Posts with the Second World War tag

Barris Beat

A pledge … 75 years later

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I met a couple of teachers, a few years ago. At least, I came to know a little of their lives. There’s not much I can relate. They were both Polish. One was named Jan Ciechanowski, born in March 1882. And Jerzy Brem was born in September 1914, as the Great War began. They both came to the area of Poland, around Krakow, in 1941. Or, more correctly, they were brought there, to the small town of Oswiecim, which elite German armies then occupied. The Nazis renamed the place, Auschwitz. And here’s the way the Nazis’ records summed up those two teachers:

Jan Ciechanowski, teacher.
Jerzy Brem, teacher.

 

 

“Jan, number 11193, executed Oct. 29, 1941” and “Jerzy, number 10190, executed August 19, 1942.” (more…)

Barris Beat

A photo in-hand is worth…

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Photo of Dr. Carl Puterbough, taken in early 1990s by Fred Phipps, with wartime image of Puterbough as pilot trainee in background.

A friend and I got talking about our grandchildren the other day. Writer Peter Jennings and I were kind of comparing notes about our granddaughters. It turned out both granddaughters celebrate birthdays this fall, and Peter shared a magical discovery.

“You know what I got her for her birthday?” he said. “An Instax Mini 9 camera.”

I admitted to PJ that I had no idea what he was talking about.

“It’s an instant print camera,” he explained. “It takes a picture and spits it out – developed – within a minute.”

“You mean like those old Polaroid Land cameras.”

“Yup! And she loves it.” (more…)

Barris Beat

More than a century

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Mosquito pilot Russ Bannock (left) and his navigator Robert Bruce, c. 1944.

He was born the same year as the original Felix the Cat cartoon and the inventor of the Kalashnikov rifle. He survived the Spanish flu epidemic the year of his birth and, though he wouldn’t remember it, was a contemporary of the Treaty of Versailles that officially ended the Great War. His lifetime spanned the administrations of 22 Canadian prime ministers and four British monarchs. And tomorrow, Nov. 1, my friend and occasional visitor to our town, Russ Bannock, turns 100.

“The family’s gathering for birthday party – just the immediate family,” Russ told me this week. “They’ll fill a room at the Granite Club.” (more…)

Barris Beat

Tony Mellaci – first responder for father and son

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S/Sgt. Tony Mellaci in France, 1944.

He saved my father, and he saved me. In fact, he saved both of us multiple times. The first instance occurred 77 years ago this December. Just before Christmas of 1942, both Tony Mellaci and my father, Alex Barris, arrived at Camp Phillips – a U.S. Army training facility in Kansas. The army had posted them there to train as medics in the U.S. Army Medical Corps. Then, something happened on Christmas Eve.

“The lieutenant told me to go to the headquarters barracks and pick up a soldier who was sick, and deliver him to the hospital. So, I and another ambulance driver picked up your father (although I didn’t know him) and took him to the hospital,” Mellaci told me. “But we never saw the sick soldier. We stayed in the cab while other medics loaded him into the ambulance.” (more…)

Barris Beat

Seated with respect

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Head stones vandalized at a cemetery in Israel. Times of Israel photo.

The images penetrated right to my core. I felt angry and hopeless both at the same time. Last week, a dear friend forwarded digital photographs she’d received from overseas. The pictures showed tombstones of fallen First and Second World War soldiers pushed over and spray-painted with swastikas.

A poignant quotation accompanied the images from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) cemetery in Israel.

“Why would someone want to cause pain in a place like this?” the caretaker of the cemetery said to the Times of Israel reporter. (more…)

Barris Beat

The turns of war

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Roger Parliament swears oath of allegiance at RCAF recruiting office, in front of his father, Garnott Parliament

When he turned 18, in 1941, Roger Parliament travelled to a recruiting office in downtown Toronto to join up for wartime service. He’d prepared all his enlistment papers and anticipated vision and hearing tests.

Then, LAC Parliament officially signed up.

But perhaps the most critical part of his decision to enlist in the armed services occurred when he came before the second-in-command at the recruiting office on Bay Street.

“I’ve decided to join the Air Force,” he told the pilot officer he faced.

Across the table from him was Pilot Officer Garnott Parliament, Roger’s father. (more…)

Barris Beat

Arnold Hodgkins’ art comes home

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Arnold Hodgkins’ portrait of war trauma. “Victim ’43”

Some things are just meant to happen. About five years ago, a woman in Port Perry made a decision about the artwork that had accumulated around her home for half a century. A large private collection of sketches, water colours and other paintings created by Carol Hodgkins-Smith’s father, Arnold Hodgkins, suddenly went public. The calendar was approaching Nov. 11, and Carol decided her father’s war art deserved a viewing right then and there in her home.

“I think it’s finally time to share my dad’s artwork with the rest of the world,” she told me. She even decided that she would allow some of the artwork to be sold as individual items. (more…)

Barris Beat

Putting a face on The Rock

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Geraldine Hibbs illustrates how deep into the Bell Island iron ore mine our tour will go.

We met a hundred feet underground. The walls around us consisted of a seam of iron ore. It was about six degrees Celsius in there, but she said the temperature never changed year-round. At one point, when she turned out the lights and lit a single candle, she explained that was all the light miners had during their digging shifts – 10 hours a day, six days a week – year after year.

Then, she made the whole place human. She said her dad had worked there in the 1950s, lost the lower part of his leg in a mining accident, but was able to joke about it.

“He wagered strangers, he could put a foot down in one spot and his other 25 feet away,” she said. “When they bet he couldn’t, he took off his prosthetic foot and tossed it 25 feet away.” (more…)

Barris Beat

What-ifs of Canadian warriors

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Veteran Bill Novick offering reflections on his role in D-Day operations 75 years ago.

He sat down to rest. He sighed a long, audible sigh. And he smiled with a touch of satisfaction. Around Bill Novick, sat family and some of his fellow travellers gathered, this spring day, at a museum in Normandy, France. They all sensed that Bill had a story to tell: the time, just before D-Day, when his Halifax bomber was coned.

“Enemy gunners at Cologne (Germany) put up a box barrage (concentrated anti-aircraft fire) 3,000 feet high, two miles wide by 10 miles long,” he said. “Searchlights moved all over the sky … and we were coned by the lights. That required evasive action called a corkscrew.” That meant Pilot Officer Novick put the 18-tonne bomber into a violent dive one way, then another, at speeds up to 250 miles per hour to escape the lights and the anti-aircraft fire.

“It was four minutes of sheer terror,” he concluded. “If we were scared, it never entered my mind that I wasn’t going to make it.” (more…)

Barris Beat

Fred Barnard’s gift to town and country

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Fred Barnard as member of the Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada in WWII.

I know this sounds like a cliché, but I remember the day as if it were yesterday. It was 16 years ago, in the summer of 2003. I was standing in line at a bank in town waiting to pay my credit card bill. Ahead of me were an older man and, at the head of the line a friend of mine. My friend asked what I was doing these days.

“I’m writing a book about Canadians on D-Day,” I said.

“Big anniversary coming up,” my friend commented.

“Yes,” I said.

Then it was my friend’s turn for service at the teller’s wicket and he turned to the counter to do his banking. That left only the older man and me in the queue. That’s when the older fellow slowly turned to me and spoke.

“I was there,” he said quietly.

“A veteran, are you?”

“I was there,” he repeated and then continued, “on D-Day.” (more…)