This year’s Remembrance Day presentation recorded at St. Thomas’ Princes Avenue Playhouse.
Normally, I’d be feeling a bit nervous. But not this time. Last Tuesday morning, I just walked up a short set of stairs and onto a theatre stage, in St. Thomas, Ont. Unlike many times before, however, there was no audience, just the empty Princess Avenue Playhouse. Then, from the darkness in front of me, I heard the only other person in the theatre call to me.
“Camera’s rolling, Ted,” he said. “You can start anytime.”
And I began my annual Remembrance Day presentation for the Township of Southwold, this year with no audience, just a video camera. (more…)
A British corporal from the front in Burma, with greetings for Joy.
A soldier with circular spectacles, corporal’s stripes on his sleeve and khaki shorts on, walks toward a stationary camera. He smiles as he acknowledges the commotion around him. Glasses clink. There’s a general hubbub of voices in friendly conversation. He’s in a military pub – circa 1940s – and stops in a kind of selfie-framing attitude and speaks right to camera.
“Hello, Joy. How’s this for a wartime miracle?” he begins. “And a novel way of saying, ‘I love you.’” (more…)
Pilot Officer Albert Wallace wearing his air gunner’s brevet.
A boy who’d become a man by joining the Royal Canadian Air Force and graduating as an air gunner (second highest marks in his class), marched to the harbourfront in Halifax on a fall day in 1942. Albert Wallace boarded the ocean liner Queen Elizabeth – transformed by the war into a troopship – and prepared for the transatlantic crossing to Britain to join the Allied air war effort over Europe. He figured the Queen E couldn’t be hit by U-boat torpedoes. She was a lucky ship.
“I know luck,” he wrote in his diary that day, Oct. 27, 1942. “I’ll never forget the close call I had trying to stop my CCM (bike) by jamming my foot against the front tire. I ended up flying ass-over-teakettle over the handlebars onto the streetcar tracks (in Toronto).” (more…)
John Birnie Dougall, a Canadian third mate aboard British merchant vessels. Jane Hutchison photo.
I never met John Birnie Dougall. But I came to know him this week, 79 years after his death. He spoke to me by way of his letters – letters he’d written as a Canadian merchant sailor keeping the supply of food, oil, munitions and hope flowing to Britain during the Second World War. As an example of his correspondence home, Dougall characterized the fate of Britain, in 1940, when it seemed Hitler’s U-boats would choke Britain’s shipping lanes to death:
“Even though England may be doomed,” he wrote in a letter to his mother Rachel, “each of us has fixed determination to do or die – a spirit that will not be beaten.” (more…)
WWII glider pilot, Martin Maxwell, attending Dutch Liberation observance, in 2015.
Early in May, almost 75 years ago, a Second World War glider pilot named Martin Maxwell tasted freedom for the first time in nearly eight months. On Sept. 17, 1944, during his second airborne operation, he had delivered British soldiers and equipment in a controlled crash landing near Arnhem, Holland, during Operation Market Garden, only to be wounded and captured days later. But on May 1, 1945, with the Germans surrendering all over Europe, Maxwell regained his freedom.
“A British tank came into our POW camp,” he said, “and we were liberated.”
This May of 2020, Martin Maxwell, a 96-year-old WWII veteran, will relive that moment, three-quarters of a century ago, as he re-joins me and our Merit Travel group for a 12-day tour marking the 75th anniversary of the Allies’ liberation of the Netherlands in 1944-45.
You can join us. Our tour plans include visiting the place where Maxwell was captured at the “Bridge Too Far” site in Arnhem. We’ll participate in the emotional “Silent March.” And we’ll tour the Scheldt estuary where 5,000 Canadians died clearing the way to the port of Antwerp and the final push against German Armies to liberate Europe.
Canadian vet Martin Maxwell receives adoring cheers and handshakes in VE Day parade at Apeldoorn, in 2015.
To this day, Martin Maxwell recalls every moment of liberation. Even with the war officially over after May 8, 1945, and now freed by advancing Allied armies, pilot Maxwell found ways to assist the oppressed people he encountered in former Nazi-occupied Europe. To speed their way home, he and a friend traded a navigation watch to a Russian officer for a jeep and six containers of fuel. They packed the jeep with biscuits and cheese and soon came upon Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
“In a small corner of the camp, called Kinder Heim (children’s home,) we found dozens of children dead and dying. A little girl ran up to my friend, threw her arms around his leg and called out, ‘Papa! Papa!’”
A woman in the home informed Maxwell that Hannah, this little girl, thought anyone in uniform was her father. Maxwell promised to return the next day with food and provisions for the children. He even traded four cigarettes for a doll he planned to give to little Hannah.
“The next day, we handed out the food and water,” Maxwell said. “And I searched for the little girl to receive this precious doll. A woman emerged shaking her head. Hannah had died in the night.”
The Second World War left deep scars on civilians and soldiers. That’s why veteran Martin Maxwell, at 96, insists that neither the freedom he and his comrades restored, nor the sacrifice Canadians made for peace, can be forgotten. If you’d like to join Martin and me – May 1-12, 2020 – seats on our Dutch Liberation Tour are still available.
Ronnie Egan wears her beret and Women’s Royal Navy Service identification in May 2015.
About a month ago, a CBC television reporter from Nova Scotia emailed me with a request. Being sufficiently old-fashioned about these things, I decided to phone him to offer a verbal (rather than texted) answer. He said he and a camera operator had just returned from an assignment in downtown Halifax. He said they had just shot video of the demolition of the Discovery Centre. I didn’t immediately get it.
“You’d more likely remember it as the Zellers store,” Dave Irish said. “It’s a building with much history. … I’m hoping to speak to you about Ms. (Ronnie) Egan saving it.” (more…)
He felt compelled to act. He could not hold his tongue. He sensed that if he didn’t step in and say something, all the evils of the past might be repeated. That’s why during a neo-Nazi meeting in the Netherlands about 1960, Heiman de Leeuw demanded entry to the meeting as well as a voice to express his concern.
“You don’t deserve to be living in this country,” he told the supporters of fascism assembled in the hall. “I refuse to keep silent.” (more…)
Seventy years ago, Europeans sensed the end of the Second World War was near. VE Day arrived May 8, 1945. A generation later, historians and moviemakers are still discovering how Victory in Europe was achieved. At Bletchley Park, an estate just two hours from London, England, details of the Allied intelligence victory continue to emerge. Last year, the movie The Imitation Game depicted the secret world of Enigma, Alan Turing and war work at Bletchley.
In the March 2015 edition of Zoomer magazine, read Ted Barris’s account of the Canadian angle on the code-breakers who hastened victory. (more…)
June Callwood worked as a professional freelance writer for 66 years. "It's All About Kindness," a new book, offers reflections on her care and concern for others. Photo by David Henderson.
On days such as Victoria Day, and its anachronistic connection to life in 2012, I wonder about how change happens. Is it just the passage of time that helps us recognize that monarchs are people too? Is it just greater access to information that brings down a Berlin Wall? Is it just mellowing that makes a Toronto mayor realize gay lifestyle is a fact of life? Well, yes, time, knowledge and acclimatizing help. But change happens because some push to make it happen. Or, as writer June Callwood observed during a 2002 lecture:
“The profession of journalism enjoys its finest moments when it speaks against oppression and greed.”
Late on June 6, 1944, Lt. Garth Webb (standing at centre) and his 14th Field Regiment artillery crew paused to reflect on the highs and lows of their D-Day experiences.
The day before the big opening the French police built a security fence around it. Workers set up wooden benches for an audience of 5,000. Rain left the glass and titanium-clad building on the Normandy beach glistening like a polished jewel. And inside the museum itself Canadian army cadets removed the pins from nearly 44,000 poppies – the pinless Remembrance symbols would be dropped from an aircraft during the ceremony – symbolizing the number of Canadians killed in the Second World War.
“I was on this beach 59 years ago,” Garth Webb said during the opening of the Juno Beach Centre on the D-Day anniversary in 2003. “And it’s just as big a thrill to be here today.”
