June 9, 2003
Soon after I arrived in Canada, I met an East European whose country was already part of the USSR at the start of World War II. As Red Army troops of other than Russian extraction were not trusted, his unit was put in the front lines. He surrendered to the Germans at the first available opportunity, and was used as a transport driver and even issued a rifle. Of course, the first chance he got he surrendered to the Allies, and after having started off the war as a Red Army conscript, he finished it as a tank commander with the British Eighth Army in Italy.
One of my boyhood friends was the son of an English mother and a Polish pilot who escaped Europe after the German attack on his country, and who served in a Polish unit of the RAF. He flew a Mosquito aircraft, the fastest the British had, stripped of its guns and defensive armament. The guns were replaced with cameras, and he flew reconnaissance missions. He was often chased by the enemy, and claimed to have obtained several "kills" by the simple expediency of going into a steep dive towards the ground. He pulled up at the absolute last second, and a German pilot, too enthralled with the chase, needed to hesitate only for an instant and he would hit the ground at several hundred miles per hour.
Many pilots from Europe and Eastern Europe were accepted into the RAF, and the British were happy to have them. All except one, that is, the Czech pilot Augustin Preucil. After gathering as much information on RAF morale, strengths, and weaknesses as he could, Preucil faked his death in an accident while at an "Operation Conversion Unit" set up to train foreign pilots to use British aircraft. In fact, he flew to Belgium, where he promptly handed the farmers, who took him in and fed him, over to the Gestapo. He then spent the rest of the war being infiltrated into groups of Czech political prisoners in concentration camps. He methodically turned them in, and many of those he betrayed were shot. He was in turn executed in 1947 by the Czech authorities, after being tried for treason. Had his Hurricane fighter plane not been photographed in 1941 while in a German museum, thus later arousing the curiosity of war historians, the British would likely still believe that he was missing and presumed dead, following his fake "accident".
The Grammar School I attended in England had a substantial minority of Jewish students and teachers, and sometimes I would get the Jewish holidays off too. One of my Jewish friends took me home one time to meet his father, who had been the Regimental Sergeant Major of an all-Jewish regiment in the British Army. For some reason, the existence of these regiments is not generally known, and yet their service records are excellent. Unfortunately, during the period of the Palestine Mandate, members of the Stern Gang and the Irgun Zwei, who had received military training from the British, showed the same eagerness to kill their former friends and benefactors as they had demonstrated in killing the Germans who had persecuted them.
A little-known group of British and Commonwealth prisoners of war volunteered for service in the German Army, and the Luftwaffe, after being captured. Known as the British Free Corps, they signed a form reading as follows: "I, (name), being a British subject, consider it my duty to offer my services in the common European struggle against communism, and hereby apply to enlist in the Britisches Freikorps." These volunteers were to be used on the Russian Front, but as only about 30 people enlisted there are no reliable records of their actually being used in combat. The unit, had it been larger, would undoubtedly have been used for propaganda purposes by the Germans. It appears fairly certain that six RAF pilots, including two Americans, fought against the Russians as officers in the Luftwaffe, being allowed to keep their RAF uniforms in case they were shot down behind the Russian lines.
Of course, the official British position to this day is that there were "no traitors," and any such information that may still exist is suppressed. However, I recently saw a documentary including film footage of a uniformed British policeman chauffeuring two German field officers around in their staff car during the occupation of the Channel Islands.
Had the Germans invaded Britain, hand-picked men approved by the local Chief Constable were to go into hiding and engage in acts of sabotage and harassment against the invaders. They were given sealed envelopes that were to be opened only if an invasion actually occurred. One man, who opened his envelope anyway, found that his first item of business was to shoot the Chief Constable, because he knew the identities of all the resistance fighters in his area!
In war, it seems that friends become enemies, enemies become friends, deals are made with the Devil, and bizarre alliances become the order of the day. Fact is indeed stranger than fiction, and no more so than in times of war.
Jeff Goodall worked for the Metro Treasury and City Finance Departments for 25 years, and served as a member of the CUPE Local 79 Executive Board for 14 of those years.