Escape from Germany
This article tells the story of a
boy from Lance Cove who was a prisoner of war in
Germany. It might be more properly entitled
"Escapes in Germany", for private
Aeneas Rees, whose adventures are told here, made
five attempts in all to escape from
captivity. He was taken prisoner in 1915
but did not make his final, and successful bid
for liberty until the closing months of the war,
crossing the border into Holland after the
signing of the Armistice.
...Aeneas
Rees was one of the soldiers from Bell Island who
served with the Canadian forces during the
war. He was born and reared in Lance Cove,
his father being descended from the mechanic who
came out from the Old Country well over a century
ago to work in the ship-building yard of the
Pitts family who were turning out vessels for the
foreign trade in the early years of the last
century.
On his
mother's side, Aeneas was descended from a
pioneer family of Bell Island, the Normores, his
mother being the sister of Frank Normore.
Mechanical skill has always been a hereditary
trait of the Rees, and it is not surprising that
he should follow in the footsteps of his forbears
and take up shop work in the machine shop of the
Scotia Company. From there he went to take marine
engineering and for a time served as second
engineer on the coastal steamer, Argile. In
1913 he went to Montreal and was employed first
with the Dominion Bridge Company and later with
Vickers, a branch of the famous firm that turned
out the Vickers-Vimy biplane in which Alcock and
Brown made the first non-stop crossing of the
Atlantic from St, John's in June, 1919.
He was
employed with the Vickers Company at the outbreak
of the war, and on August 6, 1914, enlisted in
the Royal Marine Regiment, which formed part of
the first division of the Canadian Army.
Canada's First Division sailed for England at the
end of September. They were joined off Cape Race
on the first Monday of October by the Florizel,
carrying the Blue Puttees of Newfoundland.
The convey of 33 ships then proceeded to their
destination.
After
completion of training on Salisbury Plain, the
Canadians crossed over to France in February,
1915. Their ship was torpedoed in the
channel but Aeneas Rees was amongst those who
escaped and landed safely in France. He saw
service in several engagements and then had the
misfortune to be wounded and captured in April at
the Battle of Ypres in which he served as a
machine-gunner.
Taken
first to hospital at Roulers, where his wounds
were treated, he was later transferred to the
prison camp at Giesen. On his return home after
the war, Private Rees told a story of the brutal
treatment and near starvation in the prison camps
in Germany. Nothing can be gained by
repetition of the details at this time.
While at Giesen the prisoners experienced the
results of a kindly act by the American
ambassador, Mr. Gerard, the author of a book
which was widely read during the war, "My
Four Years in Germany." Mr. Gerard saw the
prisoners working in the cold of winter without
sufficient clothing and insisted that overcoats
be issued to them.
From
the Giesen prison camp Rees was moved to
Frankfurton-Main and then to Rolenheim, where he
received four months of close confinement for not
being able to work in the brick kiln to the
satisfaction of his guards. He was then sent to
Vehnemoor where each prison gang of eight men had
to cut 30,000 blocks of peat a day.
Private Rees made his first attempt to escape
from the prison camp at Freistadt, being one of
six prisoners who crawled through a hole under
the wire fence and got as far as the River Ems
near the Dutch border before they were captured.
His second attempt was made alone but it had no
better results. He was recaptured when
brought to bay by bloodhounds within sight of the
frontier of Holland. For this he was put on
public exhibition and sentenced to six weeks of
close confinement.
His third
attempt to escape was made from a salt mine in
Westphalla. He had noticed that the last
"trip" of loaded salt cars from the
mine was not run inside the prison fence but was
left on a siding outside until morning. Some Italian prisoners buried him in the salt,
placing boards over his head and using a piece of
rubber hose to give him air. After dark he left
the car and set of for Holland but was again
captured.
He was
then moved deeper into Germany and set to work
digging drains at a prison camp near the mouth of
the Elbe. Again he escaped but was
recaptured. He was now a marked man and the
Germans sent him to Berlin where he was tried for
his life by a court martial conducted by the
Kaiser's officers. He escaped shooting by showing
the marks of the beatings he had received and was
sentenced to solitary confinement. This
time his prison was a narrow cell, seven feet
long by three and one half feet wide. The
floor was concrete and the door of solid plank
strengthened with iron so that escape was
impossible. There he spent the last
Christmas of the war, alone, far from home and
loved ones.
Transferred after several months to another
cell, this one with an earthen floor, he dug his
way out into the prison yard with his bare hands.
A barbed wire fence with live wires now barred
his way to freedom. Under cover of one of the
heaviest downpours of rain he had ever
experienced, he used a stone to dig a hole under
the fence and so made his escape.
Profiting from previous experiences, he walked in
the opposite direction from the Dutch border. For
23 days he wandered on, gradually circling back
in the direction of Holland. It was the
autumn of 1918 and the harvest of the fields and
orchards supplied him food. At last he
sighted the boundary fence between the two
countries. Carefully watching the movements of
the sentries, he took advantage of a gap between
them and slipped through.
He had
finally won his way to freedom, only to find the
war was over.
- The Daily News, November 1918
  
Photograph smuggled out of Germany
of a German warplane
by Aeneas Rees
during World War I
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