The Forgotten
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182. Quoted in Vance, Gallant Company, 288.
183. Quoted in Carswell, 177.
184. The Nazis were nothing if not consistent, as can be seen from the decree that Germans could not accept blood donations from POWs, “since the possibility of a prisoner of war of Jewish origin being used as a donor cannot be excluded with certainty.” Cohen, Soldiers and Slaves, 71–72.
185. Quoted in E. Nadeau, 234.
186. Quoted in The Enterprise, Iroquois Falls, 2 November 1988, B1.
187. Poolton, 93.
188. Carswell, 209.
189. Quoted in Dumais, 185. The invasion of Normandy brought with it the order to suspend the Shelburn Line and the instructions to await the Allied advance. Dumais did the former but ignored the latter when he joined with a Maquis who attacked Germans and bombed German positions in what was still Occupied France. Shortly after the Allies liberated Paris, Dumais, who was still officially attached to MI9, returned to his apartment to find a British officer, a Canadian provost marshal and a number of other well-armed men intent on arresting the man the concierge had reported as an imposter and black market operator. Even though Dumais’s belt buckle read “Gott mit uns” (God is with us) and he wore a mishmash of French, American, British and Canadian uniforms, the Canadian lieutenant believed Dumais’s story. He returned to England a few days later.
190. Carswell, 218, 226.
191. Soldiers in battle are not Boy Scouts. While admittedly slight, the difference between the Hitlerjugend’s actions and those of the Canadians who, during the bitter fight for Caen, fired on “the Jerries [who] came in with their hands up shouting ‘Kamerad’” (quoted in Stafford, 126) is due to the fact that the battle was still raging around the Canadians and their blood was still up.
192. Quoted in Margolian, 60.
193. Ibid., 69.
194. Ibid., 72. Meyer was convicted and sentenced to death. The sentence was commuted by Canadian major general Christopher Vokes, who said while considering Meyer’s request for clemency, “There isn’t a general or colonel on the allied side that I know of who hasn’t said, ‘Well, this time we don’t want any prisoners’” (quoted in Brode, 105). Meyer served a five-year sentence in Dorchester Penitentiary before being transferred to a British military prison in West Germany. He was released in September 1954. He became a major figure in HIAG, the Waffen-SS’s veteran’s organization and in 1957 published a memoir entitled Grenadier that praised the SS’s—and his—role in the war. For a full discussion of Kurt Meyer’s trial see Brode.
195. Ibid., 114.
196. Today, in countries like Canada, where there are not enough priests, Larivière’s question has taken on a new urgency. In some places, such as in the far north, deacons are allowed to administer (previously blessed) communion wafers. Both Larivière and Ducharme would have recognized the revolutionary aspect of an affirmative answer to the question about distributing the priests’ sacerdotal power. If being a member of the “faithful living in the world” is enough to qualify someone to give the sacraments, then the entire structure of the Catholic Church from the priest up to the pope can be called into question. Indeed, it is not going too far to suggest the trajectory of Larivière points to something resembling Lutheranism.
197. During the war, Pope Pius XII had other concerns, but he and his theological advisors must have begun considering the “school of Darwin” in a way that would have surprised Charbonneau. In 1950 the pope issued the encyclical Humani Generis, which says that the “Church does not forbid that … research and discussions, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter.” In his 1996 address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Pope John Paul II added, “New findings lead us toward the recognition of evolution as more than a hypothesis.” http://www.ewtn.com/library/papaldoc/jp961022.htm.
198. Carswell, 231.
199. Stalag IX-B is also known as Stalag 357.
200. In late July, a month after Dr. Peter Brownless, who worked with Charles Fisher, offered the Canadian surgeon lieutenant his place on a repatriation list (because Fisher was married and had a young daughter, while Brownless was a bachelor), Fisher boarded a train that took him from Milag Nord onto a ferry bound for Göteborg, Sweden. A few days later, he arrived in Liverpool on the SS Gripsholm, which soon sailed for New York, where he and a number of wounded Canadian soldiers boarded a train for Montreal.
201. The censor who stamped Geprüft 67 almost certainly did not catch MacDonald’s irony here. In Britain, the Senior Service is the Royal Navy. The Royal Canadian Navy, by contrast, dated only to 1910; the Dominion’s “senior service” is the militia.
202. Harvie, 39.
203. Quoted in ibid., 40.
204. Ibid., 52.
205. Childers, 239.
206. With the help of the Maquis, Stevenson reached England on 4 September 1944. His report was the first by a Canadian detailing the airmen’s treatment in Fresnes Prison.
207. Quoted in Childers, 244.
208. Harvie, 65.
209. Quoted in Childers, 247.
210. Harvie, 67.
211. Quoted in Prouse, 124.
212. Just after Christmas 1943, when Jack Pickersgill was in London with Prime Minister Mackenzie King, he arranged for a message to be sent to Frank saying, “Jack says mother is well.” The fake “Pickersgill” answered, “Thank Uncle Jack for his message,” which Kay Moore, a junior member of the SOE communications staff who knew Frank Pickersgill well disbelieved, since she’d never heard of an “Uncle Jack.” SOE missed, therefore, a central piece of evidence showing that Pickersgill and Macalister had been arrested and, curiously, forwarded the following message to the Pickersgill family: “All the best to Jack. Thanks for the personal message from mother. Please send her all my love and tell her I hope to be back soon.” Quoted in Vance, Unlikely Soldiers, 230.
213. Vance, Unlikely Soldiers, 247.
214. Harvie, 83.
215. Kogon, 116.
216. Harvie, 99.
217. Ibid., 106.
218. http://www.lyricsmania.com/peat_bog_soldiers_lyrics_pete_seeger.html
219. There is some controversy about the dates the SOE men were executed. I am following Jonathan Vance’s Unlikely Soldiers here.
220. In a visit a few years ago to Buchenwald, Edward Carter-Edwards and other surviving members of the KLB (Konzentrationslager Buchenwald) Buchenwald Concentration Camp Club were taken on a tour of this factory. “The visit was sombre,” he told me. “But the hair on the back of my neck stood on end when we entered the director’s office, and we saw that all the director had to do was look out his window to see the smokestack above the ovens he made—and the smoke from the fires that burned men and women.”
221. In Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying; The Secret WWII Transcripts of German POWs, Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer go beyond the well-rehearsed argument that the Germans on the Eastern Front fought tooth and nail because they feared (correctly) that the Russians would wreak terrible revenge for the rape and rapine that the Wehrmacht unleashed on Russia. The transcripts of conversations that were surreptitiously recorded show that while the average soldier may not have been “Nazified,” he was certainly “Hitlerfied,” having invested an inordinate amount of his self-identity in the idea of the Führer and his notion of struggle (Kampf).
222. Quoted in Herzog, 173.
223. Such are the fortunes of war that, but for taking a right at a fork in the road instead of a left, like his comrades who had also bailed out, Carter-Edwards would have soon fallen in with a Maquis cell that connected them to MI9, which arranged for his crewmates to return to Britain.
224. Quoted in Kogon, 138.
225. Harvie, 114. On their first day in Buchenwald, Squadron Leader Phil Lamason, the Senior British Officer present, who had been shot down on 8 June while on a bombing raid near Pa
ris, told the airmen, “Gentlemen, we have ourselves a very fine fix indeed. The goons have completely violated the Geneva Convention and are treating us as common thieves and criminals. However, we are soldiers! From this time on, we will also conduct ourselves as our training has taught us and as our countries would expect from us.” Quoted in Moser.
226. Reid, 69, 75.
227. J. Nadeau, 111.
228. The survivors of Buchenwald resented both what they saw as the comfort of Stalag Luft III and the fact that the men there were uninterested in hearing about the horrors of Buchenwald.
229. Quoted in Celis, 230.
230. Harvie, 163, 166.
231. Prouse, 128.
232. Harvie, 175.
233. Quoted in E. Nadeau, 252.
234. Harvie, 176. At New Year’s, Harvie gave way to a certain bitterness for those back in Canada with “safe cushy war jobs” who would never have to face enemy fire or know what it was to serve their country when hungry, cold and without prospects for shelter, and who could enjoy the night by getting drunk (177).
235. Quoted in Leasor, 115.
236. None knew, of course, that the Germans wanted to hold on to their prisoners for two reasons. Since the Reich was being crushed between millions of Russians coming from the east and the Americans, British and Canadians coming from the west, to say nothing of the thousands of bombers laying waste to German towns, cities and transportation infrastructure, the first reason, to deny some 250,000 men to the Western Allies, makes little sense. Given the POWs’ condition, they would not be battle-ready for many months. The second reason, to use POWs as bargaining chips for some future negotiation, was hopelessly naïve and violated Geneva.
237. Grogan, 95
238. Carswell, 247.
239. As it happens, there was another Canadian at Neuengamme Concentration Camp. George Rodrigues, who had been born in Montreal and had served in the Canadian Army’s Corps of Signals before joining MI9, had arrived there in May 1944. He had been inserted into France in August 1943 and captured two months later. Rodrigues was evacuated to Ravensbrück Concentration Camp in April 1944. He survived the war only to die two weeks after it ended from tuberculosis. Rodrigues’s MI9 records in the British Archives remain sealed.
240. J. Nadeau, 114.
241. Quoted in Brown, 197.
242. Harvie, 192.
243. Carswell, 250.
244. Poolton, 107.
245. Harvie, 193.
246. Buckham’s group won the lottery this time, being billeted in a château in Muskau, where there was food, water to heat and a bath, along with a well-equipped woodworking shop, where the POWs repaired their jury-rigged sleds and wagons.
247. Grogan, 96.
248. Poolton, 105.
249. Prouse, 129.
250. Quoted in E. Nadeau, 275.
251. Quoted in ibid., 276.
252. Carswell, 254, 255.
253. Buckham, 52.
254. The Twelve Articles: The Just and Fundamental Articles of All the Peasantry and Tenants of Spiritual and Temporal Powers by Whom They Think Themselves Oppressed.
255. Prouse, 145.
256. Brown, 213. Ironically, the one group in England that Milton did not believe should have freedom of speech was Brown’s Catholic co-religionists.
257. Harvie, 210.
258. Cox, 103.
259. Prouse, 148.
260. Poolton, 112, 116.
261. Harvie, 212–13.
262. Quoted in E. Nadeau, 288.
263. Reid, 80, 84–85.
264. Carswell, 258, 261.
265. Quoted in E. Nadeau, 287.
266. Brown, 224, 225
267. Jim Lankford, “Stalag VII: The Liberation,” Moosburg online, http://www.moosburg.org/info/stalag/14theng/html.
268. Grogan, 108–9.
269. Ian Brown, “Prisoner of War,” http://www.stalag18a.org.uk.
270. Hodgkinson, p. 235.
271. Carswell, 265.
272. Poolton, 117, 120.
273. Ibid., 121.
274. Quoted in E. Nadeau, 281, 282,
275. Quoted in E. Nadeau, 283.
276. Once returned to Russia, most of these thousands of Russians were promptly sent to penal colonies.
277. Brown, p. 248.
278. Quoted in E. Nadeau, p. 302.
279. Poolton, 139.
280. BTS stands for British Thoracic Society.
281. Quoted in London Times, 17 July 2000, Merritt obituary.
282. “Aeropagitica: A Speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing,” http://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/areopagitica/text.shtml.
283. Quoted in Hodgkinson, 48.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nathan M. Greenfield, PhD, is the Canadian correspondent for The Times Educational Supplement and a contributor to Maclean’s, Canadian Geographic and The Times Literary Supplement. He is the author of The Damned, a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction; Baptism of Fire, a finalist for the Edna Staebler Prize for Creative Non-Fiction; and the widely praised The Battle of the St. Lawrence. Nathan Greenfield lives in Ottawa.
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ADVANCE PRAISE FOR THE FORGOTTEN
“Nathan Greenfi eld has a real knack for crafting absorbing stories that really draw you in. The Forgotten is not like any conventional POW history that you may have read before. The vignettes are powerfully moving, full of wit and drama. Greenfi eld gives us a cast of fascinating characters and weaves their experiences together with great sensitivity.”
—JONATHAN VANCE, AUTHOR OF UNLIKELY SOLDIERS
“A touching must-read for anyone interested in the full story of Canada’s Second World War experience. Greenfi eld’s carefully researched account chronicles the resilience, terrors and desperation of these lonely POWs as they strive to keep hope alive in ever more appalling circumstances. He recounts with dignity and grace their bravery in the face of constant illness, privation, abuse and disappointment. It is, however, the scenes at Buchenwald and accounts of the horrors experienced there that are the most wrenching. How these brave men could retain their humanity and keep the spark of hope alive in such circumstances is truly inspiring.”
—ROBERT R. FOWLER, AUTHOR OF A SEASON IN HELL
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POW PHOTO: CANADA’S HISTORY MAGAZINE
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Copyright
The Forgotten
Copyright © 2013 by Nathan M. Greenfield
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Map of RCAF Pilot/Officer Sydney P. Smith’s Evasion Route is reproduced from Lifting the Silence: A World War II RCAF Bomber Pilot Reunites with His Past (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2010), by Sydney Percival Smith and David Scott Smith. Map of Bonaparte Beach is reproduced from The Evaders: True Stories of Downed Canadian Airmen and Their Helpers in World War II (Whitby: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1992), by Emerson Lavender and Norman Sheffe.
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