Day after day they witnessed the awesome power of the Hawker Typhoon fighter bomber that had not even flown when the war began. The sharp bank and 180-degree turn of one plane told Harvie that they’d been mistaken for Germans. As the men dove to the ground, the “Typhoons screamed down, guns blazing, then climbed back up and disappeared,” leaving behind stunned, demoralized and dead POWs.261
Seventy-eight POWs, including three from Cox’s hut who had survived the beaches of Dieppe, and 12 guards were ripped apart by the plane’s rockets and four-inch shells. Father Bergeron knew the infantryman’s saying that you’re safe from bombs except for the one that “has your number on it.” And he would have agreed that the immediate reason for his survival was that, just a few minutes earlier, he had noticed men further up the column who had need of his strong back and comforting words. But what mattered to him was the ultimate cause. His sauveur had saved him, showing him the want of the men further up the line.
The senselessness of these men’s deaths all but destroyed the Kriegies’ morale. As the dust cleared, one cried out, “Kill us now if you want. We’d rather die at your hands than be cut apart by our allies.”262 The guards could not call off the march. However, knowing that they too could be shot up by a pilot thinking he was strafing a German army column, after sheathing their bayonets, they allowed the POWs to break ranks and walk in the field, which all hoped would be seen as a signal that they were not German soldiers.
MID-APRIL 1945, ON A FIELD OF HEATHER
MACDONALD SURVIVES A FRIENDLY-FIRE INCIDENT
Like John Harvie, MacDonald had seen Wehrmacht troops marching to the front. Unlike Harvie, however, who as part of a column being led by German soldiers could savour the moments of coming face to face with the enemy all knew would soon be defeated, each time MacDonald and Reed saw or heard the boots, they had to hide, usually in bushes beside the road.
The underbrush, MacDonald learned a few nights later when a Typhoon bombed a nearby installation, was no more constant an ally than a mountain in the Pyrenees had been. For suddenly the field of heather that ran up to the clump of trees in which he and Reed planned to spend the night was aflame.
“A few moments after the explosions,” recalls MacDonald, “we noticed that a wall of fire about a half mile wide was advancing very quickly toward us. We didn’t have time to run away, so we thought that if we pulled up the heather around where we were, the fire might just go around us.”
The two airmen managed to get back into their little oasis just before the firestorm closed in. As heat from the flames and smoke made each breath more difficult, the psalmist’s words “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil” came unbidden to MacDonald and gave him hope that he’d survive. At length, the light began to move off, the heat lessened and the crackling wasn’t as close, and MacDonald found that, two years and one week after they had survived a fire in a bomber over France, he and Reed had survived a fire on a field in Germany.
MID-APRIL 1945, IN A LUMBER CAMP EAST OF LÜBECK, GERMANY
STAN DARCH IS LIBERATED BY A RUSSIAN FEMALE COMMANDER PACKING A PISTOL—AND VODKA
Even at this late date, the Reich demanded obedience from what conquered peoples it still controlled. “I couldn’t have weighed more than 120 pounds, but they had me and other men swinging axes chopping down trees, cutting them up and then hauling the heavy logs,” says Stan Darch. “Breakfast, when we had it, consisted of a piece of bread or fried potatoes, so rousing ourselves in the morning wasn’t easy. That morning, however, it took only a few moments to realize something was different. There were no guards; we knew what that meant but didn’t really have much idea of what we were supposed to do, when suddenly we heard a tank.”
In the excitement, Darch took the star on the front of the tank to signify the United States. “Imagine our surprise,” he says, “when the turret opened and we started hearing Russian—and saw that the crew commander was a woman with an automatic weapon slung over her shoulder, a revolver on each hip and a knife stuck in each boot top—and a bottle of vodka in her tunic! We found out later that her husband was the tank’s driver.”
It took a few moments to sort things out. But with the help of a few prisoners the Russians had taken, the Canadians who spoke German were able to communicate with the Russians, who told them where the British were. Darch does not remember paying much attention to the sound of a Jeep approaching from the other direction until it was close enough to see the white star on it. “It stopped and out climbed an Allied officer, who wanted to speak to the Russians about their respective sectors. So there we found ourselves in the first minutes after liberation listening to Russian being translated into German and then translating it to English and around again,” says Darch. The next day, the Russian commander allowed the Canadians to harness a horse to a cart and set off for the British lines.
MID-APRIL 1945, IN A FOREST IN CENTRAL GERMANY
GEORGE “SPEED” REID IS LIBERATED
Several days after they escaped from a makeshift camp near Fallingbostel, and after long hours of walking in a reforested area under a leaden sky, Joe Cronan, another POW, pointed to a smudge of orange in sky and asked, “Speed, have you ever seen the sun come up from the west?”263 The question seemed comical but signalled that they had spent the better part of the morning heading in the wrong direction.
A few hours later, several Germans in a truck they were passing were too busy talking to take notice of the POWs who slipped quietly by. The same could not be said of the three teenagers who, because they were carrying rifles, were able to stop the escapers on a road in a wood. As Reid tried to convince still-too-young-to-shave “soldiers” that he and Cronan were foreign workers, a car arrived. The driver, a doctor, spoke English and assured the teens that he would take their prisoners to the local jail.
After hearing how long it had been since Reid and Cronan had eaten a real meal and of the conditions they had laboured under in the salt mine, instead of taking them to the jail, the doctor took them to his cabin in the wood, where his wife cooked them a good meal. When a German soldier knocked on the door, the escapers hid, Reid wielding a two-foot-long piece of firewood. A few moments later they saw a self-propelled 88-mm gun clank by as the Germans pulled back behind a bend in the road. The doctor’s wife then kept watch, soon calling out, “George, George. This is them.”
Reid may have spent the last year and a half as a prisoner of war, but it took only those words to turn him again into an active soldier. To prevent the American Jeeps from heading straight into an ambush, he ran down a road and then across an open field, timing his dives to the ground perfectly each time the Germans to his rear opened up. When he rose from a ditch, he found himself looking at the business end of an American machine gun. “For God’s sake, don’t shoot,” he cried. A young man with lieutenant stripes said, “Who are you and what is all the shooting?” Unable to suppress his sense of humour, Reid told him that he’d taken a shortcut from the Canadian Front in Italy, then said, “But the point is, there is an 88 set up down the road.” Not long after he explained he was an escaped POW, five tanks lumbered down the road and made short work of the anti-tank gun.
MID-APRIL 1945, STALAG XI-B, FALLINGBOSTEL, GERMANY
ANDREW CARSWELL IS FREED
The Allies were not far away. The pilots in the planes just above treetop level were the closest, though the pilots of the bombers were closest to Andrew Carswell’s heart. He could hear and feel the rumble of their exploding payloads. It is a mark of Carswell’s humanity that, even though he knew that each of the explosions opened a little bit further the gate holding him prisoner, his thought was, “It must [be] unendurable for any intelligent German to see the destruction of his or her homeland continuing while Hitler rave[s] like a lunatic about secret weapons.”264
But still the war dragged on—until the morning following the night when he and his barracks mates heard the sound of a Sten gun, which told them that British tr
oops were nearby. Then, as they waited for the morning rations to arrive, an army POW rushed into their hut, saying between deep breaths, “I just saw a Churchill tank.”
MID-APRIL 1945, NEAR LÜBECK, GERMANY
FATHER GOUDREAU FEARS HE AND THE OTHERS WON’T SURVIVE THE WAR
By day, the marchers kept near ditches. They bartered cigarettes for food and saw at least one V2 rocket. When the ground quaked from nearby bombings, Father Goudreau and his congregants could not help but feel that the mass he said that morning or the evening before was “the last he’d celebrate in his life and the last they’d hear.”265 By night, the increasingly tired POWs slept in barns or in fields under the firmament, lit by the flashes of flares and artillery fire. The priest laid his head on a pillow of wood and in place of the sound of cicadas, their ears were filled with the staccato chirp of machine guns.
17 APRIL 1945, 25 MILES WEST OF FALLINGBOSTEL, GERMANY
MACDONALD AVOIDS FRIENDLY FIRE AND MEETS SOME ROYAL COMMANDOS
The small-arms and mortar fire that kept them pinned down signalled that they were close to the Allied lines. “It only lasted for an hour or two,” recalls MacDonald. “But the explosions were a little too close, and the machine guns cut the grass above us. My mother wouldn’t have been happy with my language, but I couldn’t help thinking, ‘Damn. If I’m not careful, I’m going to get myself killed by friendly fire just before I get to our lines.’”
The next day, MacDonald and Reed saw two men walking toward them. “They weren’t very close, but we could make out that one looked to be wearing American coveralls. Once they got closer, I could tell he was an airman. He’d been shot down and was on the run, and the other fellow was an escaped Russian POW. While the American caught us up with the news, including that President Roosevelt had died, the Russian went into a field to find us some food.
“The next morning, the Russian again went to find food. He returned to tell us that he’d met a German farmer who’d told him the German troops had left. We immediately began to walk toward where we thought the Americans were and soon ran into another farmer, who confirmed that the troops had left. A few hundred feet down the road, we heard singing and then, much to our surprise, there appeared a number of Russian POWs who were well fortified with vodka and were walking back toward Russia. The Russian who was with us joined them, while Wally and I walked toward the west.
“About a quarter mile further down the road, we saw a convoy. The first car stopped when the driver saw us. They were Royal Marine commandos, and we were washed over by a feeling of pure joy and elation,” recalls MacDonald.
20 APRIL 1945, WESTERTIMKE SUBCAMP OF MILAG UND MARLAG NORD
LES RELIGIEUX UNDER FIRE
Kommandant Rogge’s decision to keep some of the Oblates and Sacred Heart Brothers in the subcamp at Westertimke should have given them a measure of protection. But as part of its defence of the village of Westertimke (and in violation of the Geneva Convention), the Wehrmacht placed a six-barrelled Nebelwerfer mortar and two tanks next to the camp. Les religieux had never seen anything like the Nebelwerfer, which shook their barracks, causing the men of the cloth to spend the fourth anniversary of their capture digging a series of trenches in which they could take cover during the day and sleep at night; the Allied shells killed 6 and wounded 14 of the POWs that night.
22 APRIL 1945, STALAG III-A, LUCKENWALDE, NEAR BERLIN
KINGSLEY BROWN WRITES A NOTE FOR A FORMER GERMAN GUARD
From the enclosure at Stalag III-A, to which he had been moved back a few weeks earlier, Brown could not tell whether the explosions that shook the ground came from Canadian, British or American bombers, which had been pummelling Berlin, or from the tens of thousands of Russian heavy guns and rocket launchers ringed around the city’s north, west and south. Though none of the shells appeared aimed at the camp, as their tempo built, one by one the guards disappeared on the run.
Around noon, a guard named Paul Reemt-Heeren, who had been with Brown’s group since Stalag Luft III, found Kingsley Brown in a dingy corner of his hut. The destruction Brown had witnessed had dampened his wrath, for as he looked upon the man, he “tried to imagine what it must be like for a proud German in this hour of such crushing defeat and chaos.”266
Reemt-Heeren told Brown that he was going to try to make it through the American lines to Magdeburg, where his wife and children were. He then pulled a pen and card from his pocket, saying, “You could help me … I don’t know what I might run up against … I tried to do the right thing by the prisoners, you know that.” Using the German word vielleicht, which in this context has a meaning closer to “beseeching” than to “perhaps,” he asked if Brown could put in a good word for him. Brown took the card and, in the same hand that he had once compiled the database from which was produced his ill-fated identity as a Bulgarian steel-worker, wrote that Reemt-Heeren “had done the best he could do to make life more comfortable for the prisoners in his charge.” He signed it, adding his rank, service number and Canadian address.
Two days later, the advance guard of the Third Guards Tank Regiment of the First Ukrainian Front liberated the camp.
24 APRIL 1945, ON AN ESTATE NEAR LÜBECK, GERMANY
HARVIE MAKES HIMSELF COMFORTABLE AND AWAITS THE END OF THE WAR
Power had shifted.
RAF Sergeant “Dixie” Deans, the Senior British Officer, had been to the camp at Lübeck and declared that, since it was overcrowded, unsanitary and short on food, he would not order the 12,000 men who had marched out of Milag und Marlag Nord to take one further step. And the Germans, who knew that Stalin’s troops were within a couple of thousand yards of Hitler’s chancellery and, more to the point, that the British were 40 miles to the east, realized there was nothing they could do about it. Instead, Deans gave his word that the men would stay at the estate a few miles outside Lübeck that they had stopped at the day before. Over the next week, as the war continued around them and hundreds of soldiers and untold numbers of civilians died, Harvie and the other marchers fairly set up housekeeping and slept in clean straw.
Meanwhile, Robert Buckham, who had left Milag und Marlag Nord with another group of men, was spending his second day at a former artillery school barracks near Lübeck, and in significantly more salubrious conditions than they had experienced during their first night on the road when they had spent the night in a pigsty. Among the stranger aspects of life in the faux castle was that the POWs and German guards shared the washroom, where they shaved standing next to each other.
26 APRIL 1945, ON A ROAD 25 MILES SOUTH OF HAMBURG
SURVIVORS OF DIEPPE ARE STRAFED BY RAF PLANES
The guards, some of whom had summarily executed men who had fallen out of the line of march that had begun at Fallingbostel, moved quickly to reassert their authority after Stan Darch and the Kriegies erupted into cheers when an RAF plane wiggled its wings. First, they reversed the column; after about a mile’s march, they turned it onto a road heading north. For few moments, the tree-lined road elicited the hope of spring. And the roar of the RAF planes swooping toward them promised another wing salute.
This time, however, there were no cheers. Instead, the pilots, having mistaken the column for a troop of German soldiers, fired their machine guns as they roared by just above the budding trees. The pilots realized their mistake almost immediately. But at 150 miles per hour and firing more than 300 rounds per minute, their fire quickly ran down the length of the column. Some men, Darch included, had time to jump into a nearby ditch. Many who couldn’t get off the road were lucky as the bullets fired from machine guns from different planes staggered from left to right to produce what amounted to a dead zone running down the road. Scores died, including Lance Corporal Thomas R. Gage, who had survived the First World War, only to be one of the 89 Allied corpses the Germans ordered their comrades to leave by the side of the road.
28 APRIL 1945, MILAG UND MARLAG NORD, NEAR BREMEN, GERMANY
LES RELIGIEUX, THE SURVIVORS OF A.D. HVFF AND HMCS
ATHABASKAN ARE LIBERATED
Five days earlier, they were in a dangerous location. Save for a small corridor that connected the camp to Lübeck, Milag und Marlag Nord was encircled by different Western armies, any of which, of course, were eagerly awaited by the Kriegies. The more pessimistic prisoners realized that they could be hit by friendly fire at any moment. The setting up of a forward observation post for a nearby artillery piece confirmed that that the Germans had pulled back and that Milag und Marlag Nord and its subcamp at Westertimke were now, in Stuart Kettles’s words, “right in no-man’s land.” Soon “shells and mortars whined right over the camp. When they quieted down, moanin’ Minnies [Nebelwerfer] would start up, and the sound they make would send shivers up and down the spine of a skeleton,” recalled the officer who had seen his warship blasted apart.
Though not a soldier, Kettles was not surprised that after the shells and mortars, the “machine guns start[ed] talking.” With an American buddy, he dug a slit trench, which ensured they would be below the line of fire and better protected from falling flak.
At 11:30 p.m., the noise lessened, and Brother Georges-Aimé Lavallée prepared for another night of sleeping in his three-foot-wide gash in the ground. Minute gave way to minute without a blast, or the whine or ripping sound of a machine gun. The unaccustomed silence prompted the men to peek over their trenches. Ten minutes before Kettles and the other survivors of Athabaskan would have begun their second full year of captivity, a tank belonging to the Scots Guards, which had shared battle honours with the Canadians during the last 100 days of the last war, rumbled through the main gate and liberated the camp.
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