Boanerges1's Open Salon Blog

Reflections on Memorial Day (Update)

Sat, 26 May 2012 13:05:51 -0400

     When James Chaney Palms showed up at the Essex Scottish Regiment's recruiting office to volunteer for the Second World War, they say he was wearing riding boots.
     It might have been expected from an irrepressible young man who was the offspring of a prominent and wealthy family, likeable, well-educated and, as they say, well set-up. He was eager to enlist, although as an infantryman, he wouldn't spend any time on horseback.
     The Windsor-based regiment, with a military tradition dating to the 18th century, had secretly started mobilizing Sept. 1, 1939, nine days before Canada declared war on Germany and its allies.
     Palms, called Jimmy by his friends, was deemed officer material, and he was duly commissioned as a lieutenant. It troubled absolutely no one that he wasn't from Windsor, nor even the outlying areas of Essex and Kent counties.
     In fact, he wasn't even Canadian: He was from across the Detroit River, just one of many Americans who would train and serve with the Essex Scottish long before the U.S. entered the war.
     Then there was Thomas Henry Nichols, who lied about his age to enlist in Company A of the 2nd Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry on May 5, 1864, in Chesterfield, Mass.
     One of the first of the Northern regiments raised during the Civil War, the 2nd Massachusetts became renowned for its discipline and reliability in every command in which it served, as part of Slocum's 12th Corps in the Army of the Potomac and under Sherman during the March to the Sea.
     Nichols, who apparently never rose above the rank of private soldier, would be with the regiment in the campaign through Georgia, and was therefore with the first Union soldiers to enter Atlanta, Sept. 2, 1864. He likely saw action in places like Bentonville and Peach Tree Creek and Kenesaw Mountain. The battles were terrible, the carnage endless on both sides.
      Nichols wasn't an American, and doubtless that troubled no one either. He was a farm boy from Pictou County, Nova Scotia, and just one of many from what would become Canada who fought in the Civil War.

* * *

     The grave of James Chaney Palms isn't visited very often on Memorial Day, but it is frequently decorated with flowers, as are all those cemeteries maintained so immaculately around the world by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.
     He lies in a place called Hautot-sur-mer, France, where the dead rest head-to-head, German army fashion, since it was the Wehrmacht that buried the nearly 1,000 who were killed in the Dieppe Raid on Aug. 19, 1942; it is, to my knowledge, the only such arrangement in any cemetery where Canada's war dead are buried.
     His gravestone bears the traditional maple leaf of the Canadian Army, and under his name the inscription "OF U.S.A" appears above the name of his regiment.
     Palms is with his comrades in the Essex Scottish, more than 100 of whom were killed that day in a frontal sea assault on a fortified coastal city. He died leading his men, a survivor told me, with scarcely a mark on his body, possibly from concussion, or maybe from a small shell fragment.
     Thomas Henry Nichols, on the other hand, long outlived the horrors of the Civil War. He died in 1937, in a fishing village called Wheatley on the Ontario shore of Lake Erie, far from his Nova Scotia farm home, far from the southern battlefields he somehow survived.
     He remained proud of his service to the Cause, and was an officer in the Edward Pomeroy branch of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) veterans' organisation when he lived in Jackson, Mich.
     His grave marker bears a depiction of his veteran's medal, a five-pointed star with "GAR" in the centre. Under his dates of birth and death is "Co. A 2nd MASS. VOL. INF".
     The Commonwealth War Graves Commission doesn't maintain that cemetery, but it is well-tended nonetheless. Next to his grave is a white cross, erected by the local branch of the Royal Canadian Legion, which so honours every known area veteran of whatever conflict.
     James Chaney Palms and Thomas Henry Nichols stand for the tens of thousands of their countrymen over the last 175 years who fought in each other's armed forces, whether officially, as in the Devil's Brigade in the Second World War, or unofficially in regiments like the Essex Scottish or the Marines or the Air Cavalry or the 18th Battalion or ... the list is endless.
     Our countries owe each other so much in so many ways. On this Memorial Day, at least one Canadian will be remembering Jimmy Palms and his riding boots, and all those other fine boys who came north over the years to answer the call.

And I think I'll pick some wildflowers and spend a few moments with Thomas Henry Nichols, who's buried a couple of miles away from where I write this, to honour all those fine boys who heard the same call ... and went south in answer.

The Associated Press Says, 'Sorry'

Mon, 7 May 2012 07:05:35 -0400

Not many people know about Ed Kennedy today, but on May 7, 1945, his name was on a dispatch from France announcing Germany's unconditional surrender.

It was the biggest scoop of the Second World War, and it got Kennedy turfed out of Europe and fired by the Associated Press.

Why? He was a day early -- according to the military hierachy and the politicians.

Nearly 20 reporters, including Kennedy, were at the signing of the capitulation in a school house in Reims on May 7. All were prepared to file on the historic moment, but politics -- in the form of Joseph Stalin -- got in the way.

Stalin wanted a surrender in Berlin on May 8 for propaganda purposes. Harry Truman and Winston Chuchill acquiesced, and the story was embargoed.

But censors allowed German radio to announce the surrender. An outraged Kennedy, feeling that he and his colleagues had been betrayed, argued that the cat was well and truly out of the bag and that the story certainly posed no threat to troops, since hostilities were over.

When he was rebuffed, he thought about it for a few minutes, got even angrier, and filed anyway, using a military phone to contact the AP office in London, which sent the story out right away.

The result was instant street celebrations in cities around North America.

The brass was furious. Kennedy was recalled to the U.S. in disgrace, and the Associated Press publicly reprimanded and subsequently fired him. He wound up at a couple of smaller newspapers in California before dying in a car accident in 1963.

But by then, he'd written a memoir, one that is being published soon. Its introduction was co-written by Tom Curley, the retiring head of the venerable wire service. Curley said in an interview: "It was a terrible day for the AP. It was handled in the worst possible way." He is correct.

Censorship in wartime is a necessary evil to protect lives. Entire books have been written about it, including The Fog of War, by Mark Bourrie, which I've just finished and which makes reference to the Kennedy case.

But when censorship becomes merely a political propaganda tool, as it clearly was on May 7, 1945, then it's wrong. Kennedy did the right thing, but it cost him dearly. I'd like to think I'd have had the same guts, but I rather doubt it.

Associated Press is to be applauded for apologising for its treatment of one of its most seasoned -- and courageous -- war correspondents. It's just too bad it took 67 years.

Amazon link

Broken Arrow

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 23:04:09 -0400

     One of the few vivid memories I have of high school is sitting in a hot crowded gym listening to Prime Minister John Diefenbaker give one of his characteristically bombastic speeches.
     I retain nothing of what he said. I do remember his reaction when a rain of paper airplanes descended from the balcony where sat the thuggish senior students, one of them a scary cousin who would go on to be a scarier RCMP forensics expert.
     Each of the paper planes carried the word "Avro Arrow", a reference to the cutting edge fighter/interceptor aircraft project that Diefenbaker had unilaterally, maliciously and stupidly killed the year before.
     (Did I say killed? It was obliterated. Blueprints, models, tooling, engines, airframes, complete aircraft, all were cut up, burned or otherwise demolished. Nothing remained but a few bits and pieces ... and tantalising rumours of the survival of CF202, one of the those prototypes that would have revolutionised fighter plane technology.)
     Diefenbaker was so livid that 1960 afternoon, I don't think he finished his peroration, which may have been a first for the Conservative -- of course he was a Conservative -- gasbag.
     The death of the Avro Arrow destroyed Canada's highly regarded aeronautics and aerospace industry. Avro was the third largest company in the country in February 1959, with 40,000 employees and arguably the world's most advanced research and design team.
     How good were they? More than 30 of the engineers were head-hunted by a newborn NASA scrambling to catch up with the Russians. They played leading roles in putting men in space and on the moon. More would be taken on by the developers of the SST. It started a brain drain that really hasn't stopped.
     Why is this of interest to anyone outside Canada? No reason, really, except this.
     Next time you see a photo of one of the recently retired NASA shuttles heading to its final destination in a museum, or of the British-French Concorde, take a close look at the design.
     Now take a look below at the 1959 Avro Arrow (wasn't she beautiful?).
     Notice anything in particular? You win a prize if you thought "delta wing" aircraft, whose supersonic capability came from the minds and genius of the brilliant people at Avro Canada. They deserve your recognition and respect.
     RIP, Avro Arrow: Your legacy lived on.
     Just not in your place of birth.

Canada's Day

Mon, 9 Apr 2012 10:04:46 -0400

"It was Canada from the Atlantic to the Pacific on parade. I thought then ... that in those few minutes I witnessed the birth of a nation."

-- Brig.-Gen. Alexander Ross, commanding officer,

the 28th (North-West) Battalion at Vimy

    It's not much to look at on an army ordnance map -- a sort of whaleback feature in Nord-Pas-de-Calais that's less than five miles long and nowhere even 500 feet above sea level, overlooking a broad plain of small villages, roads, trees and fields.
    On April 8, 1917, it was in German hands, and had been since October 1914. The fortifications had defied the British and French armies in 1915 and 1916, costing the Allies 200,000 dead and denying them the high ground they so desperately needed on the Western Front near Arras.
    On April 9, 1917, that all changed.
    At 5:30 that morning, the men of the Canadian Corps left their trenches and tunnels and advanced into the teeth of a blizzard of snow, sleet and hot jagged metal; by evening, they had claimed a place in military annals, consolidated their reputation as elite shock troops ... and altered forever their country's future.
    The Corps had been used piecemeal in other engagements and acquitted itself admirably, perhaps most notably holding the line at Second Ypres in 1915, when the Germans first used poison gas.
   But this time was different. This time they went into battle together, 100,000 strong, shoulder to shoulder, from sea to sea to sea. And they would not, they could not, fail.
    The assault was supposed to be just part of the opening phase of the British-led Battle of Arras, a diversionary attack for the French Nivelle Offensive. But nobody told the Corps they were supposed to be a sideshow, and they wouldn't have listened if anyone had tried.
    The facts of that Easter Monday are well-documented elsewhere: the planning genius of Arthur Currie; the devastating accuracy of Andy McNaughton's guns; the courage, tenacity and spirit of the men who set out to take an impregnable fortified position -- and took it. By nightfall, the fighting was all but over in the only successful offensive by any command under the British since the war began in 1914.
    The cost? In Western Front terms, virtually nothing: a paltry 3,600 dead Canadians, 7,000 others wounded.
    The British usually ignore the battle, concentrating on their own nearby completely abortive assault at the Scarpe instead. The French, more gallantly and more accurately, call it Canada's Easter Gift to France, and after the Great War, they donated 220 acres atop the ridge on which to erect a permanent monument to that day.
    That memorial stands there now, a symbol that rises above mere topography. Twin pillars soar nearly 100 feet into the sky, representing Canada and France and the bond that exists between our peoples. Carved into the base are the names of 11,285 Canadians killed in that country alone who have no known graves.
    And standing solitary before the plains beyond, the "Promised Land," as some of those who took the ridge called it, is a brooding, hooded, haunting figure. Her eyes are downcast and her chin is resting on her left hand, while the right holds a limp bundle of laurel at her side. Below her is a tomb, draped in more laurel branches and bearing a helmet and a sword.
    Exquisitely carved from Dalmatian stone, she is known as Canada Bereft, forever silent, forever mourning the loss of those 3,600 sons killed capturing the heights, and the 65,000 others who died that small nations -- including their own -- might some day be free.
    No, it's really not very much to look at on an army ordnance map, this low swelling over the Douai Plain called Vimy Ridge. It's not very long, nor is it very high.
    But it was big enough to build a nation on.

Of Course It Was Snowing....

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 13:03:09 -0400

     I almost lost it. Just the one time.
     It was when the trumpeter blew "The Last Post", the traditional bugle call that marks the end of the military day and which is now played during Remembrance services. But he wouldn't have approved if I had, and neither would I.
     Instead, standing in the silence before "The Rouse" sang out, I stared at the table with his urn draped by the Maple Leaf flag, remembering how once he had opposed its replacing the Union Jack and the Canadian Red Ensign under which he'd grown up and later went to war.
     Opposed, that is, until he and Mum were on vacation in Bermuda and saw it flying, for the first time, over a Canadian government building in a foreign country. It suddenly became a non-issue.
     Nearby were two other tables filled with mementos: putter, golf cap, photos, including one of him riding his horse along a stream bed during a hunt. He was dressed to the nines in his pinks, black helmet, tan pants and tall riding boots. I think I took it; it certainly looked like my work. But maybe not. I wasn't around much then.

* * *

     The end had come surprisingly fast. On the Monday, I'd driven down to see him in the palliative care wing of the veterans' hospital. He was happily inhabiting a room with a wonderful view of the city, surrounded by some items he'd asked for and cheerfully ignoring the growing pain of pancreatic cancer.
     In clear line of vision were a portrait of Mum, another of him in uniform prior to heading overseas and a cartoon by a friend of mine commemorating the 50th anniversary of VE Day. I call it a cartoon, but it's really a piece of simple evocative art: Two old soldiers in berets and blazers in Normandy, one saying, "Well, I guess we just did our bit". Underneath is the caption "You Saved The World". Quite so.
     The last thing he said to me as we shook hands, was, "Drive safely, Son." I allowed as how I always drive safely -- it's the other morons' driving I worry about. And then I left, saying over my shoulder, "See you soon."

* * *

     It wasn't to be.
     That evening, he was still in high spirits, calling an old neighbour to wish her happy birthday, then a florist to have a bouquet sent to his latest lady friend for Valentine's Day. A while later, a nurse brought him his favourite nightcap -- a potent mixture of scotch and Drambuie called a "rusty nail". And then he dropped off to sleep.
     He went into cardiac arrest early in the morning, with my brother and sister-in-law getting there in time to hold his hand when he crossed the bar at 6:30.
     I got the call about 7 a.m., by which time Red and I had uncharacteristically been awake for half an hour. She was lying in bed, restless. I was on the lower level, watching the news and occasionally looking out the window and down the ravine.
     It was snowing. Of course it was snowing. How appropriate for hearing about the death of the old north woodsman.

* * *

     And it snowed at the cemetery too, a week later. Almost as if he'd planned it that way.
     The knot of people around the same grave we buried Mum in 17 years ago mostly huddled under umbrellas provided by the funeral home. I had my own -- I always carry one along with a green garbage bag and other foul weather gear. Another thing the onetime Boy Scout district commissioner always preached -- semper paratus.
     Then down into the small hole went the earthly remains of a soldier of the King. It was over.
     I headed home to the Redhead, a two-hour trip that felt like eternity.

* * *

     That night, we watched the home movies from when they were young -- Dad, his sisters, his brother. The only person still living is the little girl who would become his sister-in-law years later.
     Included is footage of him on crutches getting off the troop train that finally brought him home in 1945. He'd been injured in a motorcycle crash late in May, just after the war in Europe ended, and they wanted to stretcher him off.
     "Get lost," -- or words to that effect -- he said. No way was he going to greet his family and future wife flat on his back after more than four years overseas.
     In fact, that was pretty much his way of going at things. That last day, he sat up on the edge of his bed. "Give me a hand getting to my chair," he said. I did ... but I had to catch him when he suddenly stumbled and nearly fell. For that breach of hospital protocol -- getting him up without an orderly present -- we were both roundly castigated by the staff.
     "Guess we annoyed them," he said a few minutes later, a wicked, unrepentant grin on his face.
     "Good," I said.