A double review with The Forgotten: Canadian POWs, Escapers and Evaders in Europe, 1939-45
by Nathan M. Greenfield
HarperCollins, Toronto, 2013
491 pp., illus., $34.99 hardcover
Nathan Greenfield’s The Forgotten and Ted Barris’s The Great Escape: A Canadian Story take significantly different approaches to detailing the life of the Canadians held in Nazi Germany during the Second World War.
The Forgotten is a collection of stories from forty-five Canadians who were held captive during the war. Their experiences are organized chronologically, with new individuals entering the story as they are captured and departing upon their escape or liberation. Each vignette is dated, and many run no more than one or two pages in length.
As Greenfield says in his introduction, “Issues such as hunger, fear, boredom, daring escapes or longing for mail appear as part of their daily lives rather than being summoned to the fore by this historian’s plan.”
For readers, the format doesn’t provide many options. It’s difficult to follow any single story, as the various tales leapfrog through the book, and readers will need to be patient.
Fortunately, the prisoners’ stories are engrossing, detailed, and well worth reading. The human experience is carefully drawn out of their stories, rather than being held up as piece of evidence to support an argument or a theme.
One of the most interesting and unique series of stories follows “Les Religieux,” twelve French-Canadian Oblate priests and brothers and five Sacred Heart brothers who were captured after the ship taking them to missionary work in Africa was sunk in 1941.
Their story is told thanks to a previously little-used trove of “letters, memoirs, and other documents in the Archives Deschatelets at Saint Paul University in Ottawa.”
Greenfield also provides a troubling look at the experience of soldiers captured during the disastrous raid at Dieppe in August 1942. The soldiers were barely fed while they were shipped in boxcars to their eventual POW camp. The story of John Harvie and more than 150 other Allied airmen who were sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp for several months is equally disturbing.
Altogether, Greenfield’s collection provides an exceptional look at the experiences of Canadian POWs during the war.
Ted Barris presents a more traditional approach to the story of “the great escape” following the experiences of Canadian airmen at Stalag Luft III. It was from this camp that, on the night of March 24–25, 1944, a total of seventy-six prisoners escaped in the largest Commonwealth breakout of the war. Out of the group, three men eventually made their way back to England while fifty, including six Canadians, were executed.
The Great Escape provides a good look at the experience in the camp and the secret preparations that led to the breakout. A number of Canadians played significant roles in the escape, and Barris’s book explains their contributions. Wally Floody, who later served as a technical advisor on the film The Great Escape, was a key member of the tunnelling team, until he was shipped to another camp weeks before the escape.
The book relies heavily on Paul Brickhill’s original account of the escape that eventually became the basis for the 1963 film starring Richard Attenborough and Steve McQueen. Canadian historian Jonathan Vance’s A Gallant Company: The Men of the Great Escape is also an excellent account of the daring escape attempt. Vance has written specifically on the Canadians involved in the great escape.
Unfortunately, Barris’s The Great Escape is narrowly focused on the Canadian experience. At times it’s difficult to understand the entire event without knowing more about the contributions of other Allied airmen.
Barris is most successful at capturing the stories of the soldiers, in particular over the final months of the war, and their desperate attempts at survival. For months, Canadian POWs prepared for the war’s end. Most Commonwealth prisoners endured lengthy forced marches through freezing temperatures and snow from early 1945 until the end of the war.
Steve McQueen’s daring motorcycle breakout has cemented the escape as an important moment in memories of the Second World War. The film is not only entertaining but has upheld an image of the prisoner of war that endures today.
Fortunately, what both of these books do — and in particular Greenfield’s excellent collection of stories — is to drive home the excruciating and difficult day-to-day existence of Canadian POWs during the Second World War.
— Joel Ralph (Read bio)
Joel Ralph is the director of programs for Canada's History Society.