Only a couple of days to go and I’m still muddling away with some Italian and playing with Google Earth and my maps. I’ve got a draft itinerary of sorts and I’ve been trying to work out when and where to include some of the stories I’ve heard. In the midst of this I’ve had two photo shoots, one on Thursday night and one a friends wedding on Saturday. Sunday was a day of rest for my aching feet.
I’ve also finished the stones and my friend Pat has added her own. She decided that, since James was English, an English teapot would be a fitting image on her stone. She’s done it in red, white and blue and I know the family will love to think of this remembrance gracing James final resting place. I got a wee bit better at my artwork and I also chose smaller stones. I really don’t need a luggage surcharge just because the bag is full of rocks.
I hope you will bear with me as I reminisce a bit…part of this effort is intended to leave a record for the kids and grand-kids…and some of you may not know all of these background details.
This picture shows me on the right, Dad in the middle and Danny Beck on the left. It was taken in the summer of 1962 in front of our house on Twidale Avenue in Niagara Falls.
I was 15 but I lied about my age in order to join the Student Militia. Dad had been promoted to Lieutenant by then and I just love the twinkle in his eye as he stands between these two rather serious youngsters. We are all wearing summer kit of course. I ended up joining 10th St Catharines Field Battery, Royal Canadian Artillery, that September as did Danny but he didn’t take to it that much and soon lost interest.
The next shot is of me in battledress taken sometime in the winter or spring of 1965. I have very few photos of me and it was probably because of the promotion that this shot was taken. I had been temporarily promoted from Bombardier to Lance Sergeant in order to be the senior NCO in charge of signals for our annual live shoot in either Meaford or Petawawa…can’t remember which. Among other treats I recall the promotion gave me access to the Sergeant’s and Warrant Officer’s Mess which w
as heady stuff indeed as I would have been all of 18 (in real years).
All of my 10th Battery adventures took place while in high school and they always seemed to take precedence over other, more reasonable high school activities, like theatre, sports and studies. I also spent my summer days playing at soldier. I spent one summer on a Junior NCO course at Camp Niagara, in Niagara-on-the-Lake. The ensuing promotion allowed me to be an instructor on two summer Student Militia Courses, one in Niagara and one in St Catharines. I think it was the summer of ’65 while instructing in St Catharines that I was called upon to represent 10 Bty as a part of a military escort for the funeral of a St Catherine’s boy who had been killed in action in Vietnam. He was Canadian with an American mother and had served in the Battery before enlisting in the US army. As part of the Canadian contingent I was required to wear Dress Blues, which was tricky because I didn’t have Dress Blues. The QM and one of our Staff Sergeants came through though and it was a warm sunny day when we travelled to Buffalo, after a ceremony in St Catherines, to lay him to rest. I’ve tried to recall his name and even looked at the records for the Viet Nam War Memorial in Washington D.C., but I can’t recall who he was. I do recall that he was a Sergeant and that’s why I was one of the ones picked as an escort.
All of this experience led me to believe that I should make a career out of the military. I was highly motivated by a friend of mine, Bud, who had enlisted the year before and had been corresponding with lurid images of his peacekeeping posting in Cyprus…swimming in the sea in the morning and skiing in the mountains in the afternoon. I was also quite bored with school so I dropped out and joined the Permanent Force (PF) Office Cadet Training Program (OCTP). I soon realized that this was not the life I wanted. It was fun being a part-time soldier, but doing it full time was a whole different way of life and it meant missing out on a lot of other things. I’d already missed out on too many things and was eager to work on something other than military law, field-craft and command structures. I was lucky in that I was able to get out before too long and go back to high school to finish Grade 13. By the time I got to first year at Queen’s University I was 20 year old, long haired and bearded…but somewhat wiser.
My link with 10 Bty didn’t end there. October 1998 was a year after Dad passed and I was 41, married with two kids. Mom and Dad had regularly attended the annual General Sir Isaac Brock Dinner held in the Stone Frigate at Niagara-on-th-Lake. The event was really a disguised Mess Dinner whereby all the men from 10 Bty and the Lincoln and Welland Regiment would wear there mess kit or a tux and all the ladies got dressed up “like a candied pig”. Mom asked me to be her escort so I donned a rented tux and went along for the ride. I knew many of the 10 Bty men there….names like House, Holleran, Gill, Lambert and Page. They were “originals” who had gone over in ’39 but were in their 80’s and 90’s then. They had been citizen/soldiers for the vast part of their lives. I continued to attend the Brock Dinner for a few years after Mom passed but every year there were fewer of those names around the table until finally it didn’t seem like the same event and I felt totally disconnected to that little bit of history that was 10th Battery.
I’m not really a soldier and I was never meant to be one. I have made military history a bit of a hobby and I do have a lot of respect for Canadian soldiers (including naval and air) but I have a great deal of admiration for those civilians who become part time soldiers in our reserve units. In this regard I was, of course, greatly influenced by my 10 Bty colleagues and their history but I also read a few works that served to emphasise the point. Nicholas Monsarrat was a Royal Navy reservist. His book “The Cruel Sea” was, and continues to be, a favourite. A less well known author and work is Peter Elstob who wrote “Warriors for the Working Day”. Elstob volunteered to join the Royal Tank Regiment during the war and his experiences shaped this novel about reservists and volunteers who have to learn the craft of being soldiers. And, of course, let’s not forget our own Farley Mowat’s work “And No Birds Sang”. He was a young Lieutenant with the Hastings and Princed Edward Regiment, another reserve infantry unit that was brigaded with 10 Bty, and this true tale of his experiences in Sicily and Italy is a classic and well worth the read.
And just to put the personal stories in context…by the end of the war 1.1 million Canadians had served…most were volunteers. We had the largest army ever commanded solely by Canadians, about 250,000 battle hardened troops, and we had the 3rd largest navy in the world. Our population at that time was about 12 million meaning that almost 10% of our countries populace had gone to war. Of those who served, 44,000 gave their lives, while 54,000 were physically wounded while countless others suffered less obvious wounds in silence.
So there it is. Memories and stories from the past coming together in my 70th year, to be revisited and relived in Sicily and Italy, and along the way a bit more personal learning about what went on there from July 1943 to March 1945.
Must get on with processing images from the wedding.
Out