Up the Gatineau! Article
This article was first published in Up the Gatineau! Volume 22.
My Little War
R.A.J. Phillips
There were a million heroes and heroines in World War II, and I was not one of them. This is simply a personal reminiscence of the ordinary, of one of the little people who were there too.
In the spring of 1942 I was nineteen and about to graduate in Honours History from the University of Toronto. It was an idyllic and unreal place. For every intellectual challenge in the classroom or library, for every joy in cultural recreation, athletic pursuit, or good company of my peers, for every pleasure in lingering vernal walks and pauses by the dark and ancient cloisters with Mary Anne, there was an hourly chill that shook the mind and body. Iwould count the days until it all would end at the edge of a daunting abyss.
There was guilt, too, that I lingered there while classmates had left their empty seats. I had promised my late mother, who had sacrificed much to make her impossible dream of my university come true, that T would stay the course. That done, it was off to the recruiting office to volunteer as a private or, more precisely, a gunner in the artillery. The shift from heaven to purgatory was almost a relief. That experience seared me with a life- Jong envy for every young person who could learn in time of peace, dream dreams, build futures within their grasp. My loss of youth while learning left an unfillable gap in my life. We can never go back.
I expected the difference, and tackled it as a learning experience on the shore of a different planet. As a Toronto Star reporter each sumrmer I had observed something of the local military culture — and much worse. Instead of the easy-going residence in the shadow of the university’s most venerable architecture, there was the Horse Palace at the Canadian National Exhibition: specifically a stall called home by four green recruits displacing a single well-adjusted horse. As for the discipline so quickly imbued, the first evening I crossed a street once to avoid an officer, because we had been told to salute, but not yet how. That, and much else, came quickly.
Within the month we were off by train to Saint-Jean for basic training and life in brick barracks built in peacetime. The routine was rigorous, but it had its compensations. Ihad travelled all the way to Quebec which I had never seen, and met other Canadians whose tongue was not well taught in the classrooms of Ontario. By some aberration of the Low Command, Iwas put in a small precision squad whose duty was to march in parades and other manifestations to sell Victory bonds. We were already treated as heroes, even on the streets of Montreal. Our only briefing for the big city was, on pain of court martial, not to lose our caps on Ontario Street, where prostitutes snatched them for retrieval beyond dimly lit doorways. None of us was fooled by public attention.
Reality was imminent at the Survey School in Petawawa. We arrived at the end of the sand and the beginning of endless snow. It was not a bad place to be: less parade ground bashing, some auto mechanics and much classroom stuff to make us artillery surveyors. On a Saturday afternoon we were allowed escape to the glittering lights of Pembroke itself.
In the cold early winter of desolate Petawawa there was the beginning of a loneliness which was ever the price of war. Loved ones slipped farther away in time and space, and they would not be nearer until all was over. One night, as T walked back from the canteen, to a corner of which I had retreated to write my almost daily letter, the camp lay in solemn ‘moonlit stillness, the thick woods of stunted pine and spruce cloaking the rough wartime huts. There was no sound but the crunching of my footsteps, until from 2 tinny radio somewhere came the sounds of a new pop tune: “I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas.” I paused on an old stump to listen, then wiped a soiled army mitt across my face.
The even tenor of army ways was broken by a curious insistence that I should go to Officers’ Training School in Trois Rivieres. Another exciting train journey, to a cold deeper than Petawawa’s. There I was trained to snowshoe by a unique army method. Half a dozen of us were transported in the blacked-out back of a truck about 20 miles into snowbound bush land and dropped off at separated points, each with a pair of snowshoes and instructions to find our way to Trois Rividres before we froze or starved, or otherwise inconvenienced His Majesty.
Our rationale for occasional escapes downtown was largely that it was warmer. We tasted the delights of The Green Pansy, whose gastronomic pleasures were relative, and the Chateau de Blois, known by us anglophones (with some reason) as the Chateau Blotto. One Friday a colleague overrode my protestations of terminal pneumonia to have me join him for a weekend in Quebec City, an exciting new discovery, where I was taught the medicinal properties of rum and coke: one of those rare useful army lessons that somehow linger throughout life.
The final part of the officers' course was at Brandon, which brought the longest train ride I had ever known (two soldiers to a lower berth, one to an upper), as well as spring. A wonderful family in Winnipeg did their wartime duty with hospitality on weekends: my first acquaintance with this dividend of the army uniform, but far from the last. At other free times I befriended RCAF types whose training fields surrounded us, and flew with them for unbelieving hours over the vasty prairies. I was beginning to know Canada. And more. On the way to Nova Scotia, an all-caring army gave us a week’s leave in Toronto. By a path in High Park (where one then could safely tarry at night) I proposed to Mary Anne. It was the warmest moment of my life, yet chilled by the counting of the days o the next abyss, and the wondering if our lives would ever be spent together. They were, for 44 years after the wedding for which we were to wait three anxiety-filled years apart, By formal letter, I requested the permission of her academically-distinguished father who had been my professor of Greek and Roman History. My intentions were honourable, but my prospects dim. His stiff reply was one of the warmest letters I have ever had.
The late summer and autumn, or part of it, was passed near Dartmouth, across the Eastern Channel from Halifax. There were glorious interruptions as we did “schemes” in the Annapolis Valley, driving in convoys down country roads, manoeuvring the tons of antiaircraft steel into the muddy fields to repel an imagined Luftwaffe, sleeping under the stars with dreams of springtime cloisters, and of High Park. T got to be a despatch rider for those occasions, because the moiorcycle gave great mobility and the chance to slip away into new voyages of exploration. On one I performed a magnificent piece of aerobatics when a trucker with an aversion 1o stop signs emerged from a side road at full tilt and unerring aim. The medics were thrilled, because it was their first chance fo use the new and miraculous sulfa drug, which probably saved my hand.
Wartime Halifax has not had a high billing amongst the troops, but for me it was a place of ineffable charm and warm hospitality, though always with encroaching reminders of embarkation for Europe. We went to Windsor to await our turn, and from there had a final leave, trailing the most bittersweet memories of all. No one has grasped the pathos of love ‘who has not had an embarkation parting in wartime.
Crossing the Aflantic was not a fun time. The Germans were winning the submarine war, and we knew it. With dubious mathematics (this was before the age of calculators), our ship had been classified as “fast,” and therefore sent out alone across the hostile Atlantic. It was so crowded that one had to walk a long way to faint, or more likely be seasick, and there was room and time for only two sort-of meals a day. We slept in our life jackets, constantly practiced assured svicide over the forbidding waters, wondered if every unfamiliar sound was a torpedo nuzzling up to our hull, and absorbed every hourly numour of impending disaster. After an eternity lasting six days, our most glorious sight was an RAF reconnaissance plane sent out from Liverpool to protect us, or to report our sinking.
England! I was brought up by English parents on English history and English literature: my roots were English. Never in my life did I expect to have the money it would take to sail to England. Even dreary, dirty and dark wartime Liverpool, cluttered with ships and trains, was England, but we were not allowed time to wander its streets or kick its soil. We were bound for Southern England and a succession of bases from Haslemere to the Channel.
This was at the beginning of 1944 when D-Day was on every horizon. Life in the big artillery holding unit was not challenging after one had mastered some bigger guns, which were even harder to push. Even we lowly ones knew the army had goofed on its arithmetic and had trained enough artillery troops to shoot every poppy in Europe. We were all passionate to go to the continent, but transfers to front-line formations were rare. One could volunteer for the infantry, which was rather understaffed, and many did. ButI was canght by an army tegulation that classified me as underweight. Modesty aslde 1 was in great physical shape then, and commonly ran a couple of early moming ‘miles for pleasure, with packs full of bricks: well, I was in great physical shape.
That's where the nun came in. After I befriended her, we daily sipped tea together in her convent. One day we would speak only French, the next only German, and I was to write an essay in the appropriate language each night. That was intended to transfer my academic linguistic studies into the virtual reality of competence. Time was slack and it was not hard 1o arrange such pursuits (though that particular one was unique) and to travel. When early spring came, every evening, every day off, every weekend, I biked in a state of continuing euphoric love of England. On longer leaves I took the train, Blue Guide always in hand, 10 every part of Britain, where a small part of my schedule was 10 sit in every ancient English cathedral. Iboldly knocked at some doors of great men whom I had admired, and they became my friends. I laiched into a wonderful public affairs club in the shadow of Westminster Abbey, where I brashly debated wise men of England. Of course I was a regular client of the Southern Railway to London.
The Canadian uniform was a passport to far more than civilian acceptance. In those wartime days, there was in Britons an unbelievable spirit of generosity, hospitality, unselfishness and brotherly love that peace would perversely cool. Behind their smiles, I probed their agonies, and worshipped them. We who experienced that transient spirit were unbelievably lucky and grateful.
London gave the headiest of times. Professional theatre and concerts were a new experience for this poor colonial youth. The architecture, the galleries, the evocations of Literature, the old book stores, the search for understanding were pure excitement, all recorded in letters to Mary Anne every other day. And this was wartime London with its terrible gaping holes of burned rubble, with its blackout, wailing air raid sirens, bombs, shortages, with its underground stations filled nightly with the homeless and terrified: aged young women and sadly impassive children.
One came hardly to notice the enemy action on this Golden Road to Samarkand. Away from army discipline, one was careless of air raid alerts. Once I stood in a street observing the plane-filled night sky as one watches Canada Day fireworks now in better days. A shard of death-dealing shrapnel crashing on my boot reminded me of my foolishness. Later I stood alone in a library, as London was being tormented, listening for the motor to cut out on each unmanned V-1, the signal for its climactic explosion. The huge window blew in as I dived floorwards. London could be a dangerous intoxicant.
The Haslemere camps held no terrors from enemy action, but at one stage I was moved for a few weeks to Seaford on the south coast. This too was wonderful country, with the added entertainment of V-1s flying low across the coast, often shot down by friendly aircraft. The main inconvenience was that the seedy mansion where we lived was on a hill just inland, and far too close to it was an ammunition dump. V-1s, with the slightest flaw in navigation, would hit that hill and explode; the nightly wait for a hit on the ammunition dump itself was not conducive to carefree sleep — unless you were a phlegmatic fatalist, which by then most of us were.
Amongst many of us foot soldiers there was then an unarticulated mood which is hard to grasp today. Dreams and longing for peaceful Canada were overlaid with the grim working assumption that our personal war would never end: that somehow, somewhere, some day we would “buy it,” so meanwhile why worry? When we moved past D-day, small wagers on the date of war’s end were a popular pastime. With my unerring pessimism, I never lost a bet, and cleared enough to help with the odd train journey to London otherwise financed by my officer’s pay of $5 a day.
One pregnant day I made my way, with some implausible excuse, to Canadian Military Headquarters in London, vaguely babbling some of the German the kindly nun had unleashed in me. Iemerged with a grudging transfer from artillery to military intelligence, the most promising road to the continent. It was a tortuous path, starting with a posting as the administrative officer in the Canadian Army Intelligence Training School — not even on an intelligence course, booked months ahead. After a decent absorption of surrounding wisdom, I made myself unpopular by writing the exams to qualify, without taking the course.
Not yet the continent. Instead I was given the intelligence unit responsible for the security of the Canadian army in southern England. That was not professionally challenging, for the British had kindly caught all the German spies in England, but it was an entirely agreeable posting while waiting for the continent. I could do what I liked (provided periodic reports of some kind were filed), dress as I liked (I preferred being an ill-dressed biker rather than a general or admiral), and live where I liked (2 mansion owned by a generous family of three [female] generations). Professionally, I made a nuisance of myself and my team by checking the security of army units and was once jailed for my pains. My staff were more intrepid than I. One of them persuaded a counterfeiting friend to craft perfect reproductions of Dutch guilders, which he then sold as harmless souvenirs of the currency of our gallant allies; he could hardly be blamed if his customers thought they were buying the real thing for licentious use in the Netherlands. I wonder if he went into post-war politics...
Then another glitch on the way to the continent: the war ended. Though London was then out of bounds to Canadian troops owing to the V-2 menace (rockets much more lethal than the V-1s), T was summonsed that day on a curious mission. The Deputy High Commissioner of Canada confided to me over lunch at The Travellers that (a) the end of the war would be announced that afternoon; and (b) I had been appointed to the Department of External Affairs (not necessarily in order of importance). Defying military discipline for once, I stayed in the forbidden city until the last train out of Waterloo. And lived a thousand lives that day in London. I wrote to Mary Anne what I could not express. 1 wandered the streets, and loved them all anew. Iembraced a hundred Britons and Americans and Poles and Australians who had shared my agonies of loneliness to emerge with my ecstasy of hope. At the base of Nelson’s monument I sang “Land of Hope and Glory” till T was hoarse in the mightiest choir England had ever assembled.
And then I sailed to the continent, to counter-intelligence in Army Headquarters at Apeldoorn. My main job there was mop-up, dealing with knots of Germans who had not surrendered, recovering assets Germans had stolen from the Dutch, reporting. T drove across unsettled Holland once, carrying a box of real Dutch guilders worth some millions in Canadian dollars, with my 17-year old Dutch interpreter, a virgin Browning pistol and a carving knife as protection. In Bremen harbour, far from friendly faces, I went alone into the bowels of a German sub whose crew hadn’t quite decided: a fine recipe for claustrophobia.
And there was travel, glorious travel in lands I had never dreamed of seeing. With my own jeep and free of restrictions as only Intelligence can be, I combined duty runs with tourism down the Ruhr and deep into Germany. At last I could use my German. “Wo is die Briicke, bitte,” I flawlessly enquired of some boys on my first foray into the Ruhr. “Just down this road to the left, you can’t miss it,” they replied.
Only once did I court real trouble. Belting down a one-way street in Apeldoom the wrong way at a speed a touch above the limit, I came to a screeching halt with my bumper against an imposing oncoming car with pennants flying. I had almost smashed the Queen of the Netherlands. Happily, she survived unharmed to live a long and fruitful life, without discovering my identity.
Tourism? Not really. These were aching scenes I saw. Often the smell of death still lay heavy on the air. Young Hans my interpreter had survived the siege and destruction of Ambem, though his family had not. Climbing up and down hills of rubble, passing through what had been doorways into rooms of which only splintered beams lay hanging, I lived many of those ghastly days with him, wondering at his will to survive. the smile with which he greeted each new day. I quickly learned to love the Dutch people and made these exceedingly warm-hearted survivors my friends for life.
The army then moved in another mysterious way to order me back to London by the next plane. By plane! Sometime along the way I had been asked to accept the appointment of Chief of Radio Services for the Canadian Occupation Forces in Europe, or words to that effect. This was part of an ambitious educational program for our troops during their slow wait for transportation back to Canada. I was singularly qualified for the job, having occasionally listened to the Happy Gang on radio back in Canada, but my boss was a person whom I enormously respected. When I reported to him for duty in London, I was given my fine office with a view, but also the news of another change in plans. The Secretary of State for External Affairs, ak.a. Prime Minister Mackenzie King, had sent an acerbic telegram (they sent telegrams in those days) to the reigning general demanding my instant release to work for his department. He outranked the army’s Director of Education. Thankfully there was a week before the next ship sailed. Time to say goodbye to old friends and familiar places, time to adjust, time to reflect.
This reminiscence does not fairly reflect. The gentle touch of time has not erased the excitement of the European adventure, the good times, the joys of learning. It has mercifully dampened the agonies of those two years. The grinding boredom of waiting. The tensions in the fortunes of war. The scary moments from bombs and mines. The awfulness of war’s destruction. The aching loneliness for loved ones. The premature loss of youth. Above all, the loss of friends, week by week, month by month. My closest boyhood pal was killed in Italy as I arrived in Enrope, but the enormity of the war hit me most forcefully years afterwards when I stood in the University of Toronto School before awall lined with huge panels recording my dead classmates.
It was all so useless. Not that we ever doubted, or should have doubted, the need to respond to the awesome evil of Nazi Germany; but our incapacity to deal with that evil by means short of violence makes war’s agony seem useless. Even the least of us who lived through that period lost something irreplaceable in our lives. Those who have come later should know that; know that violence is scarcely better than evil.
My army career soared at its finish. The trip across the Atlantic exceeded life on any Luxury liner, for there were no submarines, and there were lights and food. The train trip from Halifax to Toronto was a rolling film of what we had been trying to preserve from afar. The steam whistle as it spread through New Brunswick valleys and across the unchanging Saint Lawrence River was a haunting Canadian Last Post to a day we gladly ended. In the CNE grounds, where I had begun in the precedence table well below a horse, a smiling CWAC driver and car were there to do my bidding, perhaps so that I should tell my new boss how nice the army had been.
These things were nothing. All that mattered was that ecstatic, impatient crowd in the grandstand as we marched triumphantly in perfect order. All that mattered was one face in the grandstand: she who had kept the faith, and would keep it during 44 years to come.