The Forgotten

by Nathan M. Greenfield

  “We were the only plane on this mission, and the hope was that the Germans might take us for a photographic mission and not send up any interceptors,” recalls Reid, who when the bridge did not come into view as expected did some quick calculations, which revealed that a wind shift had pushed them off course and they would have to circle back some 50 miles to the town of Turnu Severin (present-day Drobeta-Turnu Severin), Reid’s navigation point, and then fly east again. After locating the bridge, Tom Bradshaw pitched his plane toward it, though they were not yet closing in for the kill. Destroying a bridge cannot be done by flying over it perpendicularly because the bridge’s span would flash too quickly under the bomb sight. Instead, a plane must track along the bridge. “To ensure this, our captain steered a dummy run over the bridge at 1,500 feet,” explains Reid. “We’d been told that the bridge was undefended; still, even though I’d been on 40 other missions and shot at many times, and shot down once, in the minutes between the dive, the run and when we began to climb again, I had to remember to take a breath.”

  After circling around, the plane flew between 100 and 150 feet above the train tracks leading to the bridge. Seconds from it, a flak train’s 20-mm rapid-fire guns opened up. “Even above the noise of the four Bristol Hercules engines,” recalls Reid, “I could hear the explosions of the shells that formed flashes in the darkness around us. Almost at the same time, the plane began to shake, and I heard our bomb aimer, Ibar ‘Mac’ McKenna, yell through my headset in a pained voice that said he’d been hit and that he’d released the bomb. Relieved of 4,000 pounds, the plane lurched up about 100 feet and out of the line of fire.” The plume of fuel streaming from its starboard tank turned to fire that trailed hundreds of feet behind the plane. The two-ton armour-piercing bomb severely damaged the bridge, which trains had used in carrying important petrochemical products to Germany.

  The 20-mm shells badly damaged the plane’s engines. A starboard one was losing power, while a port engine, its constant-speed unit damaged, raced, causing the plane to veer to starboard. “We didn’t have a co-pilot on this trip,” recounts Reid. “So, as Bradshaw struggled to control the plane, I jumped into the co-pilot’s seat; it took both of our strength to right the rudder and ailerons.” Reid’s precise words, reflecting a lifetime as an engineer, hardly convey the scene. As they fought to control the plane, he was breathing through a mask, the plane that was elegant in flight was shuddering and the steady throb of its engines had been replaced by the roar of the out-of-control port engine.

  A few moments later, the wireless operator made his way back into the cockpit. “Mac’s had it,” he said. Reid, who had flown with Mac more than 30 times, told Bradshaw that he had to check for himself and unbuckled his belt while the pilot continued to battle for control of the stricken plane. As the burning aircraft slipped over the Yugoslav border, “I managed to snake my hand under Mac’s flying tunic, which was covered by his Mae West and parachute harness, and felt no signs of his heart beating or breathing,” says Reid. “Then I ripped off his mask and put my lips to his in the hopes of detecting any sign of breathing. I did not and went back to the cockpit and told Bradshaw that, indeed, Mac was dead.”

  SPRING 1944, MILAG UND MARLAG NORD, NEAR BREMEN, GERMANY

  AN ARROGANT GERMAN BENDS HIS KNEE

  Alerted that the Germans were going to search his chapel for a radio, Father Pâquet was already there when a guard named Shöfe, backed by five other guards with bayonet-tipped rifles, arrived. After Shöfe said that he was sure Pâquet would not object to the search, the priest appealed to Shöfe’s sense of honour, insisting that the search be conducted with dignity.

  When Shöfe approached the table on which bread and wine became the body and blood of Christ, Pâquet politely asked the German to go no further. With a sneer, Shöfe said, “I trust you, Father, but wouldn’t that sacred table be a perfect place in which to hide a radio?” After the “arrogant Nazi” dismissed Pâquet’s plea for the sanctity of the altar, the priest played his last card.185

  “Okay. But, I have to open the tabernacle myself and since you are here in a Catholic church, you have to conform to our ways: you will have to be on your knees before the Blessed Sacrament.” Then, as the Germans stood watching, the Oblate lit two candles, put on his surplice, opened the tabernacle and genuflected, leaving enough room for Shöfe to shine his flashlight in for a moment. Then, to Pâquet’s surprise, the fanatical Gestapo officer was on his knees before the altar.

  Though Pâquet was not hiding a radio (it was in Charles Fisher’s sick bay), the Kommandant was right to suspect that, despite their holy orders, the Oblates were not above being involved with smuggling and hiding radios. As noted earlier, Father Goudreau hid a radio in his room, and Father Charbonneau helped a British Kriegie smuggle radio tubes into camp in a cast after he feigned a broken leg on a work commando site.

  8 MAY 1944, NEAR ŽAGUBICA, EASTERN SERBIA, YUGOSLAVIA

  REID WONDERS, “HOW THE HELL DID MRS. REID’S BOY GET INTO THIS MESS?”

  They were not in uniform, but the bandoliers of ammunition slung over their shoulders, the automatic weapons they carried and the lack of coal shovel helmets told Reid they were Resistance fighters. Still, the 20-year-old from Edmonton watched and waited. He had been alone since parachuting out of his burning Wellington bomber—and experiencing, for a few seconds, the inertia-generated sensation of not so much falling as moving forward in tandem with the aircraft, surrounded by the din of the plane’s engines. Given that his landing was so hard it knocked the wind out him, it was a good thing that he had pulled the rip cord after counting to five, rather than waiting until ten.

  “How the hell did Mrs. Reid’s boy get into this mess?” he thought as he unclipped his parachute so he could bury it. “It’s difficult to compress silk, and the hole I’d dug wasn’t deep enough. So I threw dirt and leaves and twigs on it,” recounts Reid. He then took stock of what was in his escape kit. A six-inch square of chocolate, some malted milk tablets, a tablet to purify water, two Benzedrine tablets, a hacksaw and 48 American dollars would not go far.

  When the four men he took to be Chetniks (Yugoslav partisans) neared his hiding place, he stood up and, despite the pain of a rapidly swelling sprained right ankle, jumped up and down with his hands raised. “They noticed me and soon I was looking down the wrong end of their automatic rifles,” says Reid, who hoped that “they did not shoot first and ask questions later.” Asking and answering questions, however, was all but impossible, since the men did not speak English and Reid did not speak Serbian. Worse, although he’d managed to make his story of being shot down understood, he knew that they were skeptical, since the Germans attempted to infiltrate underground Resistance units; skeptical, that is, until he took them to see his ill-buried parachute.

  The Chetniks then led him to a peasant’s hut. A few hours later, another peasant brought them honey, feta-like cheese and unleavened corn bread. When, upon deciding it was time to move on, they saw that Reid’s ankle was too swollen for him to walk, they put him in a cart filled with maize and being pulled by two oxen directed by an elderly Serbian woman dressed in warm peasant clothing, a scarf wound round her head; to hide and keep him warm in the high altitude, the Chetniks covered him with the maize stalks. Reid spent his first full night in Yugoslavia in a hut “made of a pile of stones that were held together with some kind of mortar on top of which was a roof, with a hole in the middle for smoke, made of woven twigs.”

  MID-MAY 1944, BREST, FRANCE

  LIZNICK KNOWS MORE ABOUT GERMANY THAN HIS INQUISITOR COULD GUESS

  During his interrogation, the Germans provided some unintended entertainment. The 70-year-old interrogator feigned believing that “AB” (standing for “able seaman,” Liznick’s rank) signified “AA” (anti-aircraft gunner) and that Liznick had fired on the Germans who had abandoned the torpedo boat that HMCS Haida shot up. After Liznick set him straight, the interrogator changed tack and said that he thought the Allies would win the war. He se
ized on Liznick’s quick agreement to ask, “Why, did you see something?” Liznick was not, of course, going to say anything about the buildup of Allied forces he’d seen in England, so he took shelter in the anodyne comment: “No, I just feel it. We know it in our hearts.”186

  The 19-year-old Kriegie may have been raised in the postage stamp–sized village of Iroquois Falls, Ontario, but he knew more about German history than his interrogator guessed. Liznick’s parents had lived through the German occupation of the Ukraine during the First World War and had watched Hitler’s rise to power with dismay. Liznick had to stifle a laugh when the Gestapo officer told him the Jews caused the war because they were trying to corner German women.

  LATE MAY 1944, PEISKRETSCHAM, SILESIA, POLAND

  JACK POOLTON BECOMES A SABOTEUR

  The argument the POWs raised against unloading tanks damaged on the Russian Front from a train was as much about what the Geneva Convention meant by “war work” as it was about giving a short and thin Kriegie time to crawl into a tank and steal a headset that was later used as part of a radio set. Equally frustrating for the guards was the day Jack Poolton broke three shovels—and, since every member of the work party admitted to being the miscreant, the guards had to forgo punishing anyone, lest the bomb-damaged rails remain unrepaired.

  Emboldened, Poolton and a British soldier risked death a few days later when they removed the rubber seals between airbrake hoses, which rendered the train’s brakes useless. Other times they removed the packing that lubricated the axles of the freight cars—some loaded with Hungarian Jews being transported to Auschwitz—and replaced them with crushed stone.187

  29 MAY 1944, MILAG UND MARLAG NORD, NEAR BREMEN, GERMANY

  FATHER PQUET’S PENTECOST IS INTERRUPTED BY A BOMBING

  While les religieux were proud of Stella Maris, the small wooden chapel at Milag und Marlag Nord, it took only a glance upward to see the rough wooden beams and thin ceiling of a German POW barracks. The floor on which they knelt, too, told the truth of where they were, for it was not marble but unvarnished wood, recalling the room in which the Pentecost occurred 50 days after the Resurrection more than it did the marble or closely fitted and highly polished wood of the churches that generations of the faithful had built in Quebec. From a distance, the chalice on the left side of the altar, itself a rough-hewn table covered with a white tablecloth, was similar to the simple silver ones used in churches like those in Saint-Ludger de Beauce, the village where Father Gérard Boulanger had grown up, or Missisquoi, Quebec, where Father Bernard Desnoyers had first learned the catechism. Up close, the chalice’s lustre was less intense and the hammer marks became visible, as did the blobs of solder that cemented the reshaped Klim can to the stem and the stem to the stand.

  In the middle of the Pentecost service, Luke’s 2,000-year-old words never seemed more appropriate. For just as Father Pâquet finished reading “And suddenly from the heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting,” hundreds of anti-aircraft guns opened up on the hundreds of American bombers flying near the camp. The explosions drowned out Pâquet as he started to read from the Acts of the Apostles: “Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared, among them, and a tongue rested on each of them…. [as they] began to speak in other languages” (2:2–4).

  The guns being situated so close to Milag Nord—the reverberations of the exploding propellant and the shells above shaking the barracks so severely that Pâquet broke out into a sweat—was in violation of the Geneva Convention. Fear, and faith in what lay beyond the Pentecost ceremony, ensured that no matter how frightening the explosions, no one left the chapel.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  June–July 1944

  Murder in the murderer is no such ruinous thought as poets and romancers will have it; it does not unsettle him, or fright him from his ordinary notice of trifles.

  — RALPH WALDO EMERSON

  EARLY JUNE 1944, ON A TRAIN TO STETTIN, GERMANY

  ANDREW CARSWELL TRIES TO IGNORE MAC’S MESSAGE

  The tapping on his boot wasn’t random, nor did it transmit the kind of intelligence officers had in mind when they told downed airmen to use Morse code to communicate with each other when in public. Andrew Carswell didn’t need Mac’s message, “Did you ever see such a gorgeous ass?” or the sequences of taps to tell him that the buxom girl whose body swayed with the movement of the train, had lovely -. .- . .. Because of the crowding of their train compartment, her boot-clad legs straddled his as she held onto an overhead strap, which put her “tits” all but in Carswell’s face.188

  Fearing that if they made eye contact the beauty would read his mind, Carswell resolutely kept from doing so, concentrating instead on their escape, the planning for which had begun weeks earlier. First, they had to reverse the 76 bolts on the door that locked them into the cellblock, a feat accomplished over a number of nights while the guard was distracted by a friendly chat or hot cocoa, a rare commodity in Germany at that point in the war. The songs the other Kriegies belted out to cover the sound of removing the door the night Carswell and Mac escaped were so loud that the guard threatened that if they didn’t shut up, he’d shoot someone. The two hours it took “Paddy” to file down the duplicate key until it opened the stubborn second door passed to the tattoo of the guard’s snoring, which also hid the clamber of Mac and Carswell climbing the fence.

  At four o’clock in the morning, their “Ile ‘eetlah” fooled a man on the bicycle. Mac’s weak German garnered them the two tickets for Breslau and the ticket agent’s contemptuous look. To add to their posed status as uncouth foreign workers, they puffed away on cigarette butts and sat while old ladies stood. At Breslau, they nearly gave themselves away by heading for the exit marked “Soldaten.” On Track 9 in Frankfurt, they could hear their heartbeats as they waited amid German soldiers.

  In Küstrin, after a trainman upbraided them for giving him the wrong fare, they decided it tempted fate to wait six hours in the station for the 4:30 a.m. train. The remains of the haystack just outside town that they’d burrowed into still clung to them, making them look even more like tramps, when they boarded the train for Stettin a few stops before the girl who fired the Kriegies’ imagination climbed aboard.

  2 JUNE 1944, STALAG LUFT VI, HEYDEKRUG, LITHUANIA

  IAN MACDONALD KNOWS MORE THAN HE CAN ASK

  The vagaries of the POW postal system that Ian MacDonald catalogued—his parents’ first letter of 12 January arriving almost a month after their third and fourth, and his 12 January letter not being postmarked by the military authorities for almost two weeks—bewildered even as it entertained his family. They were less happy to read that he had taken up the “vice” of smoking. “The Red Cross supplied us with 50 cigarettes a week. And one of my friends suggested I start smoking them as a way to pass the time. They sure helped do so,” recalls MacDonald.

  MacDonald knew his parents would have to search through his old letters to find the addresses of Mrs. Parkinson in Toronto and John Courtney’s family in Liverpool, and that having lived for so long without word of Ian’s fate, the MacDonalds would feel for the Courtneys. “We enquired again sometime in February, I believe, about John Courtney’s fate, but the Germans have no record of him at all,” MacDonald wrote. He also knew that they’d long ponder his next sentence: “There’s a lot of questions I’d like to ask but just can’t.”

  In fact, MacDonald knew a great deal. At Dulag Luft, he had asked a superior officer to make an official inquiry. When the German replied that they had no record of him, MacDonald wasn’t completely surprised. “I knew from the Resistance that Courtney left the plane alive,” he says. “But he landed in a canal, became tangled in his parachute and drowned. What I didn’t know is what became of his body. Together with the German’s answer, I surmised that the Resistance secretly buried it.” MacDonald kept his counsel, for to ask specifically about Courtney’s body risked endangering the people who had helped him.

  5 JU
NE 1944, BLECHHAMMER, POLAND

  FATHER DESNOYERS WORRIES ABOUT THE STRAIN OF LONG-TERM CAPTIVITY

  It wasn’t every day that an Oblate priest admitted to being perplexed by a statement from the bishops. Father Desnoyers’s confusion was not, however, the first sign of a crisis in faith. Rather, Father Ferragne realized as he continued reading Desnoyers’s letter written in April, the POW’s confusion stemmed from the fact that he did not know that in February the Quebec bishops had called for special prayers for les religieux.

  The rest of the letter, by contrast, was alarming, made even more so by the onrush of events that began a few hours after Desnoyers deposited the letter in the camp’s mailbox. Since 6 June, Canadians had been caught up in the drama, first of D-Day, when 160,000 Allied troops stormed ashore at five Normandy beaches, including almost 21,500 Canadians at Juno Beach; the bloody fight for Caen, which cost almost 1,200 casualties; the daring escape of the Germans at the Falaise Pocket; the breakout from Normandy by US General Omar Bradley’s Fifth Army; and the race toward Paris. What, if anything, the imprisoned priest knew of these events and how this knowledge affected the psychological picture Desnoyers sketched, Ferragne could not know. Instead, though the reality in the camp 5,000 miles away may have completely changed, words on the flimsy paper before him created—as all letters do—what might be thought of as the “epistolary present tense” (wherein the past is present for the reader)—and that present was deeply troubling.