Travelling: Toronto to Amsterdam; 2012 to 1945

I left Toronto yesterday and arrived in Holland today to begin to follow some of my father's path during World War II.  Before signing up to the Canadian Army in 1941 he had already lived a challenging life.  He had the misfortune of turning 16 in 1929, not the best moment for job opportunities.  As many families did during the Depression, everyone chipped in.  He left school and began to work in the wire mill at Stelco, the Steel Company of Canada Limited not very far from where he had been born and lived at the time.

I was always inquisitive, asking my father about his life at various stages.  One thing he did tell me about this time was that he would get so hot as would the other workers that they were issued salt tablets and he told me his work clothes would be so salty at the end of the day they could "stand up by themselves".

This doesn't make signing up for the War any easier, but it does at least explain that hardship was not something foreign.  As I have come to understand and it certainly had to be true in his case, aptitude tests must have been conducted.  While he did not finish high school he was identified as someone capable of taking training to be a signal, i.e., able to deal with encoding and decoding messages.  His eyes weren't great so maybe they also figured out he wasn't likely to be a good marksman.

Going into the Signal Corps rather than some other branch of the army may well have helped in finding a career later in life.  To my relief, I discovered that most of the signals trained for 18 months.  I remember him telling me that he had trained on the Isle of Man -- preferring to talk about tailless cats than the demanding work.

I have yet to apply for a transcript of his service record, but it will help to answer better what he was doing in 1943.  What I have spent time with for this trip is a waterproof bag full of letters, photos, newspaper clippings and such ephemera as ads for army baseball games and football games.  These documents come mostly from his time in Holland in 1944 & 1945. 

He had also told me that he was in Normandy on D-Day +1, June 7, 1944.  From Normandy he was sent to the Battle of the Scheldt to liberate the Scheldt Estuary moving from Antwerp out to the ocean.  Both Normandy and the Scheldt were messy.  He did admit that he got trench foot from spending the better part of two months living in mud while he was fighting in the Scheldt.  The battle was also multi-faceted, being fought in multiple directions at the same time.  As a result, one could encounter the enemy coming from almost anywhere.  In Normandy, there were many German snipers behind Allied lines in the hours and days after the start of Operation Overlord.  Some of these were conscripts, local young men who did not really want to fight.  Whether my father killed anyone I do not know for certain, but I suspect he did.  He at least saw more than enough ways to die, that he never drove a car -- fearing I think that he would be involved in injury or death again.

From the Scheldt, he was part of the closing of the Falaise Gap and the push onward into Holland.  As nearly as I can determine, the closing days of his war were spent in the liberation of a little town called Almelo and possibly the much larger Groningen not so far away from it.  The last place I have a postcard from is Den Haag, The Hague.  Whether he was involved in the liberation of the Hague or sailed from there back to England I am not sure.  The Hague was liberated, however, after VE Day, when hostilities had already ended.  If I have time, I will also visit Tilburg where he appears to have been.

The experience of flying these days is an intimate one.  Between the lack of space, the hours of the flight and the noise of the engines and the chatter in the cabin, noise-cancelling headphones proved themselves.  Many people flying to Holland are flying on to other destinations in Europe, Africa or Asia.  For many folks on the plane the flight from Toronto is the shorter leg of their journey.


While the world is plagued with many problems that threaten peace, there are many aspects of life today that testify to our mutual desire not only for the avoidance of hostility but actively show people who want to get to know each other.  My current journey also attempts to do that spanning time.