The Forgotten

by Nathan M. Greenfield

  LATE NOVEMBER 1943, PARIS

  DUMAIS SETS UP THE SHELBURN LINE

  After the exchange of passwords established their identities, Dumais and Christine got down to business. Dumais promised to pay the 40,000-franc debt she had run up working for MI9, and she put him in contact with Suzanne, who agreed that Dumais and Labrosse, who used still another set of names with her, could stay at her apartment. Two weeks later, when Dumais and Labrosse returned from a trip to Normandy (from where Labrosse had been able to contact London and inform MI9 that his radio could not pick up London from Paris), the two Canadians were stunned to discover a note (written in French) on the floor of Christine’s apartment:

  Christine and Suzanne have been arrested; you’d better get out fast.

  —A friend152

  Dumais’s belief that Christine and Suzanne wouldn’t talk was well-founded. While neither Canadian’s training included briefings on what MI9 knew about the extent to which the Gestapo was willing to go to break les femmes de la Résistance, he knew of London’s deep respect for these women’s moral fibre.153 Still, his instructions were to assume that they would talk and thus he was to chart a path away from them and their contacts.

  Warily, they approached Paul Campinchi, whom Labrosse knew from his days with Oaktree and, just as warily, he again threw in his lot with MI9, connecting Dumais and Labrosse to a woman named Guette. One can only guess how the vivacious 50-year-old woman, for whom events were “either sublime or tragic,” reacted when she heard that on the train from Normandy the two Canadians had entered a compartment filled with Wehrmacht officers and, after checking their papers, a military policeman had berated them for going into the wrong car.154 Dumais understood her heightened emotion, for after the gendarme left the car, the only soldier in the car who spoke French told the two “Frenchmen” that he hated army life. All the while, despite its absence, Dumais could feel the weight of his rifle in his hands and “imagine ramming it into his belly.”

  The fate of Oaktree, Christine and Suzanne’s arrest, his MI9 training and his worries over the French penchant for “careless talk” led Dumais to insist on ten security rules for the Shelburn Line. To ensure against the entire network being rolled up, agents were to keep their addresses secret even from one another, and “evacuees [were] to be passed along the line without their guides meeting one another.” To guard against being infiltrated by fake evacuees, each one was to be interrogated as soon as possible after making contact with the escape line, which cast Dumais as the quizmaster asking RAF officers about cricket, and RCAF and USAAF officers about baseball.

  Following his first rule, Dumais did not know where Labrosse rented a room. Nor did he know where he stored their radio equipment. The shortage of apartments forced Dumais to take a room in a hotel owned by one of Guette’s friends, which meant that were the police to stumble on the trail, they would have little difficulty connecting some of Shelburn’s dots. Dumais risked providing another dot when, contrary to his orders to behave like a monk, he took Guette’s friend, Marcelle, back to his hotel, where they became real-life lovers in a dangerous time.

  EARLY DECEMBER 1943, BRITTANY

  DUMAIS’S COVER STORY LEADS HIM TO BECOME QUEASY

  The Gestapo had recently broken both Jade-Fitzroy and Jade-Amicol escape lines, and Dumais’s handlers in London had reservations about Campinchi. Dumais had his own doubts, but about Campinchi’s decision to bring the “parcels” to Paris, where it was more expensive to hide and feed them, rather than about his trustworthiness. And although the first meeting he had with Henri Le Blais—a contact he’d been put in touch with by Dr. Le Blach (whom Labrosse knew), in the small village of Plouézec, on the Breton coast—went well, the next day Dumais was dismayed to find that Le Blais had ignored the order to keep Shelburn a secret; his brother and sister-in-law, he protested to Dumais, were trustworthy.

  Duly chastened, Le Blais drove Dumais around (running his car part of the time on alcohol from a secreted tank), looking for the place London had indicated they could exfiltrate the evaders. Though Dumais’s (Desbiens’s) identity card said he was a mortician, Le Blais introduced him as a doctor, which resulted in several tense moments when, while visiting a farm, word came that a woman on another nearby farm was about to give birth and no one could find Le Blach. Keeping his cover meant attending the birth, even though the art of midwifery was not covered in his MI9 training. Le Blach’s timely arrival spared Dumais from having to play the part of monsieur le docteur, though to keep his cover, he had to assist, finding to his surprise that watching a baby being born made him feel more queasy than watching men die at Dieppe.

  DECEMBER 1943, STALAG VIII-B, LAMSDORF, GERMANY

  KINGSLEY BROWN HAS TROUBLE PROVING HE’S KINGSLEY BROWN

  The last thing the swapovers wanted to hear was their real names being called over the camp’s loudspeakers, as Kingsley Brown’s and British Army Lieutenant Joe Ricks’s were four days after they arrived at Stalag VIII-B. Brown’s Canadian accent could easily have been hidden among Darch and the other Dieppe veterans and Ricks’s English among the other 45,000 Kriegies; indeed, several men already were being hidden. And that, the camp’s Man of Confidence told them, was the rub. If they hid them and the Germans started a major search, they might find a young POW who sabotaged a power plant’s turbine, and “if they find him, they’ll hang him.”155

  The last thing the swapovers who had just turned themselves over to the Kommandant’s office wanted to be told is “You don’t fool me. You’re not Brown and Ricks”—and to stop wasting his time. Even after he finally arrested them a day later, the Kommandant said he didn’t believe they were Brown and Ricks: “They are still in the camp. But we’ll find them, we’ll find them.”

  Equally curious was the camp’s cooler. The food and amenities at Stalag Luft III were better than at Stalag VIII-B, but the cooler at Göring’s “guest house for Allied officer air crew,” Brown knew from experience, was rather austere, quite unlike the one to which Brown and Ricks were consigned. Brown recalled it having “the disorderly charm of a stevedores’ poker club,” complete with late-night bull sessions with German guards anxious to share Red Cross cigarettes.

  MID-DECEMBER 1943, STALAG III-A, LUCKENWALD, GERMANY

  REID CITES THE “KING’S REGULATIONS, CANADA”

  The Senior British Officer was an officious bastard.

  Overlooking the evidence, including how Reid’s uniform hung off his sickly thin body following a two-week bout of malaria and ignoring the obvious fact that the Germans had not provided him with water to wash, as soon as he saw Reid, he upbraided him—for not having shaved. Unimpressed with British authority (and aware that the officer had surrendered his men in Greece without a fight), Reid answered that while fighting the enemy and scouting in the front, he didn’t carry his razor. The brigadier ordered him to borrow one. “Under K.R.Can., I can’t do that,” said the Canadian, which flummoxed the brigadier.

  “Under what?”

  “King’s Regulations, Canada,” said Reid, earning himself a loud dressing down and the threat to be placed on report once they were registered in a POW camp.156 The brigadier, however, was harmless, unlike the German guards who a few weeks earlier had beat Reid unconscious after they saw him watching them through a window beat an old man and young woman unconscious, then turn a hose on them and leave them on the cold November pavement to die. The beating violated Geneva, as did the blacking out of Reid’s cell, the removal of his cot and the denial of medical care when his malaria returned. As his temperature spiked dangerously high, the Germans provided him with a soup can’s amount of food and water per day. On the cold concrete floor in a darkened room, Reid lay curled up in his thin blanket, “shaking, freezing but sweating,” while waiting to die.

  MID-DECEMBER 1943, STALAG VIII-B, LAMSDORF, GERMANY

  BROWN TRIES HIS HAND AT THE BAR

  After about a week of being men with no names, Brown suggested to an intelligence officer that perhaps h
e might check their fingerprints. Two days later, Brown and Ricks found themselves before a court martial charged with Namentausch, name exchanging.

  The trial was allowed by Geneva and, given everything Brown and Ricks had done to prove who they were, they had no defence. However, Brown, who had covered many trials for the Toronto Star and had no high opinion of the officer corps at the Stalag, shocked the court by asserting, “You have no jurisdiction, mein Herr.” The adjutant could only ask, “Why?” Neither he nor the Kommandant could answer Brown’s argument. “We are air force personnel. We are under the personal protection of Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring. The Wehrmacht has no jurisdiction to try us.”157 This generated a request for clarification from Berlin and another few days for Brown and Ricks to enjoy chess, poker and philosophical discussions enveloped in blue cigarette smoke.

  That Berlin sided with the Kommandant was hardly a surprise; Brown had always known his point was as irrelevant as it was elegant. Thus, the guilty verdict, and the pro forma 15-day sentence in the cooler. Brown remained quick on his feet, however. For when the Kommandant added that they were going to serve their sentence in Stalag Luft III, Brown objected: “But mein Herr, we have already served eleven days of solitary here.” No doubt anxious to avoid another appeal to Berlin, the Kommandant shrugged his shoulders and told his adjutant, “Give them a receipt for eleven days.”

  24 DECEMBER 1943, PLOUHA, BRITTANY

  DUMAIS HAS TO HIDE 15 ESCAPERS AND EVADERS TILL THE NEW YEAR

  At 6 p.m. on 15 December in François Le Cornec’s house, the man who had agreed to be the beachmaster at Bonaparte Beach turned his old radio to the BBC. At the end of the broadcast Les Français parlent aux Français, the announcer said, “Yvonne pense souvent à l’heureuse occasion,” confirming what Dumais and Le Cornec already suspected: because of the storm churning through the Channel, the Royal Navy’s pickup of the 15 “parcels” now in Brittany had been postponed 24 hours.158

  Yvonne was still thinking of happy occasions the next night. And the next, and the one after that. Hopes rose when the sky lightened and fell when it darkened. Worries about keeping the men making home runs hidden from the prying eyes of the villagers of Plouha competed with personal discomfort generated by the fleas that infested the beds Dumais and Labrosse slept on at Le Cornec’s house. Day and night, the strong wind that blew the damp Breton cold under the door and through gaps in the window sashes was more than a match for Le Cornec’s small supply of firewood. As Christmas neared, Dumais wished for a break in the weather and “some good flea powder!” The lump of coal, which, it is said, Santa Claus leaves for naughty British children, would have been much more welcome than the message on Christmas Eve that the pickup operation had been postponed until the end of January. In the interim, Dumais and Labrosse returned to Paris, while Le Cornec hid the evaders on farms, where they posed as mute labourers.

  24 DECEMBER 1943, STALAG LUFT III, SAGAN, POLAND

  JOHN GROGAN’S SURPRISE CHRISTMAS PRESENT

  Three weeks earlier, an Australian POW arrived at Arbeitskommando E192 with a bundle of letters for John Grogan and some bad news. The real Frank Hickey was suffering from tuberculosis and was slated to be repatriated to Canada as “John Grogan.” Grogan had less trouble convincing the authorities that he was a swapover than did Kingsley Brown. Before being returned to Stalag VIII-B, however, he was transferred to Stalag Luft III for a punishment stint, which is why on Christmas Eve he was not far from Brown, who was serving out the last few days of his sentence in the camp’s cooler.

  For reasons that are unclear, Grogan was put in a hut where, ironically, he became ill and developed jaundice. His second Christmas in Germany was lightened only slightly by the loudspeakers, which broadcast a German band playing “O Come, All Ye Faithful” and a song the German guards could sing, albeit with different words from those Grogan learned in his youth: “Stille Nacht”—“Silent Night.” Brown too heard the songs, as he remembered how on Christmas Eve the year before a truck had arrived in the camp compound with several kegs of beer sent with his “best wishes” from Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring.159

  25 DECEMBER 1943, DULAG LUFT, FRANKFURT

  CHRISTMAS DAY

  Despite the requirement laid down by Article 16 of the Geneva Convention, the Germans made no provisions for religious services at Dulag Luft. Ian MacDonald recalls, “In a very private way, I made sure to say my prayers. I thought of and, of course, prayed for my family back home. Even in the drab surrounding of the Dulag, I remembered what it was that was so important to me back home about Christmas—and that was the reason for the day, the birth of the Christ Child.”

  The fresh snow of Christmas morning only heightened Brown’s forlorn feeling. Not only was he a prisoner far from home but also he was not allowed to partake in any of the Christmas masses read by Father Goudreau. Nor could he join in the conviviality of the barracks, which in some included full-dress dinners with table service and ornate menus. The dinner at Stalag Luft III promised Hors d’Ouevres Royaux, Potage Klim de Tomates, Viande d’Invasion Imagineé with Pomme de Terres Smashed à la Timoshenko (Timoshenko was a Soviet general), plum pudding and a number of other courses.

  Since he hadn’t indicated he needed to go to the latrine and he’d already been given his breakfast of black bread, margarine and fake jam, Brown did not know why his guard was opening the door to the cell. His cellmate, Joe, stood closer to it, so he saw the guard put his finger to his lips, wink and motion them out of the cell. Brown followed, taking care to keep quiet and wondering why the guards, who were all NCOs, were lounging about with conspiratorial looks on their faces. Then he heard the familiar deep, sonorous chimes of Big Ben and the words “This is London calling …,” followed by King George VI’s studied voice coming over a radio as he read his Christmas message, a “gift of a half-dozen German soldiers to two other soldiers wearing a different uniform.”160

  CHAPTER NINE

  January–March 1944

  Look! Through the port comes the moonshine astray! It tips the guard’s cutlass and silvers this nook; but ‘twill die in the dawning of Billy’s last day.

  — BENJAMIN BRITTEN, Billy Budd

  MID-JANUARY 1944, PARIS

  LUCIEN DUMAIS BREAKS OFF WITH MARCELLE

  Notwithstanding the enticing birthmark just below Marcelle’s hip, Lucien Dumais was having second thoughts about his liaison with her. Though she was a prostitute, morality was not the issue. His fiduciary responsibility for the tens of thousands of francs entrusted to him by MI9 and the security of his mission was. Knowing of his access to seemingly limitless funds, she pressured him to buy her more and more clothes, which risked drawing unwanted attention.

  Cutting Marcelle off, however, risked her ire and the possibility that she would whisper Desbiens’s name and address into the ear of an official and collect a handsome reward. Dumais did not know whether Marcelle thought he was simply a sugar daddy or a British agent. But he knew it was the latter when she immediately answered “Non” when he asked her to live with him. In the hall-of-mirrors world Dumais lived in, the very fact that she knew that he was a British agent provided some protection, for she would then know also that he had powerful, if distant, friends. When he moved from Guette’s a few days later, he did not tell Guette where he would be living.

  MID-JANUARY 1944, STALAG LUFT III, SAGAN, POLAND

  RCAF FLIGHT LIEUTENANT WALLY FLOODY SOLVES TWO TUNNELLING PROBLEMS

  Wally Floody was pleased with “Harry.” Closed since the decision to concentrate on “Tom,” Harry need only a few days’ work before men who had signed up to fight from the sky resumed moiling toward freedom.

  More perplexing was what to do about the yellow spoil that couldn’t be disposed of on the snow. After much discussion, Roger Bushell, who headed the Escape Committee, decided to risk hiding the spoil under the theatre—since it was built with Red Cross tools and its productions used Red Cross supplies, many thought it had what amounted to parole tool status
.161 Bushell knew also that if the Germans discovered the spoil stored in the theatre’s basement, things could become difficult for Father Goudreau, for that’s where his chapel was, though perhaps the chapel’s very presence would dissuade the Germans from searching there.

  Another problem was that the Canadian digger Scruffy Weir, who had been sent to Stalag Luft III after recovering from his burns, the sight of which had so shaken Brian Hodgkinson, dug too far to the right, while fellow Canadian Hank Birkland dug too far to the left. To keep Harry true, Floody hit on the idea of scheduling one to dig immediately after the other.

  28 JANUARY 1944, BONAPARTE BEACH, BRITTANY

  DUMAIS SENDS HIS FIRST SHIPMENT OF “PARCELS” TO BRITAIN

  The BBC announcer was no longer concerned about Yvonne’s happiness. Instead, he said “Bonjour tout le monde à la Maison d’Alphonse,” prompting Le Cornec to open a bottle with which he, Dumais and Labrosse toasted what they hoped would be “a busy season.” A few hours later, the Allied airmen who had been hiding in nearby farmhouses arrived at Jean Gicguels’ stone cottage, not far from Geulit Cove. There, at what became known as La Maison d’Alphonse, they met what appeared as just another Frenchman doing his bit to redeem the honour of the country that had collapsed before Hitler in May 1940. Command came easily to the diminutive Canadian, who shocked the escapers by addressing them without the trace of an accent. “Well, fellows,” said Dumais, “this is the last lap of a long journey. It is the last, but the most dangerous one. We are about a mile from the Channel; if everything goes well, you’ll be aboard a British warship in two hours and in England by nine o’clock in the morning.”162