Faint Footsteps, WW2 (4)

I Picked Up the Trail Late but Not Too Late

I was given some real treasures when I was young but only discovered their value in my sixties.

That is probably true for others, I bet.

Link to Faint Footsteps, WW2 (4)

Photos GH

Scotland 2014

First Stop - Irvine and 1942

I fly out of Toronto Tuesday PM and arrive in Glasgow the next morning. Within the hour, wearing sturdy shorts - and a light, reliable jacket with a camera in each pocket - I will be on a train heading 40 miles SW to Irvine and the Harbour Lights Hotel for a long, refreshing pint of bitters. I'll talk to the barman about the time my father sat in the same room in 1942, under a blanket, shivering from the cold.  

["A story of a cold night in Irvine's waters, 1942, is in Father's navy memoirs"]

He'll remember the story because we talked about it only two years ago via email. It was then I told him about my father's Navy memoirs and the time a barge ran aground on a sandbar just off Irvine's coast, three young men jumped overboard to rock the boat loose but only two got back aboard before the barge raced away to an important training exercise to be held under the watchful eyes of PM Churchill, Commander (of Combined Operations) L. Mountbatten, and King George. Surely the barman will remember our unique correspondence.

I told him the Skinner family helped my dad warm up after he arrived at the pub immediately following his rescue, soaked to the skin. The barman told me two years ago that he bought the place from the same family, that some of them still live in Irvine. 

["The public house changed its name. Because of the incident? I'll find out"]

My father's story (Exercise Schuyt 1: Marooned on a Submerged Sand Bar) has survived some 70 years or more, as have some of its main characters. So, the stage is set for my first full day in Scotland and there'll I'll be with cameras in my pockets and notebook and pen in hand. Methinks I'll have a right proper adventure, eh.

Link to Scotland 2014

Photos GH

Scotland 2014

Step Five - More Prep Work

Undoubtedly, when in Scotland from Oct 14 - 29, I will complete several scenic drives, hike into the hills, complete several 'walk-abouts' through wee towns looking for a cozy pub and hot meat pie, and snap over 1,000 photos and videos along the way. These things will all be done by habit, along with others. For certain I'll awake early everyday, slowly recall where I am, throw the covers off, splash water in my face and get going. The clock will be a-tickin'.

Today I put important matters in order. I'll write to the library in Irvine, my first stop on the SW coast, about 40 miles from Glasgow. I'll ask if they are willing to accept a copy of my father's Navy memoirs for their collection of books. He trained for Combined Operations outside of Irvine (Camp Dundonald, Auchengate), enjoyed a visit with the Cricksmere family at 22 Waterside St. while on leave (he mentions three girls and their brother) and was involved in a well-known training incident in the waters not far from where I am staying on Harbour Street.

Also important: I need to buy a watch, contact a few town newspapers to see if microfiche records exist from the 1940s, look at the menus for two pubs (highly recommended) in Edinburgh and connect with two important gentlemen, i.e., Geoff Slee, the creator of www.combinedops (re Combined Operations, WW2) and Jim Jepson, an expert re locations of training grounds in Inveraray, my second stop.

All in good time I will have a full and interesting slate.

Link to Scotland 2014

Photos GH

"Bury Me At Sea" 6

“Bury Me At Sea”: A Father’s Final Voyage

A WW2 Navy veteran’s request becomes a son’s great adventure 

Previously on Bury Me At Sea...

Today, though he has been gone for eleven years, (my father and I) are very close and have very much in common. But when he was alive we kept very busy with our own lives, including our homes, hobbies, sports and hundreds of other activities, and very seldom shared serious conversations about important matters. Such is life, my father would say.

About my ‘no worry, no hurry, Dad’ attitude in 2001, I say I got lucky.

As well, I say my mother’s death broke the history of silence between us and helped make the impossible possible.

*  *  *  *  * 

The Impossible Is Possible 

‘Round about 1953, during a Sunday drive on the only south-bound road out of Burgessville, Ontario the family car caught on fire. My mother expressed heated concern about the smoke entering the car so my father pulled over to the side of the road and hit the brakes. Everyone important to me jumped out of the car and, with me, stood safely in a nearby ditch. Dad then popped the hood and smoke flew everywhere.

I was four or five years old at the time and cannot recall how long we stood in the ditch or how we got home. But I do know this - that car ride was the most exciting of my short little life.

The most exciting car ride of my adult life took place during the early months of 2001, not far from Burgessville as well.

[Exciting rides. The car caught on fire near the fiery red tip

of the toothpick. Quaker Street, if drawn on the map, would

run east to west, where the word 'Norwich' appears above.]

My father and I were heading east together on Quaker Street, toward Norwich, and looking at a few of his bluebird houses located on a family farm that was also home to a wee golf course. Conversation was steady, friendly.

[One of Dad's birdhouses on Bertrand's farm, Quaker St.]

And he turned to me and said, “I’ve decided about where I’ll be buried.”

He could have picked a better road before telling me. Quaker Street is very narrow and hilly where we slowly cruised, not a shoulder within miles, just steep-banked ditches. I felt the moment was very dramatic but I sat still in my seat, didn’t white-knuckle the steering wheel and kept the car safely on the road. I just turned my head toward him for a second and nodded.

“I’m going to be buried in Norwich with Edith,” he said. He didn’t go into details.

Surely I said something wise and discerning, like “That’s a good decision, Dad” or “I think you’re doing a really good thing”, but I honestly forget if I even spoke a word.

He couldn’t have picked a better road before telling me. Shortly thereafter we remarked on spectacular snow-covered scenery on the south side of the road where a railroad line from the Norwich Co-op to Woodstock used to be, where his mother used to walk to take meals to his father at the old tile yard. And a minute after that we passed the new Quaker Street cemetery where mother would be at rest in a few months.

With his decision made I felt relief. My family could go ahead confidently with plans for our mother’s interment and I could get final arrangements made related to particular notations and symbolic etchings on a double gravestone. And I found consolation in the knowledge that my mother’s burial wishes had been granted, that she would not be buried alone.

Had I been a wiser, braver son I might very well have turned to my father and asked how he felt about not being buried at sea, or what factors helped him choose the one over the other. But I wasn’t that son. While he was alive we never discussed the matter again.

After his death, however, it came up - and not out of the blue - one more time.

More to follow.

More photos of Doug Harrison's birdhouses at Bertrand's farm.

Please link to Bury Me At Sea 5 

Photos by GH

"Bury Me At Sea" 5

“Bury Me At Sea”: A Father’s Final Voyage 

A WW2 Navy veteran’s request becomes a son’s great adventure 

Previously on Bury Me At Sea... 

As weeks went by and a long list of winding roads in Middlesex, Elgin and Oxford counties became more familiar to us both, we not only got closer to final answers but grew closer as father and son. At the beginning of our travels together a medium coffee each was all we had time for before I dropped him back at Parkwood, and I was sometimes hesitant to get to the point of the matter. As spring approached only a large coffee would satisfy our needs (and sometimes we’d stop at a small town along the way and pick up refills), and it seemed we both approached issues together more confidently. Talks about mother were not only getting somewhere but doing us both some good.

Finally, the day arrived, not by accident but by some small surprise, when just thinking about things had to come to an end and final decisions had to be placed upon the table. And I found I had little trouble turning to him after we’d taken a second look at gravestones in Norwich and asking the question: What do you think you’ll do?


* * * *

I recall driving father to Long Point on a pleasant Saturday afternoon and while cruising at about 70 kilometres per hour on a dirt road outside Walsingham I spotted his favourite birds - bluebirds - flying from fence lines and telephone wires to a nearby and freshly plowed field.

I slowed the car and pointed toward the activity. “There’s your bluebirds,” I said.

“I think you’re right,” he said. “I can’t see them very well ‘cause of my eyes but I know how they move. I’m counting on you to spot them now.”

Within five minutes I slowed again and stopped at the side of a large open field.

“I think an owl is coming this way, being chased by crows,” I said.

The pack was about a half kilometre away and as if on cue, the one large bird and its many pursuers headed right toward us. As they approached the car, flying about 5 - 10 metres above the bare field, I could see the large bird was not an owl and was bigger than any winged creature I’d seen in the past.

Once I recognized it I said, “Crying out loud, it’s a bald headed eagle.”

The eagle and smaller black birds seemed to be heading right toward the windshield of my car. They cleared the fence line and were instantly upon us, but instead of scooping us up with his mighty talons, the bald eagle flew across the road and over another bare field, being harassed all the way, by a score of sworn enemies darting this way and that. We sat silently for several seconds, craning our necks to see the birds disappear into the distance.

I took a breath. “Wow. That was something.”

My father said, “I’ll say. I’ve never seen a bald eagle as close up as that.”

I recall that day often. It was a good day for my father and I. The toughest decision we had to make was which back roads to take and whether we wanted a second cup of coffee or dough-nuts with that. Not all rides together were as sweet.

One day, as spring approached in 2001, I felt my father’s decision, to be buried at sea or beside his wife Edith in Norwich, had to be made, not in a hurried fashion, but at least before the frost left the ground at the cemetery on Quaker Street. My thinking was, once the frost was gone my family could get together and inter our mother.

Father and I had looked at grave sites and stones (singles and doubles) on more than one occasion by then, likely knew more about kinds of fonts and their sizes than we cared to know, so while sipping coffee in my car and following our noses along some country road I turned to him and said, “What do you think you’ll do?”

“I’m going to think about it some more,” he said. And he didn’t go into detail.

I likely said something along the lines of ‘no hurry, no worry, Dad. We’ve got lots of time’, because I didn’t want to rock his boat or seem impatient. I feel that was the best move I could have made at the time, even though I didn’t know then what I know now about how important his days in the Navy were to him.

Today, I would say the following about his idea to be buried at sea: It was related to the most significant, life-changing years or events in his life.

The where, when and why related to his idea or desire I will never fully know or understand. For example, he may have been relaxing on a Vancouver Island beach (at Givenchy III, a Combined Operations training base on a spit of land outside the town of Comox) between training sessions in 1944 or ’45, when the light bulb turned on in his mind. He may have been at a Navy reunion in the 1960s or ‘70s and talking to buddies from RCNVR and Combined Operations. He may have been writing his Naval memoirs at his home in Norwich in 1975.

["Guard duty at Comox"]

["Relaxing (centre) on the beach, Comox. 1944"]

Whenever or wherever the idea was born, it was kept alive for many years because ‘all things Navy’ were never far from his mind. Not only did my father write 40 pages of memoirs but he wrote many stories about his experiences in Europe (e.g., re Combined Ops training in northern Scotland and southern England) and during three major Allied invasions or D-Days, i.e., in North Africa, Sicily and Italy, in 1942 and ’43. These stories he contributed to his local paper, The Norwich Gazette, and to three books about Canada’s role in Combined Operations that were published in the early 1990s. As well, my father and mother attended several Navy reunions and often spent weekends with couples that shared common Navy bonds with father.

Until 2010, the year I carted some of my father’s ashes to Halifax, I was blissfully unaware of most details related to his Navy background. In fact, I believed at that time he had been a member of the Merchant Marine and spent his time in ships ferrying supplies across the Atlantic Ocean to England, and I knew almost nothing about Combined Operations and the landing crafts used to drop troops and all the materiel of war upon foreign beaches, often in the thick of extremely hazardous conditions.

There is a reason for my ignorance: My father and I didn’t talk about such things. And I didn’t read many of his scores of newspaper columns.

Today, eleven years after his death, we seem very close (at least in my mind) and I am aware we have very much in common. When he was alive, however, we kept very busy with our own lives, including our homes, hobbies, sports and hundreds of other activities, and very seldom shared serious conversations about important matters. Such is life, my father would say.

About my ‘no worry, no hurry, Dad’ attitude in 2001, I say, I got lucky.

As well, I say my mother’s death broke the history of silence between us and helped make the impossible possible.

More to follow.

Bury Me At Sea 4

Photos by GH

"Bury Me At Sea" 4

Previously on...

“Bury Me At Sea”: A Father’s Final Voyage 

A WW2 Navy veteran’s request becomes a son’s great adventure

Most of the pressures I felt on November 26 paled in comparison to what I thought lay ahead during discussions with my father.

Fortunately, while anxious thoughts filled my mind I received two gifts that brought some relief.

* * * * * 

The first was the gift of time, and it could not have come at a better one. Because the ground at the cemetery was frozen the interment of mother’s ashes would occur in the spring, so I had three to four months in which to talk things over with my father.

The time was used with benefit in a variety of other ways. My brother, sisters and I had time to plan a wake in the comfortable setting of our family home in Norwich, during which my mother was remembered in conversation, stories and song by all, including many thoughtful friends. (At no time did anyone mention they really missed the opportunity to stand out on the frozen tundra to say a final goodbye to my mother while facing into a biting Canadian wind). My brother had time to search for and find a ceramic orb for our mother’s ashes, and I had time to find a wooden box - formerly for someone’s 78 rpm record collection - and velvet bag, into which the orb would be placed and later lowered into the ground.

The other gift was that of sound advice. Glen Pearson, a neighbour in London and the best of friends during the best and worst of times, heard about my plight and responded with a few very helpful ideas. He felt it would be worth mentioning to my father that a burial at sea offers surviving family members no place to go to visit and remember ‘the dearly departed’, e.g., at significant dates during the year, like on a birthday or Father’s Day. On the other hand, a grave site in or on the outskirts of mother and father’s hometown, and a suitable gravestone upon which both parent’s names are inscribed, provides a definite place for sons and daughters and other family members to visit and think good thoughts.

After doing a bit of research I found I could bury father at sea by going aboard a Canadian Navy vessel (e.g., HMCS Sackville, Halifax) at a prescribed time or by mailing cremated remains to a certain pastor with connections to the military, and that a detailed map is provided with the exact location of burial in Halifax Harbour, but I felt the map would not provide the same type of connection to my father - once dead and buried - as an actual site in our long-standing hometown.

Armed with such options and ideas, I slowly nudged my father to think about what he felt the best course of action would be as we considered our shopping list of future responsibilities, i.e., purchasing and preparing a grave site along with a fitting gravestone before the spring thaw.

Fortunately, we both liked big cups of hot coffee and long car rides in the country together. So, on (just about) every Saturday during the winter of 2000 and spring of 2001, I’d pick him up at the front door of London’s Parkwood Hospital (he moved there shortly after mother’s death) and we travelled up this country road and down that one - just following our noses, my father would say - and when the time felt right, I’d ask, ‘slow and easy’, like a man who had about four years to decide and not four months, what he thought about this option, i.e., a single grave site for mom; or that one, a double for both of them. Or this one, i.e., a grave site on Quaker Street (north-west of his hometown); or that one, in a harbour near Halifax.

["SS Silver Walnut under construction. Details to follow"]

“No pressure,” I’d say. “Take time to think and I’ll see you same time next Saturday.”

I kept my siblings informed about our progress by email and only by studying them closely could anyone discern whether I was both inwardly and outwardly calm at the same time. But I say now that the discussions with my father didn’t result in an ulcer like I thought it would. (It could be true I have, at times, an overactive imagination).

As weeks went by and a long list of winding roads in Middlesex, Elgin and Oxford counties became more familiar to us both, we not only got closer to final answers but grew closer as father and son. At the beginning of our travels together a medium coffee was all we had time to drink before I dropped him back at Parkwood, and I was sometimes hesitant to get to the point of the matter. As spring approached only a large coffee would satisfy our needs (and sometimes we’d stop at a small town along the way and pick up refills), and it seemed we both approached issues together more confidently. Talks about mother were not only getting somewhere but doing us both some good.

Finally, the day arrived, not by accident but by some small surprise, when just thinking about things had to come to an end and final decisions had to be placed upon the table. And I found I had little trouble turning to him after we’d taken a second look at gravestones in Norwich and asking the question: What do you think you’ll do?

More to follow.

Bury Me At Sea 3

Photo by GH

Dad's Navy Days: 1945 - VE-Day, Vancouver Island (34)

"Everything went mad and uncontrolled"

Dad's days in the Navy may have felt to him like a long haul at times. He went from being a young man to mature veteran in only four calendar years but because they were also war years, 1941 - 45, the journey may have seemed endless at times.

The same can be said for this series of posts that celebrated the seventieth anniversary of significant WW2 events in my father's life, detailed some of the trials and tribulations he faced as 'a man of the barge' in North Africa, Sicily and Italy between November 1942 and October 1944, and recounted tales from his memoirs and news articles about his two years on the west coast of Canada at a Combined Operations training base.

Long years finally concluded, for many but not all participants in the great war, in a fitting celebration and fast return to civvie street. But before my father gets back to work at the Norwich Co-op, there are yet to share two final excerpts from his many stories.

The first is from The Norwich Gazette, circa early1990s:

I was on the navy softball and hardball teams and we played as many as six games a week.

[Doug Harrison, third baseman, sitting on fender, far right"] 

For a diversion when we had liberty on weekends a bunch of us sailors would go into Courtenay for a show, beer or dancing at the Sons of Freedom Hall. One man went in advance if possible and booked Room 14 at the Riverside Hotel. 

['Sons of Freedom Hall': Exterior sign reads Native

Sons Hall. Rare building still stands": Photo GH, 2012]

["I fell in love with the original timbers": Photo GH, 2012]

There was a good reason for doing so. Room 14 had a low window which faced onto an alley and late Saturday night and early Sunday morning after a long night on the town, many sailors retreated through the window to sleep wherever space was available, piled like cordwood, as many as 12 in a room for two.

["Riverside Hotel, Courtenay, late 1940s": See below]

[Hotel destroyed by fire in 1960s: Photos compliments

of former deputy fire chief, on duty at time of fire"]

The second is from father's memoirs, written in 1975:

Then one day, the day we had been waiting for came - V.E. day - and what a celebration. They poured beer in my hair, there was no routine, but nothing untoward happened*.

["VE-Day parade in Norwich: Uncle Arthur Catton,

boy at right side of photo, unravels toilet paper"]

The fellows were just so glad, that it gave us time to think back and count our blessings. No, I cannot recall anything unusual happening to write about. It had a sobering effect on most of us who had been in Combined Operations under the White Ensign.

Of course, I said we were very very happy, but we were also very very lucky and knew it. Soon we went to H.M.C.S. Naden, with none of us volunteering for the Japanese theatre of war, although we were all asked by a recruiting officer.

A naval photographer took a picture of six of us: L/Sea** Watson, L/Sea Warrick, L/Sea Rose, L/Sea Westbrook, L/Sea Spencer and myself, L/Sea Harrison, because we all joined the same day, went through twenty-three months overseas together and were going to be discharged all on the same day too.

Back row: Donald Westbrook, Charlie Rose, Joe Spencer

Front row: Joe Watson, Doug Harrison, Arthur Warrick

I travelled to Comox and Courtenay in 2012, saw the Combined Ops training grounds (from a distance) at The Spit, stayed just down the street from The Riverside Hotel's former location and met two widows of men who had been in the Navy with my father. I also freely wandered about the Native Sons Hall, camera in hand, and it was there the former deputy fire chief, with an old photo album under his arm, found me.

I even sat down beside an old-timer who knew a lot about VE-Day. He was there at the time and had a newspaper on his lap to prove the tale. I wish I could have matched his smile.

I returned home with many questions answered, and inspired to travel west again.

I'm already savin' up.





*the following words were crossed out, for some unknown reason, between the two phrases - everything went mad and uncontrolled

**Leading Seaman

Link here to Dad's Navy days: 1944 - Comox (33)

Photos by GH unless otherwise stated

Dad's Navy Days: 1944 - Comox, Vancouver Island (33)

“Stroke! Stroke! Stroke!” I hollered,

just bursting from laughter

Less than half of my father's days in the navy were spent at a Combined Operations training base at Comox on Vancouver Island, from January 1944 until the summer of 1945, but he probably ate and slept better on a regular basis during that time than when he was overseas.

1944 alone would have counted as a very big year, in my father's mind, at least for a little while. He travelled west for the first time, got married for the first time, ate his fill of 'monstrous oysters', trained Zombies (new ratings or entries) how to handle a navy cutter and organized a few boat races. But getting make to civvie street in the fall of '45 would have brought him back to earth.

In his hometown paper, about fifty years later, he wrote the following:

At Comox, right close to our barracks was a government breeding ground for oysters. I never knew of such a thing and didn’t care particularly as all I had eyes for were those monstrous oysters which showed up when the tide went out. I wasn’t alone, believe me.

["Giant oysters, BC-style"]

As the tide ebbed at night we once again borrowed the Captain’s dinghy and a few burlap bags and rowed out to the oyster bed. We climbed out of the dinghy into the horrible muck, filled our burlap bags and paddled away before the tide left us aground. These choice oysters were dumped into the sea out of sight behind the barracks, thereby assuring us of our own private oyster supply. We ate most of them raw; salt water and a bit of sand didn’t matter too much and a good slap on the back was required most times to help swallow them. Wonderful!

["Photo of 14-man cutter at matthewwestfall blog"]

I acted as Coxswain on large navy cutters as soldiers worked the oars. The cutters were 27 feet long and wide enough (except at the bows) to seat four men, two men to an oar. This was fun, getting the proper stroke amongst 18 green oarsmen. If the rhythm was wrong and an oar caught a crab (got stuck in the water), the effect was that nearly every thwart was cleared of oarsmen and bedlam prevailed.

“Stroke! Stroke! Stroke!” I hollered, just bursting from laughter. The oars are about 12 feet long and are they ever heavy. To give the soldiers a well-earned rest I would give the order “Rest oars.” Then the oars would be pulled in, rested on each side of the cutter, and the soldiers could rest their weary arms on the looms for awhile.

["Small crew tosses oars in this old photo"]

I enjoyed giving the order to ‘toss oars’. With this the huge oars were brought from the water and as quickly as possible tossed up in the air, and of course the water came pouring down from the blades in a regular storm for a minute and everyone got soaked to the hide, including me, but on a hot day it was refreshing. I was longing for a swim anyway.

There were several cutters with soldiers and with experience we began to have races. The competition was a good thing and a real esprit de corp developed within the teams. The races were close, the blisters were soon forgotten and the training became enjoyable as some fun was injected into it.

Years later, even months later, he realized how thankful he was to be alive and well when V-E Day was finally celebrated at Comox.

More to follow.

Top photo by GH

More Dad's Navy Days

Dad's Navy Days: 1944 - Comox, Vancouver Island (32)

"I ended up on the business end of a

pair of oars in the Captain’s dinghy..."

["Navy boys ready to board a train to Vancouver"]

["Navy boys on The Spit; turn left for oysters"]

What my father recalls about his 'navy days' from 1941 - 45 is now an essential part of how I view him 11 years after his death. Memories that go back seventy years to an isolated spot on Canada's vast west coast allow me to time travel to many faraway places with wide open eyes.

Some of his memories are found in an article he wrote for his hometown newspaper in the early 1990s:

DOWN MEMORY LANE: NAVY DAYS 

    In 1944 I was stationed in barracks on a piece of land
    called “The Spit” at Comox on Vancouver Island, B.C.
    About a half mile of water separated the spit from Comox
    and to get ashore we had to be inspected and travel to
    Comox on a real Liberty boat. 

["Ship at Comox pier; oyster beds to the right":

photo courtesy of Comox Library and Archives]

    Fishing for salmon was great there. I myself never fished;
    I ended up on the business end of a pair of oars in the
    Captain’s dinghy while someone else sat in the stern and
    trawled, using filleted herring as bait which acted as a shiny
    spinner. Some Fridays we were able to supply the noon meal
    with freshly caught salmon. We didn’t have meat
    because of the R.C.s.

    In order to catch herring for bait we used an old Indian
    custom. We acquired a thin piece of wood, similar to house
    trim, about six feet long. At one end we pounded in about
    18 inches of finishing nails about an inch apart. The heads
    were snipped off the nails and it looked like a long comb.
    When we saw the sea gulls diving for fish near the jetty we
    rushed down with our long comb and when a school of
    herring swam past we just poled them up onto the jetty.
    What we didn’t require we threw back in. The natives had
    a rule; if the gulls are in, the herring are in, and if the herring
    are in, the salmon are too, and away we went fishing.

    A few miles west of Comox was the small town of Courtenay,
    and I stood amazed on the bridge over the river in spawning
    season and watched the salmon. Bank to bank salmon -
    it didn’t seem possible. [The Norwich Gazette]

["Photo taken on bridge over the river in Courtenay":

courtesy of Courtenay/Comox calendar for 2012]

Salmon, herring and spawning season are mentioned. And not one word about the Royal Canadian Navy and World War 2. I bet he enjoyed times like that on The Spit.

While I was on The Spit in 2012 I fell in love with the beaches and fresh breezes. While I was in Courtenay and standing upon the bridge that replaced an earlier model (see above photo) I saw nary a salmon except, in my mind's eye, the ones my father discovered about seventy years earlier.

All beauties.

Photos by GH unless otherwise stated.

More Dad's Navy Days

WW2: Ten Poignant Stories (6)

Please find below a collection of paragraphs from books concerning WW1 and 2. All are reminders of times that should not silently slip from our memories.

"Epus P. Murphy's pet monkey went mad and we put it

in a bag of sand meant to douse incendiary bombs

and threw him over the side"

The following are excerpts from "DAD, WELL DONE", a collection of Navy memoirs and stories by my father, Doug Harrison, Leading Seaman Coxswain (a man of the barges), with RCNVR and Combined Operations, 1941- 45.

And Then the Worst Began

July 10, 1943.
We arrived off Sicily in the middle of the night
and stopped about four miles out. Other ships were
landing troops and new LCIs*, fairly large barges.
Soldiers went off each side of the foc’sle**,
down steps into the water and then ashore,
during which time we saw much tracer fire.
This was to be our worst yet invasion.

Those left aboard had to wait until daylight
so we went fishing for an hour or more,
but there were no fish.

A signal came through, i.e., ‘do not fire on low
flying aircraft, they are ours and towing gliders.’
What, in the dark?
Next morning, as we slowly moved in,
we saw gliders everywhere.
I saw them sticking out of the water,
crashed on land and in the vineyards.
In my twenty-seven days there
I did not see a glider intact.
We started unloading supplies with our LCMs
about a half mile off the beach and then
the worst began - German bombers.
We were bombed 36 times in the first 72 hours -
at dusk, at night, at dawn and all day long, and
they said we had complete command of the air. 

page 31

*landing craft for infantry

**forecastle

Utter Death and Carnage

We fired at everything. I saw P38s, German
and Italian fighters and my first dogfights.
Stukas blew up working parties on the beach once
when I was only about one hundred feet out.
Utter death and carnage.
Our American gun crews had nothing but coffee
for three or four days and stayed close to their guns
all the time. I give them credit.

[“I was only about one hundred feet out.
Utter death and carnage.”] 

Epus P. Murphy’s pet monkey went mad
and we put it in a bag of sand meant to douse
incendiary bombs and threw him over the side.
The Russian Stoker on our ship, named Katanna,
said Dieppe was never like this and hid under
a winch. Shrapnel and bombs just rained down.

Once, with our LCM* loaded with high octane gas and
a Lorrie, we were heading for the beach when we saw
machine gun bullets stitching the water right towards us.
Fortunately, an LST** loaded with bofors (guns) opened up
and scared off the planes, or we were gone if the bullets
had hit the gas cans. I was hiding behind a truck tire,
so was Joe Watson***. What good would that have done?

Our beach had machine gun nests carved out of the ever-
present limestone, with slots cut in them to cover our beaches.
A few hand grenades tossed in during the night
silenced them forever.

page 31-32

*landing craft mechanized
**landing ship for tanks
***from Simcoe, Ontario

N.B. Above photo is of, and from, Lloyd Evans w another monkey, on another ship on its way to Sicily, 1943. Mr. Evans is now 90, and lives in Markham, Ont.

Small handfuls of men from the barges wrote about their adventures after WW2 was over. My father put his notes together in the mid-seventies and I am delighted to have them near at hand. Lloyd Evans is another. His recollections and photos are invaluable and remind me of days that are oft-forgotten but should not be.

The Russian Stoker (Bill) Katanna mentioned in the second piece is second from left in above photo. My father is back centre, left of man wearing Navy cap. Katanna's hammock is now housed in the Esquimalt Navy Museum, Vancouver Island. Names of 'men of the barges' aboard the SS Silver Walnut - on its way to the invasion of Sicily - are written upon it.

Photos by GH

More WW2: Ten Poignant Stories

Dad's Navy Days: 1944 - Comox, Vancouver Island (31)

"when he was asked to go to sea again,

he said he would go to cells first"

["St. Croix photo at Naval Museum of Manitoba"]

Seventy years ago my father was living the good life - and he knew it - on an isolated spit of land about 200 kilometres north of Victoria. He didn't know when the war or his duties to the RCNVR and Combined Operations would cease but just about every soldier, pilot or sailor still overseas and facing hostilities would have happily traded places with him.

It was heaven there in British Columbia. That being said, most of the men he worked with had survived harrowing experiences and I'm sure that over time their stories were shared over coffee or beer and some consequences related to, e.g., shell shock, revealed themselves.

My father writes:

Wm. Fischer (sic), a stoker (not of combined ops but of R.C.N.V.R.), was stationed there. He had, I believe, an unequalled experience. He was on an Atlantic convoy run, on H.M.C.S. St. Croix, and one night in rough seas the St. Croix was sunk and he was the lone survivor. His life jacket had lights on and later he was picked up by the English ship H.M.S. Itchen. It in turn was torpedoed and Fischer was one of three survivors. They took him and his wife on saving bond tours, etc., but when he was asked to go to sea again, he said he would go to cells first. With an experience like that I would have too. He was lucky to be alive.

Other more detailed accounts, including a newspaper interview, of Wm. Fisher's experiences reveal that the stoker was not the sole survivor when the St. Croix was sunk but was the only member of the St. Croix's crew to survive the later sinking of the rescue ship Itchen.

At Naval Museum of Manitoba one can read the following:

"On 20 September 1943, while escorting convoy ON.202, south of Iceland, HMCS ST. CROIX was torpedoed and sunk by U-305. Sixty-five members of the ship's company perished. Five officers and seventy-six men were rescued by HMS ITCHEN, however, only two days later, the ITCHEN was also torpedoed by an enemy submarine. Only one ST. CROIX sailor survived."

It is quite likely Fisher would not have gone 'to cells' alone if others in his circumstances, along with his new mates at Comox, had to make a choice between combat duty once again or cells. They had life pretty good where they were, and easy routines surely helped most returnees recover from many ill-affects of the strenuous and dangerous work endured in Europe.

One of my father's recollections reveals battle-stresses from, e.g., one month's duty in Sicily, may have resulted in unusual behaviours back in Canada less than a year later:

Gordon Bell, a YMCA director, came to ‘the spit’ as it was called nearly everyday and provided piano music, sewed on crests and buttons, repaired uniforms and showed movies. One night my oppo, Frank Herring, slightly drunk, was laughing his booming laugh at a hilarious movie when he took a sudden urge and jumped right out the window, frame and all, and he didn’t even get out.

["Some nights were spent at the Riverside Hotel, Courtenay.

Bickle Theatre was another attraction (left background)."]

Some will say my father's Navy buddy had consumed too many beers. Others will say - and I'm one of them - that after two years of hostilities some members of the armed forces reacted differently to alcohol, normal duties or peace time than others. Frank Herring likely wasn't the only man back from Europe who 'took a sudden urge' to do unusual things at times. 'Shell shock', depression, the various consequences of seeing buddies vaporized into a pink mist by a bomb blast, and so on, resulted no doubt in a long list of unusual behaviours in our nation's veterans. My own father's long list of hospital visits surely reveals a good deal about war's ill affects. (But that's another story).

After writing about Wm. Fisher and Frank Herring my father writes about more positive adventures:

["Water near the barracks w Comox in left background"]

There was a government oyster breeding ground at Givenchy and at low tide we would get bags full of the largest ones and put them in the water near the barracks, so, when the tide came in no one saw them and when tide went out we had a feast. We cooked a lot, but some of the large ones we ate raw. They were hard to swallow, i.e., the large ones, and we often needed a slap on the back to be able to move it down our throat.

[“Oyster breeding grounds to the right of ship. circa 1930s"]

Perhaps because of the plentiful oysters and the occasional cold beer, my father - a die-hard nature lover - writes only one line about the eye-popping (in my opinion) natural surroundings that encircle the Combined Ops training base:

It was beautiful to see the snow-capped mountains and the contours - which had various names.

Surely there was more he could have written. But then, maybe by the time he got around to writing his memoirs in 1975, certain memories had faded and he was happier to think of his home surroundings instead.

More to follow.

More Dad's Navy Days: 1944 - Comox (30)