Seven Days in Hell: Canada's Battle for Normandy and the Rise of the Black Watch Snipers

by David O'Keefe

The scout platoon crossed paths with another batch of prisoners of war marching under armed guard, making for the enclosures on the beach as they neared the bivouac point. To Hook Wilkinson, his first glimpse of Nazi prisoners left him with the impression that a whole generation of German manhood had gone missing. The “rabble on display” included only the very young or the very old, with most over forty or under eighteen, and as Hook related, “some looked much younger as most couldn’t even shave.” Brunner, eavesdropping on snippets of their conversations, chuckled at the wild speculation concerning their impending fate. Many wondered if they’d end up in England, Scotland or the United States, while others, seeing the Canadians march past, feared they would end up in the Siberia-like “gulag” system in northern Canada that Nazi propaganda had invented and taught them to dread. The other thing that surprised Brunner was just how few of these men spoke proper German, as a sizable portion hailed from the conquered regions of eastern Europe and Russia. These Ostfront soldiers, men captured by the Nazis who then either volunteered or were pressed into battle, all wore Wehrmacht uniforms but spoke regional dialects endemic to Poland, Hungary, Romania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia or the Baltic states. At one point, Hook noticed a small group of Mongolians and Koreans whom the less-than-worldly men around him collectively referred to as “Japs.” All of them, in Hook’s assessme...