The Forgotten

by Nathan M. Greenfield

  The tunnel was lit by electric lights, powered by a surreptitious splice into the hut’s electric lines. Boards taken from the bunks supported the tunnel’s roof; to keep their mattresses from collapsing through the gaps, the men stiffened them with more straw. Each charcoal briquette pressed into the damp earth walls to strengthen them was one fewer to burn in the quixotic attempt to heat the icy barracks.

  One day as he was excavating, the roof caved in, trapping Cox at the tunnel’s face, 70 feet from the entrance. Unless he was dug out within minutes, Cox would suffocate. To conserve air, he blew out his candle. As the minutes ticked by in the tomb-like darkness, Cox stopped himself from panicking, which would only use up more air. As deathly drowsiness began to overtake him, he felt a hand on his boot and then a stream of damp, heavy air.

  CHRISTMAS 1940, OFLAG VI-B, DÖSSEL, GERMANY

  THOMPSON’S SECOND KRIEGIE CHRISTMAS

  A year earlier, the memories of Christmas at Georgian Bay were fresher. Then, Thompson could still believe that Göring was right that the war would be short—though, of course, in Thompson’s version, the Allies would be holding the victory parades. Now, as Thompson found himself in his fifth POW camp, Hitler’s writ ran from Calais through half of Poland. Thompson’s memories of Christmas focused on dinner at his aunt’s and skiing down mountains and across snow-covered fields, where he first experienced something like the freedom he lost the night before he met Göring. Even more important were the memories of All Saints’ Anglican Church, where for generations his family had sat in the first pew. His father, Penetanguishene’s Member of Provincial Parliament, was a fine lay reader who gave his voice to the Nativity story, which echoed against a number of stained-glass windows that commemorated Thompson’s family

  The one for his late mother showed the Presentation of Jesus at the Temple, while the one for the grandfather for whom he, Alfred Burke Thompson, was named, depicted sunlit Jesus holding a shepherd’s crook and a baby lamb.

  CHAPTER TWO

  1941

  I have been in danger at sea.

  I have suffered shipwreck.

  I have been in hunger and thirst often starving.

  — 2 CORINTHIANS 11 : 2410

  JANUARY 1941, OFLAG IX-A, SPANGENBERG, GERMANY

  VERNON HOWLAND IS PUNISHED IN AN UNDERGROUND CELL

  The month started badly. First, there was the cold, not the dry cold of a Prairie winter, but the cutting raw cold of the north German coast. Were it not for their Red Cross parcels that arrived every couple of weeks, the prisoners would have been weak from hunger. Despite what Geneva said about POWs receiving the same rations as garrison troops, and the hundreds of thousands of tons of grain and thousands of tons of other foodstuffs that poured into Hitler’s Germany under the Nazi–Soviet Pact and huge requisitions of food from the occupied countries, Howland received only two slices of dark and sour German bread, a small piece of sausage, watery cabbage or turnip soup and a cup of burned acorn coffee.

  Then, the ferrets discovered the tunnel, and sent Vernon Howland and 50 other men to the Führerlager, a hut outside the main camp but still surrounded by barbed wire. Though disappointed by the discovery of the tunnel, when he arrived at the Führerlager, Howland practised the skills needed to break out of a POW camp. While the guards searched the other men, he sidled up to the table and pocketed a pair of wire cutters presumably seized from another prisoner. During the night, as he hoped, the camp’s lights were extinguished when an RAF bomber stream passed nearby and he and RAF Wing Commander Joe Hill dropped through a hole in the floor they’d cut that afternoon.

  Equipped with the wire cutters and a board, and heartened by Howland’s bravado—“I’m from the Prairies, I’m used to barbed wires; there’s not too much problem here”—their nerve held even as, once at the fence, they could hear guards leading snarling attack dogs and their snip of the first wire “sounded like a rifle shot.” Using the board, Howland pushed the next wire up to enlarge the hole and was beginning to climb through it when the “All Clear” prompted him to slide back through the wire. Just as they started to dash back to the Führlager, the lights came back on. Caught unawares, the guards shouted and in their confusion fired a few wild shots, giving the two inexperienced escapers time to slip behind a garbage can, then safely run to the hut. A few days later, Howland and Hill were transferred to Oflag IX-A, in a 13th-century Spangenberg castle now ringed by machine guns and a dry moat home to three wild boars.

  The gloom, compounded by the stench of rotten potatoes that hit them as they entered the underground prison, lifted slightly when the British prisoners served the new arrivals a fortifying stew. Only later did Howland learn that the stew was made from rations the Tommies had saved by going three days without food. His unheated, windowless, lice-infested cell was retribution for the conditions endured by captured U-boat men imprisoned in Fort Henry in Kingston, Ontario.

  22 FEBRUARY 1941, 600 MILES OFF GAPE RAGE, NEWFOUNDLAND

  GNEISENAU SINKS THE CANADIAN MERCHANT SHIP A.D. HUFF

  The outcome was never in doubt.

  On the one side steaming toward Halifax at 8 knots was the 6,000-ton, 410-foot-long freighter, her holds half-filled with crushed stone for ballast, armed with an old 4-inch gun. On the other, a 38,000-ton warship capable of making 30 knots, bristling with guns, including nine that fired 11-inch shells. The short battle began when Nova Scotia–born Preston Ross’s captain, ignoring the message “Heave To,” ordered his gunner to fire on the battle cruiser and his engine room to squeeze another knot from A.D. Huff’s two-decades-old boilers. The gunner’s target was almost 800 feet long. But the mists above the Gulf Stream can be dense, and he could barely make out Gneisenau, the very ship Vernon Howland had tried to bomb 7 months earlier. Realizing how little his gun could do against 14-inch-thick armour, the gunner refused to fire and, along with Ross and other crewmates, watched the awe-inspiring flash and heard the thunderous report of shells straddling their ship.

  The gunners found their range with the shell that hit the windlass just behind Huff’s bow. The force of a 600-pound shell smashing into the Canadian ship at two and half times the speed of sound was enough to pierce her half-inch-thick steel deck. The explosion of 300 pounds of amatol staggered the ship and blew the heavy windlass on which was bolted the ship’s anchor chain into the sky. As the chain and wreckage rattled down on the mangled deck, Ross saved himself by ducking behind an open steel hatch. Nothing could save the fourth engineer and oiler, who were enveloped in scalding steam—or the ship when another shell blew up in the engine room.

  As the man-of-war closed in, the Huff’s 41 remaining crew members took to the lifeboats. The captain planned to guide the lifeboats 600 miles north to Newfoundland. But, to prevent merchant mariners from signing on with another ship and thus working to carry much-needed supplies across the Atlantic, Gneisenau’s captain ordered Ross and his crewmates aboard the warship, where they were jammed into a small, airless room—the “air was so bad you couldn’t light a match, before the brimstone would burn, it would go out,” recalled Ross.11

  17 APRIL 1941, 600 MILES FROM CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA

  AFTER THE SINKING OF THE SS ZAMZAM, 17 FRENCH-CANADIAN PRIESTS AND BROTHERS ARE CAPTURED

  Even as the phosphorescence of the South Atlantic enchanted them, the 17 Canadian Oblates and three Sacred Heart Brothers wondered whether the German navy would recognize the SS Zamzam, their Egyptian-flagged ship steaming toward Cape Town, South Africa, as neutral. Near 6:30 a.m., as shells started exploding on the ship, they knew the answer.

  As Father Herménégilde Charbonneau struggled in the darkness to get dressed and put on his life vest, the passageways filled with steam and panicked men, women and children. Charbonneau reached the dining room seconds before another shell detonated, showering him and three other priests with broken glass. Fearing that the next explosion would kill them, the four Quebec-born Oblates of Mary Immaculate gave each other mutual absolution. A shell that exploded
near Brother Léo Parent, then making his way toward the bow, sent a splinter from a metal beam hurtling onto his ankle. The faith of les religieux helped them keep calm while, all around them, women, children and the other men rushed to the lifeboats, some discovering that theirs had been destroyed.

  The tons of water pouring into Zamzam’s blasted hull caused her to settle, but her keel remained even, so the undamaged lifeboats could be launched. At Father Pierre-Paul Pellerin’s lifeboat station, order began to break down, and though he was willing to give his place to the Protestant missionaries’ wives and children, he was no weakling. As grown men pushed forward, Pellerin claimed his place by grabbing a cable and swinging into his assigned boat. The situation was calm enough at Father Louis Larivière’s lifeboat station that he had time to return to his cabin to retrieve his forgotten crucifix and still board his boat before it was lowered. Holding to his “precious companion,” he could do no more than watch and pray as the overloaded boat avoided the people bobbing in the water below.12

  After seeing that his lifeboat had been destroyed, Charbonneau made his way to the bridge—just in time to see the Zamzam’s killer emerge from the mist. During those long moments, he feared that the commerce raider Atlantis (which was disguised as a Norwegian freighter named Tamesis) would fire again. Lost in the din were voices from Father Barsalou’s lifeboat that urged on those trying to free the oars from their stowage positions at the bottom of the boat. Unable to do so, the people in the boat then tried to push it away from the cargo that had been blasted out of Zamzam’s hold and which, driven by the swells, crashed against the sides of the fragile craft. As water rose in the lifeboat, someone screamed, “Where’s the plug?”—moments later another 25 souls were adrift when it sank.

  While the Germans boarded the Zamzam and allowed Charbonneau and the others on the bridge to go to their cabins to retrieve personal items, Barsalou, buoyed by his lifebelt, swam for his life. After ten exhausting minutes, he neared a Carley float on which four young Protestants were singing “a hymn that showed their faith in the Lord.” He thought he’d been saved as he grasped a line trailing from the float, but it disintegrated in his hands. Somehow he managed a few strong strokes, reached the float and, despite being weighed down by his wet clothes, lifted himself onto it. He gained only a moment’s respite before others trying to climb onto the square float caused it to flip over, throwing everyone back into the sea.

  Over the next 45 minutes, German motor launches plucked men, women and children out of lifeboats and from the water, which was warm enough so that none died of hypothermia. By the time Charbonneau and the other passengers and crew still aboard Zamzam were transferred to Kapitän zur See Bernhard Rogge’s ship, he knew that, although the United States might object to the sinking, it would not set off a crisis that could bring America into the war. For not only had Zamzam been sailing blacked out and zigzagging, but her captain and engineer were British. In her hold were trucks destined for the British 8th Army, then slugging it out with General Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps. And, most importantly, Rogge had in his hands papers that proved she was sailing under Admiralty orders.

  EARLY MAY 1941, OFLAG IX-A, SPANGENBERG, GERMANY

  VERNON HOWLAND SEES THE SUN, AND HINTS OF THE GERMAN ATTACK ON RUSSIA

  Berlin’s acceptance of a Red Cross report that German POWs in Fort Henry were not, in fact, living in dungeons resulted in an immediate improvement in Howland’s rations, in the form of Red Cross parcels and an end to his troglodyte existence, at least for an hour a day.

  Howland welcomed the air, sunshine and exercise. Evidence of the buildup of German arms in the east, foretelling an attack on Russia, also heartened him. So did the talkative guard who predicted that once Germany was fighting the Bolshevik hordes, Britain would become Germany’s ally—though Howland knew Britain would not switch sides. An attack on Russia would, however, embroil Germany in a two-front war it could not win.

  Since Spangenberg is hundreds of miles west of Germany’s eastern border, Howland was surprised when he saw the construction of anti-tank traps. The sight of the old men, women and children digging it being lashed by a guard with a 15-foot whip made him vomit.

  19 MAY 1941, ATLANTIC OCEAN AND FRANCE

  LES MISSIONAIRES ERRANTS DE L’ATLANTIQUE: WANDERING MISSIONARIES OF THE ATLANTIC13

  The exhausted and frightened Zamzamers, as they would come to call themselves, were welcomed aboard Kapitän zur See Walter Jäger’s supply ship, Dresden, by lines of marines, their bayonet-topped rifles at the ready. From her deck, they watched the doleful sight of their liner, her keel blasted open by charges, slip beneath the waves.

  The move to the German supply ship improved their living conditions. On Atlantis/Tamesis, more than 230 men, women and children were crammed into a fetid hold on the ship’s fourth deck. Mothers with children soon called out in vain for milk, and to everyone’s dismay, men, women and children shared the single bathroom. The knowledge that, since they were below the ship’s water line and locked behind a watertight door, none of them would likely survive were the commerce raider to be attacked, underscored the urgency of the prayers in English, French and, by Zamzam’s Egyptian crew, Arabic. Aboard Dresden, most of the 80 women and 34 children slept on mattresses laid out in what had been the ship’s smoking salon. More than 200 men slept on the canvas-covered floor of a 54-by-54-foot hold, without portholes, ventilators or light bulbs.

  The presence of more than 200 unexpected mouths to feed forced Jäger to put the Zamzamers on half rations, feeding them “a swill of rice, small pieces of meat, a flour paste, bread without butter, weak tea, while the Germans ate ham and eggs, beef, potato salad, oranges, coffee.”14 It didn’t take long for dysentery and constipation to manifest themselves. Still, Jäger tried to make life as comfortable as he could for his prisoners. Married men could visit their families, for example. Despite the Nazis’ ban on “decadent Negro American” music, Jäger allowed the playing of jazz records. The Quebecers sang French folk songs, including “Un Canadien Errant” (The Wandering Canadian), a mournful song about un canadien banished from his homeland who sits by a river and asks it to tell his friends, family and country that he remembers them.

  Even more important for the Oblates and Sacred Heart Brothers was Jäger’s decision to allow the priests to use the wardroom as a chapel for Sunday mass. To prepare the wardroom, les religieux removed the board to which were affixed pictures of Hitler and Großadmiral Erich Raeder. The discovery of a crucifix on the bulkhead delighted them, as did its position between the two pictures, for it recalled Jesus’s position between the two thieves on Golgotha.

  By 1941, many Lutheran churches had been folded into the (Nazified) Deutsche Christen Church, which denied that Jesus was Jewish and glorified war. Broadly speaking, under the Concordat of 1933 between the Vatican and Berlin, the Nazis agreed to leave the Catholic Church alone as long as it stayed out of politics. The Oblates unknowingly crossed this line toward the end of the mass when they recited the last line of the Lord’s Prayer, “Deliver us from evil,” which led Jäger to deny them further use of the wardroom, though he did allow services under a tarp on deck.

  Weeks later, as the Dresden steamed into the North Atlantic, prayers took on greater urgency, as did the lifeboat drills, for now they were in waters heavily patrolled by the British. Just after sunrise on 18 May, Father Gérard Boulanger saw a lighthouse and knew that Spanish neutrality now shielded them from British bombs, torpedoes and bullets. A few days remained until they would reach France, the home of their order founded in 1826. The brothers planned to undertake a pilgrimage to Lourdes to thank the Blessed Virgin for her protection, until Jäger told them that because they were British subjects they would not be freed when Dresden docked in France. By contrast, since the Americans belonged to the still-neutral United States, they would be freed. This greatly disappointed British secretary of state for foreign affairs Anthony Eden, who had hoped that the attack on a ship carrying American mission
aries, many from the Midwest, would provide President Franklin Roosevelt with an argument to counter midwestern isolationists. Jäger assured the Canadian Catholics that since they were civilian missionaries and not military padres, they would be repatriated soon.

  When they walked off Dresden’s gang plank, the priests and brothers found themselves in a cordon of heavily armed guards, who marched them to a barbed-wire enclosure.

  19 MAY 1941, OTTAWA

  CANADA LEARNS THAT THE PRIESTS AND BROTHERS HAVE BEEN CAPTURED

  Concern for the Oblates’ and Sacred Heart Brothers’ well-being had been growing since 2 May, when, having heard nothing of them since a telegram sent from Brazil almost a month earlier, the Provincial in Ottawa (the head of the order’s national office) sent a night letter to Thomas Cook travel agency asking for news. The company that arranged the missionaries’ passage to South Africa responded curiously: “Several sources leave us to believe that they have arrived safe and sound in Cape Town.”15

  L’Action catholique broke the news on 19 May under the headline “Zam-Zam sunk in the Atlantic: Catholic Missionaries Aboard.” Later that day, a Radio Canada reported that among the missionaries were 17 French-Canadian Oblates and Brothers of the Sacred Heart.