29 APRIL 1945, STALAG VII-A, MOOSBURG, GERMANY
FATHER LARIVIèRE IS LIBERATED
Despite his Teutonic name, Charles H. Karlstad was an American brigadier general, tasked with pursuing the remnants of the 17th SS Panzer Grenadier and 719th Infantry Divisions that were falling back toward a bridge over the Iser River. Earlier on the 29th, a car travelling under a flag of truce and carrying a Swiss Red Cross official, an SS officer and two POWs—one an American, the other a British officer—arrived at Karlstad’s headquarters in Puttenhausen to tell him that between his men and the bridge was Stalag VII-A, which held more than 100,000 prisoners, including 30,000 Americans.
Freeing the captured Americans and other Allied troops was important. But the German proposal to create a neutral zone that encompassed the bridge was unacceptable because it would allow all the Germans to withdraw across it unmolested. Worse, were the Germans to be playing by anything less than the Marquess of Queensberry’s rules, they could take the POWs with them as human shields. Accordingly, Karlstad rejected the proposal and instead demand the unconditional surrender of Moosburg.
When the surrender was not forthcoming, American armour overwhelmed in quick succession first an SS stand on the banks of the Amper, then dug-in positions in the field between the river and the town. The Americans raced through the town for the bridge over the Iser, which the Germans blew up just before they reached it. As other Americans neared the camp, the SS peppered their armour with small-arms fire, which was answered with shells and machine-gun fire.
Father Larivière was liberated by US lieutenants Joseph P. Luby and William J. Hodges, whose heaviest gun was a .30 calibre machine gun mounted on their Universal Carrier. As the soldiers approached the gate of Stalag VII-A, they saw 250 armed guards between the inner and outer wire. “Without slackening speed but with both hands on the business end of his machine gun, [Luby] rolled into the middle of the German formation, brought his jeep to a sudden halt and called ‘Achtung’.”267 He then ordered the Germans to line up and drop their weapons. And thus, for the first time in almost three years, hundreds of those who had been captured at Dieppe could look around and not see a German soldier ready to take a bead on them.
2 MAY 1945, NEAR LÜBECK, GERMANY
FATHER BERGERON KNOWS FEAR
The order to board the train that was to take the wounded and sick men the final 36 miles to Lübeck gave Father Bergeron pause. Since leaving Milag und Marlag Nord, he’d seen dozens of burned-out trains.
But the contents of the small, tan cardboard suitcase he insisted on carrying himself assured him. The value of the chalice inside the suitcase was so different from the silver ones used even at the small church in Jonquière, Quebec, where he had served as an altar boy, and from the ones used by Father Deschâtelets at the ceremony on 21 July 1940 in Cap-de-la-Madeleine (near Trois-Rivières, Quebec), where the Oblates received their mission. Silver in colour, though not in substance, the largest and most important item showed the marks of the tin bashing that turned a couple of Klim cans into a chalice, the holy cup wherein wine is transformed into the blood that Catholics believe affirms life—so different from that which when spilled on the ground soon turns the brown of death. The monstrance, which holds the Host, was also of beaten tin, an incised Cross on its ill-fitting cover. The velvet bag that seemed a reliquary protected a glass pipette that measures out the four drops of wine. The suitcase also contained a carefully folded white chasuble that a Kriegie had made for the priest to wear during mass.
Bergeron’s faith gave him the strength to give succour to the wounded and sick men loaded onto the train, and to hear of stories told by men and women who had survived the horrors of Dachau. Bergeron’s faith tamped down his fears during the 36 hours it took the train to chug to Lübeck and the three days it served as his barracks until late in the afternoon on 2 May when British troops liberated him, a few hours after Harvie, Goudreau and Tommy Thompson were also freed. Three days later, the Tommies caught up with the column of men that included Edward Carter-Edwards and several other RCAF men who had been in Buchenwald.
2 MAY 1945, A TOWN IN THE SUDETENLAND, CZECHOSLOVAKIA
JOHN GROGAN IS LIBERATED
The day before, John Grogan and four other men took advantage of the disorder caused by a strafing attack to escape from their column of POWs. Now they were holed up in the rubble of a village that the Germans had a tenuous hold on until, moments after, several T-34 tanks clanged into view and “the ground seemed to explode around where the Germans were.”268
Worried that the Russians might have itchy trigger fingers—and surprised by the sight of a woman climbing out of the first tank and then directing traffic—Grogan and the others waited. They saw an officer “with bits of red on the collar of his tunic and on his peaked cap” get out of his car and spread out his map on the hood. Then they saw more soldiers and armed civilians, who a New Zealand soldier thought were probably partisans, carrying soup kettles. At that point, they figured that the village was secure and fingers somewhat less itchy.
They were wrong. As soon as he stepped out the door, a sniper fired just over Grogan’s head, causing Grogan to duck back into the wrecked house he and the others had been hiding in. Another soldier, who had found the universal sign of surrender, lowered a white sheet from an upstairs window. “Here goes,” the New Zealand soldier said as he and his Allied comrades walked out of the house with their hands up. Luckily, one of them spoke Russian and yelled, “English prisoners of war. Don’t shoot!”
3 MAY 1945, NEAR LÜNEBERG, GERMANY
RUSS BURROWS FINDS HIMSELF UNDER ALLIED ORDERS AGAIN
They had been camping in the field for days. Before that, they’d been at a farm where, amazingly, each man had been given several Red Cross parcels. So Russ Burrows and Pat Ireland, who a few days after feasting on potato pancakes joined a shuffling band of POWs that included several Canadians, were not hungry. The German guards were nothing like those who had shackled Burrows and his comrades. Gone was their swagger. Gone too was their Führer, who had committed suicide three days earlier; now their shrunken state’s commander was Reichspräsident Karl Dönitz, who, in order to give thousands more Germans the chance to cross into American or British lines, was dragging his feet in the surrender negotiations. Some five hours earlier, his writ ended on a patch of ground in Lübeck close to where Robert Buckham’s group had been encamped for more than a week when one of General Bernard Montgomery’s columns emerged from the mist and smoke. The explosion of a shell fired from the lead tank silenced a machine gun in a nearby house, serving as a coda to Buckham’s war.
A few hours earlier, three British Bren gun carriers rumbled into Burrows’s view. “The British were in hot pursuit of an SS detachment. After asking us if we had food, they said they’d inform the proper authorities about our location and that we were to disarm the guards. What really surprised us, however, was the officer who then said that we were to go into a small town built around a man-made lake and secure it,” says Burrows, who armed himself by appropriating a guard’s rifle and bayonet. “If anything, the townspeople were just as happy as we were to hear that the war was over.”
7 MAY 1945, STALAG XVIII-C, MARKT PONGAU, NEAR SALZBURG
FATHER JUNEAU IS LIBERATED BY THE RUSSIAN ARMY
It had taken almost two weeks of marching, but on 23 April, Father Juneau and some 13,000 other POWs evacuated from Stalag XVIII-A in Wolfsberg had reached Stalag XVIII-C. Conditions at the camp at Markt Pongau, which already held 5,000 more men than it was designed to, were deplorable. In the overcrowded hospital, “sick men [were] lying in every corner.”269 More worrisome was the food situation, which despite the presence of Red Cross officials soon became dire.
On 2 May, even though the Wehrmacht units nearby were still fighting the Americans, the camp’s Kommandant ordered the guards to leave, effectively leaving the camp in control of the senior Allied officers. By 6 May, their control was stretched to the breaking point when severa
l hundred hungry men broke out of the camp and looted a German goods train. Order was restored, but the incident convinced the officers to send a medical officer to Salzburg, which they knew was in American hands. The following day, a party of American troops arrived and formally liberated the camp and arranged for supplies to be delivered.
8 MAY 1945, ON A FARM 16 MILES SOUTH OF LÜBECK, GERMANY
BRIAN HODGKINSON IS LIBERATED BY CANADIAN PARATROOPERS
No one in the part of the farm where Brian Hodgkinson was being held knew that a day earlier at Rennes, France, Dönitz had signed the surrender agreement ending the war in Europe. What they did know was that the guards had vanished, and that Polish POWs and dragooned Russian farm labourers who had tended the purebred Jersey cows had also vanished. A few moments of explanation by a Scottish soldier with the relevant experience, trial and error, and some good-natured razzing telling the pilot to “Steer the bloody thing, Hodge,” resulted in first a wet pants leg and then some milk in a pail.270 By the time his comrades realized that the teats could be used as pistols, the floors, walls and remnants of the Kriegies’ uniforms were doused.
Shortly after noon, as the cows lowed peacefully, Hodgkinson looked toward the entrance of the farm and saw the uniforms of the Canadian paratroopers, and his war too was over.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Homecoming
I pass, like night, from land to land;
I have strange power of speech;
That moment that his face I see,
I know the man that must hear me:
To him my tale I teach.
— SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE,
“RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER”
For some, the moment of liberation was quickly followed by truck rides to airfields and flights to Britain. Barely a day passed between when Royal Marines slapped Ian MacDonald’s back and showered him with cigarettes and chocolate bars and when he climbed down from the Stirling bomber in an airport in England, where, within minutes, he went through what amounted to the ex-POW’s baptism. “They took us to an outdoor area and put small pipes in our pants legs and the arms of our jackets and blew in DDT to kill the fleas and lice.” Having washed and donned a new uniform, he and some other men climbed into a truck heading for the Canadian base at Bournemouth. “For weeks I’d had only the haziest idea where I was. And then, on the truck that took us from the airport, I saw through the wet windshield the unmistakable landmark of England, Big Ben, and I knew exactly where I was,” says MacDonald.
Andrew Carswell was back in England on 19 April, just days after feasting on a loaf of white bread still warm from the oven and a disconcerting encounter with two British soldiers in a Jeep who urged Carswell and another POW to kick down the door of any German’s house and “pick up some souvenirs.” When Carswell pointed out that looting was illegal, the soldier asked, “And who’s going to report us?”271 Honoured by the co-pilot who offered the ex-Lancaster pilot his seat, Carswell’s first glimpse of England was of the cliffs of Dover standing against the setting sun. In his tattered clothes, he felt bashful when, upon landing, a pretty young woman wearing the stylish uniform of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force led him to table and supplied him with tea and cakes as she explained the delousing and bureaucratic procedures to follow. Then he was assigned to a sergeant’s room, where he found clean towels, soap and a razor, as well as a pair of RAF-issue pyjamas. Sitting on the bed, with its clean, starched white sheets, Carswell savoured his freedom.
Jack Poolton arrived in England on the 22nd. In the ten days since he’d been liberated when an American Jeep arrived at the barnyard near Ditfurt and a German guard handed over his rifle with the words “Ich bin jetzt der Gefangene (sic)” (I am the prisoner now), much had happened.272 A week earlier, as the former POWs awaited transportation to Britain, a delegation of Ditfurt’s older women came to the Senior British Officer and asked him to billet British or American “kommraden” in their homes to protect them against marauding Poles. Poolton volunteered and understood the mother of the family he was assigned to when said she had always “despised Hitler,” though he did not believe her. And he understood what she was offering when she said she would sleep on the couch and he would sleep in the bed with the young woman. The man who had survived a sniper’s bullet at Dieppe, who had been so thirsty at Envermeu that he tried to suck water from the damp earth beneath a factory floor, who had been shackled like a common criminal, turned down the offer by saying he would sleep on the couch.
A few days later, while walking back to the town, Poolton and several other men were surprised when a soldier stepped from behind a hedgerow, Tommy gun at the ready, and said, “Who the hell are you guys?” Poolton’s explanation brought a deluge of cigarettes and chocolate bars from American troops, who, despite the radio message sent on the 12th, had not known there were any POWs there. At Halberstadt, Poolton’s and the other British POWs’ haggard looks stunned the “beautiful American Red Cross women” and sickened the “black American attendants” charged with delousing.273 On the 21st, after he realized RAF planes would not be soon arriving, an American pilot welcomed Poolton and his British comrades aboard his plane for a flight to Brussels. A day later, Poolton walked into an office at Waterloo Station and sent a telegram to his family before travelling to the Fourth Canadian General Hospital in Farnborough.
Late the previous week, the SS Duchess of Richmond tied up in London and Father Boulanger disembarked. His journey back to England began, as did Jacques Nadeau’s and that of the men the Russians liberated with him, with a trek east. Nadeau’s liberators had allowed the Canadians to take a horse and cart, and their encounters with suspicious units to the rear eased (though their watches not saved) by a pass signed by none other than Marshal Zhukov, who upon meeting the former Kriegies insisted on toasting them with vodka. By contrast, a Russian officer told Father Boulanger and the men with him, “The road is there … March!” Over the 28-day, 200-mile arduous march across the devastated Polish countryside, the priest came to see his small, almost always hungry party as a gathering of Cains, frightened and fleeing “the land of sin.”274
Somewhere south of the ruins of Warsaw, Nadeau’s group boarded the same Katowice-Odessa train Boulanger had boarded a day or two earlier after praying before the famed Black Madonna, in Częstochowa, Poland. Perhaps because Boulanger was a priest or because he had crossed Poland with British POWs, whom the Soviets assumed to either have received aid from or been sympathetic to the Polish nationalists loyal to the exiled government in London and not the Communist puppets Stalin was in the process of installing in Poland, the Russians herded Boulanger’s group into an overcrowded cattle car the priest likened to “a library of humanity.” In Nadeau’s car, in contrast, the five Canadians could stretch out and sleep. None of the Canadians was injured when several trains jumped the tracks. Instead of helping the wounded and respecting the dead, the Russian troops and trainmen looted the broken bodies. Boulanger wrote in disgust, “You’ll have to convince someone else other than me that these are civilized people … But I forget … they are our allies! Vive Stalin! Vive the Russian paradise.”275
Of the few days he spent in the Black Sea port before boarding the SS Duchess of Bedford, Nadeau’s most difficult moment occurred while he and his comrades were being deloused. The women who came into the room to pick up the basket filled with their flea-ridden clothes pointed at their penises, laughing at each other’s running commentary. Though spared this mortification, Boulanger was interned in a makeshift camp where armed guards patrolled and once again Red Cross parcels staved off hunger. On 22 March, Boulanger stepped aboard the SS Duchess of Richmond, and since she, like the Duchess of Bedford, belonged to Canada Steamship Lines, like Jacques Nadeau, the priest was actually on sovereign Canadian territory almost a month before reaching London.
By 8 May, Victory in Europe Day—immortalized for most North Americans by the image of a sailor kissing a woman in Times Square—more men, including John Harvie, were back
in England; years later he recalled enjoying the difference between the second-class hotel he had been billeted in when he was a fledgling airman and the turreted Royal Bath Hotel he stayed in in 1945, and rued the fact that his stomach was not quite up to the rich food available from the kitchen more used to serving royalty. Though liberated by the Russians, Stan Darch was lucky that he was not, as were Kingsley Brown and hundreds of other men from Stalag Luft III, still in a POW camp, this time under Russian control.
The well-armed female tank commander likely knew nothing of the growing tensions between the Russians and the Western Allies over Stalin’s demand that Soviet POWs who had fought for the Germans be forcibly repatriated to Russia. These tensions had resulted in Russian soldiers firing over the heads of ex-POWs who had climbed into American trucks arriving in Luckenwalde, thus forcing the men back into the prison camp.276 Instead, the tank commander gave Darch and the other POWs a team of horses and a wagon that allowed them to cover the 40 miles to the American lines in time to eat supper at a proper hour on 5 May. Darch arrived in England on the 10th, three days after the crew of HMCS Athabaskan arrived in the belly of a Lancaster bomber and three days before Robert Brooks and his crewmates arrived in England; they had been liberated by the Russians on 23 April.
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