Battle of Bowmanville

When the Canadians came with the manacles, the big blond Nazi boys at Camp Bowmanville put up an awful fight. In the melee one was bayoneted (severely), another shot (not seriously); 400 barricaded themselves in the camp's main hall.

The Veteran's Guard of Canada, which polices the camp, managed to snatch 126 of Bowmanville's Nazis and send them to another camp to be bound, with 1,250 other Germans, in reprisal for the chaining of Canada's Dieppe raiders (TIME, Oct. 19). But the Canadians were so banged up in the fight (one man had his skull fractured by a jam jar) that they sent for reinforcements before attending to the 400 barricaded Nazis in Bowmanville. Said one guard with a shiner: "The Nazis are pretty good fellows generally, but they're cross as bears today."

The long hot Sunday that followed the first set-to was spent waiting for the reinforcements. But there was some action. The Nazis captured a Canadian captain, but when they tried walking out with the captain in front of them, the guards let go a couple of tentative machine-gun blasts and the prisoners ducked back.

Finally reinforcements came: young Canadians taking a commando course at Kingston, Ont. On Canadian Thanksgiving (Monday), after the prisoners had gone two days without food, the energetic future commandos, hooting like Indians, carried out a planned campaign. They battered through the camp door with a telephone pole, chopped a hole in the roof, bayoneted the windows, turned a fire hose in. After 35 minutes of high-pressure water and tear gas, the Nazis marched out smartly in military formation.

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