Posts with the Second World War tag

Barris Beat

For the love of cursive

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Sergeant medic Alex Barris in Czechoslovakia, 1945.

It was April 1945. The Second World War was just days from ending in Europe. My father’s medical battalion had received a few days’ leave in the then Allied-occupied German city of Düsseldorf.

There, Alex and his comrades enjoyed hot meals, hot showers, and billets with beds and clean sheets. Somewhere in the chaos, somehow in the uncertainty, my father found a place and some time to sit down and compose a letter.

“Dear Koula,” he wrote to a pen pal in New York City. “We have known each other so long, yet I never saw you very often after I finished school.”

Koula Kontozoglus, a pen pal worth writing to,

The words spoke to me deeply because Dad was expressing emotion in a war zone that allowed little room for feelings. He was admitting frailty – delinquency for not writing often enough. And his words flowed because they were written cursively. (more…)

Barris Beat

History becoming the realm of youth

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The storytellers of our society tend to be our elders. In most European cultures, and indeed First Nations cultures, the laws, the lineage and the lore are generally gathered and told by the senior members of society. That’s why the stories of young researcher and military historian Rebecca Murray proved so refreshing to me.

“Kate Reid served as a WD (Women’s Division) in the Royal Canadian Air Force during the Second World War,” Murray explained during her presentation at a history conference I attended in Calgary last week. “She was my Nan, and one of 17,000 WDs in the Air Force.” (more…)

Barris Beat

Get some. Miss some.

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Firefighters in the Blitz, 1940.

The public-speaking appearance was half done. At intermission, last Friday night in the central-Alberta city of Camrose, I sat at a table signing books and listening to feedback from members of the audience.

A woman approached; with her British accent she offered her take on the subject of my evening talk, the Battle of Britain. She was a child in London during the Blitz in the summer of 1940, when she said her father had served in the London fire brigade fighting fires German bombers ignited each night.

“When he came home in the morning after fighting fires all night, I remember his face was completely black with soot,” she said, then drawing imaginary circles around her eyes, “except the white around his eyes where he’d warn protective goggles.” (more…)

Barris Beat

Warrior with a bucket of sand

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Fire watchers had tools, but during the Battle of Britain their greatest weapon was courage.

I’ve flown into Heathrow, the city of London’s major civilian airport, dozens of times – seeing a sky full of jetliners lined up to land at Europe’s largest commercial airport. But not until I met Torontonian Dorothy Firth, who lived there during the Second World War, had I ever imagined what the skies over that city might have looked like during a period known as “the Blitz.”

“It was always a nasty sound and a horrible feeling when the air-raid sirens went off,” she told me when I met her a few years ago, “because you never knew how fast the German (bombers) were coming.” (more…)

Barris Beat

Jewel on the Hill

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Thomas Foster Memorial, our jewel on the hill.

We were winding up our visit to the building just north of the Sandford Road, a structure my author friend Conrad Boyce called a “Jewel on the Hill,” when our wonderful guide took questions. The one I asked had nothing to do with the building, but everything to do with its namesake.

“What’s the story about Thomas Foster rewarding women for delivering the most babies?” I asked.

“In his will in 1945,” explained tour guide Nicole Greenly, “the recently deceased mayor of Toronto, Thomas Foster, awarded cash prizes to women who had the most babies in Toronto in the decade following his death.” (more…)

Barris Beat

Will memory of D-Day fade away?

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D-Day veteran’s son, Don Henderson (r), presents RCAF base map to Jean-Pierre Banamou. June 2024.

Last week, inside a modest-looking but sizable Quonset building, known as the D-Day Academy, in Normandy, France, Don Henderson, a visitor from Calgary, made a small presentation. From his backpack, he pulled an official RCAF map of Normandy showing where his father, Leading Aircraftman Wilbert Henderson helped construct one of the first Tactical Air Force (TAF) bases in Normandy immediately after D-Day.

“My dad landed on D-Day-plus-11,” Don Henderson began. “He was the second driver in the air force vehicle. But when the first driver was shot, my dad carried on using this map to reach B4,” site of the TAF base.

Standing next to Don Henderson in the D-Day Academy museum, its director Jean-Pierre Benamou watched as the Canadian unfolded the fragile map revealing all the Juno Beach coastline that Canadians seized from the Germans beginning on June 6, 1944.

“I’ve kept this map all my life, but I want to donate it to your museum” said Henderson, and he handed the map to the clearly moved Benamou.

“Canadian veterans and their families are always bringing important artifacts back to Normandy, so that we don’t forget,” Benamou said. “D-Day is not dead for us. We relive it every day we welcome visitors here.” (more…)

Barris Beat

The two-per-cent insult

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Canadian soldiers marched through the streets of Dieppe, after the hit-and-run Allied raid on August 19, 1942.

About the time most people in North America were sitting down to dinner that summer day in 1942, a young Canadian whom many of us knew here in Uxbridge, Stephen Bell, was exhausted, bloodied by combat on Dieppe beach and throwing his hands in the air.

“Aufgeben! Aufgeben!” the Germans pointing their weapons at him were shouting.

Bell didn’t speak enough German to know they were shouting “Surrender!” but realized he was still wearing a revolver on his belt. He undid the belt, dropped it to the ground, and again put his hands in the air.

 The hit-and-run raid on the French seaport of Dieppe that morning, August 19, 1942, had ended with Bell becoming a prisoner of war; he would spend the rest of the war in various German POW camps. He was one of 1,946 men the German defenders captured that day, more than the whole Canadian Army would lose in Western Europe in almost an entire year of action between D-Day on June 6, 1944, and VE Day on May 8, 1945.

Altogether 3,467 of the nearly 5,000 Canadians who embarked form England that day became casualties. More than 900 of those were killed in the bloodiest nine hours in Canadian military history. (more…)

Barris Beat

There’re passwords and then real secrets

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Reg Weeks kept the most vital intelligence of 1944 secret without using a password.

The other day, I needed to get an identification card replaced. The transaction required a password entry. Do you think I could remember it? I kept drawing a blank. Frustrating! If you’ve ever been around me when I can’t remember or have to create a new password, you’ll hear me repeat:

“If I were king of the world, I’d have all passwords eliminated!” (more…)

Barris Beat

Vimy and the value of work

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Bandsman Lyman Nichols, eventually called upon for more than his musical skills in the Great War.

It was nearly the last question I fielded the other night. I’d just told the story of Uxbridge youth Lyman Nichols – how (underage) he had joined Sam Sharpe’s 116th Ontario County Battalion in 1915, but when he turned 18 how, as a bandsman, he joined the 116th officially and marched off to the Great War, how he survived the battles at Vimy Ridge and Passchendaele, and how he’d come home wounded among 160 surviving soldiers (of the regiment’s original 1,600).

“What had helped the Canadians get through?” someone at my Vimy dinner audience in Peterborough asked.

“They were task-oriented,” I suggested. “Perhaps more than all the regular soldiers from Britain and the Empire, the Canadians before the war had been farmers, lumberjacks, fisherman, labourers, even students who all understood the meaning of getting a job done.”

(more…)

Barris Beat

A lesson in public speaking

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Charlene Orrell, incoming president of the Army Cadet League of Canada, meets with volunteers.

When I arrived at the meeting, the executive director of the group was at the lectern addressing members. Rob Gill had finished his introductory remarks to the Army Cadet League’s annual general meeting, including a few jokes to break the ice.

Then he got to the theme of the weekend conference, “Community Engagement,” and wisely he chose to focus on the organization’s people. Among them, he complimented the outgoing president.

“Rick Brown doesn’t say an awful lot,” Gill said. “But he’s one of the best listeners I’ve ever known.” (more…)