A Book 60 Years Overdue

Sgt. Bill Ferguson nestled down into his bed of hay, cold and hungry as usual.

He doodled a bit on the pages of his war journal. Then he turned to where he kept the black-and-white photographs of Doris, his young bride back home in Toronto. It was what he did every night for years, before hiding the journal away.

It was April 16, 1945. Ferguson was among 80 or so prisoners of war holed up on a farm in Wildetaube, on the German side of the Czechoslovakian border. The Germans had marched them there from the notorious Stalag IX-C prison camp, fleeing the advance of the Allies.

There were 200 of them when they started 10 weeks earlier. But the winter’s cold, rampant infections, starvation and escapes had taken their toll. Throughout bone-chilling days and nights, Ferguson kept the journal safely hidden inside the lining of his coat. It slapped against his thigh with every step.

Now they were bunked down for a few days inside a barn, getting some rest and scavenging for any scrap of food. Rumors had been flying for days about the Americans’ imminent arrival.

Ferguson could hear loud artillery all around. The night before, several of their German guards had bailed out. There was great excitement in the camp. But he tried to keep his emotions under control. He had heard this before.

Suddenly, the little Cockney soldier everyone called Churchill came running into the barn, a pack of Pall Mall cigarettes thrust high in his hand. “The Americans are here!” he shouted.

It was true. GIs waiting outside loaded the jubilant POWs into Jeeps and drove them off for showers and hot meals. After three years of deprivation, Ferguson was free.

When he arrived back in Toronto a month later, Doris was the one who brought it up. “Where’s that journal you’ve been writing me about?” she asked.

Ferguson stared blankly at his wife.

In his mind, he saw himself placing the book high in the rafters just before Churchill came banging through the barn. That was the last time he saw it.

A Soldier’s Story

It wasn’t really a classic war diary. There were no accounts of battles and soldiers’ late-night thoughts.

Ferguson had been badly wounded and taken captive his first day of combat.

His journal was more a repository of lists, poems and souvenirs documenting life inside the sprawling POW camp in central Germany.

It was too dangerous to write about important things, like what prisoners were hearing about the Allies’ advance, or how they were being treated by their Nazi guards.

Instead, he transcribed notices posted by their German guards or the stringent list of rules they had to follow.

One page contained the names of all the bugle calls, some with secret meanings unknown to the guards, played by POW musicians. Another detailed the camp’s meager daily rations of meat, potatoes, turnips and bread.

Talented fellow POWs filled some pages with ink drawings. Another soldier made a beautiful watercolor portrait of Ferguson.

When he could get them, Ferguson stuck German newspaper clippings about the war inside the log. At the back of the journal, Ferguson pasted photographs of soldiers imprisoned with him and of friends and relatives back home.

And, of course, the shots of Doris. Oh! She was beautiful, with blond curls and her funny, wide grin.

His favorite was the one where she was in shorts on the beach, looking flirtatiously into the camera.

The journal, handsome with a red maple leaf on the cover, was one of several sent by the Toronto YMCA to raise the spirits of Canadian soldiers.

The Red Cross brought them to the camp.

But for Ferguson, looking at the snaps of Doris, of his family, of the vacation home where they had spent many happy days, was always bittersweet.

Always the things he didn’t have, and might never have again.

He had joined the Royal Regiment of Canada in a surge of patriotism after Adolf Hitler invaded Poland in 1939. Soon, he left his family’s construction business and his wife of one year for intensive training in England.

His introduction to combat was fateful.

He was among 6,100 troops taking part in the Allies’ August 1942 raid on Dieppe, a heavily fortified port on the northern coast of Nazi-occupied France.

Casualties that day were so high that it went down as one of the greatest Allied debacles of World War II.

As commandos scrambled onto shore at dawn, German soldiers ensconced in high bluffs raked them with machine gun fire, rockets and other firepower. Of the nearly 5,000 Canadian soldiers who took part in the raid, 3,367 were killed, wounded or taken captive.

Seven of the 11 men under Ferguson’s command were killed as they attempted to plant a 3-inch mortar on the beach. Shot through the chest, Ferguson passed out. He came to when a German soldier tugged at a compass hanging from his neck.

Though badly wounded, Ferguson dragged himself up a 12-foot ladder over the cliffs and into a waiting transport. Anyone unable to do so was left behind to die, he said.

“You will do a lot of things when there is a guy with a machine gun behind you,” he said.

After the war, Ferguson got on with his life. He began working for Schenley Distillery, a large Canadian liquor company. He moved to the United States in 1958, settled in Thousand Oaks and raised three children with Doris.

He didn’t give the journal much thought. It was gone, and there was nothing he could do about it.

Family Discovery

Sunny and temperate, Madeira is a popular winter escape for older Europeans. Its azure seas and warm beaches drew Englishman John Bennett and his wife to the Portuguese island off the northwest coast of Africa in January 2004.

Dining one night, Bennett overheard two couples speaking German at the next table. Bennett asked if he could join them, hoping to practice his own rusty knowledge of the language.

Over the course of the next several days, Bennett got to know one of the couples quite well. And they had a story to tell.

The man, Bodo Zschack, told Bennett that when he was 10 years old, his family’s farm had been a stopping point for a group of POWs toward the end of World War II. After the soldiers departed, Zschack said, he found a journal belonging to one of the soldiers, a Canadian.

His family had made attempts over the years to find the man, he told Bennett.

But the village where his family lived had became part of communist East Germany after the war. Mail considered suspicious was intercepted by the East German government, he said. Language was another barrier.

Could he help? Zschack asked Bennett.

The 80-year-old retired electronics manager promised to try.

“I sort of made it a little project,” Bennett said.

The age-stained book, its linen-bound cover and binding frayed, was too fragile to mail to England.

But back home in Kent, Bennett tried contacting the soldiers, many of whom were English, whose names were mentioned in the journal.

He made inquiries on World War II websites frequented by former POWs and their families. No one responded.

In May, Zschack invited Bennett to his farm in Wildetaube. While there, Bennett took extensive photographs of the journal. Tucked in the pages, he came across a letter that Ferguson’s father had written to his soldier son.

The address line of that thin, blue letter contained the jackpot: Ferguson’s full name, rank and military number.

“That’s what I needed to start tracing him,” Bennett said.

He sent letters to the Canadian government and to its Veterans Affairs bureau. For months he heard nothing.

Then, in October, Bennett got a call from America. It was a stranger looking for the person who had sent the letter to Canadian Veterans Affairs.

“I understand you’ve been looking for Bill Ferguson?” said the caller, a man with a powerful voice.

“Yes,” Bennett said. “Can you help me find him?”

“Your search is over,” said the man. “I am Bill Ferguson.”

In His Hands Again

On April 16, Bill Ferguson, now 93, accompanied by his son, Drew, and Drew’s wife, Cherie, returned to Wildetaube. John Bennett and his wife were there too.

Bodo and Inge Zschack welcomed their visitors with a festive party. They roasted a pig and invited what seemed like the whole village.

A video crew from the German media was there.

Ferguson sat at a table and Zschack, now 70, handed the old soldier his journal. It was 60 years to the day that Ferguson had last held it.

Ferguson moved his hands along it, fingered the edges and then gently opened the pages. “Can you read it to me?” he politely asked Drew.

The young soldier who had stared longingly at that black-and-white photo of the girl in the shorts was now nearly blind.

Macular degeneration has taken most of Ferguson’s sight. Time took his wife, in 1998.

A Look Back

At home in a Fillmore retirement home, Ferguson opens up the past once more for a visitor.

Hands once smooth and strong, now mottled by the bruising of age, slide over the pages of his journal.

He can’t see the detail, but as soon as someone describes the words on the page or a drawing or Doris on the beach, he bows his balding head and smiles.

He regrets that he wasn’t able to share this journal with Doris, his “Ferg.” That’s what they called each other, Ferg, the aging soldier explained with a gentle smile.

He peered down at the book again.

“Ferg, you would have loved this.”

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

60 years later

Sgt. Bill Ferguson, of the Royal Regiment of Canada, thought he had lost his World War II journal for good. But 60 years after leaving it in a barn in Germany, the Fillmore man reclaimed it.

August 1942: Ferguson is captured near the French port

of Dieppe.

1942-1945: He is held at a German POW camp.

April 1945: He leaves his journal in a barn in Wildetaube, Germany, when American forces arrive.

January 2004: Englishman John Bennett meets German Bodo Zschack on the island of Madeira and agrees to help him find Ferguson and return the journal.

Sources: ESRI, Times reporting