The Forgotten

by Nathan M. Greenfield

  They were a beaten army, but to the Germans’ surprise, when they saw the wedding party, the Canadians showed that loss in battle did not equal defeat of spirit. Some who had hidden money from the Germans’ sticky fingers threw it to Madame Dupuis, causing her to cry. The shout “Long live the lovely bride” both saluted her and thumbed the POWs’ noses at the Germans because it echoed the toast to King George VI, “Long Live the King.” She ignored the bills fluttering to her feet, picking up only a single bronze penny to hold as a tribute to them.61

  As Private Stan Darch drew close to young Jean-Claude Robillard, who was holding his father’s hand as he watched the procession of the lame, the private realized that this would be the last time for who knew how long that he’d be able to hug a child. Jean-Claude sensed something of this and held his father’s hand tighter. What grabbed his father’s attention, however, was Darch’s bloody feet. As the rest of the wedding party threw cigarettes, Robillard quickly bent down, unlaced his shoes and handed them to the Canadian from Hamilton, Ontario, who knew only one word of French: “Merci.”

  19 AUGUST 1942, LATE EVENING, ENVERMEU, NEAR DIEPPE

  GERMAN SOLDIERS DENY THE POWS WATER, AGAIN

  At the church, the officers were separated from their men, who were marched some miles further to a disused brick factory. The priest, who had earlier presided over the Dupuises’ marriage, was surprised at the number of French-speaking Canadians and provided straw to soften the pews and floor the exhausted men were to sleep on. Before collapsing into sleep, Major Brian McCool realized that although he had surrendered his revolver, he had forgotten about the cartridges in his pocket. Risking sacrilege, but to keep the Germans from finding them, McCool removed the plug from the baptismal font and dropped the cartridges down the drain.

  Captains John Foote and Wes Clare also spent the night in the church. Because of the insignia on their shoulders, they’d been picked up to be interrogated by intelligence officers. Clare, a Royal Regiment medical officer, knew little and said less. Foote, his Presbyterian ministry notwithstanding, had used a Lewis gun on the beaches of Dieppe, and dissembled more than a padre should when he told his interlocutor that as a chaplain he “didn’t know anything about the technical part of the war.” Foote, who ignored one order by going to Dieppe and who earned a Victoria Cross for refusing another by staying with the wounded men on the beach, enjoyed saying that morale in England was “just fine.”62

  At the brick factory, some men were fed, Dumais receiving a hunk of German black bread that even in his famished state he found revolting. The disgusting smell and taste of rubber Kaffe heartened him. For, he reasoned, if this “is what they were reduced to for coffee, they must be in a poor way.”63 Others, like Darch, had had nothing to drink since the morning and did not get water until the next day because by the time it was their turn to go to the water pipe, Hitlerjugend, who ignored Geneva and shut the valve, had replaced the Wehrmacht troops standing guard. Poolton was so desperate to relieve his thirst that he scraped a hole in the factory’s hard dirt floor and pressed his tongue and parched lips to the damp earth.

  As he drifted off to sleep on the floor, Darch had no way of knowing that Monsieur Robillard was passing his first night in a dank prison cell in Envermeu, punishment for his act of kindness.

  20 AUGUST 1942, NEAR DIEPPE

  DUMAIS ESCAPES AND WHISTLES “UN CANADIEN ERRANT”

  The ever-decreasing rumble of the train and sound of shots told him two things: the train carrying the bulk of the Canadians to a POW camp was heading into the gathering night, and the guards suspected that someone had jumped from it. Then he recognized the French voice calling out “Sergeant Major Dumais.” He was about to call back when he saw a railway patrol. Some minutes later, as he walked along the embankment hoping to find his countryman, Dumais whistled a song he knew that no German or Frenchman would know but any French Canadian would: “Un Canadien Errant,” one of the songs the Oblates sang aboard the Dresden.

  23 AUGUST 1942, VERNEULLES, FRANCE

  CANADIANS CAPTURED AT DIEPPE SUFFER NUMEROUS VIOLATIONS OF THEIR GENEVA CONVENTION RIGHTS

  On the 20th, ever the sticklers for rank, the Germans put the officers in third-class compartments. Poolton and Darch were two of the more than 1,000 “ordinary ranks” shoved, 70 at a time, into cattle cars, but at least they’d been given some water and a hunk of black bread, which, they noticed, had been augmented by sawdust. Whatever fillip the Canadians got from seeing peasants flash furtive V signs vanished when they reached Verneulles, an old military base 100 miles from Paris, and saw the gallows adjacent to the railway siding.

  Nothing at Verneulles evinced the Germans’ reputation for order or concern for their Geneva responsibilities. The huts provided protection from the elements—and dirty floors on which to sleep without blankets. Worse, despite knowing that scores of men were wounded, some with suppurating wounds, the Germans provided no medical services. The best efforts of the Canadian doctors could not save several men from dying in the five days they were at Verneulles.

  What interested the Germans was information. Impressed with the maps they’d seized and remembering the Canadian Corps’ prowess in the final hundred days of the last war, when it defeated the Germans at several battles, the Germans wanted to know how Canadian generals could think that a single division lacking even field artillery, let alone the support of heavy naval guns, could make a lodgement against a well-defended port. The obvious senselessness of the raid led to the question, which bemused Captain John Runcie, “Had [it] been ordered by Stalin?”

  Hitler sent Dr. Paul Schmidt, who in 1937 had translated at his meeting with Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, to interview the Canadians.64 Blocked by military intelligence from asking probing questions, Schmidt lapsed into clichés about “huge, hearty backwoodsmen with … jolly laughs which revealed their perfect teeth.”65

  In his memoir, Schmidt inadvertently promoted Captain Antoine Masson two ranks, but he remembered the gist of the conversation in which le canadien ignored what he and his men were going through and took the occasion to complain about Germany’s treatment of the Polish Catholics, which prompted Schmidt to say, “Nazism and Christianity could not be reconciled.” After admitting that many Germans listened to the BBC, Schmidt predicted that Stalingrad would soon fall, a point Masson disputed. With ultimate cheek, Masson told Schmidt not only that he would soon escape but also that he would “answer Dr. Schmidt on the radio.”

  Perhaps because before the First World War, Germany’s foreign minister, Joachim Von Ribbentrop, had lived in Canada, working first on the Quebec Bridge and later as a dealer in fine wines in Ottawa, the Germans knew enough about Canada to try to suborn the hundreds of French Canadians. First they told them that, since they were French and Germany was not at war with France, they were not at war with Germany and offered them the opportunity to broadcast home via Radio Calais. Knowing how important letting families in Canada know that their loved ones were alive, the officers told their men to record the broadcasts and include as many names as they could.

  The second effort to suborn the French Canadians involved food, and goes some distance in proving that the decision to provide scant rations at Verneulles had nothing to do with being surprised by having “so many ‘guests.’” Rather, the Canadians understood their poor rations as an attempt to soften them up. After three days of only two bowls of watery soup each a day and a small ration of hard bread (augmented by some handfuls of grass), the Fusiliers Mont-Royal were ordered to gather round a truck, where an official from Vichy France called them “brothers” and offered them fresh fruit, cigarettes and chocolate. At first, the fusiliers refused, but then their officers told them to accept the gifts. The Vichy and German authorities were shocked when les Canadiens français turned around and shared their largesse with their English compatriots, saying to their captors, “We are one nation of Canadians and that is why we fought so well.”66

  24 AUGUST 1942, LE MANS,
FRANGE

  DUMAIS FINDS HELP ON HIS HOME RUN

  Among the 400 or so people filing out of the church in Le Mans, 130 miles south of Dieppe, following Sunday mass on 22 August, some would help, others might turn him in. Perhaps the old woman over there would be like the lone woman who, turning pale when she saw the Canada patches on Dumais’s shoulders and being unable to help herself, pointed to another house, saying, “Try her.” Or maybe that couple would be like the Collais, who ignored the freshly posted notices threatening death for anyone “who helps, shelters or fails to reveal the presence of an Allied soldier.” While Madame Collai fed him, her husband, Robert, replaced the nails in his boots (which would have given him away) with cement before leading him to a shelter in a clay quarry, where Dumais spent a dry night despite the heavy rain. The next morning, Madame Collai brought him food, civilian clothes, a map of France ripped from a school book and some money, then walked him to the train station. Even the presence of a German soldier a short way down the corridor could not prevent Dumais from waving a discreet goodbye to this helpful and courageous woman.

  Some in the crowd leaving church may have already seen him, for he’d arrived in Le Mans the day before. Then, the need for food forced his hand and, after walking some distance out of town, he approached a farmer and explained who he was. The farmer was gruff and suspicious but, perhaps because Dumais’s accent, which for reasons the farmer and Dumais almost certainly did not know seemed more familiar than the French of either Paris or Vichy, the farmer gambled that the man in front of him was not an agent provocateur.67 The farmer and his wife gave him food and let him sleep in their stable. The next morning, Sunday, they again fed the mysterious stranger, then gave him a bacon sandwich and some hard-boiled eggs before ushering him on his way.

  When he’d approached the Collai farmhouse and spoke to the farmer, Dumais risked being recaptured. But at least, had an alarm gone up from the house, he could run, and if the farmer had turned on him … well, Dumais was a trained soldier. Neither option was feasible in the crowd that, after church, gathered in the market area of the town famous for its 24-hour motor race. Risking being noticed because he was not known, Dumais listened for any stray word that would reveal the speaker’s allegiance. Amid the gossip and jabber about shopping, he heard a woman complain to a man about yet another German requisition of foodstuffs and, even more importantly, say a few words “on the possible meaning of the Dieppe raid.”68 When, a few minutes later, the man was alone, Dumais went up to him and asked for his help.

  The man took Dumais to a restaurant, the owner of which was suspicious of Dumais until he was unable to give her the correct number of meal tickets for a glass of cognac. Before he left, she gave him 500 francs. At the train station, Dumais hid himself in plain sight by carrying a woman’s heavy luggage onto the train. Several hours later, he arrived in Poitiers at 3:30 a.m.

  25 AUGUST 1942, ON A TRAIN TO GERMANY

  “CHURCHILL’S SECOND FRONT”

  It was more than another train made up of stinking cattle cars crammed with men. It was a propaganda statement.

  Aware of the clamour for a Second Front by such unlikely allies as Stalin and Lord Beaverbrook, not to mention rallies in London, New York and Toronto calling for one, the Germans painted “Churchill’s Second Front” on the sides of the cars carrying the remnants of the 2nd Canadian Division to Stalag VIII-B in Lamsdorf, in Upper Silesia. At some stops and railway crossings, the men heard soft cheers. At a stop outside Brussels, the schoolgirls the Germans had brought to see the sad state of the girls’ hoped-for deliverers refused their part in the drama by singing “Will ye no come back again,” until they were silenced by rifle butts.

  25 AUGUST 1942, NEAR LUSSAC-LES-CHâTEAUX, VICHY FRANCE

  DUMAIS CROSSES THE DEMARCATION LINE

  The Promised Land lay on the other side of the railway line. Holding in check the impulse to run across it, Dumais stealthily moved a 100 yards first to his right, then to the left of his original position, all the while sniffing the air for a whiff of a guard’s cigarette. Only when he was sure that there was “no movement, sound or smell” did he jump over the fence, cross the tracks and leap another fence before diving into some bushes.69

  The relief of being in Vichy France almost did him in. While walking down a road as if he “hadn’t a care in the world,” he suddenly heard the dread word “Halt!” and saw through the darkness a guard raising his rifle. In the few seconds it took the guard to pull back the bolt of the rifle and call out “Halt” again, Dumais had taken a few steps backwards, putting just enough distance between them that when the guard fired and missed, Dumais could jump into the ditch on his right and start running down it. He disappeared into a copse of trees and then ran into the thick undergrowth on the other side of the road. After running through a field heavy with ripe artichokes and across another field, Dumais found a haystack in which he “bedded down, warm and safe.”70

  Woken at 8 a.m. by the sound of a truck, Dumais started down the road. Under bright sunshine, he slipped into a reverie in which the sound of an RAF plane coming to pick him up drowned out the sound of the very real car that slowed down just as it reached him. Though ready to run for it, Dumais tried to look unconcerned as the driver asked if he was going to Lussac-les-Châteaux. “Yes, I’m going there,” he replied and, when offered a lift, warily climbed into the car.

  Though the woman in the car was chatty, Dumais could see the driver keeping watch on him in the rear-view mirror. Keeping the conversation going became difficult when the woman’s questions became personal. The tension lessened when Dumais saw the sign for the village and the car slowed down in front of a garage. It rocketed up when the man asked, “Would you be going to the Hôtel de la Gare?”—the hotel the old blacksmith who had given him directions on where to cross the demarcation line had told him to go and ask for Père La Classe. Trying to sound nonchalant, Dumais replied, “Not particularly, unless the cooking is good.” The driver said, “The cooking is exceptionally good; you should try it,” and pointed down the road to the hotel. It took Dumais a moment to realize that the woman and driver were part of a “conspiracy” orchestrated by the blacksmith who had helped him a few days earlier to ensure that the Canadian soldier ended up in the hands of a Resistance cell that would, three weeks later, bring him to Marseilles.71

  26 AUGUST 1942, PARIS

  PRIVATES ROBERT VANIER, CONRAD LAFLEUR AND GUY JOLY REACH PARIS

  None of the three French Canadians knew which Resistance cell they lucked into on 25 August, the day after they too leaped from the train carrying the Dieppe survivors. Whichever it was, it was efficient. After feeding and giving them clothing, the farmer they revealed themselves to went to get a doctor to dress their wounds and photograph them so that fake identity papers could be produced.

  The next day, armed with bogus work passes signed by the mayor of another town, they were driven to Amiens by the doctor, who took the time to point out an ammunition dump so that the Allies could bomb it. By 4 p.m., accompanied by a member of the doctor’s family and carrying more than 2,000 francs and knapsacks filled with food, they were on a train for Paris.

  For months after the war started, feeling safe behind the Maginot Line, the three French Canadians found Paris to still be the “City of Light.” Then came the disaster of May 1940. By 23 June, Hitler himself was there. At noon each day, German troops goose-stepped down Champs Élysées, while Parisians learned to fear the knock on the door in the middle of the night. More important even than the humiliation of the swastika hanging from the Arc de Triomphe was the requisitioning of huge quantities of food, including almost all the food available in Paris, and 80 per cent of the country’s cattle. In 1941, hungry Parisians turned to their cats, causing the authorities to issue warnings about eating cat stew. By 1942, malnutrition led to a 41 per cent rise in deaths in Paris; the 13.5 million food parcels sent by families elsewhere in France allowed the 2.5 million Parisians to stave off starvation.

/>   Paris had been “reduced to a sham,” wrote Jean-Paul Sartre, the streets of the famed Latin Quarter, which had bustled with students since the Middle Ages, empty, while the Folies Bergère and cafés were filled with German soldiers.72 The cacophony of the Parisian night, with its motorcycles and horns, had been replaced by “rifle shots; the sudden pepper of a machine-gun” and the sound of powerful cars in which, it was always feared, was another Parisian arrested by the Gestapo.73 Still, for the three French Canadians, the names were almost enough: Gare du Nord, Montparnasse, Notre Dame, the Métro, the Louvre (which, they did not know, was empty). The little hotel their guide took them to stood next to the rambling, art deco department store Samaritaine, its shelves and cases uncommonly bare. And, even though the presence of German patrols meant that at any moment they might hear the dread words “Eins, zwei, drei, halt!” privates Robert Vanier, Conrad Lafleur and Guy Joly “did a little discreet sightseeing.”

  28 AUGUST 1942, NEAR PARIS

  CAPTAINS BROWNE AND MASSON ARE FED AND GIVEN A PLACE TO SLEEP

  Conditions aboard the train carrying the Dieppe survivors to Germany had deteriorated greatly. The few medical supplies Ron Beal and other stretcher-bearers had saved had long since run out. So had the food. The sleep-deprived, cold men, still struggling with the ignominy of surrender, felt also the degradation of their reeking filthy bodies, which hadn’t seen water, save for perhaps the bloody saltwater at Dieppe, in more than ten days.