The Forgotten

by Nathan M. Greenfield

  Brother Cournoyer’s 20 June letter tells the dean of the Oblate College in Richelieu, Quebec, that Father Barsalou and Brother Georges-Aimé Lavallée were in the hospital and that Father Pâquet had been suffering from kidney pain and rheumatism, ailments Pâquet skips over in his extant letters.

  Father Barsalou’s 15 June letter to his sister-in-law, Jacqueline, unites his priestly vocation and his personal sorrow for his brother Jean-Paul’s sudden departure for “our heavenly home.” He admits to coping with his pain by throwing himself “at the feet of our Lord to beg him to have mercy on you, his dear wife.” He tells her that if she submits to the will of God, she will find both courage and consolation. He hopes that she will draw comfort from knowing that his prayers and those of “my whole parish” (words indicating that, at least momentarily, the good father had slipped the surly bonds of wire and imagined himself once again in a proper church) are with her.

  LATE JUNE 1943, FRESNES PRISON, PARIS

  MACDONALD FINDS A WAY TO TRIP UP THE GESTAPO

  The view out their window on the fourth floor of the notorious Fresnes Prison was filled with promise. Millions of tan stalks heavy with wheat waved in the gentle breeze. Off in the distant green fields, lowing cattle fattened themselves. But German requisitions meant that almost none of this food reached the capital a few miles away.

  Built as a showcase in the late 1800s, Fresnes held political prisoners, captured secret agents and Allied airmen shot down over France. Despite producing their identity disks, because they were captured in civilian clothes, MacDonald and Parkinson were told by the Gestapo told that they could be treated as spies. “And,” one German told MacDonald coldly, “as you know, in all countries, spies are shot.”

  Likely because the Germans knew they were airmen and thus actually came under the jurisdiction of Göring’s Luftwaffe, the Canadians were not tortured or roughed up, though the the terror of what the Gestapo did to civilian prisoners at 11 rue des Saussaies was ever-present. In the corridors and in the exercise yard of Fresnes Prison, these “poor men showed me broken limbs, bruised flesh and the slashes in their skin left by whippings with electrical wire,” recalls MacDonald.

  MacDonald knew he was to give only his name, rank and service number. However, he figured, holding fast to Geneva risked the Gestapo upping the ante. “The greatest danger was getting tripped up. No matter what tactic they used, as long as I said I did not know anyone’s name, I could keep that story going.” Descriptions were, however, more difficult, until MacDonald and Parkinson decided that MacDonald would use his parents as models to describe his helpers, while Parkinson would use his mother, which meant that the Gestapo was building up a dossier about three middle-aged Canadians.

  EARLY JULY 1943, FRESNES PRISON, PARIS

  MACDONALD RECEIVES NEWS OF THE WAR

  The meagre rations at Fresnes were not supplemented by Red Cross parcels. As the weeks wore on, MacDonald and Parkinson tightened their belts and, as Kriegies across Europe did, recalled favourite foods and meals. As long, hungry days passed, punctuated only by another questioning session or the few minutes allowed in the 10-by-20-foot exercise yard, MacDonald found himself fighting an indoor version of barbed-wire psychosis, the first symptom of which was the feeling that he was weakening during the interrogations. “We had some French books that I could read a little but nothing else to do. With time on our hands and the sure knowledge of what the Gestapo was willing to do, it was difficult to keep all sorts of terrible scenarios from passing through your mind,” MacDonald says. The men’s spirits were strengthened by the news, brought by other POWs who were thrown into their cell, of Russian advances in the east and, especially, of the invasion of Sicily. “We didn’t know the numbers of Canadians involved, but we knew they were now fighting Germans in Europe, and that meant the world to us,” he recalls.

  29 JULY 1943, OVER THE TYRRHENIAN SEA

  RCAF FLIGHT LIEUTENANT STEWART COWAN IS SHOT DOWN

  Seconds after seeing a smudge on the horizon, the telltale sign of an Italian destroyer flotilla, Stewart Cowan ordered his flight of fighter bombers to go in for the kill. Within moments, the Italian anti-aircraft gunners created what amounted to a minefield in the sky. Above the sound of the plane’s engines and exploding shells, Cowan called out to his navigator, Tony Crawford, “My God, Tony! We’re sitting ducks in the sky!” Cowan’s training held as he pitched his Beaufort diver bomber toward the destroyer and saw his stream of 20-mm cannon shells put one of the destroyer’s gun crews hors de combat just before bullets turned his windscreen black.133

  Then Cowan felt his doughty plane start to shake, the effect of a piece of flak cutting through the starboard engine’s propeller. Moments later, with the port engine aflame, Cowan prepared to ditch in the Tyrrhenian Sea off Italy’s western coast. The two Canadians scrambled out of the hatch and onto the starboard wing, at the end of which a dinghy, which had automatically inflated when the wing touched the water, awaited them. As the plane began to sink, they couldn’t find the knife to cut the cord attaching the dinghy to the wing. Anxious moments passed before the cord suddenly broke.

  2 AUGUST 1943, STALAG X-B, SANDBASTEL, GERMANY

  BROTHER ANTOINE LAVALLéE IS AMAZED AT THE POWER OF A BOMBING RAID

  For days they had heard long bomber streams sawing through the night toward Hamburg 40 miles away and seen the sky glow an otherworldly pink from the incendiary and other bombs that rained down on the great port city in the air-raid campaign that the Sacred Heart Brother would have considered aptly named: Operation Gomorrah.

  Nature’s fury—jagged flashes of light and great peals of thunder—merged with the man-made explosions that convulsed the night of 2 August. At about 11 p.m., a bomb, likely dropped from a plane in its death throes, fell a scant 3,000 yards away. The explosion lit the sky while the blast wave “shook the barracks so strongly that pictures,” but not the Cross to which Brother Antoine Lavallée had devoted his life, “fell off the walls.”

  13 AUGUST 1943, POW CAMP, NEAR THE VATICAN

  COWAN MOMENTARILY FORGETS THE SCIENCE OF BOMBING

  When he’d been shot down, everything had happened so quickly that Cowan did not know fear. There had been a moment of frisson seven hours later when the flying boat coming to pluck him and Crawford from the Tyrrhenian Sea turned out to be an Italian Red Cross plane. But the crew had been friendly, as had the commander of the base near Naples and the guards, who provided a large spaghetti dinner and led them to a bomb shelter during a bombing raid that night. The sight of German soldiers taking up defensive positions in Italy—Mussolini having fallen—was not comforting, and hearing a German crow about persuading British Sikh POWs to wave the Geneva prohibition against handling ammunition by withholding water from them (when the temperature routinely climbed above 110°F), sickened Cowan, but he was in Italian hands. The worst that could be said for the POW camp that he and Crawford stayed in for eight days was that the sight of birds enjoying the hot, sunny days and heavy grapes growing nearby made the solitary days even harder.

  In the early afternoon of 13 August, after having been transferred back to Rome, Cowan stood on a balcony of a building serving as a POW camp, overlooking the Vatican a mere 300—unbridgeable—yards away, listening to an American officer. An air-raid siren cut off the impromptu lecture about how, during the 1527 Sack of Rome, Pope Clement VII escaped with his life by running through the fortified corridor connecting the Vatican and the Castel Sant’Angelo. True to form, the Romans in the streets below ignored the siren until they heard the sound of the bombers.

  The shock of seeing the plane open its bomb bay doors as it flew directly overhead toward the great dome designed by Michelangelo, and then over St. Peter’s Square as the space filled with thousands of panicked men, women and children, made Cowan forget the science of bombing. He turned to prayer, something he didn’t do when he was shot down. Had the moment not been so charged, he would have known that, since the Marauder bombers were 4,000 feet high, the
bombs released over St. Peter’s would not explode in the Vatican but, because of inertia, about a mile away.

  Moments after the roar and shock wave generated by the explosions washed over them, the American officer pointed to the black smoke rising above the dust as evidence that the bombers had hit an oil tank car, and added that the rail yard had likely been wrecked. During the London Blitz, Cowan had “stepped over mangled bodies and tried to get help for the wounded,” and had not flinched at firing his cannon at men on a destroyer.134 Yet when he looked at the smoke-stained sky over the Eternal City, his eyes filled with tears.

  19 AUGUST 1943, STALAG VIII-B, LAMSDORF, GERMANY

  STAN DARCH REMEMBERS THE HORRORS OF DIEPPE

  Chewed up by machine guns or blown apart by mortar bombs, the Canadian soldiers at Dieppe had been dead for a year. Some of the scars of battle, such as the burned-out landing craft and tanks, remained on the beaches. The wind, rain and remorseless scrubbing action of the sea had long since worn away the copper-red stains of Canadian blood and the bits of flesh smeared on the beaches of France.

  The more than 1,500 survivors of Dieppe remembered, however—mostly in private. “I don’t remember talking with anyone,” says Stan Darch. “Perhaps I didn’t have to. We all knew what each of us had in our mind. I thought of everything, the hours leading up to the landing, the explosions before we went ashore, the confusion on the beaches.” Men, some friends, all comrades, remained frozen in his mind in the positions in which rigor mortis had taken hold one year earlier.

  24 AUGUST 1943, MANDO ISLAND, DENMARK

  RCAF SQUADRON LEADER ROY MCLERNON AND SERGEANT ROBERT BROOKS’S BOMBER IS SHOT DOWN

  RCAF bomb aimer Sergeant Jim Plenderleith dropped thousands of aluminum strips through his Halifax bomber’s flare chute as the plane approached Mandø Island, off the west coast of Denmark. For more than a month, Bomber Command’s planes had been dropping “Window,” which disrupted the German radar by bouncing the radio waves back to the receiver in a random fashion, making it all but impossible to vector the night fighters. Some 14,000 feet above Mandø, however, the glittering pieces of aluminum had no effect on a lone wolf, Leutnant Kurt Böttinger; a burst from his machine gun set one of the bomber’s two starboard engines on fire at 2:30 a.m.

  Before RCAF pilot Roy McLernon could pitch his plane into a corkscrew dive, Böttinger’s guns set his wing on fire. As fire burned toward the fuselage and the plane filled with smoke, Sergeant Robert Brooks in the Perspex dome above the plane’s midsection opened fire with his twin Bofors. But he could not depress them enough to hit the German plane.

  With the fuselage already afire, Plenderleith crawled toward the escape hatch in the plane’s nose and jumped, followed by the crew’s British flight engineer and then the plane’s navigator, RCAF Sergeant Randolph Welters. Brooks should have jumped from the rear escape hatch but fire blocked his passage, forcing him to crawl 70 feet through thickening smoke to the front of the plane. As soon as McLernon saw Brooks, his face burned and eyebrows singed, he stepped aside so Brooks could bail out before him.

  A moment after the slipstream opened Brooks’s chute, the Halifax began a near vertical dive. Then an exploding fuel cell threw McLernon against a bulkhead with such force that he thought the plane had crashed. Fortunately, McLernon quickly realized that the Halifax was still airborne and jumped out into the Danish night.

  25 AUGUST 1943, STALAG XVIII-A, WOLFSBERG, AUSTRIA

  FATHER PAUL JUNEAU’S THEOLOGICAL INNOVATION

  After more than two years in prison camps, for les religieux, much remained the same. In July, writing for an illiterate French-Canadian soldier named Charles to his fiancée, Fernande, Father Juneau carefully couched the news that Charles was in the hospital, having hit his head against the wall in a football game, between mention of Charles’s great joy at receiving pictures of Fernande and of his fervent desire to learn more about “our beautiful religion.” “No doubt you have remained faithful to the dream of one day joining your destiny with his, if it be God’s will” was balm for the young Montrealer.

  Yet much had changed. Earlier in the month, Father Larivière had written to Father Antoni Toupin that the entire structure of the Oblate order and, indeed, the Catholic Church, which places priests and brothers under the authority of an ecclesiastical superior such as the Provincial in Ottawa, had become “rather theoretical.” The POW camps may not have been the wilds of North America during the time of the Jesuit Relations (1610–1636) but, since they could not communicate with their Oblate superiors or the Vatican, Larivière wrote something that would have been unthinkable a mere two years earlier: “In practice, I am my own superior general, as I am my own bishop, though I take into account the opinion (and possible direction) that comes from three continents with whom I have a relationship.”

  An even more striking example of how the war had affected the Oblates is what Father Juneau told his brother on 25 August 1943. The holding of Pentecost mass (13 June) on a “basket-ball pitch” had no theological import. That on Pentecost and again on the Feast of Corpus Christi (27 June) he conducted mass on an altar that was “placed so that the celebrant was facing the congregation” was little short of revolutionary, for priests did not start saying mass in this fashion till after Vatican II in the early 1960s.135

  26 AUGUST 1943, MANDØ ISLAND, DENMARK

  MCLERNON ESCAPES TO THE MAINLAND WHILE THE RESISTANCE HIDES BROOKS

  From his position in the middle of the haystack he’d crawled into, McLernon couldn’t quite tell what language the men a few yards away were speaking. If they were Danes, they would likely help him. The machine gun in the lookout post he saw on the beach may have been unmanned, but it indicated that German troops were not far away. Pressed by thirst and hunger after almost 30 hours on the ground, McLernon made the decision to reveal himself.

  The men near the haystack were indeed Danes, who not only gave McLernon much-needed food and drink but also trousers and a sweater to put on over his RCAF tunic. He also needed shoes because the vacuum effect of the slipstream had burst the zippers on his fur-lined boots and ripped them off his feet. Thinking that even disguised as a workman McLernon would arouse the suspicions of the Germans patrolling the causeway connecting Mandø Island to the mainland, Søren Christensen, one of the Danes, sent a coded message to Knud “Skipper” Hansen that, were it to be intercepted by the Germans, would hardly have raised an alarm: “An object looking like a mine was drifting toward the North.”136 By the evening of the 26th, McLernon, who had travelled from Mandø secreted under a tarp in the engine compartment of Hansen’s fishing skiff, had been seen by a doctor, given a complete set of civilian clothes and was now being grilled by the chief Special Operatives Executive operative in the area.

  Meanwhile, driven by thirst and hunger, on 26 August Brooks revealed himself to Herluf and Holger Anderson, who gave him milk and loaded him into their horse-drawn cart for the trip to Mandø village. The Andersons may have been in their teens, but they knew their business. To ensure that soldiers who might be walking to or from their barracks in the north end of the village couldn’t see Brooks as they took him to Hans Rasmussen’s house, they had him sit with his back to the village. With Germans nearby, Rasmussen judged keeping Brooks in the village too dangerous. To make him look like one more labourer, Rasmussen gave him a change of clothes, a cap and, to complete the disguise, a rake before putting him on a bicycle, with directions to hide in a concrete drain near an old dike.

  LATE AUGUST 1943, CAMPO CONCENTRAMENTO PRIGIONIERI DI GUERRA NO. 21, CHIETI, ITALY

  COWAN PINES FOR HIS SWEETHEART BACK IN TORONTO

  Keeping his spirits up at the POW camp 125 miles northeast of Rome to which he’d been moved proved difficult. First, there was the Senior British Officer, who, to Cowan’s dismay—and to stop the Canadian from freelancing an escape—ordered him to surrender his compass. Then there was his hair, tufts of which remained in his comb, causing him to fear that he’d be bald at age 23. T
he street scenes—mothers and children, families, even an assignation in the shrubbery right outside the Vatican that he’d witnessed from the balcony in Rome the day after the bombing—were recent enough to remind him just how unnatural the all-male environment of the POW camps was, and what it was like to hold your sweetheart in your arms and feel her “warm kisses and the sound of her voice.”137 Then another POW’s “Dear John” letter put him ill at ease about his own sweetheart, who was in Toronto training to be a nurse.

  Cowan attributed his loss of hair to his mental state, whereas it was probably caused by the meagre rations, which also caused him to lose weight. As in the German camps, the POWs did not receive the planned allotment of Red Cross parcels, which meant they lacked nutrients and fats. The importance of tasty food to mental stability can be seen in the credit Cowan gives to his navigator Tony Crawford’s cooking—a plate of fried pasta and raisin pancakes or the sort of twice-baked biscuit Admiral Nelson’s men ate, soaked in condensed milk and then fried—for being his “salvation.”

  But food could do nothing to alleviate his concern about his elderly parents. Did they know he was alive? Were they? “Am I,” he wondered through the lonely nights in pungent rooms where the stillness was punctuated by snoring officers, “destined to be part of the dust of Italy?”