The following story appeared in The Globe and Mail, Toronto, Canada. Dec. 7, 2007. It is being reprinted with permission from the author.

HALIFAX, Nova Scotia — Jack Fairweather of Lewisburg was rather taken aback when he learned last year that the French government had decided to award him the Legion of Honour for his exploits in Normandy in 1944.

After all, it had been six decades since the war ended. “I was surprised,” he told The Globe and Mail in February 2006. “My army career was 3½ years of my life, 60-some years ago. I’ve gone on to do other things.”

A gynecologist and obstetrician, he spent most of those years caring for women and babies in small-town Pennsylvania, likely trying his best to forget about the Second World War.

In faraway France, however, he was still remembered — and little wonder. With Jack Veness, his inseparable army pal, Dr. Fairweather had survived a D-Day firestorm, been captured, escaped from a prison camp and then sought refuge with a French underground unit led by a ruthless criminal whose taste for murder the two men managed to subvert. In the process, they saved the life of a policemen and other townspeople.

Their wartime heroism and adventures were chronicled by Maritime writer Will R. Bird in his 1954 book “The Two Jacks: The Amazing Adventures of Major Jack M. Veness and Major Jack L. Fairweather.”

When the Canadian Army went ashore on the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944, the two men — both from New Brunswick — landed with the North Nova Scotia Highlanders. By the next day, the North Novas (as they were known) had battled their way about 15 kilometres inland and occupied the villages of Buron and Authie when they came under attack by the 12th SS Panzer Division.

The ensuing battle devastated the North Novas. Dozens were killed or injured and about 100 were captured. The two Jacks were among those taken prisoner.

“We thought it was bad luck that we were captured, but on the other hand, there were a lot of people who didn’t survive,” Dr. Fairweather told The Globe in 2003.

After being forced to walk for close to a week with little food or rest, the prisoners reached the gates of “Front Stalag,” a prison camp fashioned out of a collection of worn-out army huts and a ring of three barbed-wire fences.

The two Jacks spent the next six weeks in the camp before being crowded into a railway boxcar and sent on their way to a permanent camp. About five days later, with bombs dropping all around them, the two men decided that if they were going to escape, now was the time.

“It was made pretty clear in training ... an officer’s first duty when captured is to escape,” Dr. Fairweather said. “We had that in the back of our minds.”

One night, just outside Tours in central France, the two men jumped from the moving train through a hole in the boxcar.

“Jack said, ‘This is our chance, we have to take it,’ ” Dr. Fairweather recalled. “He said, ‘Come on, we can do this.’ ”