Climbing down, Russ examined the three-inch hole in the hull. He traced a path away from the tank, in the direction of some bushes lining the laneway. Walking behind the bushes, he found a discarded Panzerfaust launch tube, a hand-held anti-tank weapon.
Russ pieced together what must have happened. The tanks were ambushed by a band of Germans attempting to escape the area. The joining of the Canadian and American armies near Falaise had completed the encirclement of the German Seventh Army. The Germans were desperate to escape north of the Seine, fighting through the thin cordon of Canadian troops spread out across the countryside. Despite closing the Falaise pocket, it was a leaky trap, and small groups of Germans continued to filter through the Canadian lines. The Germans hid during the day and moved at night. When the Canadian tanks entered the forest, they’d unknowingly disturbed a hornet’s nest.
The concealed Germans would have heard the approaching tanks, but seeing no infantry, they would have known it was safe to let them approach. When the trap was sprung, the lead tank was fired on from close range with the Panzerfaust. With the first tank disabled, the Canadian troopers would have pulled their hatches closed, making themselves virtually blind. Then the Germans could easily approach. They must have climbed onto the tanks and told the trapped Canadians to give themselves up or face the consequences.
The Germans had done their best to disable the captured tanks. They destroyed the breech of the tank’s cannon and shot up the command tank’s radio equipment. The only reason they hadn’t siphoned off gasoline and poured it inside the crew compartment to set the tanks alight was the attention the smoke and explosions would have brought.
There was no sign of the ten men who had been in the tanks. The troopers must have been taken prisoner, but by no means were they safe. Forced to accompany their German captors, the Canadians would be subject to attack from their own troops. But with the Germans desperate to flee north, dragging prisoners along would be difficult and a threat to the their escape. It was also no secret that members of the 12th SS Division had executed Canadian prisoners at nearby Ardenne Abbey. Remnants of that infamous division continued to be the nemesis of Canadian troops in the fighting around Falaise.
Russ returned to Headquarters and reported the discovery. Several days later one of the captured troopers turned up. He was a British artillery officer who confirmed what Russ had pieced together. He also told how he had escaped and reported the troopers were all alive and without serious injury. They were taken north by their German captors and were surely on their way to Germany and a POW camp.
During the 1930s, economic hardship forced thousands of Canadian teenagers to grow up quickly, taking on the responsibilities of adults. In 1938, Russ was twenty-two and the Depression was all he had known as an adult. He already had spent six years supporting his mother by working demanding jobs for low wages. It was pick-and-shovel work and bush jobs, with no end in sight. But it was hard to ignore concerns about a looming war in Europe, trumpeted in newspaper headlines and on radio. The world was split in two camps, the democracies led by Great Britain, the United States, and France, and the dictatorships of Fascist Germany, Italy, and Spain, and Communist Soviet Union.
Every day newspapers reported the threat posed by Germany to democratic nations. The focus shifted from trouble spot to trouble spot in Europe, fanned by the threat of Nazi aggression, from the Ruhr to Austria, the Sudetenland, Danzig, and Czechoslovakia. Since taking absolute power, the Nazis had shown their willingness to treat their own citizens with violence. Canadians already were reading about concentration camps, where brutal treatment was the norm.
While other nations stepped up the production of armaments, Canadian politicians said they would support Britain in the event of war, but did little to increase the size of the armed forces or to equip them. When 1938 came to a close, Canadians had a sense of foreboding that war was inevitable. If war came, it would require young men like Russ to put their lives on hold and shoulder even greater responsibilities than they had faced during almost a decade of the Depression.
Two
Fremd im eigenen Land
A Stranger in His Own Land
Frank’s pulse raced with the roar of the engine. He was the lone passenger on the small Junkers W34, skittering across the runway in northern Finland as the pilot swung the tail around, coming to a stop facing down the long asphalt strip. The pilot pushed the speed control lever forward, causing the small craft to shake in anticipation. Suddenly, it jumped forward as he let go of the brakes, and Frank grabbed the edge of his seat, his hands slippery with sweat. The accelerating aircraft bounced along the runway, and as the nose lifted, the pilot pulled back on the control column.
The pilot turned to look at the blond paratrooper, whose face was pressed against the window as the plane rose into the air. He looked barely more than sixteen, like a boy dressed in a soldier’s uniform, though his identity card said he was twenty. The pilot chuckled, remembering when he had checked the young man’s orders against his identity card. Both said he was Franz Sikora, but when the pilot called the boy Franz, he was told, with a hint of defiance, that despite what his papers said he was Frank. Franz was his father’s name.
The weather in Freistadt,[1] Czechoslovakia, was cold and rainy and, as always in such weather, Franz Sikora’s legs ached. He limped slightly, walking slowly to the court office. His head also ached from the celebration of the previous evening. His friends had joined him, raising glass after glass to celebrate the birth of Franz’s first child, a son. The men he celebrated with, all in their early thirties, were veterans of the Great War, members of the same regiment from their town. The regiment was raised in 1914 in the Teschen region, part of Austria-Hungary. Glasses were raised to toast Franz’s son and his wife Josefina. Though his drinking this night was an exception for Franz, the celebration continued late into the evening. As usual when the old comrades met, the conversation turned to the former commander of their regiment, to friends who had not returned from the war, and to those like Franz who had been badly wounded.
When his friends asked what the boy would be named, Franz paused for a second then told them his son would also be named Franz. The friends stood up, held their glasses before them, and in unison said, “To Franz.” They refilled their glasses but then sat silently. They thought of happier times for Germans like themselves.
Franz looked in the mirror at his legs as he dressed for work the next morning. They were thin and very white, like two fragile sticks. He ran his hands over the pockmarked skin, puckered and purple where the machine gun bullets had struck him as he had gone over the top of the trench in an attack on Allied lines. Finished dressing, he put his son’s birth registration in the breast pocket of his jacket. As he walked the narrow cobbled street to the court building where he worked, he felt nervously for the papers, anticipating the reaction of the Czech official when he saw the name printed on the forms.
Naming first-born sons after the emperor was a tradition all Germans in Teschen had once followed. But in 1924, when Franz’s son was born, Austria-Hungary no longer existed. Teschen had been made part of a new country, Czechoslovakia, ruled by the Czechs from Prague. And the emperor was long dead. Franz-Josef died in 1916, when the Great War still had years to run. It was just as well he had died when he did, Franz thought, since it would have tormented the great old man to see the country he’d ruled for more than fifty years split up. Naming his son Franz was a tribute to a time when Austria-Hungary still existed and Teschen was ruled by Germans, as the Czech in charge of the court office would be well aware.
Franz’s family was German not because they lived in the country of that name. They were German by heritage, descendants of the migration in which, centuries earlier, their forbears moved east across central Europe. Just as there were large differences among people in different regions within the borders of Germany itself, Germans living in Teschen had their own distinctive culture. The region, with its unique dialect and traditions, had a reputation for peaceful coexistence, with Germans, Poles, Jews, Czechs, and Slovaks living in