Joey Jacobson's War

by Peter J. Usher

  Could this story be true? There is no record of an Allied bomber being shot down near Lichtenvoorde before 28 January 1942, nor is there any record of successful evasion and return to England by airmen from that part of the Netherlands before that date. Between Joe’s diaries and his letters, there is no mention of anything remotely like this – indeed from those sources alone one can account for every day of his life from his arrival in England to his death in the Netherlands nine months later. There is nothing in the records of his operational training unit or his squadron that might support this account.

  Hendrik Leemreize with May and Percy Jacobson at Joe’s grave, Lichtenvoorde General Cemetery, 30 July 1950. (AVOG Crash Museum)

  The graves of the crew of AT122, Lichtenvoorde General Cemetery, probably early 1950s. (Canadian Jewish Archives)

  Even if Joe had come down a second time at Lichtenvoorde, how would Hendrik Leemreize have known it was him? Joe carried no identification and no one knew who he was. Leemreize is never mentioned as a witness to the crash, so only if he had gained admittance to the hospital and viewed the bodies could he have possibly recognized Joe. And although Percy and May both recorded their visit to Lichtenvoorde in detail, including their visit with the Leemreizes and seeing the film, they made no mention of this story. If it had happened, surely Leemreize would have told them about it, and surely Percy and May would have recorded it.

  What then accounts for this story? Resistance people in the Lichtenvoorde area did begin assisting downed airmen the following year by sheltering and then escorting them to contacts in Belgium, whence the evaders would be passed along a chain through France to Spain or Portugal, as the more direct route via the Dutch coast was heavily fortified and guarded. Hendrik Leemreize was indeed prominent among those involved in pilotenhulp, as the rescue of downed airmen was called. He would escort groups of airmen by train, buying successive short-trip tickets so it would not appear that anyone was taking a long journey if asked for his ticket. But this system required more than just individuals finding and sheltering airmen. It required a trusted network of escorts and couriers across the country and into Belgium, and that was not yet in place in January 1942. None of the very few attempts to help downed airmen in eastern Netherlands before that time succeeded in returning them to safety.8 It appears that the funeral was a pivotal event in welding a dozen or so key people in Lichtenvoorde into an effective organization that in the following years rescued dozens of Allied airmen. Yet no one talked about such doings at the time because no one knew whom to trust. Some in the network were betrayed and executed. By 1944, the occupation authorities regarded Lichtenvoorde as “Little England” on account of its efforts, but they were largely unable to break the network and it continued rescuing Allied airmen for the remainder of the war. Leemreize said little about his resistance work even after the war, although he was later recognized and decorated for his efforts.9 So far as is known, however, there was no instance of a downed airman being rescued in eastern Netherlands and then crashing in the vicinity a second time, at any time in the war.

  After fifty or sixty years, the details of events may be telescoped, conflated, or confused in memory. That in no way detracts from the importance of the Allied airmen’s funeral on 1 February 1942 in galvanizing local resistance for the next three years. At least for some, the second coming of Joe Jacobson, born of a Jewish mother, has become a part of that story. And for the Leemreizes, Joe Jacobson was a symbol of wartime resistance. The specifics of what the Lichtenvoorde resisters were able to do at any particular time are less important than that they did indeed act with courage, selflessness, and at great personal risk during the occupation. The resisters succeeded in returning many Allied airmen to safety, and each in his or her individual capacity contributed to victory and liberation.

  The crash of AT122 and the funeral honours for its crew that Lichtenvoorde insisted upon during the occupation are memorialized to this day. The story has been recorded in books, articles, and film, and recounted from time to time on television and in newspapers.10 Every year on 4 May, Memorial Day in the Netherlands, the people of Lichtenvoorde gather in St. Bonifatius church by the hundreds for the town’s remembrance service for both Dutch servicemen and civilians killed in the war, and for the RAF flyers who lost their lives in the vicinity. Those hundreds follow the same route to the General Cemetery as did the funeral procession for Harding, Hodgkinson, Jacobson, and Selfe. Following a brief ceremony, the town’s children place flowers on the graves of the twenty-three Bomber Command flyers buried there. The people of Lichtenvoorde have forgotten neither their own resistance to occupation and oppression at a terrible time in their history, nor those from afar who died in battle for their eventual release from tyranny.

  Thirty-Two

  Epilogue

  Nearly six years of war had left Percy numb and exhausted. The revelations of brutality and horror in Europe that emerged in the war’s final days seemed beyond belief. Yet in Percy’s eyes, too many of his fellow citizens remained oblivious and complacent. Percy had made periodic reference to his disappointments about local events during the war, not least about continuing anti-Jewish prejudice, and whether Joe’s life was a sacrifice in vain. Had those six years of horrific struggle amounted to so little in Canada? It was now urgent to begin work on peacetime reconstruction, as Joe and Monty had so earnestly believed and fought for.

  My own feelings were mixed. I was glad … that is putting it mildly for the millions of people who could again feel with relief that their own were safe. I knew that I had in my thoughts rather feared the day when the realization of our personal loss would be … well I will leave it at that … I just felt lost for a while. I sat in Murrays drinking coffee for an hour, then walked along St. Catherine Street watching the crowds celebrate. … We closed our offices at noon. I went home to lunch in the usual way. Arranged to send some V Day flowers, red and white, to May whom I knew was feeling very much the same as I felt. We spent the afternoon quietly together. … Sounds a very trite description of one of the greatest days in history but my spirits were flat and I am not going to embellish this account with stuff that I did not feel.

  (PJD 7 May 1945)

  Percy continued both his business and literary activities after the war, but rarely maintained his diary. In the summer of 1950 he represented Canada at the annual PEN International conference in Edinburgh after he and May visited Joe’s grave in Holland. Percy had been in failing health and died the next year, surely in part of a broken heart. May survived Percy by twenty-five years. She wore Joe’s operational wings as a brooch until her dying day. She treasured them as a tribute to Joey himself, above the Memorial Cross, which she had received in recognition of her own loss, and which she seldom, if ever, wore.

  Monty Berger (whose father would soon become an air force chaplain) went on to an illustrious military career as an intelligence officer in a fighter squadron. Throughout the war, he continued to correspond with the Jacobsons, whom he held in high regard as they did him. Like them, he often recalled Joe’s spirit for inspiration. Monty would write, on each anniversary of Joe’s final flight, of the intensity of their bond during those few months in England, and their idealistic hopes for the new world they were fighting for. Responding to a letter from Percy about discouraging news on the political front in Canada, he said to the Pony Club:

  I remember saying in the early days to many people, and especially to Joe, “I begin fighting when this war is over.” With 2½ years of war-weariness away from home, I find my resolve not weakening, but strengthening, and strengthening immeasurably. I have seen the elite of this generation go off never to return, and someone somewhere with fight, only if mental rather than physical, and with good heart, must carry on. (9 January 1944)

  Monty never abandoned the idea of the play that he and Joe had discussed. They had intended it to be based on their own experience, but Monty now wanted to draw on Joe’s character and outlook, based on his letters and notes, and to draw
a moral from Joe’s sacrifice. He hoped to complete it with Percy’s assistance, when the duress of his wartime duties might allow.

  The message we want to get across … still stands, more indelibly clear than ever. It shines as a beacon light and cannot fail and its value as a guide does not less[en] for, alas, the gloom about is just as thick as ever … (29 January 1944).

  Monty returned to journalism after the war with the Montreal Gazette, but later went into public relations. In 1965 he sought the Liberal Party’s nomination in the federal riding of Mount Royal, but was defeated by Pierre Trudeau. The play never did get written, but neither did Monty forget it. He talked to me about it sixty years later, when he gave me the Pony Club letters he had kept all that time.

  Gerald Smith arrived in England in the spring of 1942 to serve as a radar technician. The next year he re-mustered to aircrew, and returned to Canada to train as a navigator. By the time he completed his training, the air force no longer needed new men from overseas. After the war, he became a senior manager in the women’s retail clothing business in Montreal. Herb Ross enlisted in the United States Army. After taking basic training at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, he served in North Africa, India, and Burma. The three surviving members of the Pony Club remained in contact for the rest of their lives.

  Joe’s older sister Edith married soon after Joe was killed, and her husband later took over Percy’s office furniture business. Janet married an American in 1948. After he died, she returned to Montreal and married Gerald Smith, who had recently become a widower. She visited Joe’s grave for the first time in 2013.

  Joe’s cousin Lionel (Ray) Silver, an air observer in 10 Squadron, was shot down on the famous “Thousand Raid” on Cologne on 31 May 1942. He spent two weeks in the hands of the Gestapo before being turned over to the Luftwaffe authorities. He spent the next three years as a prisoner of war, chiefly in Stalag Luft III whence the Great Escape was mounted. In January 1945 he endured the long march westward that the Germans forced on their prisoners as the Russians advanced on the Eastern Front. He resumed his career in journalism after the war, and he was an active member of the Canadian Ex-Air Force Prisoners-of-War Association to the end of his days in 2001.

  Every member of the McGill Redmen team who played in the championship game on 19 November 1938 enlisted within the next three years. Seven did not return. Those who survived took up the professions for which they had trained, or went into business. Many of them rose to prominence in Canadian life.

  Roger Rousseau spent the rest of the war in a series of German prisoner of war camps, ending at Stalag Luft IV in Pomerania, where he was beaten and bayonetted. In the dead of winter of 1945, he survived the same forced march to the west that the Germans inflicted on all captive Allied airmen. He finally received an RCAF commission when he was repatriated to Canada in 1945. He went on to a distinguished career in the diplomatic service and was the chief of the Montreal Olympic Committee in 1972. He died in 1980.

  All of the Hell Hooters became casualties. Aside from Joe and Roger, Mac Keswick was killed in training in 1941, and Jeep McLean was killed in action in 1942. Les Jupp and Cliff Chappell were captured in 1942, and Art Hunter in 1943. Les and Art spent the remainder of the war in German prisoner of war camps. Cliff was part of a spectacular escape from an Italian PoW camp to Allied lines in 1943. Over half of the seventy-four air observers who graduated from Rivers in February 1941 became casualties of the war, thirty being killed in action and another twelve taken prisoners of war. The casualty rate was much the same for all of the air observers who had arrived in England in the spring of 1941.

  Henriette and Dan Kostoris were desperate to have their children back, and so the Jacobsons took Liliane and Yvette to New York in the summer of 1942 to sail to Lisbon. After a few days alone there, they were put on a flight back to England. Dan died in 1948, Henriette a few years later. Liliane married a decorated Canadian air observer, and they returned to Montreal after he was demobilized. Yvette moved to the United States after the war for her education, where she married an American and remained there.

  Cecily Samuel graduated from the University of Toronto in 1942, and married a local doctor in August 1943. They later moved to Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. Janine Freedman returned to Belgium after the war, and married a legal adviser to King Baudouin.

  The Air Training Program eventually trained 131,553 men from all over the Commonwealth, of whom over 45,000 would learn the science of navigation and bombing at the several schools that were established across Canada. When the heavy bombers came into general service in 1942, the air observer trade was separated into navigators and bomb-aimers who were trained separately thereafter.

  The issue of whether Canadians already serving in RAF squadrons should be transferred to the newly established all-Canadian bomber squadrons came to a head the week after Joe was killed. Some of Britain’s senior commanders (and indeed some Canadians themselves) resisted this move. The problem was being solved by attrition, however, as there were less than a hundred Canadians remaining in 5 Group. Joe had been the last Canadian air observer in 106 Squadron.

  106 Squadron retired its last Hampden about eight weeks after Joe was killed, shortly after converting to Manchesters. By May the squadron was entirely re-equipped with Lancasters, Bomber Command’s highly successful workhorse for the remainder of the war. Wing Commander Allen had by then moved on, replaced by the charismatic Guy Gibson, who would eventually lead the celebrated dam-buster operation. Gibson had been earmarked for leadership by Arthur Harris, the newly appointed commander in chief of Bomber Command, who admired his courage and single-minded determination, his hatred of the Hun, and his impatience with men of lesser commitment. Perhaps Gibson would have seen those same qualities in Joe, had he completed his tour of operations in 106 Squadron.

  Joe was one of almost ten thousand Canadians killed in Bomber Command, or nearly a quarter of Canada’s war dead in all services and about a fifth of all men killed in Bomber Command between 1939 and 1945. While they generally died clean-shaven and adequately fed, unlike infantry men, Bomber Command proved the deadliest of all the service branches.

  Those who survived came home to a different country. Canada had gained a stronger sense of itself, and never again would go to war in Britain’s footsteps. Economic depression had given way to modest prosperity. Canada was becoming a land of opportunity and hope. A few of the early Air Training Program graduates chose air force careers after the war, but far more went back to civilian life, where many made their mark in business, the professions, or politics. Anti-Semitism did not disappear after the war, but it was much less in evidence, and over the next few years anti-discrimination legislation would mitigate its worst effects. Canada was a better place to be Jewish in 1950 than it had been in 1940. Joe and the thousands of other Jewish volunteers, many of them in the air force, had surely played a part in changing the attitudes of their fellow citizens. Joe would have had the opportunity to take his place in the national life of Canada.

  Bomber Command would eventually overcome the travails of 1941 and 1942, and go on to inflict enormous devastation to Germany’s war machine and its cities. Bomber Command’s strategic offensive soon became, and remains today, the most controversial aspect of the Allied struggle to defeat Nazi Germany. The controversy is both technical – relating to its military objectives and its effectiveness in achieving them – and moral. The former has become the province of military historians. The latter remains very much with us today, as the prospect of bombing one’s enemy into submission has neither gone out of fashion in strategic planning nor lost its potency in mobilizing public support. Although it has not been my purpose to engage in either of those debates, Joey Jacobson’s story sheds light on them.

  In Britain, the bombing offensive was almost immediately disowned. Churchill made no mention of Bomber Command in his victory speech after VE Day, even though it was to that force that so many of Britain’s best-trained men and so much of its industrial output
had been directed for nearly six years. No campaign medal was issued specifically for the strategic air offensive, and “Bomber” Harris was ignored in the 1946 New Year’s Honours List.1 Harris himself came to bear the brunt of blame for area bombing, even though he was implementing the policies of his predecessors at Bomber Command and his superiors at the Air Ministry, the difference being that he managed to do so successfully, with Churchill’s endorsement. Nor was Bomber Command much celebrated in postwar popular memory. The British public found the trope of plucky but improbable triumphs – Dunkirk, the desert rats, the dam-busters, and the Great Escape – more appealing than the planned, methodical de-housing of industrial workers and the merciless destruction by fire of cities like Hamburg and Dresden.

  Joe would have had none of that. He had been entirely dedicated to the strategic air offensive, he supported its objectives fully, and he had no qualms about whatever damage it inflicted. He believed that winning the air war would require unswerving resolve and disciplined organization. He might well have been amazed at its subsequent effectiveness, which proved far beyond his dreams and imagination in those nadir months before he was killed. But defeating Germany was not simply an end in itself. For Joe, it was the necessary precondition for building a better world in a future peace. Even if he came to accept that he would not likely survive to see it, he never lost that dream, and never stopped thinking about how to achieve it. He had been a deadly serious warrior and a romantic idealist, courageous in both endeavours to the end.