Against All Odds

by P. J. Naworynski

  The dressing-down didn’t stop there. Sandy chastised the players for becoming swell-headed. He continued: “When photographers and newspapermen make a fuss over you, it isn’t because of your individual talents; none of you is that good. It’s because you are a member of the Canadian Olympic Team.” The message was loud and clear. You are here for one reason—because we have picked you to play hockey for Canada. Toe the line from now on, or you’re gone.

  Not wanting the guys to lose focus, Sandy impressed the “bigness” of the Olympic Games on his charges. “This is one of the greatest opportunities a hockey player could ever expect. There is a lot to gain, materially and otherwise. Win the Olympics, and our names will be remembered for generations.” With that he outlined their itinerary for the week of exhibition matches to be played against excellent squads in Britain and France. The next day they would be docking in Southampton. There was no more time for messing around, and no more time for games. He wanted them to get their things together, get their heads on straight, and get down to business.

  IN THE EARLY MORNING HOURS OF Thursday, January 15, local tugs belched out thick clouds of smoke as they pulled and pushed the massive Queen Elizabeth into her berth at the docks in Southampton, England. A few hours later, with a hearty breakfast in their bellies, the men disembarked and waded into a throng of fans cheering not for them but for the Hollywood celebrities and bigwigs coming out of first class.

  While jockeying through customs and crowds to grab his luggage and get to their bus, Murray Dowey got the surprise of a lifetime when a sergeant major bellowed out to him, “You Murray Dowey?” Perplexed and somewhat uncertain as to why he was being singled out from among the other RCAF Flyers, Murray answered, “Yes, sir.” The major pulled him aside, pointed over to a man standing amid the throng, and told him, “Your grandfather is here waiting to see you.” Shocked and filled with elation, Murray enjoyed a few fleeting minutes with his grandfather. The last time Murray’s granddad had seen him he was just a baby. Murray’s grandfather had built homes in Canada during the Depression, but he left and returned to live on a farm in England not long after Murray was born. Murray’s mom had somehow alerted his granddad about Murray’s last-minute trip, and his granddad busted out all the stops to get to Southampton for a chance to once again hug the little grandson he had not set eyes on for decades.

  The brief reunion was bittersweet for Murray. He longed to spend more time connecting with the grandfather he had just met, but he had to hop on the team bus, which was waiting to make tracks for London. Dowey recalls: “I remember the last words I said to him. I said, ‘Grandpa, hopefully on the way back I’ll be able to stop and have a few days with you.’ But it never happened.” Those few minutes on the dock in Southampton were the first and last time Murray ever got to see his granddad.

  With their gear piled high in the back few rows of their bus, the boys headed for London, about eighty miles to the northeast. Bad luck once again beset the team when they were barely out of sight of the docks. About a mile into the journey a streetcar came barrelling through an intersection and slammed into the side of the Flyers’ bus. The impact shattered the back windows and sent Patsy Guzzo and Wally Halder flying from their seats. Fortunately, the tram hit the back half of the bus, where their leather luggage cases and hockey kit bags were stacked floor to ceiling. A few more feet towards the middle, and the impact would have surely injured some of the players. As it was, Sandy Watson, Hubert Brooks, and many of the boys were picking glass fragments out of their hair and luggage for the next couple of hours. But no one was hurt.

  After a brief encounter with the bobbies who surveyed the damage, they were back on their way with chuckles and shaking heads. It was a glorious welcome to Mother England.

  More sobering than the crash, however, were the street scenes that welcomed the players. Two years after the war, stark evidence of the devastation wrought by German bombs was present in all directions. The bus passed bombed-out streets, destroyed cathedrals, and countless buildings wrapped in scaffolding as armies of men attempted to rebuild the shattered English infrastructure. Sandy had warned the men what to expect regarding meals and lodging overseas. London in January 1948 presented much bleaker offerings than the creature comforts enjoyed by the men back home in Canada. Here the effects of the war were still exerting a heavy toll in the areas hard hit by the turmoil; the men could expect power outages, shortages of food, and grim accommodations. For men like André Laperrière, Patsy Guzzo, and Murray Dowey, it was a shock to witness first-hand the aftermath of post-war England. But for others, like warriors Roy Forbes, Frank Dunster, and Hubert Brooks, this was familiar terrain that stirred up memories of hard-fought times.

  Hubert Brooks during flight training.

  Ralf Brooks

  INTO THE FIRE

  07

  Nearly seven years before Hubert Brooks made the trip to England as an Olympic hockey player, he had arrived in the port of Southampton to start his overseas military service. On September 29, 1941, he and his RCAF brethren spent their first night billeted at the Metropole Hotel in the centre of Bournemouth, just down the road from Southampton. There was no service or hotel staff at the Metropole. Instead, the young men coming over and readying for operational training units were greeted by damp, chilly rooms with communal toilets and crumbling plaster walls. Breakfast for the new RCAF recruits consisted of sad powdered eggs marooned on a slice of rock-hard toast, complemented with a tiny piece of grease-soaked Spam. Over the next few weeks Brooks and his classmates were put through a battery of tests, training exercises, and medical checks. They took in aircraft recognition lectures, practised shooting skills, and were equipped with their battle dress and flying gear, which consisted of silk- and fleece-lined boots, chamois leather gloves, helmets, goggles, and new flying suits. From here it was on to the operational training unit as part of Bomber Command, and the young man who grew up on a homestead in Bluesky, Alberta, was one step closer to action in the air.

  Brooks joined the 19th Operational Training Unit, whose motto was “Strike hard. Strike sure.” Everything at the OTU was geared towards perfecting the trainees’ individual skills while slamming home the crucial importance of working together as a team. Hubert and his air observer classmates performed countless navigation exercises, circuits and landings, single-engine flying, and practice bombing runs. They graduated from Anson aircraft to Whitley aircraft on their trajectory to the skies in the bigger Wellington and Halifax bombers.

  Month after month was spent perfecting the art of high-level bombing. This required intense coordination between navigator/bomb aimer and pilot in order to successfully hit a fifty-foot target from an aircraft travelling at speeds in excess of two hundred feet per second. By the time Brooks had finished his training and joined the 419 Moose Squadron, he had accumulated 200 hours of daytime flying and 110 hours of nighttime flying. As a member of the 419, he became ensconced in a brotherhood of Canadian men who had developed a strong fighting spirit and an intense sense of comradeship. On April 5, 1942, it was time to put his training to use. His first mission was an attack on Le Havre. The four-and-a-half-hour round-trip flight went off without a hitch. Brooks and his crew dropped fourteen 250-pound bombs on their target and made it safely home to their base at Mildenhall in County Suffolk.

  Just three nights later Brooks and his crewmates would take part in the biggest, most ambitious night raid of the war to date. Five hundred Allied aircraft were going to target Hitler’s industrial centre at Hamburg in a concerted effort to bomb the mighty German war machine to bits. Unfortunately, things were about to go a lot less smoothly in Hubert’s second mission.

  In the waning light of April 8, Hubert Brooks and his crewmates readied for takeoff in a Wimpy Wellington aircraft that they had named N for Nuts. They were in the number-two position in the squadron, but just as they were about to go full throttle down the tarmac, skipper Art Crighton spotted a problem with one of his flight instruments. Their plane was pulled
out of the stream for a last-minute fix. The panel got sorted and they eventually roared down the runway in thirteenth position at 22:00 hours. As they took to the night sky in “lucky” slot thirteen, superstition and feelings of uncertainty seeped into even the boldest of the crew. Lucky number thirteen—for Brooks this smelled of only one thing . . . disaster.

  As he lay in the nose of N for Nuts, he readied his bomb sights and kept his eyes fixed on the approaching target of Hamburg’s industrial complex. All around him German flak batteries lit up the night sky in a parade of exploding shells and massive blinding searchlights. On approach to the target the front gunner called out over the intercom, “Starboard engine’s on fire!” Seconds later Brooks jettisoned the bomb load and gave skipper Art Crighton a course for home. But the boys were not having a good night. The automatic extinguishers were unable to tame the flames consuming the starboard engine. To make matters worse, mere moments later, the port engine also burst into flames. Initially the crew in the stricken bomber had hoped they could limp to the North Sea and make it to the safety of the Frisian Islands. But their plane was in major trouble. She was engulfed in fire and plummeting towards the earth. At 1:18 a.m. Captain Crighton ordered Hubert and his crewmates to bail out.

  In a flurry of well-practised and co-ordinated movements, Brooks attached his parachute harness and dove out of the Wellington’s escape hatch into the frigid night sky. He pulled the rip cord and shot upwards at a hundred miles per hour with only one thought racing through his mind: Let me land on the right side of the border. Let me land in Holland, not Germany.

  FORTUNATELY FOR BROOKS THERE WERE NO German Focke-Wulf night fighters prowling the skies and picking off Allied targets as they descended to the ground that evening. Nonethless, his parachute landing was far from graceful. When he smacked down in a farmer’s field, Brooks hit hard and injured his left leg. A nanosecond later his parachute pack smashed into his head, and one of the buckles opened up a gash in his skull that started pouring out blood. Undeterred, he successfully tore his parachute into strips, buried it, and then limped in the darkness in a northwest direction towards the North Sea.

  Hubert hobbled across fields and scrambled into unseen strands of barbed wire that slashed his face. With his knee screaming at him and his face covered in blood, Brooks approached a farmhouse in the early light of the morning. He was hoping to be received by some friendly Dutch folks. But lady luck had waved goodbye to the twenty-year-old back in Mildenhall. When he knocked on the farmhouse door, Brooks was greeted by the steely glare of a German farmer. While the farmer’s wife dressed his wounds and made him some breakfast, the farmer’s daughter beetled off to alert the local police. Shortly thereafter she returned home with a German soldier escort. By 8:00 a.m. Hubert Brooks was a prisoner of war.

  From the moment he surrendered in the farmhouse kitchen, Brooks was emboldened by a single thought: escape.

  That afternoon Brooks was reunited with most of his crewmates from N for Nuts at the German air force field and detention barracks on the outskirts of Oldenburg. Amazingly, his buddies had managed to make the jump from their stricken bomber. All but rear gunner Ernest Howard. Ernest almost made it, but his parachute got jammed in the rear escape hatch and he had ridden the flaming bomber down to his death. Brooks vowed that whatever it took, he was going to make it home alive.

  The survivors were carted off to DuLag Luft, an interrogation camp near Oberursel, a stopgap en route to the main POW camps. DuLag Luft was run by the Luftwaffe air operations staff and the Abwehr, or German intelligence. Its main purpose was to extract as much information as possible from aircrews by a variety of means. The boys were strip-searched and had all their belongings taken from them. In the eyes of their German captors they became nothing more than numbers and information. Hubert Brooks was bestowed with POW number 24803.

  Chucked for days into a solitary cell dubbed “the cooler,” Brooks was grilled by interrogators seeking all kinds of information. They wanted to know his home address, the type of aircraft he had flown in, the bomb load, his point of departure, the name of his squadron, and information about his base commander; their thirst for any clues or bits of Allied knowledge seemed insatiable. But Hubert was a tough customer. He would give them only his name, rank, and serial number.

  Although his captors had managed to find the special fly buttons and collar studs issued by the air force, Brooks was able to squirrel away a key item from his escape kit: a tiny compass that was about the size of a dime. Just before he was strip-searched, he hid the compass in his mouth for use when the opportunity presented itself. After four days of mental gymnastics in solitary confinement at DuLag Luft, he was shipped to Lamsdorf prison camp, also known as Stalag VIII-B.

  Stalag VIII-B was a massive camp located deep in the heart of the Nazi-dominated region known as Silesia. The area was a centre of coal mining, steel manufacturing, and heavy industry that was vital to the military production of the Third Reich. Tucked away in the outer reaches of Germany, near the borders of Czechoslovakia and Poland, it was about as far from the front and neutral countries that an Allied fighter could find himself.

  Hubert’s first impression of Stalag VIII-B was that it was enormous, covering many acres of land. The entire camp was encircled by two barbed-wire fences. The inner fence was about twelve feet high, and the outer fence was slightly higher. In between the fences the Germans had placed coils of razor-sharp barbed wire. They had also positioned a tripwire perimeter about a dozen feet from the fences. If you somehow made it past the tripwire, you would be shot by the guards who were positioned around the clock in twenty-foot towers equipped with searchlights and machine guns. There were also constant foot patrols and guard dogs to contend with.

  On April 15, 1942, Brooks came to the stark realization that he was captive in a veritable fortress: a fortress reputed to be the largest stalag in the entire Third Reich. Many of its prisoners had been taken at battles in Dunkirk and Crete. The main camp housed seven thousand men in the army compounds. A separate air force section held a smaller contingent of five hundred captured airmen. Thirteen thousand additional captives were registered with the camp, but they were away on work parties scattered around the countryside in smaller labour camps known as Arbeitskommandos.

  Hubert recognized almost immediately that escaping from the main compound with its searchlight towers, machine-gun nests, warning wires, patrols, and guard dogs would be near impossible. But if he could get himself on a work party, with a bit of patience and planning, he might have a chance of success.

  The Arbeitskommandos were set up to house and take advantage of the lower-ranking POWs by using them as grunt labour. This freed up young, strong German men to join the fight. The labour camps were less guarded than the main camp and had POWs working under guard in coal mines, quarries, factories, lumberyards, and railroads. In order to get himself on a work party, Brooks had to somehow bust himself out of the air force and into the army, and he had to become a lower-ranking soldier. The solution was simple: he needed to find an army boy who was willing to swap identities.

  As Brooks hunted for his dopplegänger, his family back in Montreal received the news, via telegram and official letters from the Air Ministry and Department of National War Services, that Hubert was alive and being held as a POW at Stalag VIII-B. When Montreal reporters pressed his sister, Doris, for a comment about her brother’s capture she quipped, “Good luck to the Nazis. Hubert is too full of the devil for them to hold him.” She was right.

  Brooks looked around for a soldier who was roughly the same age, height, and size as him. Ideally the man willing to swap identities with Hubert would have the same hair and eye colour as well. One day while he worked his way through a crowd of prisoners watching a soccer match, Brooks discovered a Kiwi soldier who fit the bill and was willing to make the switch. Private Frederick Cole of the New Zealand Infantry had just come back to the main camp after a long stint at an Arbeitskommando. He was less than keen to go back out fo
r more hard labour. He would happily play the role of Flight Sergeant Hubert Brooks and exchange the hard grind of a soldier for a bump up to officer status.

  Switching identities was remarkably easy. A few days after meeting, both Cole and Brooks feigned illness and got shipped off to the camp hospital. Once inside the bustling hospital they dodged into a washroom, where Brooks promptly peeled off his air force blues and Cole removed his khaki Kiwi battledress. Five minutes later Hubert Brooks was marching back to the army compounds as a New Zealand private.

  Brooks immediately set about planning his first escape. He knew he couldn’t do it alone. Thankfully, the POW who put together the work parties was a British sergeant major, so Brooks was able to essentially pick his posting. He engineered his way onto a work party in the biggest, deepest coal mine in the village of Bobrek, not far from the pre-war Polish border. For two weeks he slugged coal from dawn until dusk in the depths of the coal shaft. Amid the dust and the dirt he met an Irish soldier named Private Cross, and the two devised a plan to escape from their barracks on the upcoming Saturday night.

  In the days leading up to Saturday, June 6, Brooks smuggled a pair of pliers back from the mine in a coffee can. He and Cross also cobbled together some food provisions from their Red Cross parcels. Brooks still had his dime-sized compass, as well as a tiny Union Jack taken from the wrapper of a mustard tin that the two men could use to identify themselves to friendlies. The plan was straightforward: cut through the barbed-wire enclosures of their camp in the darkness of night and trek to Krakow, where they would try to liaise with members of the Polish Underground. The sleeping quarters at Bobrek were surrounded by two barbed-wire fences with floodlights in all four corners. The windows of their huts were also covered in barbed wire, and there was one armed guard at the main gate and another guard patrolling the perimeter.