 66 Canadians being repatriated after being declared Definitely Unfit for Service.143 By contrast, recovering resulted in his being one of hundreds of Kriegies herded into boxcars for transport to a makeshift camp at Langensalza.
The overcrowded camp was as far from the rules laid down by Geneva as was the transport, which was so overloaded that the men stood shoulder to shoulder on powered lime on the cars’ floors, their shuffling feet stirring it into a choking, eye-burning cloud. A hole with two long boards across it served as a latrine. Worse than the physical discomfort was the humiliation that came with trying to defecate while sitting on boards that were open to all sides, the natural function made all the more difficult by the poor diet that tended to constipate. Men who had to answer nature’s call weren’t shy about yelling for those who were struggling to hurry up.
13 OCTOBER 1943, BARANELLO, ITALY
CORPORAL GEORGE REID, MOTORCYCLE DISPATCH RIDER, IS CAPTURED
“He hadn’t been dead too long because he didn’t smell too bad,” recalled George Reid, the motorcycle dispatch rider who, like Reid and the other man in his patrol, wore the flash of the Seaforth Highlanders of Canada.144 As Sergeant McKee removed the dead rider’s .38, the gentleness of his doing so serving as a battlefield elegy, Reid, wracked by malaria-induced chills, hoped that the extra gun wouldn’t be needed on this, his last patrol before ten days’ rest. Charged with bringing back a German for interrogation, the Canadians found instead an Italian family that provided an excellent pot of spaghetti and word that the Germans had withdrawn across the narrow Biferno River, which Reid and McKee soon found themselves wading across.
The family in the farmhouse on the top of a hill told them the disquieting news that Germans were heading for Baranello, where the Seaforth’s “D” Company was supposed to be. Fed by the absence of even a single Canadian patrol challenging them on the road to Baranello and whiffs of Turkish tobacco smoke from German cigarettes, Reid and McKee’s concern heightened. The men inside what appeared to be a police station told them that the Canadians had taken cover when the Germans shelled the town. As if on cue, someone knocked on the door and said in an unmistakable English accent, “We are pulling out of the town. Come out or be left behind.” After opening the door a few inches, Reid found himself “looking down the barrels of automatic pistols and a Schmeisser machine gun,” unable to pull back because of the Italians pushing him out the door.
Determined to protect McKee, Reid stayed silent when asked where his companion was, which prompted the German to ignore Geneva’s prohibition on slapping prisoners. After the answer that he’d been looking for some wine brought still more blows, Reid tried saying he’d been looking for a “girl.” A moment later, he caught a break when someone, likely McKee, threw a number of small hand grenades into the street; their explosions caught the German by surprise and gave the Canadian just enough time to demonstrate why in Vancouver he’d earned the nickname “Speed Reid.”
It’s doubtful that Reid’s brigadier, Bert Hoffmeister, ever said that “Germans are lousy shots.” Yet, as he ran from two machine gunners, the flash of their traces showing that they were firing on fixed lines, and struggled to keep his balance in his hobnailed boots as they hit the cobblestones, it served Reid to think he had. He surely thought the Germans searching for him were a less than skillful group when, from his hiding place, 19 men rushed by him. Reid’s hope of playing possum ended when a sergeant saw him and kicked him in the ribs. Reid’s jump caused the German to say, in that surprisingly sportsmanlike tone that men who have just faced each other in battle sometimes use, “Ach, nicht kaputt. Komm. Komm raus!
MID-OCTOBER 1943, FRESNES PRISON, PARIS
IAN MACDONALD THINKS ABOUT THE LAST RITES
It seemed too much like a movie.
The guard ordering Ian MacDonald to take his few personal belongings, the walk down the white-and-black tiled corridor to the stairs that he’d taken before but which this time ended not at the door to the exercise yard but at another cell. After seeing its bloodless walls and bed with clean sheets, MacDonald asked why he’d been moved. “This is the cell that is kept for those who are condemned to die,” he answered.
MacDonald found it difficult to square this nicer cell with the prospect of being hanged or shot in the morning. “I spent the night with rosary beads praying and thinking about what this would do to my dear mother and father, and brothers and sisters. And of dying without being given the last rites.”
As the door opened, MacDonald readied himself for the inevitable. Instead, he was told, “We’re going to take you now into Germany.”
19 OCTOBER 1943, DULAG LUFT, FRANKFURT
,!MACDONALD’S FIRST LETTERS HOME
“After the weeks I’d spent in the Gestapo’s hands, and the night in the cell when I thought I’d die in the morning, arriving in a real POW camp was a relief. I wouldn’t, of course, have my liberty, and I was still subject to German military law, but signing papers, being photographed and, especially, being given prisoner identity disks with POW number 3038 all meant that now I was a regular POW and therefore came under Geneva,”
says MacDonald.
The Postkarte and blue aerogram sheet on which he wrote home a letter a few hours after being assigned to his barracks arrived on 10 and 15 January 1944 respectively. Both were censored, though it is not possible to determine if the words etched out by acid were removed by German censor Geprüft no. 37 or by British censor D.B. 643. In the postcard, the interrupted sentence reads:
I was 2 months trying to escape, caught & held prisoner——
Paris for four months.
In the aerogram it is:
I managed to escape as far as the Spanish border but was betrayed and sent to a prison in Paris for four months (7 June–Oct. 17)——.
MacDonald confirms that what alarmed the censor were the words “Fresnes Prison.” Censors on both sides would have wanted to keep secret that RCAF personnel were being held in civilian prisons and thus in the Gestapo’s hands. Neither censor noticed that in the letter MacDonald signalled this by writing that he’d “just received the privileges of a prisoner of war today so now I am doing quite nicely.”
MacDonald’s youngest brother, Leo, confirms that the family parsed the tone and even the handwriting, which was strong and regular and therefore supported the somewhat awkward sentence “I’m feeling fine & entirely unwounded” that appeared in the middle of the postcard’s message. The request in the letter for “a couple of shirts, a sweater and belt” was more important than it might seem on the surface of it. It indicated that, while MacDonald was physically well, he lacked basic material possessions. As well, it gave Mrs. MacDonald something to do—shopping for his clothes—that linked her in an immediate way to her son’s welfare.
The Forgotten Page 18