Canada. Canadian Armed Forces - Our Finest Hour

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OUR FINEST HOUR

Copyright 2015 by David J. Bercuson.

All rights reserved under all applicable International Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

EPub Edition: September 2015 ISBN: 9781443418751

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First Canadian edition

Page 487 constitutes a continuation of this copyright page.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication information is available upon request

ISBN 978-1-44341-873-7 (HC)

RRD 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A t 2134 on the evening of August 16, 1944, Halifax MZ-899 O, coded BM-D, of the RCAFs No. 433 Squadron, lifted off the runway at Skipton-on-Swale, Yorkshire, climbed low over the hills separating the Vale of York from the North Sea, and headed for the coast of Denmark. The Main Force of Bomber Command, including 171 aircraft of No. 6 Group (RCAF), was due to bomb Kiel and Stettin that night, but Halifax MZ-899 O and eighteen other RCAF aircraft were assigned to gardening or minelaying missions, instead. Halifax MZ-899 O was never seen again; all seven crew members perished.

This book is dedicated to the crew of MZ-899 O: Pilot Officer J.G.M. Savard from Montreal, Quebec (pilot); Pilot Officer M.E. Fairall from Toronto, Ontario (air gunner); Pilot Officer B. Bercuson from Regina, Saskatchewan (wireless operator/air gunner); Flying Officer H. Grimble from Sturgeon Creek, Manitoba (navigator); Flying Officer J.L. Baillargeon from Windsor, Ontario (bomb aimer); Pilot Officer A.W.J. Drennan from Windsor, Ontario (bomb aimer); Sergeant R.I. Atkinson of the Royal Air Force (flight engineer)and to the 42,029 other Canadians and the hundreds of thousands of other Allied soldiers, sailors, and airmen who died in the cause of freedom in the greatest war in history.

T he Second World War shaped the modern world, this nation, the people who fought in it or lived through it, and me. I was born two days before the formal Japanese surrender was signed on the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945. When I was a small boy, the recently completed war seemed to have an impact on many important aspects of my life. I vividly remember my mothers European relativesrefugees from the Holocaustbunking in our small apartment on Maplewood Avenue in Montreal just after they arrived from the displaced persons camps of Europe. I thought them strange and somewhat repulsive. They ate herring, had gold teeth, spoke a language I did not understand, and pinched my cheeks a lot. My sister was born at the end of 1949 with a congenital hip problem. It was attended to by Dr. Breckenridge, who had achieved fame as an army doctor in the war and was still in the army reserves. I remember the photo in his office of him in his army uniform. My uncle, who had been a wireless air gunner with the RCAFs No. 6 Group, Bomber Command, had been badly injured in the crash of his bomber. I remember him telling me about the war and showing me his flying helmet.

The war was all around me as I grew up. At our family table, we talked about Douglas MacArthur, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Harry Truman. My parents took me to Hyde Park, New York, to see where Franklin D. Roosevelt was buried. My father told me about his cousin from Calgary who had been killed in action in 1944; he had flown away from England one night and had not come back. Most of my friends had dads or uncles who had served in the armed forces. My father had been in the reserves, then worked for RCA Victor building tank radios. My mother had photos of her two brothers in the living room; both had served in the US armed forces, one just after the war in occupied Germany. I still have a cigarette case he gave me with a map of the US zone of occupation on it. My mothers uncle had been a US Army doctor in Normandy, her cousin a Boeing B-29 pilot based on Saipan.

At home we avidly watched Victory at Sea on television. My father brought home documentary films about the war to show on his new sound projector. Our class collected money for infirm veterans at Christmas. My male high-school teachers were all veterans. One had suffered from battle fatigue (we called it shell-shock) and sometimes grew erratic in front of our class. We feared him when that happened. In class we debated whether it was important to buy poppies on Remembrance Day, whether the war should be remembered year after year. When the Israelis captured Adolf Eichmann in Argentina in 1959 and spirited him to Israel to face trial for war crimes, we debated whether they should hang him or let him go, to show the world how truly Christian and forgiving they were (I attended a Protestant school). I was glad when he was hanged.

We were war babies, not baby boomers. My generation was born during or immediately after the war, when the veterans came home to start families. The streets were filled with mothers wheeling baby carriages. The nursery schools and kindergartens were jammed. War books, war comics, and war movies were the fare of every boy. We refought the war with our toy guns, trying to emulate the scruffy infantrymen we saw shuffling in the newsreels. We were acutely conscious that there had been a war, that it had been very important, and that most of our fathers, uncles, teachers, and friends fathers had been in it.

Those days are gone. Ask a Canadian high school graduate today about Dieppe or Juno Beach or the Canadian liberation of Holland, and you will usually get only a blank stare. To them veterans are old men with blazers, berets, and chests full of medals seen on TV every now and then, marching to mark some occasion no one else seems to remember or care about. Our governments had better things to do after the war than make sure the memory of it stayed alive. In the 1960s, curriculum experts in provincial ministries of education from coast to coast decided that social studies were more important than history, and we stopped teaching historyof Canada or anything elseto the next generation. Students learned little about Canadas unique history and heritage, and virtually nothing of its contribution to the defeat of Nazism in the Second World War. That contribution was important both to Canada and to the Allies; Canadian soldiers, sailors, and airmen fought in virtually all the major theatres of war. They were infantrymen, bomber pilots, merchant seamen, corvette captains, tankers, reconnaissance pilots, submarine hunters, and more.