There was no moon that night, so each escaper had to hold the coattail of the one in front of him. The first man in the column held on to 18-year-old Marie-Thérèse Le Calvez’s coattail. Dumais forbade them from smoking or talking, and enjoined from coughing. “When you reach the coast, you’ll have to go down a steep [150-foot] cliff. Lie on your backs and slide down. When you get to the bottom, you’ll be told where to sit,” Dumais told them, skipping over the fact that a few hundred yards on either side of the cliff sat German listening posts.
28 JANUARY 1944, DULAG LUFT, FRANKFURT
IAN MACDONALD ACHES FOR MAIL
As Father Desnoyers would write later in the year, to glean every scintilla of life from the paper that came from beyond the wire, Kriegies “read, reread and reread letters.” Words were a balm for the soul, whether from a distant wife, parent or priest who knew you so well that he could say mass in your cadence. The healing quality of letters was so profound that many men let others read their letters so they too could hear voices from far beyond the barbed wire. Yet the happiness Ian MacDonald felt for one Canadian who received a letter turned to gnawing emptiness when he discovered that the letter was postmarked some five weeks after MacDonald estimated his own parents had been given his address.
When he wrote home later that day, instead of dwelling on his disappointment, which would only distress his parents, MacDonald sought to give them a glimpse of his life, affecting a worldly nonchalance about bombing raids: “Life is still much the same as ever, our boys in England supply excitement for us but it’s rather annoying when you have to get out of the bed in the early hrs. of the morn.”
30 JANUARY 1944, PARIS
DUMAIS FINDS AN UNLIKELY ALLY IN THE MONTMARTRE MéTRO STATION
Compared with the heart-stopping moments Dumais endured at the checkpoint in the Métro following his return to Paris, the exfiltration of 17 “parcels” from Festung Europa was routine. The inky darkness and sound of the surf hid the men as they slid down the cliff to the beach where the Royal Navy was scheduled to pick them up. It had taken only 12 minutes to unload six crates filled with weapons, ammunition, chocolate, a wireless and four million francs, and then escort the evaders into the boats.
The Montmartre Métro station, by contrast, swarmed with Gestapo and gendarmes, who were checking every suitcase. When he realized that instead of working in pairs the German and French officials were at different tables, Dumais headed for one manned by a young gendarme and tried to disarm him by joking that his suitcase contained grenades and machine guns. The time he took looking for the suitcase’s key gave Dumais the opportunity to say, “If you look in those cases, you’re a dead man … I’m not alone and others have your number.” The threat was believable because the Resistance had recently killed a number of zealous gendarmes, but it left the Frenchman unmoved, as did Dumais’s next words: “All right then, you’re either with me or against me.”163
As Dumais felt his heart beat wildly, the gendarme responded calmly, “The inspectors are watching, so you’d better open them. We’re searching for food” before making a show of lifting a few shirts out of the suitcase. The young policeman kept his composure when he saw the stacks of francs and Dumais told him, “It’s Resistance money.”
31 JANUARY 1944, MILAG UND MARLAG NORD, NEAR BREMEN, GERMANY
FATHER ROBERT BARSALOU JOKES
While the winter had not been cold and there hadn’t been much snow, Father Robert Barsalou wrote his family in mid-January that there had been “much darkness” due not so much to the early sunset but, rather, to the 4 p.m. “obscuration,” a word he assumed they would know from the Blitz. “In Canada, you have no experience of the ‘blackout,’ and I do not wish you to.”164
The POWs were supposed to write in pencil, but on 31 January, Barsalou was allowed to use a pen. That he found this mundane joy “interesting” says volumes about the boredom of camp life. Equally telling is the exuberance with which “l’enfant missionnaire” lists who he sees in the two pictures he had just received: father, mother, brothers, sisters, sisters-in-law, nieces, nephews and “new additions.” The only rank vacant in “Le Régiment Barsalou” (the use of “Régiment” being another sign of the years he’d spent with the military) was “brothers-in-law.” Their absence explains his plan to create “Sister-in-law’s Day,” which he knew would make his family chuckle and that showing that, after years in a POW camp, he still had his sense of humour.
26 FEBRUARY 1944, BRITTANY
DUMAIS SHOWS HE MEANS BUSINESS
Twice in the past few weeks, Dumais had reached for his gun. The first time, he handed it to an American with orders to keep watch on a certain “Olafson,” whose weak command of English didn’t jibe with his story of having had radio training in the United States, and his ignorance about the plane in which he claimed to have parachuted out of prompting a message to London. In the end, Dumais couldn’t carry out MI9’s order to “Get rid of him” because Olafson had escaped, though without enough information for the Germans to roll up Dumais’s escape line.
The second time, the gun stayed in Dumais’s hand, pointed at the chest of a man who’d been one of the senior members of Oaktree, the escape line that both Labrosse and Campinchi had worked for. In deference to them (and against his better judgment), Dumais had agreed to allow this man to join the second exfiltration from Bonaparte Beach: Operation Bonaparte II. But not only had the man Dumais called a lunatic, incredibly (given Dumais’s insistence on security), attended a loud farewell party organized by Campinchi, but the “lunatic” came south from Paris with a former helper whom he promised would also be exfiltrated. Worse, on the train they spoke English and smoked English cigarettes. Once in Brittany, the “lunatic” attended still another farewell party, at which, gun in hand, Dumais took him into custody. Dumais refused to allow the second man to join Bonaparte II and made clear what would happen to him if he returned to Brittany. The Canadian MI9 agent was equally blunt with London; if they sent the “lunatic” back to France, Dumais would “shoot him on sight.”165
Bonaparte II went off without a hitch, though Dumais was disappointed that his first Canadian “parcel” was arrested in Saint-Brieuc. “By way of compensation,” he wrote years later, “a British fighter pilot shot down near Boulogne was picked up by a post van, taken to Saint-Brieuc, joined Bonaparte and was back in England five days after he had left!”
27 FEBRUARY 1944, STALAG II-D, STARGARD, NEAR STETTIN, GERMANY
SERGEANT MAJOR LISCOMB STANDS UP TO A NEW KOMMANDANT
They knew Stalag VIII-B was getting crowded. Still, the orders to board a train for another POW camp came as a surprise. “It was a strange feeling leaving the camp,” recalls Stan Darch. “Of course, we didn’t like it, but we knew it and we knew the guards and their routines. We knew that ‘Spitfire’ was a son of a bitch, and we knew which guards were gullible enough to supply us with what we wanted.” The going price for a radio tube was a reasonable 1,200 cigarettes. On their march to the train station, the 1,400 Canadians could not help but notice the black muzzles of the automatic weapons pointed at them.
They’d heard and seen the fleets of bombers overhead, and new arrivals had brought news of the victory in North Africa, the defeat of Italy and the Russians’ advances in the east. The train trip was, however, the Canadians’ first opportunity in a year and a half to judge the progress of the war themselves. “We were struck by the civilians that we saw. When they saw us, they did not appear too happy,” says Darch. The winter snows had covered the fields but could not hide the terrible toll the bombers had taken on houses, factories, roads and railways.
When they arrived at the POW camp near Stargard, the Kommandant asked if anyone could speak German. A man named Schillenberg of the South Saskatchewans said he did. “Later,” recalls Darch, “he told us that the Kommandant said to him, ‘That’s a German name. Why are you in the Canadian Army?’ and he answered, ‘I made my bread and butter in Canada. That’s why!’”
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p; The men expected the usual statements about not trying to escape. Instead, Schillenberg told them that, according to the Kommandant, they’d all volunteered to work for Germany and as a result would be eligible for extra rations. As soon as the fetid men who had not yet been fed heard this, they started cursing. After a few moments, Sergeant Major Liscomb of the Essex Scottish stepped forward and the catcalls stopped, and the nonplussed Kommandant must have assumed that the natural order of command had re-established itself. Through Schillenberg, Liscomb told the Kommandant that he and the other NCOs would, quite simply, not be going out to work.
“Are you refusing to work as ordered?”
Liscomb answered, “No. We are not refusing. We [wish] to speak to the Swedish Red Cross representative before we go.”
The Kommandant stood his ground. “You have until tomorrow to make up your minds or you will be shipped to Poland.”
“Then you had better arrange for the train, sir. We could do with a ride anyway.”166 Then he turned his back on the Kommandant and returned to his place in the ranks. In the tense moments that followed, Liscomb wondered if his stand would cost him his life. It didn’t, but the Kommandant cut off Red Cross parcels and ordered a reduction in German rations. Not only did both actions violate Geneva but they degraded the men by underscoring their powerlessness. Were it not for the Canadians’ stock of cigarettes, which they bartered for food with other POWs, Darch and his comrades would have suffered severe malnutrition.
4 MARCH 1944, STALAG XVIII-A, WOLFSBERG, AUSTRIA
FATHER JUNEAU HAS DOUBTS
As the third anniversary of their capture neared, les religieux’s moods diverged. A month earlier, Father Larivière had written of the men of “doubtful or no baptism” among whom he’d been cast and seen religious ignorance, disinterest and, in some cases, something approaching “paganism.” Father Pierre-Paul Pellerin agreed: “In my two years of imprisonment here, I have not found a single Christian heart. I assure you, the mold is not easy to cast.”
Writing from Austria on 3 March, Father Juneau told his brother, Romeo, that he regretted that “the whole country admires” him (presumably he means the people of Saint-Paulin de Maskinongé, who had read the letters that his family had published in the local paper) because as time went on he felt “less and less up to the task.” In a letter written a few weeks later to his father, Juneau returns to this theme: “The priest in a camp does not have the right to be sad or morose. It is his duty to spread joy from the moment he enters a room…. and repeat: ‘Everything is O.K. All for the best! Carry on, my boys! It won’t be long! Have a smoke, a Canadian “fag.” Nothing but the best!’” The emptiness of these stock phrases is all the more evident because he wrote them in English.
15 MARCH 1944, BRITTANY
DUMAIS RUNS THE “CROSS-CHANNEL FERRY SERVICE”
The decoder in London must have thought Labrosse had made a mistake when he called for pickups on the nights of 15, 19 and 23 March. With Paris convulsed by the discovery of dozens of dismembered and charred bodies in a house in the 16th arrondissement, it was a good time to move the 75 “parcels” stashed around the city. The discovery that the coast was under an alert prompted Dumais to send Labrosse back to Paris to cancel the pickup on 19 March. Despite the alert, on 15 March, the escape party reached the beach without incident. A moment after hearing over the walkie-talkie that the Royal Navy was a mere four miles away, an explosion rent the night. “We’ll have to pull out for the time being,” the British sailor said, “but we’ll be back.”167 After several nervous hours marked off more by the growing numbness in the arm that held the walkie-talkie to his ear than the watch on his wrist, through the static Dumais heard the code word.
The delay meant that when the boats approached the beach, dawn was close. The naval ratings and Dumais’s men quickly emptied the boats of supplies and loaded the “parcels.” As dawn broke, the ringmaster of what one wag dubbed the “Cross-Channel Ferry Service” could still make out the redoubtable boats, but the German gunners, mercifully, had not seen them.
17–18 MARCH 1944, REMERANGLES, FRANCE
RCAF PILOT OFFICER KEN WOODHOUSE IS SHOT DOWN AND TAKEN TO PARIS
Ken Woodhouse could not see the man asking, “Avez-vous vu un parachutiste?” But his German-accented French told him how close he was to being captured. The interval between hearing the Frenchman answer “Oui” and “over there, over there”— was just long enough for the RCAF pilot to wonder if he’d blundered by climbing into the coffin-like box on the back of a truck that drove up to him just moments after he bailed out of his Spitfire (on his 65th mission) 60 miles north of Paris.168
Maurice Rendu did not speak English, but his meaning was perfectly clear when, a few minutes after he had warded the German off and after a few more minutes’ drive, he stopped, let Woodhouse out of the box and motioned for him to crawl into a haystack and remain quiet. After Rendu drove off, Woodhouse filed the “Made in Canada” label off his nail clippers, cut the pilot wings off his shirt and cut down his flying boots before taping his dog tags to his ankle.
By dusk the 22-year-old had been moved to the house belonging to Rendu’s father, Wilfred, who warmly if embarrassingly welcomed him by exclaiming, “Mon Dieu, il est un enfant!” (My God, he’s just a child!). Soon, however, “two rough-looking men dressed in typical French farm clothing” stood by ominously as Maurice peppered him with questions that Woodhouse guessed were meant to determine that he was, indeed, an Allied pilot but which he could not answer because of his inability to speak French. As his fear built, one of the two men broke into a smile and said in unmistakable American English, “Hi Mac. Welcome to France.”
Before dawn on the 18th, Woodhouse and the two American airmen were in a truck that picked up three more men before stopping at a door set curiously in the wall of a brick building. The door led to a loading chute; from the white powder on the floor, the Canadian from Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, knew they were walking into a flour mill. A second door led them into the living room of a house, where still another evader waited for them. A few hours later, the men were on a truck on their way to see a forger who was readying their identity cards. In the front seat was a gendarme who had thrown his lot in with the Resistance. There were some moments of tension when they came across German troops marching a work detail of British POWs. But, seeing the gendarme, the Germans waved the truck on and the tension lessened, though Woodhouse’s pity for his captured allies did not.
The instructions on how to behave on the train were detailed. No talking, showing that they knew each other or acting like tourists. Smoking had to be done in the French way; that is, by leaving the cigarette in the mouth. Even picking up their tickets was choreographed. Each evader had to pass through a crowded area, in the middle of which someone would slip the ticket into his hand.
Shortly before arriving at Gare du Nord, the two Resistance men shepherding Woodhouse and the American airmen to Paris asked to see their identity cards. The evaders were stunned when their “helpers” ripped up the cards and threw out the pieces, explaining that “the cards were incorrect and it was better to have none at all.” If they were captured, they could now at least pretend to be escaping unaided.
Several pairs of eyes were watching them once they arrived in Paris. Some belonged to the Gestapo. Others were unseen friends who, as the evaders circled the block outside the station, watched to see if they were being followed. Woodhouse was quite unprepared for the helper who picked them up in front of a bakery. Instead of another brawny male, a “little old lady appeared from somewhere, … [she] strutted along without a care in the world, stopped to buy some bread while we waited outside, and eventually delivered us to an apartment—and then disappeared, we never saw her again.”
23–24 MARCH 1944, PLOUHA, BRITTANY
WOODHOUSE AND TWO OTHER RCAF OFFICERS ESCAPE FROM BONAPARTE BEACH
Between Genevieve Schneegan and Olympe Vasseur, at whose apartment he stayed in Montmartre, and Marie-Thér�
�se Le Calvez, who, when they arrived in Saint-Brieuc, led Woodhouse and eight other men, including two other Canadians, to a farmer’s shack fitted out with rough-hewn beds, Woodhouse had been in the hands of three helpers. Monsieur and Madame Maurice Cavalier hid Woodhouse and arranged for new identity cards from a forger whose palette consisted of papers, inks, examples of signatures of mayors of hundreds of villages, German officials and numerous rubber stamps.
Mirielle Catherine Herveic led Woodhouse, RCAF officers Russel Barnlund and Ken Lussier, and the six other evaders onto the train from Paris to Saint-Brieuc—and, to ensure that they had their reserved compartment to themselves, threw a proper Parisian fit that cleared the compartment of the squatters. Save for the moment when the American Bob Sweatt unthinkingly lit a German soldier’s cigarette with a Ronson lighter, the trip from Saint-Brieuc to Guingamp was uneventful: because Guingamp was inside the 15-mile Restricted Zone, the evaders expected heavy security. Woodhouse and Sweatt were taken to safe house; in addition to sheltering evaders, Monsieur and Madame Laurent stored arms, ammunition, explosives and radios.
The next evening, Francis Kerambum, whose day job hauling supplies for the Germans provided both cover and much-needed petrol, drove Woodhouse, Sweatt and several other evaders to their meeting place with Le Calvez. To the men’s surprise, she immediately led them “through fields, along hedgerows, past some darkened houses and then, in a final fifty yard dash,” first to a barn and finally to the shelter.169
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