The Forgotten

by Nathan M. Greenfield

  The link between cleanliness and a soldier’s self-esteem, the spit and polish for which company sergeant majors are so derided by their charges, demonstrates an army’s organization and is a physical manifestation of esprit de corps as well as, of course, protection against diseases like typhus. By depriving the survivors of Dieppe of the opportunity to clean the terrible marks of battle and their own filth from their bodies, the Germans struck directly at the Canadians’ pride as free men. Primo Levi, who survived Auschwitz, wrote that a prisoner must do anything possible “to stay clean in order not to debase yourself in your own eyes” and thereby do the dirty work of the Germans for them.74

  In one cattle car, exhaustion, hunger and thirst unhinged at least one Canadian. Lieutenant Frederick Woodcock hallucinated that the Germans had bent him “backwards over this pile of barbed wire and they were wrapping wire all around [his] right shoulder.”75

  The third-class compartments in which the officers rode were more comfortable, but since their windows were nailed shut, they were stifling. Near 1 a.m., Masson left his compartment and, after bribing a guard with a cigarette, stood near an open window. Just east of Paris when the train slowed in a tunnel, Masson jumped out the window. The side of the tunnel was closer than he realized, and he hit his head on the wall, luckily falling between the train and the wall. By the time the train had left the tunnel, Masson could see four figures—in fact other Canadians who had also jumped from the train—leave the tunnel in the direction from which it had come. Then, the flash of a light, a challenge in French and the sound of the men being arrested.

  About an hour later, as he neared a small village, Masson passed a man whose decidedly un-French “Bonsoir” caused Masson to look back over his shoulder. Only then did he notice what he’d missed in the darkness: the man’s Canadian battle dress. It took only a moment for Masson and Captain George A. Browne, who had also jumped from the train, to establish their identities and decide to start walking away from Paris.

  About a half mile down a small path, they saw some workers’ houses. As Browne hid in the shadows waiting to see how Masson was received, the French-speaking officer knocked on the door of a house. When a man came to the window, Masson explained that he and another soldier had been on the raid on Dieppe and had just escaped from a German POW train. Their rank smell, dirty faces and greasy hair notwithstanding, the family fed them and, after giving them water to wash, put them to bed.

  29 AUGUST 1942, STALAG VIII-B, LAMSDORF, GERMANY

  THE DIEPPE POWS MARCH SMARTLY INTO THE POW CAMP

  Once the train entered the Reich, the Canadians had little idea where they were, but not because they couldn’t read German. Rather, the names of the stations had been removed. At one station, the SS kicked to the ground the food and water civilians tried pushing through the slats of the befouled cattle cars. In Private Danny MacDonald’s legs, the bacteria that had seeped into the wounds caused by machine-gun bullets bred uncontrollably, producing copious amounts of foul-smelling puss. “Churchill’s Second Front” completed its journey when it reached the railway siding on the road that led to the prison camp near Lamsdorf, in far eastern Germany.

  As the gaunt, exhausted, famished and desperately thirsty men climbed down from the train and, as gently as they could, took their wounded comrades down on stretchers, they noticed the beautiful day and the thousands of plump cherries hanging from the trees, within easy reach on either side of the road. The guards barked that they’d shoot any man who touched one.

  Unbeknownst to the Germans, as they arranged the POWs in four columns for the march to the camp a mile away, Regimental Sergeant Major Harry Beesley, the senior officer present, prepared a bit of theatre that signalled the Canadians’ implacable resistance. Given what they’d been through on the beaches of Dieppe, at Verneulles and on the train, Ron Beal and the others could hardly believe Beesley when he said, “You’ve had it pretty good. You’ve had one action. You’re prisoners of war now [but] there are men in that camp that have been prisoners for two and a half to three years who were taken at Dunkirk, some in North Africa, some in Crete, some in Greece … their spirits are broken. We’ve got to show them that there is still a British army and an Allied force.”

  To the guards’ dismay, the men, many of whom were so stiff and weak when they climbed off the train that they stumbled around like drunkards, formed up and began marching as if on parade. The NCOs lifted their heads and swung their arms. Barefoot or not, and irrespective of the condition of their uniforms or whether they even still wore one, the men marched in step. Not even the sight of a cemetery in which they saw maple leaves etched into grave stones, indicating that Canadians had died in that very prison camp during the First World War, broke their march. As they neared the gates, the British POWs, who looked relatively healthy, responded with cheers and shouted, “Good old Canada!”76

  After days without food, the Canadians expected to be fed when they were stopped between the camp’s inner and outer wire. Paperwork, however, took precedence and, instead, each man was photographed, fingerprinted and given a disk with his Kriegsgefangenennummer (POW number) stamped into it: “Mine was zwei, fünf, zwei, drei, acht—25238,” recalls Darch. So many men answered the question about their occupation the same way that one German officer was heard saying, “My, they have an awful lot of farmers in Canada.”77

  Although the Canadians had been expected for at least a week and the camp was already feeding thousands of POWs, no excuse was offered by the Germans for failing to fulfill the Geneva requirement to feed POWs the same rations as garrison troops. Accordingly, the men saw the German failure to feed them as psychological warfare designed to break their spirit. Indeed, even when they were finally given food—which, they later found out, came not from the camp larder but from the British POWs who gave up their daily ration of watery cabbage soup—the Germans ensured that the very act of eating underlined the POWs’ subservient status. Instead of handing them cups and spoons, the Canadians were allowed to go to a garbage pit to retrieve dirty cans. Poolton ate the putrid soup from his boot.

  29 AUGUST 1942, SAINT-AMAND-MONTROND, VICHY FRANCE

  VANIER, LAFLEUR AND JOLY ESCAPE TO ENGLAND

  Their papers were good, but the gendarmes in the small town in the south of France where Lafleur, Joly and Vanier got off the train were better.

  Had Lafleur and Joly (Vanier, still troubled by a wound, remained in the train station) known that the small town’s most famous resident was Maurice Papon, who since July had been responsible for deporting Jews from Vichy and seizing their property, the two Canadian soldiers might have gone through with their plan to overpower the gendarmes who stopped them on the street and make a run for it. Instead, after diplomatically bringing up Dieppe and seeing the gendarmes’ favourable response, Lafleur and Joly told the gendarmes who they were.

  To their relief, the gendarmes said that the police commissioner would be sympathetic. Aware that the Deuxième Bureau regularly tested local officials’ rectitude, the commissioner carefully questioned the three Canadians (Vanier having been picked up) before loading them into his car and driving them to the home of a wealthy American, who hid them until MI9 spirited them to safety via Marseilles and then Toulouse, eventually taking them to Perpignan, where the Royal Navy picked them up.

  EARLY SEPTEMBER 1942, STALAG VIII-B, LAMSDORF, GERMANY

  THE CANADIANS LEARN THE KRIEGIE LIFE

  “After five days in a cattle car, even barracks seemed almost human—at least there was place to lie down and sleep,” recalls Darch, who occupied the middle of a three-tier bunk bed on the right side of the almost 200-foot-long clapboard building. “When you walked in to it from each end, there was an area where there were two tables that sat about eight men, a washstand and a stove. It was still warm in September, so we did not notice that this stove would provide precious little heat when the winter winds began to blow. There were three sets of bunks down the length of the hall. Twelve men to a section, bunks aroun
d a central post … six on one side and six on the other. The paillasses were infested with lice and bedbugs, and so were we.”

  The men washed in the barracks. “We had soap,” says Darch, “but it was hard and full of pumice. It allowed us to clean our hand and faces and take a sponge bath, which, at least for a short time, did something about the lice. [But] the cold water and hard soup were no match for the lice in the seams of our uniforms. Nor could the cold water and foamless soap clean the blood stains off our uniforms.” Each man’s uniform was a memento mori of sorts, a symbol of their defeat.

  Few Canadians spoke German, but it didn’t take them long to learn the essential words. Each day started with a guard slamming open the barracks’ door and yelling, “Raus! Raus!” meaning “Get up and out of the barracks!” Rain or shine, at 8 a.m. and again at 5 p.m., the Kriegies made their way to the camp’s Appellplatz, where they were counted. Like Poolton and Beal, Darch still wore his uniform. “Others didn’t. They came off the beach with nothing.” Although the men did not know the extent of Germany’s requisitions of the countries it had conquered, the well-kept German towns they had seen through the slats of the cattle car told them something of Germany’s resources. They were therefore surprised—and enraged—that the Germans left the men without clean clothes until Red Cross supplies arrived some weeks later.

  The stench of the 40-holer that served 1,500 men was overwhelming. “From time to time a horse-drawn wagon—the ‘Honey Wagon’—came to pump out the latrine, which made shit go down but did nothing about the population of rats. Seeing their eyes peering up at you before you sat down to do your business gave you added incentive to be quick about it,” recalls Darch.

  Of even greater concern were the rations. They came near noon, but there was never enough to fill the POWs’ stomachs. A pint or so of cabbage soup that was supposed to contain their meat ration almost never did, unless worms and bugs counted. “Dividing the solid food was more complicated. Groups of ten men were given a bunch of potatoes, which were boiled with skins on. Then they were placed in rows according to size, and then we drew cards to see which you got,” says Darch. A group of ten divided into two groups of five for the division of the hard loaf of sour black bread, which was often covered in green mould. “Cutting the loaf was a ritual each of us watched eagerly,” recalls Darch. “Every crumb mattered.” Each man was supposed to receive 350 grams, or just over 12 ounces. “Normally, this worked out to six pieces for each of us ‘muckers’—‘muckers’ was the name for the men in a food group. Two for lunch, two for dinner, and you had to save two for breakfast, which, if you were lucky, you smeared with some ersatz jam. If you didn’t save your pieces for breakfast, you went hungry.” They would have starved were it not for the Red Cross parcels that started arriving in early October. John Grogan and three other members of the Royal Regiment shared two parcels twice a week.

  6 SEPTEMBER 1942, HôPITAL DE LA SALPÊTRIÈRE, PARIS

  CAPTAIN JOHN RUNCIE’S HOME RUN BEGINS

  For the last four days, he’d had it pretty good.

  Before that, he’d been at Verneulles. Then, with the connivance of Canadian medical officers, Captain John Runcie convinced a German medical officer that he was suffering from acute appendicitis and that he should be sent to Paris for an X-ray. Perhaps because the staff at the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière were French, they placed him in a private room, the ward on the other side of the wall being filled with Germans wounded on the Russian Front. Runcie was a decent actor, for while the X-ray showed nothing, the German doctor prescribed a special diet and a few more days’ hospital rest, days the Canadian put to good use.

  Just over two weeks earlier he’d put his faith in machine guns, mortars, radios, 6-inch naval guns, fighter planes and the other accoutrements of modern warfare. Now, late on the night of 5 September, he put his faith in 17th-century aesthetics, specifically, the French window (that opened outward like two doors) and the low wall that enclosed the grounds of the hospital designed by one of Louis XIV’s favourite architects. The window opened, and the healthy Runcie quickly climbed the rain-slickened stone wall. He found the Resistance fighter who’d promised to be there waiting in the shadows of a nearby church, holding civilian clothes and shoes for the pyjama-clad, barefoot army officer. Because of the curfew, he had about an hour to get Runcie to a safe house.

  Unlike Dumais, Lafleur and the other fusiliers on home runs, the English-speaking Runcie had to be even more careful about being overheard. Still, for the ten days that he stayed with a family in Montmartre, accompanied by the man who had met him by the church, Runcie “moved freely about Paris during the daytime, mingling with parties of German sightseers in the streets and entering cafés and places of entertainment.”

  Runcie does not say and likely did not know how his hosts procured the food they gave him, or the ration tickets needed in restaurants. Given the limited official rations available, it’s almost certain that his allotment came from the flourishing black market. A month earlier, the police officials prosecuted 42 cases of trading on le marché noir, a phrase that appeared for the first time in the Larousse dictionary published that year.

  15 SEPTEMBER 1942, NEAR THE DEMARCATION LINE

  BROWNE’S AND MASSON’S HOME RUN FAIL

  Led by a 12-year-old boy carrying a fishing rod, Browne and Masson neared the Allier River, on the other side of which lay Vichy France. Stuffed in Masson’s pockets were forged demobilization papers and an identity card with a believable photograph that stated he was Alsatian, which, he and Browne hoped, would explain Masson’s accent. Browne also carried demobilization papers; to explain why he didn’t speak, he was listed as being deaf.

  The presence of German guards forced Masson’s party to walk further down the river than originally planned. After fording it, they found a taxi that took them to the town of Sancoins. The two Canadians and their young guide were shocked when the taxi driver stopped at the police station and told them that because he picked them up so close to the Demarcation Line, they had to report to the police.

  It took only a moment for the gendarme who interviewed Masson to know that he was not an Alsatian, for he was, and Masson couldn’t understand a word of his. Masson countered the accusation that he was a Polish Jew by saying he was from Toulouse and was travelling alone to visit his sick mother. The suspicious official then called in Browne, who played deaf while the official accused him of having a false photo on his identity card, which was ironic, since it was the one true part of their cover story.

  With their stories in tatters, Masson went for broke and told the official they were Canadian officers and promised that if they were let through, 100,000 francs would be forwarded to him as soon as they reached England. The officer’s demeanour changed and after telephoning his superior indicated that he would help them. Keeping most of their money and papers in his possession, the official ordered another policeman to take them to a hotel.

  The boy smelled a rat and, once they were alone in the hotel, persuaded the Canadians to take advantage of the cover of night to push on, by foot, toward Saint-Amand-Montrond. Assuming that the police were now looking for them, every time they heard a car, all three dove into the nearest ditch. Toward morning, near the village of Saint-Pierre-les-Étieux, the poor condition of Browne’s feet (he had been walking barefoot for days because the shoes given to him in Paris were too small) forced them to board a gasoline trolley, only to find themselves face to face with the policeman who had taken them to the hotel.

  According to Browne, the policeman told them that by running away from the hotel they “had complicated things” and must now be kept out of sight until arrangements could be made for them to continue their journey. Masson recalled a more frightening moment: the flashing of a revolver and the policeman saying “he would handle the whole thing unofficially.”

  For the next few days, they believed this promise. True, they were in a cell in the gendarmerie in Châteauroux. However, the men there who claimed to be
Deuxième Bureau agents were friendly, as were the guards who brought them their food. And, always a hopeful sign, cigarettes were plentiful. They assumed that their handcuffing before going to the train station was part of an agitprop drama designed to pre-empt questions from any official they might meet along the way, an assumption seemingly confirmed when they were on the train. Even having to spend the night of 14 September in a cell in the gendarmerie in Lyons did not alarm them, for again they were very well-treated, and timing their disappearance, they knew, was a delicate operation.

  Their hopes were dashed the next morning when the truck they’d been hustled onto stopped at the forbidding Fort de la Duchère.

  FALL 1942, STALAG VIII-B, LAMSDORF, GERMANY

  THE IMPORTANCE OF CRIBBAGE

  Pictures of poorly shaven, dishevelled soldiers playing cards while smoking an endless number of cigarettes paint a decidedly unmartial portrait of POWs, who, though ever more hungry, remained, after recovering from the shock of defeat and the Germans’ treatment of them, fit men in their prime. In the years to come, a number of men would experience depression or, as they called it, fall victim to “wire happiness,” the most obvious sign of which was a vacant stare. The greatest enemy was boredom. To fight it, hundreds bashed the circuit—that is, walked endless times around the inside perimeter of the barbed-wire fence, which both kept them in shape and familiarized them with the camp’s layout and security, as well as with areas beyond the camp—essential information for a successful escape.