The Forgotten
Page 25
Desnoyers’s observation that captivity “produces a curious psychological effect among most of us. In the absence of other elements, accidental details of life [in the camps] are often blown out of proportion” signalled that the camp’s psychology had moved beyond the strains that Ferragne might guess at. That on particularly rainy days they had to treat certain Kriegies with “extrême délicatesse” spoke for itself.
6 JUNE 1944, NORMANDY
D-DAY
By nightfall, several hundred Canadians lay dead on Juno Beach, but the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division had made a lodgement in France. Sergeant C.B. Morris of the North Nova Scotia Highlanders and his men were in a field about three miles from Saint-Aubin-sur-Mer. True, the Canadians had not reached their first day’s objective, Caen (and wouldn’t for weeks), but neither had the British at Gold or Sword Beaches, or the Americans at Utah and Omaha. Indeed, the forward elements of the Canadian force were deeper into France than those of any other division that attacked Hitler’s vaunted Western Wall that famous day.
None of the POWs knew these details, of course. But across the length and breadth of Hitler’s empire, hundreds of thousands of POWs knew that the long-awaited Second Front had finally been opened. At Heydekrug, in Lithuania, Andrew Cox (who had arrived there a few months earlier) and MacDonald learned about it when it was broadcast over the camp’s loudspeaker: “There has been an attempted landing on the Cherbourg Peninsula. And it has been repulsed.” MacDonald, who, had been bashing the circuit recalls laughing at the idea that the Germans would throw the Allies back into the sea. Near Stargard, Germany, Jacques Nadeau, who, as his landing craft approached Dieppe almost two years earlier had seen two dozen of his Fusiliers Mont-Royal comrades blown apart when a mortar bomb exploded in their landing craft, heard about the landing in Normandy from a radio that belonged to German civilians working on the farm.
In Yugoslavia, where he was one of many supplying prison labour, Norman Reid heard about the invasion while listening to the Chetniks’ radio. Though they didn’t speak English like MI9 and SOE agents scattered throughout Europe, the Chetniks tuned to the BBC to hear coded messages. Reid’s joy at learning of the invasion competed with his worry about his parents; he knew that they would have received word that his plane was missing and wouldn’t be able to stop worrying that he had died before this, his 21st birthday.
From the quantity and type of stores being landed with each Bonaparte and the increased bombing of rail yards, Lucien Dumais had guessed the invasion was near. Yet excitement shot through him when, at 11 a.m., he heard the radio announcer state: “Early this morning the Allies landed in Normandy.”189 Stuart Kettles and the other survivors of HMCS Athabaskan were still in solitary confinement and didn’t learn of the invasion for 11 days.
Carswell and Mac did not hear about the invasion until they were returned to Stalag VIII-B almost a month later. After arriving in Stettin on D-Day, they survived Carswell’s dropping of his POW identity disk right in front of two German guards—who missed the glint of metal because they were frogmarching two British POWs. Mac and Carswell were less lucky a few hours later when a local policeman enforced the laws against foreign workers being away from work during work hours. Their admission at the police station that they were “English prisoners of war” caused one officer to pull his gun and another to call the Gestapo.
The two SS men who burst into the room looked and acted as if sent from central casting, brandishing Lugers, with one yelling, “Move it! Fast, you English pig-dogs!” as they pushed Mac and Carswell down the hall into a black Mercedes.190 The men in the building, which, to Carswell, was reminiscent of the buildings on Toronto’s University Avenue, sported Schmeisser machine pistols. Carswell’s offer of a Sweet Caporal cigarette to the Charlie Chaplin lookalike brought another round of “Schweinehund Engländer,” which didn’t violate Geneva, and a blow to the side of his head, knocking him down, which did. Both Carswell and Mac had given the police their POW identity disks. After an interrogation, during which the interpreter’s poor English was exceeded only by their poor German, the two were marched down a hallway. When they didn’t move fast enough, each was kicked so hard he landed face first on the floor.
Worse was to follow: being left to shiver while naked and being crammed with 18 other men into a 10-by-20-foot cell lit by one dim bulb. “The idea of dying scared the hell out of me,” recalled Carswell, “but what really frightened me was the idea of dying under someone else’s name. If I died, I wanted at least my parents, friends, and relatives to know what had happened to me.”
6 JUNE 1944, 10:30 A.M. TO DUSK, NORMANDY
Canadian Sergeant C.B. Morris Sees the Hitlerjugend Murder Other Canadians
“Live fire” exercises barely approximate battle. Still, the pre-invasion training gave Morris and his men some idea of what they’d face when they waded through the Normandy surf, as they did at 10:30 a.m. on 6 June under the protective fire of three Royal Navy cruisers and fighter bombers rocketing and strafing German positions. However much Private Lorne Browne and his comrades in the North Nova’s 7 Platoon cursed the planners of training exercises, those exercises did teach them how to avoid shrapnel and the deadly splintered remains of trees blown apart, like those in the orchard they’d just run into on the outskirts of the village of Authie. Those exercises also taught them to use their Browning automatics, which took a toll on Oberstleutnant Karl-Heinz Milius’s 3rd Battalion, which was part of the 12th of the 25th SS-Panzergrenadier Regiment Hitlerjugend. No training regimen could have ensured that all of the men who, near 2 p.m., ran back through the narrow streets of Authie would zig, zag or hit the dirt in time to avoid the vectors of death created by German guns in a village the North Novas thought they’d cleared a few hours earlier. Yet like Captain Frederick Fraser and the tank officer whom Morris saw being blown up while trying to get their tank out of the orchard, his comrades who died on Authie’s dusty streets died soldiers’ deaths.
Even before seeing the stylized lightning bolts of the SS on their shoulders—or that some of soldiers to whom he and his comrades were surrendering were too young to shave—Morris realized that these Germans were nothing like regular soldiers, whom he expected to conduct themselves like battlefield bookkeepers, interested only in names, ranks and service numbers. Instead, the Hitlerjugend “behaved like a crazy bunch of fiends,” wounding several Canadians in the legs with gratuitous automatic weapons’ fire. In shock from being hit in the face and arm, another North Nova, Corporal W.L. MacKay, who had already seen a victory-drunk teen shove Browne to the ground, step on his head and repeatedly bayonet him, witnessed killing after killing—none of which could be attributed to the blood-dimmed tide of battle.191
In an alley off Authie’s main street, MacKay saw Privates John Murray, Anthony Julian, James Webster and five other Canadian POWs sitting on the street being ordered to take off their steel helmets, and watched helplessly as an SS man shot each in the head. Then, in an act that hearkened back to the barbarity Sophocles decried in Antigone more than two millennia earlier, the killers dragged two of the bodies into the middle of the street, where they revelled in the sight of a tank running over them. What remained of them “could be collected in a shovel,” recalled Authie resident Constance Raymond Guilbert, who a few minutes earlier had seen another SS trooper use his rifle butt to bash in Private William Nichol’s skull as he tried to surrender.192 Other SS soldiers took a Canadian corpse, propped it against a wall, placed an old hat on its shattered head and shoved a cigarette into its mouth.
Private John Metcalfe, another North Nova, paid for being unable to pull the small metal box containing his emergency chocolate out of his tunic fast enough with four bullets in his abdomen, minutes of agony and then three shots to his head. If Lance Corporal Joseph Arsenault thought that answering an SS commander’s question in his Summerside, PEI, French might soften the German’s demeanour, he was mistaken; the SS officer killed Arsenault with one pistol shot to his neck. Private Jeffre
y Hargreaves was murdered because with a wounded leg he had trouble keeping up with the POWs being marched from the village of Buron, while a blast from a machine pistol killed one POW and mortally wounded another some distance up the column.
The six Canadians an SS officer shoved into Madame Godet’s house knew that its thin roof and stone walls wouldn’t provide much protection if one of the heavy shells British warships were firing at the defences of nearby Caen fell short, but at least it would protect them from shrapnel, like that which wounded another North Nova’s leg so badly he fell out of the line of march. Nothing could protect them from the SS officer who shot each of King George’s Canadian soldiers in the head. Not far away, the SS man who pushed Louis Alaperrin, a brave Normandian, away from the wounded North Nova was no less imbued with his Führer’s cause; he fired two shots that destroyed the Canadian’s head. About the same time, an SS NCO in nearby Authie ignored the Red Cross brassard on the arm of a Canadian who was tending to still another North Nova and shot the medic dead. The SS reinforcements rushing to the front barely broke step when they met up with the column of Canadian POWs being marched toward Caen but slowed down long enough to shoot nine men in cold blood.
As they neared the outskirts of Caen toward dusk, the injured Private J. MacDonald, in a horse cart being pulled by other exhausted and battle-shocked men, was at the end of the line of men who had been told, “For you, the war is over.” Since the road was wide, at first MacDonald thought nothing of the oncoming truck. But as it neared, the driver swerved and drove into the column of defeated men, killing privates Douglas Tobin and Roderick McCrae outright and wounding two other Canadians before swerving back to the other side of the road.
This time, the Germans did not leave the dead on the road. Instead, they ordered Morris and a few other men to carry the bodies behind a schoolhouse. Oddly, given the sheer bravado of these and other killings, the guard tried to cover up the driver’s crime by marking the graves with the killed soldiers’ steel helmets, the way battle deaths are marked. As well, reported Lance Sergeant Stanley Dutka, “the officers in the [captured] group were forced to sign a paper saying that the men died of wounds.”
The burst of gunfire that killed Lance Corporal J.H. Greenwood and wounded Lieutenant W.F. Grainger, after they and Captain Walter Brown of the Sherbrooke Fusiliers raised their hands in surrender when their Jeep was spotted by a German patrol, left Brown untouched. The young SS trooper who thrust his bayonet into Brown’s body could not have missed seeing the Anglican padre’s clerical collar.
7 JUNE 1944, D-DAY +1 NIGHT, NORMANDY
MURDERS IN THE ABBEY
During the day, the German commander on the scene in the Caen sector watched as his troops contained the Canadians around Authie and Buron. But under the cover of darkness, enraged that he hadn’t driven the Canadian “small fry” back into the sea, SS-Brigadeführer Kurt Meyer lashed out at the impudent invaders. Near 8 p.m., he ordered the bulk of the Canadian prisoners to be marched to Bretteville-sur-Odon, a village about a mile away, while a group of randomly selected POWs were marched from his headquarters at L’Abbaye d’Ardenne to an adjacent château. According to historian Howard Margolian, there, six Canadians were first slapped and then killed “by crushing blows to the head” when they refused to indicate the location of their battalion’s headquarters.193 Another five Canadians were soon executed with a single shot each to the head.
By mid-morning the next day, 8 June, when seven Canadians were brought before him, Meyer’s exasperation burst forth: “In the future, no more prisoners are to be taken.” This became a key piece of evidence in Meyer’s war crimes trial.194 According to SS-Private Jan Jesionek, after the first man was killed by a machine pistol shot to the head, in their remaining moments alive, each man saw the pile of Canadian corpses and the spreading pool of blood. These seven deaths brought the total of Canadians executed in cold blood since the Canadians had touched down on Juno Beach to 55. Over the next 24 hours, another 25 would be murdered, some with a shot to the head, some by machine guns.
11 JUNE 1944, NORMANDY
SIX CANADIAN TANK TROOPERS ARE SHOT DEAD
As Dumais and Raymond Labrosse made their way to Chartres, where they would spend the night in a safe house keeping mum while their hostess, a talkative woman from Quebec, expounded on the glories of Canada, still more of their countrymen breathed their last breath, most having seen the faces of their murderers.
Six were tank troopers. The first to die was Lee Peston, who was shot in the back by the SS men who had taken him and two of his comrades prisoner near the hamlet of Le Mesnil-Patry. Four other tank troopers were executed by an SS soldier named Mischke in a field covered with clover. The NCO escorting four other tank troopers yelled “Run, run” before pulling the trigger on his machine pistol.195 At least one of the stream of bullets ripped through Trooper Lawrence Sutton’s head; others mortally wounded Trooper John Dumont, who groaned in agony for several minutes before dying.
While the deaths of sappers John Ionel and George Benner were recorded in the Royal Canadian Engineers’ war diary and Rifleman Allan Owens’s in the war diary of the Winnipeg Rifles, they died together. A few minutes after a military policeman ripped off their identity disks, a burst of machine pistol fire tore through their backs and pushed their dying bodies into a bomb crater a couple of hundred yards from the grey stone farmhouse that housed SS-Brigadeführer Wilhelm Mohnke’s headquarters. As Mohnke looked on to make sure they were dead, more bullets were fired at their bleeding, broken bodies. In total, Mohnke’s men were responsible for 41 murders; neither he nor any of his men were tried for their war crimes.
Just as four days earlier the Red Cross brassard didn’t protect the Canadian medic tending to a wounded North Nova, the Red Cross flag flying from Dr. Shütt’s first-aid station on 11 June did not protect Major J. Forbes of the Queen’s Own Rifles, nor did the proximity of the first-aid station to SS-Obersturmbannführer Bernhard Siebken’s headquarters, just steps away. Sometime after nightfall, Forbes and tank troopers Arnold Bowes and Glibert Scriven were taken from the German first-aid station and killed. In total, in the ten days starting with D-Day, 156 Canadians were murdered in cold blood.
MID-JUNE 1944, 30 MILES NORTHWEST OF ŽAGUBICA, EASTERN SERBIA, YUGOSLAVIA
NORMAN REID CONVINCES THE CHETNIKS THAT THE AMERICAN AIRMEN NEED A DOCTOR
Their uniforms told him that they were Americans, perhaps some of the very men who dangled from the parachutes Norman Reid had seen blossom beneath planes with smoking engines. Or were they from planes whose absence was marked by the holes in the ragged bomber stream making its way home? Wherever they were from, upon hearing one singing a song he couldn’t understand, Reid was amazed at the speed with which the Yank in the yard they were approaching had picked up Serbo-Croatian. “It was a real treat to be able to speak English. But imagine my surprise when I was told that the song he was singing wasn’t Serbian but, rather, top of the Hit Parade. The words I couldn’t make out were, ‘Mairz doats [Mares eat oats] and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy.’”
Not every American was in shape to sing. Four had broken legs. Reid’s St. John Ambulance training could have dealt with three, but Lieutenant Estop had a compound fracture that was already showing signs of gangrene. Using hand signs, Reid explained to the Chetniks that Estop needed medical help. “At first they shrugged their shoulders and then made clear the difficulty of getting a doctor. I don’t know exactly what convinced them, but something did, and soon they sent for a doctor,” says Reid.
While they waited, peasants dressed in baggy woollen pants and tops, and many with goatskin hats three inches tall arrived carrying cheese, sheep’s milk and unleavened bread. To Reid’s delight, he saw someone light a fire, set up two forked sticks and begin cooking a freshly slaughtered lamb. “I never smelled anything so good in my life,” he recalls. “When it was finished, we sat around a great wooden table and ate chunks of meat off the bone.”
Sometim
e later, the doctor arrived; he, like Reid, spoke some French. Slivovitz—plum brandy—was all they had to help numb the men’s pain, and it didn’t do much. “Their screams were awful, but I simply had to hold on, stretching each man’s leg, until the doctor managed to get the splints into place and then bind them with twine.”
17 JUNE 1944, STALAG LUFT VI, HEYDEKRUG, LITHUANIA
MACDONALD HOPES THE RUMOUR OF A PRIEST COMING SOON IS TRUE
It is a measure of how the military situation had changed that on D-Day plus 11, when the Americans were still slogging through the Normandy bocage and the Canadians were stymied outside Caen, the censor let pass the sentence “News of the invasion has cheered us up quite a bit.” But this was not, MacDonald knew, what would most interest his parents, who hardly needed to be told what effect news of the invasion would have had on their son. Nor were they overly interested in the weather, which, of course, had long passed by the time they would be reading about it. What would really matter to them, especially after his recent admission of having taken up smoking, was that he maintained his faith. They hoped that a padre had, in fact, arrived at MacDonald’s camp. But they took solace in the fact that even without one, MacDonald, who had been an altar boy, continued to say a “service of Rosary and Prayers.”