Newspaper stories about escaped German POWs and Canadian trains loaded with guns and ammunition in Maine’s North Woods fanned the flames of war fever in the early weeks of 1916 more than a year before the United States entered the Great War in Europe.
A procession of Canadian-Pacific trains full of war supplies rumbled through the forests north of Bangor on their way to ports in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.
Train after train spaced only a few minutes apart steamed through the woods from Quebec through Brownville, Mattawamkeag, Vanceboro and other small towns, hundreds of cars at a time loaded with grain and other provisions, motorcars, gun carriages, ammunition and thousands of horses headed toward St. John and Halifax.
The Vanceboro railroad bridge at the Canadian border had narrowly escaped a sabotage attempt the year before. Today a force of 27 Canadian soldiers armed with repeating rifles and automatic revolvers still patrolled the bridge day and night assisted by powerful electric search lights, the Bangor Daily News reported Feb. 10, 1916.
A few weeks earlier, German POWs had created a sensation in Queen City newspapers when they appeared in Calais and then Bangor after making a daring escape from a Canadian prison camp. On Jan. 20, 1916, the astonishing story broke in the Bangor newspapers. A dozen Germans had escaped from the detention camp in Amherst, Nova Scotia, about 300 miles away. Some had boarded trains along the way.
Four of them had escaped to safety after crossing the St. Croix River on the ice before being stopped by U.S. immigration officials.
A fifth escapee, William Wegner, a deserter from the German Navy, was missing, apparently having made it to freedom somewhere along the Maine border near Calais.
After working in a logging camp near Meddybemps for a while, he formally applied for and was granted immigrant status, according to a story in the Bangor Daily Commercial a month later on Feb. 24. “He had in his possession $241 in cash and checks and his physical condition was perfect,” the story said. He said he planned to become a farmer.
The interview with Wegner is interesting because it indicates a degree of skepticism about who some of the escapees actually were. Wegner avoided answering a question posed by the reporter that suggested some of the others might be German agents seeking to enter the country using the escape as a ruse.
The seven other escapees had been captured either on the Canadian side or on the American side. The latter group were unable to pass immigration muster and were returned to their Canadian captors, according to newspaper stories.
The fate of the four successful escapees (minus Wegner) was told in the Bangor newspapers in a series of stories published in January. Their adventure — “picturesque and romantic in the extreme” — was right out of the pages of a “romantic war story,” the reporter for the Bangor Daily Commercial gushed.
Gustav Hartwig, George Kleinwort, William Schroeder and Hans Neu were interviewed at Bangor’s Union Station by a Commercial reporter on Jan. 21.
They were on their way to New York City, having passed the standard immigration requirements (meaning they were healthy and had some money) at Calais before a special board of inquiry. None of the men were American citizens, but two of them, Hartwig and Kleinwort, had applied for citizenship.
All the men were well-dressed, personable and spoke good American English, indicating they had spent a significant amount of time in the United States, the reporter wrote.
Kleinwort, Neu and Schroeder had been imprisoned at Amherst for 18 months.
Neu, who said he owned a ranch in Mexico, had been trying to get from New York to Spain on a neutral ship when he was seized by the British and imprisoned in the Citadel at Halifax. He escaped disguised as one of the plumbers at work on the fortress after stealing a pair of their overalls, but was recaptured and sent to the POW camp in Amherst.
Schroeder, a marine engineer, and Kleinwort, described variously as a traveling salesman or a traveling clerk for a New York bank, had ended up at Amherst after being taken from a Dutch steamer two miles from Sandy Hook on their way back to Germany.
Hartwig, described as the leader of the group, said he was a civil engineer. He was also captured off a ship while trying to get back to Germany, and imprisoned on Melville Island at Halifax. He tried to escape by swimming to shore one night, but was recaptured and sent to Amherst three months ago.
Schroeder drew a plan of the escape while telling the story to the Commercial reporter. The 12 men had slept in a large room where the bunks lined the walls in tiers of three. On one wall was a closet at the back of which was a large sand pile.
From the sand pile to the camp’s border, which was surrounded by barbed wire entanglements, lay a distance of 67 or 150 feet, depending on which newspaper story was correct. The plan was to dig a tunnel to freedom. The work took nearly three months.
Working at night, one man at a time using pieces of metal fashioned into tools brought the dirt out of the lengthening tunnel, “stamped [it] into the ground” and covered it with the sand. The tunnel, illuminated by a string of Christmas tree lights, was wide enough for one man at a time to wriggle through. The escape took place during a storm on Jan. 17.
After being apprehended by U.S. immigration agents, the four were placed in the Calais jail overnight. They played cards, socialized and were visited by many people, including Albert Lorenz, “the German who was caught at Marion last fall and held in the Calais lockup for 71 days,” a Bangor Daily Commercial story said on Jan. 21. They were relatively unscathed from their adventure, one nursing a cut leg from the tunnel escape and another a frostbitten ear.
The four seemed to be well supplied with money (two having wired for cash from connections in New York). Three of the unsuccessful escapees, however, who had reached the American side, had been unable to pay “the head tax or to qualify for the necessary examination and they were sent back to Canada,” said the Commercial.
After the interview at Union Station in Bangor, the story of the German POWs from Canada dropped from the pages of the Bangor newspapers. Bangoreans had gotten a good look at the kind of men they might soon be fighting, and found them not unlike themselves.
The men’s photographs appeared in the newspapers looking dapper, carefree and friendly. They could certainly tell a story in good English, and for that the reporters they met along the way were grateful.
For a night in Bangor they were celebrities. A Mr. and Mrs. Boardman of Portland, possibly a well off couple staying at the Bangor House or some other fancy hotel, even invited them for dinner.
Wayne E. Reilly’s column on Bangor a century ago appears in the newspaper every other Monday. His latest book, “Hidden History of Bangor: From Lumbering Days to the Progressive Era,” is available where books are sold. Comments can be sent to him at wreilly.bdn@gmail.com