Unlikely Soldiers: Macalister and Pickersgill

For Christmas last year, I was grateful to receive a most thoughtful gift from my brother and his fiancée: the story of Canadians Frank Pickersgill and Ken Macalister, who were executed as spies by the Nazis at Buchenwald in August of 1944. The book is entitled Unlikely Soldiers: How Two Canadians Fought The Secret War Against Nazi Occupation, and was written by the accomplished historian Jonathan Vance of the University of Western Ontario. It was a captivating read - at times painfully so.

The main title of the book is entirely accurate: two more unlikely soldiers than Pickersgill and Macalister would be difficult to imagine. Of course, with the mass mobilization of WWII, there were countless ordinary people engaged in the most extraordinary of activities. The subtitle of the book is more problematic, though. Ken and Frank had barely landed as covert operatives in occupied France before they were captured through a combination of bad luck, treachery, and nakedly criminal incompetence on the part of their headquarters in London. If they "Fought The Secret War Against Nazi Occupation" as the subtitle states, they did it from the inside of a prison cell; an entirely defensive action consisting mostly of resisting torture and keeping their secrets. Courageous, to be sure, but not the fight they signed up for, I'm certain.

Here's what the publisher has to say in way of a summary:

When Nazi Germany’s Buchenwald concentration camp was liberated in 1945, its records revealed that two young Canadians, Ken Macalister and Frank Pickersgill, were among its countless victims. At 30 and 31 years of age, they had been agents of Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE ), an undercover unit established by Winston Churchill that used sabotage and subversion to bring down the Nazi regime from within.

Jonathan F. Vance brings us the dramatic, untold story of two men who were the most unlikely of soldiers. Pickersgill, an up-andcoming journalist, and Macalister, one of the finest law students ever to attend the University of Toronto, were both living in France when the Nazis seized power. Pickersgill, arrested as an enemy alien, spent two years in prison before escaping to England.

The men’s intelligence, resourcefulness and familiarity with French customs and language caught the attention of the SOE. Trained in special-operations techniques, from radio control to killing, they were paired together and parachuted into France—just as the underground network they were to join was cracked open by the Germans.

Unlikely Soldiers is an extraordinary tale of unsung heroes, intrigue and tragic error. With access to the recently opened SOE archives, Vance draws new material into a fascinating narrative that will appeal to anyone interested in military history, the evolution of espionage, or simply the remarkable story of two heroic Canadians.

Vance's writing style is perfect for the story he tells. It is neither a dry academic history, nor a sensationalized spy thriller, but it employs the best of both genres to tell an amazing story of two flawed men trying to accomplish an especially dangerous mission in spite of odds they know all too well are stacked prohibitively against them.

After learning the fact of their death in the first chapter, I found it difficult to learn about their lives in the subsequent ones; knowing it was all to end very badly made it hard for me to get to know them. And Vance was diligent about making sure his readers knew these men. With letters and personal accounts of their habits, their strengths, and their foibles, Macalister and Pickersgill become more than characters in a story. Frank comes across as a gifted, passionate, impulsive, but somewhat directionless dilettante who finds his purpose in the war, but spends the majority of it in captivity. Ken, by contrast, seems far more established on the straight and narrow path to success and standing in the world - a Rhodes Scholar deemed one of the most brilliant Canadians of his generation by many who knew him - but shows a brittleness of spirit prior to the war that suggests he feels all too well the weight of the expectations placed upon him.

Both men quite obviously come into their own when fate requires them to show what they're made of at their core. I expect this passage about Pickersgill would have surprised anyone who hasn't seen firsthand the transformation that can occur in an individual trained to a mission in which they firmly believe:

During an interrogation one day in late September, Frank had spotted a wine bottle on the table in the room; in a flash, he snatched it up, smashed the end of it on the table, and slashed the jagged edge across the neck of the nearest guard. He dashed out in the hall, still brandishing the bottle, which he used on another guard who got in his way (both guards died from their wounds). There was only one way out so, despite the fact that he was on the second floor, Frank hurled himself through the casement windows and landed on the pavement below. Picking himself up and clutching the elbow he had broken in the fall, he ran toward the avenue d'Iéna, only to be brought down by a hail of bullets. The Germans whisked him off, more dead than alive, to l'Hôpital de la Pitié to be treated for the broken elbow and two bullet wounds. He pulled through but his biggest concern, as he told Rousset, was that he may have revealed something under anaesthetic.

Whatever their personal flaws, they stood up extremely well under the most desperate of circumstances when the time came.

That Pickersgill and Mcalister had been captured at all, let alone less than a day after they parachuted into France, was largely the fault of a suspected traitor named Henri Déricourt in the ranks of the the resistance network in the area, and compounded by unforgivable carelessness and negligence by the spymasters in England:

But, despite the fact that he had sent 143 messages, all of them impeccably coded and with both his bluff and true checks exactly where they were supposed to be, someone at F Section decided that he had suddenly become careless. Instead of closing off all contact with Norman and declaring the circuit lost, someone simply composed a message chastising him for forgetting to use his true check and advising him to do better next time. That one message was as good as a death sentence for dozens of agents and résistants.

Had he known what he and his partner still had yet to endure, Frank might have chosen to die in the street outside his prison rather than continue on to Buchenwald:

Except for a few minutes on the exercise yard and the occasional savage beating by their guards, they were left alone [standing at attention in their cells]. Then, at around five o'clock in the afternoon of the tenth, they were removed from their cells, brutally beaten again, and marched past the main gate to the crematorium, aa modern facility withe a large courtyard surrounded by a high fence. Ken and Frank, who had been together almost every day for the last eighteen months, remained together. The guards pushed them all down the stairs to the basement, to a long cement room known as the Leichenkeller (corpse cellar). As the sixteen men looked at the dozens of hooks sunk into the walls seven or eight feet off the ground, they realized that Rechenmann's last request [that they be executed by firing squad] had been ignored. Waiting for them was the block's executioner, SS-Scharführer Walter Warnstädt, and the kapos who worked in the crematorium. Warnstädt ordered that the prisoners' hands be bound, not in the shape of a cross but with the wrists parallel to one another, because it caused more pain. One by one, each man had a noose of thick wire slipped over his head, and was then hauled up and suspended from a hook. Death came agonizingly slowly - it was nearly twenty minutes before the last man gave a final twitch and went limp. The bodies were heaved down, piled on the electric lift, and sent back upstairs to the coke-fired crematorium. Then, as on a thousand other days in Buchenwald, oily smoke stained the bright blue sky over the Ettersberg as the wind caught flecks of ash and carried them toward France.

Reading that passage after getting to know these Canadian heroes over the past two hundred and fifty pages was like a punch in the gut. Which is a testament to the power of Vance's writing, of his ability and determination to make sure Ken and Frank weren't simply names in a dusty history text.

As you might expect at this point, I highly recommend the book. Not only does it tell a most important Canadian war story, but it does so with such lyrical craftsmanship that the pages almost turn themselves. Kudos to Jonathan Vance for telling such a compelling tale in the manner it merits.

In this book, Frank Pickersgill and Ken Macalister have the tribute and memorial they so richly deserve.