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Proud to serve by land, air and sea
North Shore veterans recall their Second World War experiences
Rosalind Duane
rduane@nsnews.com
A few frayed cords barely hold the tired spine in place as it struggles to keep the well-worn pages together, but it's worth the effort.
The unassuming cover reads simply A Wartime Log, but inside North Vancouver veteran Roy Pellant's book are memories of the people and places he experienced during the Second World War.
The scrapbook was a gift he received from the Red Cross and he carried it with him through his service with the infantry and later his incarceration in a German prison camp.
The pages are filled with descriptions, musings, favourite poems and hand-drawn escape maps and cartoons.
Pellant points out the long list of names and addresses of the men he shared space with at the prison camp, and when asked why he collected that information he says simply: so people would know they were there.
Pellant was a student at UBC when the war broke out while he was in his last year of a BA program. He was planning on becoming a teacher, but enlisted with the Canadian army in 1940 at the age of 21. He was a product of the officer training program and was sent to England before being shipped out to North Africa. He was only there a few weeks before the German effort in Africa fell and so he was sent to Italy to join the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry out of Alberta.
However, Pellant notes that he wanted to transfer into the Seaforth Highlanders because they were from Vancouver, but he never got the chance.
In Italy for a short time, Pellant was leading a three-man reconnaissance along a shoreline bank when he was knocked unconscious by a grenade. German troops were lined up on the other side of the bank and easily took the three-man crew. Pellant says he woke up to find a small group of enemy soldiers looking down at him. They hadn't shot him because one of the Germans wanted the leather jacket he was wearing, but when the soldiers removed Pellant's leather jacket they noticed the two "pips" on his shoulder.
The rank insignia denoted his officer status as a lieutenant so the Germans decided to take him back to their base for questioning.
He still doesn't know what happened to the other two soldiers he was with at the time he was captured.
Pellant was in jail for a few days before being loaded onto a train bound for a prisoner-of-war camp in Slovakia. He shared the cramped train car with 60 other men for the two-day journey and says it got gamey pretty quickly.
When the Russian forces got too close to the German camp, the prisoners were relocated to West Germany, where Pellant says they were held in converted army training barracks that was fairly comfortable compared to their previous location. Some of the soldiers he shared the prison barracks with had already been there for many years.
Pellant spent a year and half imprisoned in the camp, where the captured soldiers received a care package from the Red Cross each week that contained various items, including books. What the captured soldiers really wanted though was food, says Pellant, noting that most meals consisted of just a few spoonfuls. There were a lot of potatoes, he adds, but meat was scarce.
One of the detailed drawings in Pellant's log shows the eight two-deck bunks that filled his room, which housed 16 men. He notes that they had a radio hidden in the wall of the room because the Germans were always searching for radios to confiscate.
"We got pretty good at hiding them," says Pellant.
When asked how the war ended for him, Pellant answers, "When the Americans came by with half a dozen tanks one day and opened the gate."
The fate of the failing German war effort was becoming clear in the days leading up to the arrival of the Americans, and Pellant says German guards at the prison camp were just walking away from their posts, heading home. Pellant joined the Canadian and British soldiers who packed up what little they had left and walked out of the camp, but not before raiding their captors' administrative offices. Before he left, Pellant snatched the file the Germans had on him, and his memorial log now contains the prisoner photo and card the Germans had on file.
After walking for two days, Pellant arrived at a landing strip in Brussels where he waited with a large crowd of other former prisoners for a plane to England.
Many years later, Pellant was sifting through a pile of postcards and photos at a store when he came across a picture of a group of soldiers gathered on a field. He quickly recognized himself among the group and realized someone had taken a picture of the prisoners waiting for their plane trip to England.
That black-and-white photo now holds a special place in Pellant's memory book.
Although he hadn't looked at his book for many years, Pellant easily remembers the details of every entry in it, and when asked what his favourite part is he answers, "I'm rather proud of the whole damn thing."
At the end of the war, West Vancouver's Geoff Marlow flew his own plane back to Canada.
As an air force pilot during the war, Marlow flew Lancaster bombers from England to targets in Germany during his 18-month operations tour. After Germany's forces fell, Canada was regrouping to join the war in the Pacific against Japan, so the planes had to be brought back home, notes Marlow. The long flight wasn't his first trip across the Atlantic since enlisting at the age of 18. Before the war began, Marlow's parents had sent him to school in England to study mining engineering. When he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force, he was sent back to Canada for half of his two-year pilot training program. He made the trip on a converted liner with about 6,000 troops and some prisoners, and he recounts the day he came face to face with a German submarine. The ship was three days into its voyage to Halifax when Marlow ventured out onto the deck to watch the horizon because it was the one thing on the ship that didn't move, he notes with a laugh.
As the day faded to dusk, Marlow's solitude was interrupted by a periscope that popped up about 400 yards away. Before he could react, the liner's helmsman had already spotted the hiding sub and the troop ship suddenly heeled 90 degrees to avoid its firing line.
"We presented our rear end to the sub," notes Marlow. He explains that the back of the ship presented a smaller target, and the advantage of the liner was its cruising speed, which could reach 22 to 28 knots compared to the sub's 15 knots. The liner spent all night weaving back and forth to avoid any other German subs, which always travelled in packs, says Marlow.
By the time it crossed the ocean, the ship was so far off course it docked in New York instead of Halifax, which Marlow explains was an unexpected treat.
At the end of the training, Marlow was one of only 30 per cent of the original group to pass the course.
Flight training continued back in England, and Marlow says it was a different experience flying in London after his training in Alberta. The wide-open Alberta prairie was marked by two easy-to-follow railroad lines, and pilots couldn't get lost because they simply followed the line or could fly low enough to read the grain elevators for direction. But the busy infrastructure of Britain presented a much bigger challenge. During his service, Marlow flew 30 missions with the 434 Bluenose Squadron, which was the length of a tour of operations in a bomber cockpit before a pilot was reassigned to other jobs in the squadron. Every morning, the pilots checked the battle order posted at 11 a.m. to find out if they would fly that night. At 5 p.m., they would receive the details of their mission at a secret briefing.
Marlow pulls out a map and traces some of the routes he took to Germany during his bombing missions. The map, still marked with specific flight times, speeds and routes, is one he tucked into his boot for reference on a mission. The bombers carried seven men, without a co-pilot, so the pilot couldn't leave his seat even to go to the bathroom during a long flight. Marlow notes that pilots faced many dangers aside from the German military. Up to 800 planes flying in close formation on some missions resulted in mid-air collisions, and the Lancasters were complicated machines to operate, says Marlow, so there were many deaths related to engine failure and other mechanical mishaps. He explains that due to the dangerous nature of the job, 25 per cent of the total number of the Canadian military losses were from bomber command. However, he notes that the contribution of Canadian bomber pilots is not always recognized because of the reality of their missions, in which German civilians were among the casualties of destroyed targets, which included factories producing ammunitions and other items for the German army. However, he explains that the air support was important to the Canadian war effort and should be remembered.
For his exemplary service with the Royal Canadian Air Force during the Second World War, Marlow was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. When asked why he received the medal, he answers: "For surviving. You've got to survive to get it."
North Shore soldiers could also be found in the battle at sea, and North Vancouver's George Frederick was among the merchant navy seaman who spent the Second World War aboard a "park boat." He explains that there was a small collection of Canadian ships that were named after provincial and federal parks. Frederick was 17 when he enlisted in the navy, but he had tried to join up at 16 when he and three of his buddies tried to fool recruiters with phoney birth certificates. However, the con was caught, and Frederick had to wait until he was 17 to start his service. He still remembers the breakdown of the four-hour watch rotation that was a regular part of his onboard routine: an hour and 20 minutes at the wheel, same on lookout and same again on standby. Although he was trained in many areas of seamanship, Frederick notes that all he really needed to learn to do was paint, as he spent many hours painting over rust spots.
"I don't know why they showed you all the rest," he says with a laugh.
Frederick never shot at anyone during the war but he did get shot at.
He recalls when he and two fellow seaman decided they wanted to get a look at the front one time when the ship was docked. The unarmed trio travelled as close to the front as they could go, and with the German line in sight, got caught up in the shelling.
"(We) poked our noses in where we shouldn't have," says Frederick. They were also stopped and questioned by Canadian soldiers on the way back from the front because they were wearing dungarees and leather jackets and looked suspicious without their uniforms. Since the end of the war, Frederick has spent many years working on behalf of veterans through the services offered by the Royal Canadian Legion, and was recently named a life member because of his contribution.
The experiences of these three North Shore veterans will be honoured along with many more in Remembrance Day services across the country tomorrow.
published on 11/10/2006
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