Two days before my nineteenth birthday, the Phony War ended as the blitzkrieg shattered the defences of the Maginot line, overwhelmed Holland and Belgium and thundered westward toward the English Channel.
A devastation which would snuff out at least fifty million human lives along with the lives of thousands of millions of the Others had begun. Though we could not even begin to comprehend its ultimate horror, we knew our world had shifted and a terrible darkness was descending.
It is hard now to remember, let alone describe, the conflicted state of mind into which we so suddenly and tumultuously found ourselves thrust. Personal hopes and plans were swept aside as we sensed, if dimly still, that everything we had believed secure was now in jeopardy. There was a rush to take up arms.
By the end of May many of my closest male friends had enlisted in the army, the navy, or the air force. On May 28, I headed for the Royal Canadian Air Force’s manning pool in Toronto’s Exhibition buildings to become part of a long line of (mostly) youths trying to enlist. After a cursory preliminary interview, I was passed along for a medical examination by a harassed doctor. He pronounced me underweight.
A few minutes later a tired recruiting sergeant glanced at my medical report and confirmed my lack of suitability.
”Shove off,” he said. ”The air force don’t need no peach-faced kids.”
Although I knew I looked younger and more fragile than I really was, I was still furious. Once back home I unburdened myself to my father, who was now under orders to report for duty with the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment.
Angus attempted to soothe me with some derogatory comments about the air force being ”the junior service” before casually mentioning that there were still openings for junior officers in the ”Hasty P’s” as the regiment was familiarly known.
I had no interest in becoming an infantryman or in joining my father’s old outfit, but I was not going to be left behind while all my peers got into uniform so I agreed to try the army.
On June 18, Angus and I set sail in Scotch Bonnet from Toronto, bound for the regimental depot at Picton on the Bay of Quinte. When we arrived there, it was to learn that my father had been made a major and given command of Headquarters Company of the 2nd Battalion, based in Trenton. I was told to proceed to the headquarters of Military District No. 3 in Kingston for a medical examination.
I feared I would fail this examination too but the staff of HQ MD 3 included a number of my father’s aging cronies from the Great War. One of them ordered me to drink six large glasses of water – seven if I could get the last one down – before presenting myself to the medical team.
Bollocks naked, I went before the three doctors, one of whom eyed my rotund stomach with interest and made as if to poke it with his finger. He was restrained by the one who had told me to drink up.
”For God’s sake, Harry, don’t do that! You’ll drown us all!”
Then they put me on the scales and to nobody’s surprise found I weighed enough to pass medical muster.
Having been declared fit to die for my country, I was returned to Picton. There, after taking the oath and being duly attested, I was enrolled in the ranks of the 2nd Battalion as Private Mowat, F.M., was issued a moth-eaten First World War uniform meant for a much larger person, and provided with two threadbare blankets of equal antiquity. I was not issued a weapon because at this stage of the war there were not even enough military rifles in Canada to arm the active battalions, let alone the militia.
I had no need of a weapon anyway. My first assignment was as a batman (officer’s servant) to the elderly lieutenant who was the depot’s assistant adjutant. I spent the first month of my service life shining his boots, polishing his brass, burnishing his Sam Browne belt, and helping him get over his hangovers, for he seldom went to bed sober.
Determined to become a good soldier I worked to such effect that I was promoted to lance corporal (acting) and put in charge of the bar in the officers’ mess.
This happy state of affairs ended as soon as my father got wind of it.
Angus had my career firmly charted. He was determined that I follow in his footsteps by becoming a platoon commander, even though he of all people must have realized this was likely to get me killed or maimed.
After he discovered that, instead of slamming my feet up and down on a parade ground, I was ”slinjing” (his word) in the officers’ mess, I received orders to report to HQ Company in Trenton.
Headquarters Company of the 2nd Battalion was run by a handful of mostly over-age soldiers commanded by my father. It consisted of three rifle platoons, composed of men who were either too young, too old, or too disabled for active service, or those who could not be spared from warrelated civilian jobs but could ”soldier” two nights a week and on weekends.
Most of our training was of First World War vintage. A farmer’s field became our training ground and here we laboriously dug a full-scale 1918-style trench system. On those rare occasions when we could scrounge a little ammunition from District Headquarters, we practised marksmanship at targets illuminated by the headlamps of parked cars. On weekends we engaged in war games, during which we were sometimes attacked by antiquated RCAF biplanes whose pilots dropped paper bags filled with flour on us as we pointed wooden machine ”guns” at them and shouted ”Bang!”
Because I had spent much of my young life in the wilderness, I got the job of field-craft instructor. With the coming of winter I wangled thirty pairs of ski boots from a Bata shoe factory, miscellaneous skis and poles from Trenton and Belleville merchants, dressed my platoon in white cotton smocks, and so created the Canadian army’s first ski unit. This improvisation may have had something to do with my finally being commissioned an acting second lieutenant.
To avoid any possibility of finding himself accused of favouritism, Angus treated me with rigorous severity. ”You may be my son,” he told me one day after chewing me out publicly for being sloppy on parade, ”in fact, I’m fairly confident you are, but in this regiment you’re just another snotty-nose who has to be taught to change his diapers and respect his betters.”
Off duty Angus was more of a comrade. Helen had remained in Richmond Hill with her new house while Angus and I lived aboard Scotch Bonnet, moored in Trenton harbour. We took turns doing the cooking, drank together, read together, and talked more than we had ever done before. But from the moment we stepped ashore in the morning, uniforms pressed and boots polished, he became an alien martinet who seemed determined to grind me into the ground. I hated him, yet I had never loved him more.
Determined to dispel any vestiges of peacetime torpor in the local population, Angus displayed a Churchillian inventiveness. To bring the reality of war home to Trenton, he staged a raid by a German U-boat – or what could have been a U-boat but was, in fact, Scotch Bonnet. With her black hull and a very dark night, she was practically invisible as she eased slowly and silently into Trenton’s inner harbour. Once there she discharged several ”torpedoes” at the dim outlines of three coal barges and a small freighter moored to the docks.
The torpedoes were army-issue ”thunder flashes” – powerful fireworks – lashed to small cedar rafts which, using Bonnet’s dinghy, I towed close to the targets and released after igniting the fuses.
No damage resulted but the tumult and confusion following the explosions was spectacular. Sirens rent the air. HQ Company was called out to defend the town. Not until next day did the absurdity of the supposition that German submarines were active in Lake Ontario strike home. By then my father’s purpose had been achieved.
The 2 nd Battalion was a way station from which I impatiently waited to be transferred to active service overseas with the 1st Battalion. But the 1st Battalion was not in action and was enduring no casualties, so there were few openings in its ranks. As autumn drew on, I became increasingly frustrated with soldiering in Trenton. When Sergeant-Major Bill McCoy, a leathery backwoodsman from north Hastings County, suggested he and I spend a few days at his hunting cab
in, I jumped at the opportunity.
I asked for leave and, for once, my CO proved accommodating.
”Just make sure you bring back some venison. And maybe a brace or two of partridges.”
Bill and I shed our uniforms and drove north through the mining town of Bancroft to a great granite dyke with a break in it called Hole in the Wall. Here we pulled on packsacks and snowshoes and tramped off into the winter woods. Three hours later we reached Bill’s cabin, chased out a porcupine who had taken up winter quarters in the woodshed, built a fire, fried up some bannocks, and had a belt of rum.
During the next few days we mostly went our separate ways, Bill following deer trails while I wandered along a frozen river that snaked a convoluted course through hard-rock country. I carried my shotgun but though I saw rabbits, a bob cat, a belligerent ermine weasel, and many birds including ruffed grouse, I did not fire a shot. My rationale for this restraint was that I did not want to alarm the deer and so spoil Bill’s chances. The truth was that I was far too happy at once again finding myself in the company of the Others to even consider using my guns against them.
A blizzard kept us stormbound in the cabin for a day and Bill grew fretful. A legendary deer hunter, he believed it was imperative that he return to Trenton with at least one carcass tied to the fender of his car. Deer were remarkably scarce, however, and by our next-to-final day he was still ”skunked” and getting desperate about it. On the last day he persuaded me to lend him a helping hand.
I was to take station at the head of a gulley while he made a wide sweep through the surrounding country and circled back toward me, occasionally baying like one of the hounds with which he hunted in peacetime. Although I could hear him coming a mile away, no deer appeared. Bill was almost upon me and I was about to come out of hiding when, soundless as a ghost, a big buck materialized out of the dusk not fifty feet away.
For a moment the buck and I looked straight into each other’s eyes, then he whiffled lightly in the friendly way deer do with one another, walked unhurriedly into the gulley, and disappeared.
A minute later Bill appeared, sweating heavily and looking angry.
”Didn’t you see that goddamn deer?”
I nodded my head.
”You saw him? And never took a shot?”
Again I nodded apologetically. There was a long, pregnant pause before Bill spoke again, bitterly emphasizing the ”mister” which was my due as an officer.
”Well, Mister Mowat … you just went and spoiled a damn good hound!”
Christmas came and went and I was still stuck in Trenton. Applications by militia officers to be given active status and sent overseas were a dime a dozen. One needed powerful influence to gain acceptance. Angus used all he had, but to no avail.
I still have the official reply to one of his attempts:
To: O.C. HQ Coy, 2nd Bn. H.P.ER. Trenton.
Re: F.M. Mowat, 2/Lieut, Non-Permanent Active Militia.
1. The further request of the m/n officer to transfer to Active status is herewith noted.
2. It is not considered that the services of this officer with the Non-Permanent Active Militia should be dispensed with at this time.
[signed] L.E. Grant, Col.,
H.Q. Military District No. 3.
Scrawled in ink at the bottom of the page is this addition:
Sorry Angus, we just can’t do it. He looks so damn young there’d be bound to be questions asked in Parliament about the Army baby-snatching.
Finally, on February 17, 1941, I was TOS (Taken On Strength) of the Canadian Army (Active) and posted to Fort Frontenac in Kingston. My stay in Kingston was a happy time. There really wasn’t very much for me to do while I awaited posting to an officer-training centre. I was given nominal command of a few troops in transit, and when one soldier came down with measles the lot of us were quarantined together in an old stone warehouse on the lakeshore. We were not allowed out but abundant quantities of beer came in. And, in the dark of night, sundry local girls who, I assume, must have had an immunity to measles, came in too.
Ten days before my twentieth birthday, I was dispatched to an officer candidates training unit in Brockville. Enclosed behind a ten-foot barbed-wire fence, almost as formidable as that of a concentration camp, it was commanded by a very tough colonel (Whitehead was his name, so of course we called him Blackhead) whom we concluded must have been the peacetime warden of a penitentiary. He ran a classic U.S.-style boot camp where sadistic permanent-force corporals and sergeants did their level best to reduce us officer cadets to the emotional level of snivelling worms, while at the same time trying to imbue us with the physical attributes of pit bulls and the bloodthirstiness of demons.
I am happy to remember the day of our departure from ”Brockville Military Academy.” Colonel Whitehead owned an Irish wolfhound bitch of which he was inordinately fond, seeming to prefer her to any other being. She happened to be in heat on the weekend my class graduated, so some of us scoured Brockville for its most disreputable mongrel dog. Having fortified him with a huge steak we then, in the dark of night, hoisted him over the wall into the garden surrounding the colonel’s private quarters and let nature take its course.
There was bloody hell to pay next day, but we already had our marching orders.
Although I was now a fully qualified first lieutenant, I did not get the immediate overseas posting I had anticipated. Instead I was seconded as an instructor to an infantry training centre at Camp Borden in central Ontario.
Outraged, I had myself paraded before the camp commandant there (another has-been resurrected from the last war) and demanded to be put on draft for England.
He was adamant in his refusal and I found myself fated to spend a rotten fall and winter in Camp ”Boredom,” doubtful that I would ever be released to join my regiment in England.
Eventually the fates relented, but it was not until July 18, 1942, that I found myself on a troop train entering the seaport of St. John where, along with a thousand others, I boarded the Letitia, a former luxury liner converted to serve as one of His Majesty’s Transports.
Short hours later we were under way ”across the Pond.”
PART TWO
INTERLUDE
– 8 –
A GREEN AND PLEASANT LAND
The transatlantic passage turned out to be something of a holiday cruise, with pay. The weather was calm, clear, and warm. The sea was gentle. Although we had to eat kippers, oatmeal gruel, boiled meat, and Brussels sprouts, liquor was abundant and, at sixpence a shot, well within our reach.
Five of us reinforcement lieutenants shared what had been a first-class cabin for two, and we behaved somewhat like youths at a summer camp, filled with the boisterous exuberance of those who, for the first time in their lives, truly feel free of the restraints imposed by family and society. The prospect of soon being set ashore in ”England’s green and pleasant land” before marching bravely off to war was overwhelmingly romantic.
I spent a lot of time on the upper decks observing the escorting corvettes and destroyers, half hoping and half fearing to glimpse the deadly dorsal spike of a periscope or the rushing white track of a torpedo, but the war seemed intent on avoiding us … until one evening a three-inch gun mounted aft on the poop deck opened fire.
I was in our cabin when the cannon roared. Almost simultaneously the ship’s warning siren signalled an attack while the loud-hailer ordered us to action stations. My station was with the troops below decks so I missed seeing ”the show” that followed.
One of Letitia’s lookouts had reported seeing the wash of a barely surfaced submarine almost directly astern of us, and our naval gunners had reacted with commendable speed, sending half a dozen fifty-pound shells screaming toward the target, which dis appeared. Two escort destroyers came foaming toward it at flank speed. Penned below decks, we felt the sickening thuds as depth charges began exploding and desperately hoped they would find their mark.
They did. Some hours later we learned via the
ship’s scuttlebutt that the target had been rammed and cut in half by a destroyer travelling at a speed of twenty knots.
This would have been a notable victory had the target been a U-boat instead of a whale.
One of my cabin mates expressed the general disappointment:
”Goddamn whales sure screw things up!” he lamented. ”Teach them a fucking lesson! Keep out of our way.”
In due course we raised the lush, green hills of northern Ireland, and a day later Letitia and her convoy sisters steamed slowly up the Clyde to dock at Greenoch.
The roadstead was packed with shipping ranging from camouflaged luxury liners and brooding battleships to dirty little tugs and sinister submarines. Both banks of the Clyde appeared to be sinking under a proliferation of shipyards whose stocks were filled with the skeletons of new vessels being hastily riveted together to help fill the voids created by U-boats.
The summer sky was everywhere streaked and soiled by gouts of coal smoke rising from the roaring maze of industries associated with the yards. Over our heads barrage balloons tugged at their tethers like blind, bloated beasts striving to escape a sea of suffocating fumes. Riverside streets and quays were encrusted with masses of trucks, horse-drawn wagons, and human beings. There was a continuous heavy-bellied rumble punctuated by strident metallic shrieks. Though I did not comprehend its significance at the time, what I beheld on Clydeside that day was a classic battle in the never-ending war between Man and Nature.
There was little time to dwell upon this monstrous spectacle before we were hustled off Letitia, herded over incredibly cluttered wharves, and wedged into the tiny carriages of British trains whose engines hooted like demonic owls.
Jammed into claustrophobic compartments, my companions and I peered eagerly out at a land that seemed grotesquely out of scale. Small as I am, I felt large and loutish in a landscape where everything was as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope. The illusion was heightened by the onset of darkness as the engine of our train snuffled southward into night. Tiny towns, Lilliputian cattle, handkerchief-sized fields, toy trucks and autos grew vague and disappeared. The blackout blinds in the carriage were pulled down, leaving one small bulb to illuminate two rows of white and astonishingly childlike faces staring palely at one another in the coal-reek gloom. All that long night we slept or dozed as best we might.