Almost a Lifetime

J.L. Granatstein is a professor of history at York University, the
co-author of the Dictionary of Canadian Military History and Empire to
Umpire: Canada and the World to the 1990s, and the author of The Good
Fight.

John McMahon was a Belfast man who joined the Royal Air Force and who,
as a Lancaster bomber crewman, had the misfortune to be shot down on his
first operation over Holland in 1943. This book is an account of his
experiences in a German prisoner-of-war camp, of his lucky survival in
the chaos of the end of the war, and of his return home. After the war,
McMahon came to Canada, and late in his life he tried to find those who
had helped him in the Netherlands, the pilot who had shot his aircraft
down, and what happened to his POW-camp friends.

The story is generally well written, and parts are fascinating. The
account of prison-camp life is good, and McMahon’s story of his
end-of-the-war experiences is almost incredible. The bit players include
a German woman, a Russian doctor, and British medical personnel in POW
camps—if all had not been in place, the author could never have
survived.

What works less well in the book is the later efforts to find the Dutch
civilians who helped him, the Luftwaffe pilot who scored a kill on his
Lanc, and the old camp friends. The Dutch are helpful, the German is
polite but distant, and too many of the old friends have succumbed. Had
I been the editor of this book, I’d have cut this aspect, which simply
doesn’t work. The rest of McMahon’s story is very well told and
would have made a good book in and of itself.