The Forgotten

by Nathan M. Greenfield

  LATE JULY 1944, STALAG LUFT IX-C, MÜHLHAUSEN, GERMANY

  ROBERT PROUSE IS IN “THE COOLER”

  Amid hope and rumours generated by D-Day, the fact that he was due a 21-day stint in the cooler for having escaped slipped Robert Prouse’s but not his Kommandant’s mind. When it came time to serve his spell, he was better prepared for the sensory deprivation of sour, sawdust-filled black bread and water than he had been during his previous spell in the cooler; as long as his eyes were closed, a few grains of salt allowed Prouse to imagine that the tasteless, cold black bread was a pork chop or a piece of steak.

  Each day, having awoken with sore hips from sleeping on bare boards and a stiff neck (his neck having been propped up on a couple of paperbacks, the stories of which were interrupted by missing pages), Prouse kept his mind busy by planning more and more audacious escapes, composing doggerel and computing how many minutes and seconds remained to his punishment. Although well aware that if he lost, his time in the cooler would be extended, Prouse couldn’t help enjoying the game of cat and mouse he played with the guard known as “Plank-face,” who never did catch Prouse smoking his contraband cigarettes.200

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  August–September 1944

  We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we carry nothing out. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.

  — THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER

  (ORDER AT THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD)

  EARLY AUGUST 1944, NEAR PRANJANE, YUGOSLAVIA

  NORMAN REID RADIOS FOR HELP

  USAAF Lieutenant Tom Oliver’s plan to radio the Allies in Italy to tell them that there were some 150 downed American, British and Canadian airmen around Pranjane, Yugoslavia, faced at least two obstacles. First, they lacked a challenge letter—a password—that would indicate the message was truly from downed Allied airmen and not the baiting of a trap. Second, to give their location and status, the message might be long enough to give the Germans time to home in on it, thus revealing the location of the Chetniks’ encampment. Despite these misgivings, Norman Reid agreed with Oliver, who had been an evader one day longer than he had, that the Chetniks weren’t in any hurry to deliver them to the Allies. To their surprise, the Chetniks provided a radio operator.

  In the absence of a codebook, the message had to be sent “in clear,” that is, in plain English. “The messages had to be short but had to contain enough air force jargon to pass muster,” explains Reid. “Because the rescue planes would have to land and take off on grass, and because they would have to pick up so many men, many of them wounded, the rescue could be affected only by DC-3 Dakotas, which every flyer called ‘workhorses.’ Accordingly, one message was ‘Shoot a workhorse to us. TKO’ (Thomas K. Oliver),” Reid recalls. Another used the American nickname for pilots and their penchant for nose art: “Driver of Fighting Mudcat down in Yugo, need help.” A third relied on slang: “Situation SNAFU, 150 GIs down, wounded sick. TKO.”

  6 AUGUST 1944, STALAG XX-A, TORUN, POLAND

  IAN MACDONALD TAKES COMMUNION

  Thanks to the maps published in the newspapers showing the relentless push west by the Red Army, MacDonald’s parents were not at all surprised to learn in January 1945 that the previous August MacDonald had been evacuated from Stalag Luft VI in Lithuania, or that he expected “another move in a couple of days’ time for the same reason.” What they didn’t know, of course, was where he was that January or how he—one of millions of POWs, survivors of concentration camps, terrified civilians and Soldaten belonging to broken regiments—were faring on the icy roads of Germany.

  MacDonald knew that his parents could answer how his brothers Alexander and Leo were “making out in the Senior Service” in only the most general way.201 Both were serving in the Royal Canadian Navy, Leo as a radar operator in the north of Scotland and Alexander as HMCS Ottawa’s anti-submarine officer. After two years of writing to her prisoner-of-war son, Mary MacDonald didn’t need to refer to the Red Cross’s Revised Regulations Governing Communication with Prisoners of War in Enemy, Enemy Occupied or Neutral Countries to know that she couldn’t even allude to the secret message in Sandor’s 15 May letter: “Oh yes, I ran into your cousin Sandor over here. He’s still in the Merchant Marine and expects to be running out of the South of England for a while.” After some confusion, compounded by the fact that William Alexander MacDonald—but always called “Alexander” or just “Sandor” by his family—signed the letter “Willie,” the MacDonalds realized that he was speaking about himself and that the invasion of France was imminent.

  EARLY AUGUST 1944, RAVNA GORA, SERBIA, YUGOSLAVIA

  REID LEARNS HELP IS ON THE WAY

  Reid’s doubts about whether the Chetniks’ radio operator was playing straight evaporated when the man handed him a paper reading “HELP WILL ARRIVE” and asking for their location. “Using the Chetniks’ maps, determining our longitude and latitude was easy,” says Reid, who later learned that the message was actually received—and disbelieved—by his own 205 (Heavy Bomber) Group. “What was difficult was figuring out how to send the coordinates without alerting the Germans. Oliver hit on the idea of using one of his men’s service numbers, to which we added the longitude and latitude and then the instruction to subtract Staff Sergeant Sullivan’s numbers.”

  The Germans may not have broken their code, but when a spotter plane appeared overhead, Reid feared that their directional-finding teams were on to them. The anxiety caused by a lone spotter plane was nothing compared with the frisson that followed the appearance of three Junker JU-52s, which could drop parachute troops. After a few circles, they flew on, likely to the Luftwaffe base a scant seven miles away.

  10 AUGUST 1944, FRESNES PRISON, PARIS

  RCAF FLYING OFFICER JOHN HARVIE IS BETRAYED

  The German occupation of Paris meant that RCAF navigator John Harvie saw nothing of the traditional pageantry associated with Bastille Day, 14 July, as he sat in the back of a large black car that drove him through the streets of Paris. Though somewhat discomforted by being alone (he’d volunteered to be the first from the four evaders he was with to be moved to another safe house), he took heart from the fact that since being shot down on 5 July northwest of Chartres the men and women he’d relied on for help had embodied the French Revolution’s motto, Liberté, egalité, fraternité.

  The car passed the swastika flag–draped Arc de Triomphe, and as Harvie saw soldiers at the ready lining one side of rue des Saussaies, his worry increased, only to ease when the car made a ninety-degree turn and drove through an archway and thus, he thought, away from the Germans. A moment later, the driver slammed on the brakes, and he and the other man in the front seat leaped out of the car, then swung around, revolvers drawn, yelling, “Hands up!”202 The entire incident seemed so much like a B movie that it took Harvie a moment to realize that he’d been delivered to Gestapo headquarters at 11 rue des Saussaies.

  The interrogator’s language skills far exceeded his concern with Harvie’s rights as a prisoner of war. The mere mention of the Canadian’s Geneva protections brought a slap to the face, despite the fact that he’d handed over his identity disks.

  Mercifully, the threat “It does not matter anyway, you will all be shot within the week” was not carried out.203 Instead, Harvie was taken to Fresnes Prison, which already held a number of RCAF men, including Edward Carter-Edwards (shot down a month earlier) and scores of other Allied flyers; by mid-August, 168 Allied airmen, including 25 other Canadians, were held there.

  Deprived of reading material and kept in isolation, Harvie occupied his mind with creating puzzles, whistling the tunes of popular songs, reciting poems learned at school and passages from the Bible, doing Latin translations of texts remembered from high school and debating with himself whether he should become a doctor, lawyer or engineer. The gnawing hunger nearly broke him.

  In early August, Harvie heard the sound of explosions that, he reasoned, came from long-range Allied guns. To him t
hey beat a tattoo that he hoped heralded his release. Harvie knew nothing of Hitler’s order to destroy Paris, but the 21-year-old was enough of a military man to guess that the warlord who’d ordered the Blitz would not hesitate at ordering the destruction of the City of Light. Fearing that the retreating Germans would bundle their prisoners onto a train and take them to the Reich, on 10 August, Harvie scratched out this message:

  F/O John D. Harvie

  J 27573

  RCAF

  Prisoner here

  July 14/44–Aug 10/44

  God Save the King!

  Long Live the Allies!

  Oh to be in Canada!204

  10 AUGUST 1944, RAVNA GORA, SERBIA, YUGOSLAVIA

  REID IS RESCUED

  For three nights, as he heard the American planes circling overhead, obviously searching for the landing field Reid and Oliver had prepared and marked with a fire in the shape of an “X,” Reid kept thinking, “Here’s your chance to get out of this place—a few thousand feet up in the air is your way home, and they can’t find you!” Then, on the fourth night, instead of the sound of planes coming in for a landing, Reid and Oliver heard a great crash, followed by chickens squawking. They ran toward the chicken coop and found three Americans, OSS Captain George Musulin and two others, radio operators, carrying C-rations and radio gear. “I was, of course, overjoyed to see them. Since the DC-3s that would take us out would not be arriving for another day, I can honestly say that in those hours, the C-rations—or to be more precise, the powdered coffee in them—meant even more. After months of drinking ersatz coffee, powdered coffee tasted like ambrosia, and so did the thick piece of fruitcake.” Musulin paid the woman who owned the shed he had destroyed on landing 15,000 dinars, or $10.

  At dawn on the 10th, six DC-3s, flying more in a gaggle than in formation, appeared overhead. The planes were accompanied by a squadron of P-51 Mustangs. “I could tell from their markings that this was not just any squadron. The pilots sent to protect us were the Tuskegee Airmen, the only squadron manned by black Americans.” Once all the planes had landed, the Tuskegee Airmen took the occasion to shoot up the nearby Luftwaffe base.

  Before boarding a plane, Reid gave his boots to a Chetnik and his Smith and Wesson pistol to another, who gave him two kisses, one on each cheek—the second one being a sign of how well they’d come to know each other. “It was a tight fit. The DC-3s were designed to hold about 18 people, but each had to take about 25, many of whom were wounded. The takeoff, during which we brushed the trees, was only the beginning of a white-knuckle flight, during which we were protected by the Tuskegee Airmen flying in formation on either side of us,” recalls Reid.

  14 AUGUST 1944, NEAR LANGEAIS, FRANGE

  STAN DUTKA SURVIVES STRAFING AND ESCAPES

  In the scant seconds the pilots had to decide whether to fire their guns, they looked for a large red cross on the train in a siding near Langeais, France. Instead, they saw men trying to camouflage the train, marking it as a “target of opportunity” for the Allied pilots who now commanded the air. The strafing scattered the Germans and allowed some nearby French women to rush to the train and open its doors.

  By the time Stan Dutka jumped from the train, the Germans had returned and were shooting at the prisoners. Instead of running, Dutka stopped to help the wounded, whose numbers soon grew when the planes strafed again. Then the Germans began shooting at some of the women who had helped the POWs.

  Covered in other men’s blood, Dutka pretended to be injured and limped to where a guard had gathered some wounded men. The guard told him that the train also contained about a hundred Luftwaffe officers, arrested after a bomb failed to explode in an attempt to kill Hitler a month earlier, which was the first the POW had heard of Claus von Stauffenberg’s plot.

  Thinking that Dutka was lame, neither this guard nor the others took much notice when he moved closer to the nearby wood. There he waited until, shrouded by darkness, he was able to slip into the wood and begin running. Before long, he came across two civilians, who took him to a house, where he ate, washed, and was given civilian clothes before being taken to a second house. There he was hidden just over a week, until 14 August, when he was driven to the nearby town of Angers, which had been liberated by General George Patton’s army two days earlier.

  14–15 AUGUST 1944, ON A TRAIN OUTSIDE PARIS

  HARVIE, RCAF SERGEANT EDWARD CARTER-EDWARDS AND THE OTHER ALLIED AIRMEN ALMOST CHOKE TO DEATH

  John Harvie was right.

  Even as the sounds of battle closed in on Paris, Harvie’s SS captors loaded him, Edward Carter-Edwards and the other Allied airmen (and, to Carter-Edwards’s horror, the couple that had guided him to Paris) first into trucks and then into boxcars, 90 to a car built to hold 40. The heat of August combined with the fetid smell of unwashed men, vomit, urine and the remains of dysentery attacks that dripped down the legs of embarrassed men to create a nauseous miasma that not even those near the openings between the slats could fully escape.

  Not long after it wheezed out of Paris and into a tunnel, the prisoners felt the train jerk to a stop. Their first worry, that the SS would massacre them if the Resistance had blown up the tracks, was quickly replaced with the fear of suffocation as thick black smoke began seeping into the boxcar. Carter-Edwards remembers wondering as the blackening air burned his eyes and throat, and as he heard the choking and coughing around him, if this breath would be his last. As men breathed carbon dioxide and even more deadly carbon monoxide, some began to hallucinate. American pilot Roy Allen, who had been breathing through a sweat-soaked piece of cloth, was aware enough to feel the train backing up. By the time Harvie and Carter-Edwards’s car was opened, Allen and the men in his car were already on a field, gasping in smoke-free air.

  A short time later, the SS troops divided the men. One group was hostages. The men in the other, larger group, some of whom were forced to carry German equipment, were marched down a dusty country road. When they neared the far end of the tunnel, they saw that the track had indeed been blown up, thus preventing the train from reaching the bridge that spanned the Marne, the river at which the French had stopped the German advance on Paris in September 1914.

  At one point on the three-mile forced march, a few prisoners broke file to go to a well near the side of the road. A few hand pumps brought forth a welcome flow of cool water and threats by the guards that they’d shoot the men if they didn’t get back in line. Some of the people in the hamlets they passed bravely gave the “V” sign made famous by Churchill and threw them potatoes, tomatoes and small loaves of bread. A few even “darted out from their doorways, carrying cups of water or cider, even wine.”205 Despite his weakened state, Harvie considered charging down the slope and into the river but then realized that the Germans could toss hand grenades into the water.

  The POWs expected that once they were in the town they’d be taken to a prison and so were surprised when they were led across another bridge and to a waiting train. Before forcing the prisoners onto it, the SS guards allowed Red Cross workers to give them rough brown bread, sweetened with “jam” that left a decidedly chemical taste. While this group of POWs ate, the second group of prisoners arrived.

  16–17 AUGUST 1944, ON A TRAIN IN FRANCE

  HARVIE LEARNS TO HATE THE GERMANS

  This cattle car was somewhat less crowded than the previous one, and it had a barrel for use as a latrine. But what heartened Harvie and the other men most was that, just before leaving the car, the French workman who had been covering the ventilation cuts with barbed wire dropped to his knee and with his hammer pried up a floorboard. Escaping was not, however, simply a question of waiting until the train was underway and then dropping to freedom, for a barbed-wire broom had been attached to the rear of the train. To survive, an escaper would have to roll over the rail and between the wheels of the moving train.

  A total of five men, including RCAF pilot Joel Stevenson, escaped before the Germans realized what was happening and started searching the und
erside of the cars.206 As three men stood on the plank to hold it in place while the guards prodded beneath the car, Harvie thought the prisoners had caught a break when the train inched forward, which he took as the signal for the guards to climb aboard. He knew they hadn’t when he heard a burst of gunfire and the train stopped. A few moments later, the guards stormed into the car and nailed shut the escape hatch.

  As mile after mile of France slipped away beneath them, the earlier threat that they’d be shot began to seem less ominous. Then, shortly after dawn, the train stopped and the door to Harvie’s car was opened, revealing a row of young SS troopers pointing machine guns at the other prisoners. Some of the SS men entered the car, screaming, “Raus, ihr Schweine.”207 When the “pigs” refused to move, a few of the heavily armed troopers started shoving POWs toward the door; others pulled whomever they could reach to the ground. Soon some 50 men, including Harvie, were standing in a field in the middle of France and ordered to strip. “The bastards,” Harvie feared, “are going to shoot us naked so that our clothing can be recovered … without bullet holes and blood stains!”208

  The SS’s plan proved more benign. Stripping the POWs naked ensured that they would not try to escape from the train. A few hours later, the train stopped again. The men who had dived for the floor upon hearing a submachine-gun blast had just climbed to their feet when the Germans opened the car’s door and demanded to know who had been looking out the vent. For a long moment, no one moved. Then a young prisoner came forward. The SS men ignored the cries of the other POWs that the boy needed medical attention for the hand just hit by bullets fired to enforce the order against looking out the vent. Instead, Himmler’s men grabbed the boy and pulled him to the ground.