Honouring Heroes

This past Wednesday marked the 102nd anniversary of the signing of the armistice which brought the First World War to an end. We in the Anglosphere use this occasion every year to commemorate and honour our veterans and fallen heroes. The holiday is known as Armistice Day in the UK, Veterans Day in the USA, and Remembrance Day here in Canada. I always take a moment of silence at 11:00am (the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month) to reflect on the sacrifices of my forbearers and the millions of others who endured unimaginable hardships to protect the liberties we enjoy today.

My sister and I refer to our paternal grandparents as Nanny and Poppy, and both were involved in World War Two. Nanny was a Rosie the Riveter, building munitions at a factory in her native Ottawa. Poppy was born and raised in London, and during the Battle of Britain he risked his life nightly to help extinguish fires set by the incendiary bombs of the Luftwaffe. His grandparents and one of his aunts were killed during the Blitz when a German bomb collapsed our family's ancestral home.

Poppy was later drafted into the British Army and served in Italy until the end of the war. He fought in the famous Battle of Monte Cassino, during which he and many of his compatriots were pinned under a train for three days by enemy fire. They eventually prevailed and broke through the Axis line, all but assuring the capture of Rome. This victory was absolutely crucial to ensuring the defeat of Mussolini and his Nazi allies, and I'm proud of the part my grandfather played in it.

Poppy didn't like to talk much about the war, but he did tell me a few stories when I asked him about it as a boy. The retreating German and Italian forces were notorious for setting booby traps, and one of Poppy's friends was blown up right in front of him while attempting to claim a trophy from a dead enemy combatant. He also recounted that during the final week of the war he'd lost another good friend whom he described as one of the finest men he'd ever met. Even more tragic than the timing is that this man was killed by friendly fire.

Last summer my Uncle Robert told me a story that Poppy never shared with anyone but his wife, but which Nanny told Robert after my grandfather passed away. Poppy was scouting ahead of his unit one day and came around a hedgerow at the same time that a German soldier was coming around the other side of it. Both men raised their rifles but Poppy shot first, hitting the Nazi in the stomach. Immediately overcome with guilt, Poppy lay down next to the young man as he bled out, attempting to provide him comfort and giving him a sip from his canteen when the German asked for "wasser." When the other Britons arrived, they placed the injured man on a stretcher and took him back to a field hospital, where he died of his wound. Poppy looked through the dead soldier's wallet and saw pictures of his wife and children. Nanny said that Poppy had nightmares about it for the rest of his life. He took the man's belt buckle as a reminder, passing it down to my father, who passed it down to me. It's engraved with the image of an eagle perched on a swastika, surrounded by German writing. I never knew the story behind it until my uncle told me, but it has now taken on even more meaning for me. I don't know how many men he killed or friends he lost, but I can't imagine how hard it must have been for my Poppy to live a normal life after what he'd seen and done in the war. He was considerably younger at the time than I am now.

My mother's parents also made great sacrifices to protect our way of life from the forces of evil. My Grandma was a girl during the war and her father enlisted in the Canadian military, despite already being in his thirties and the patriarch of a family of four. He was killed in action in Italy, and I don't think my Grandma ever really got over it. The telegram to my Nana said that her husband was killed instantly when a piece of shrapnel from an enemy mortar struck him in the heart, but I've always wondered if that was a sugarcoated version of the truth intended to help assuage the grief of a war widow. Nana wondered that too.

My Grandpa was from Massachusetts and he enlisted in the United States Army Air Force in 1942, at the age of 19. He served as the radar operator of a B-29 Super Fortress and took part in 31 bombing raids in the South Pacific. The most infamous of these was Operation Meetinghouse, a massive assault on Tokyo which resulted in over 100,000 Japanese deaths, over a million casualties, and over a million people displaced from their homes. The vast majority of these victims were civilians, and Grandpa was burdened with guilt until the end of his life. He was triggered badly in 1992 after reading a biography of President Truman which went into detail about Operation Meetinghouse and described how terrible it was to be killed by napalm. Most of the missions he took part in were directed at military industrial targets, but he did also participate in the single deadliest night of bombing in the most bloody war in human history. It's common to justify this attrition by pointing out how much worse a land invasion of Japan would have been (especially if Stalin had invaded from the north), but I can't imagine that this was very comforting to the men like my grandfather who had to carry out the gruesome orders.

Grandpa received many medals for his service, although he didn't really seem to care about them at all. He'd show them to me any time I asked, and my favourite was his Purple Heart. He'd received it after being shot just above the hip by a bullet which passed right through him and continued to ricochet around the fuselage of his plane, hitting two of his fellow airmen. The scar from the entry wound was almost perfectly round and about the size of a nickel, but the exit wound in his lower back was oblong and about the size of a baseball. Small pieces of the projectile were lodged in his body for some time after the war, and he'd occasionally sweat them out during the two years of night terrors he endured after returning to the States.

Grandpa was like Poppy and most other vets in that he almost never spoke about his experiences in the war, although he would describe in general terms how awful it was to have lunch with a friend and then find out that evening that he had been shot down. This was a common occurrence, since Grandpa's was one of the only planes in his squadron to make it through the war. He also told me that he'd had one final brush with death after his discharge, when he saw a torpedo narrowly miss the hull of the transport ship taking him to the safety of San Francisco. It's indicative of the pervasive racism of the day that he remembered officers informing the cadets during basic training that Japanese pilots lacked both peripheral and night vision due to their "slanty" eyes.

Grandpa would sometimes tell me stories he'd heard from friends in the infantry, as I imagine it was easier to discuss the things he hadn't experienced first hand. Marines told him grisly tales about discovering Japanese soldiers who'd committed harakiri, a ritualistic suicide in which one stabs oneself in the torso. Surrender was absolutely out of the question for the Imperial Army, and Japanese snipers would tie themselves to their treetop perches so as to keep fighting even when mortally wounded. Most disturbing of all is that at one point a group of enemy soldiers had run out of bullets and was holed up in a network of caves with swords and bayonets ready, so the USMC had to go in with flamethrowers to take them out. The soldier who told my Grandpa the story described it as "barbecuing 'em."

My Aunt Susan recently requested and was granted access to my Grandpa's war records, and only then did we learn specific details of his time fighting the Empire of the Sun. He'd received his Distinguished Flying Cross after his plane heroically descended to unsafe heights in order to protect a compromised American aircraft. We also discovered that during the mission in which he was wounded, his plane had been badly damaged by anti-aircraft fire and then had to fly more than a thousand miles over the ocean in order to safely return to American-held territory. The island on which they were forced to land before returning to their base on Saipan had only recently been captured, and Grandpa was forever haunted by the appearance and stench of mounds of dead bodies piled high on the sides of the runway.

Several years after the war, my Grandpa was in a bar in New York when he recognized a fighter pilot friend of his who'd been shot down and declared missing in action, presumed killed in action. It turned out that he miraculously survived after crashing into the ocean and treading water, waiting to die of exposure or for a shark to kill him. After a short while, a submarine suddenly surfaced nearby and a sailer opened the hatch, jokingly asking him if he needed a lift. There were only two American subs in the entire Pacific Ocean, so the odds of one of them having seen his plane crash were astronomically small. It's also incredible that my grandfather happened to be in the same bar at the same time in the late 1940s.

Grandpa's brother Cesar was also in the war. He lost 15 pounds due to seasickness and anxiety as he crossed the Atlantic, then served as a corpsman while Allied forces pushed the Third Reich all the way from Normandy to Berlin. He always ducked questions about his time overseas by joking that he'd found the biggest tree in Europe and hidden behind it, although I've cleaned up the language a bit. My great-grandmother was a devout Catholic and must have nearly worn her rosary to dust as she prayed for the safe return of her two youngest sons. Grandpa lost his faith in the war (along with his taste for coconut and pineapple), but he never let his mother know.

Nearly everyone I grew up with is descended from people whose lives were turned upside down by the Second World War. My aunt's father was from Yugoslavia, and when Germany invaded he was sent into the woods to camp out with the town's horses in order to prevent them from being commandeered by the Nazis. When he returned to his village, it had been levelled and everyone was gone. He was 9 years old at the time, and spent the next few years wandering Europe and surviving by his wits. He finally landed in a displaced persons camp and then met his future wife on the boat over to Canada. She was the daughter of an enthusiastic member of the Nazi Party in Germany, and even in her 80s I don't think she's ever been able to reconcile that.

My next door neighbours when I was young became some of our closest family friends, and still are to this day. They're Jewish, and are descended on both sides from Holocaust survivors. Evelyn's Romanian parents were married to other people prior to the war and each had children, but tragically both were sent to Auschwitz and lost their entire families. They got married after the war before moving to New York and having Evelyn. Her father was grateful for every subsequent moment of his life, as he had resigned himself to dying in the camps and now treated every day with his new wife and daughter as a treasured gift. Her mother, on the other hand, was understandably utterly miserable for the entire remainder of her very long life, constantly fretting about the safety of her daughter and, eventually, her grandsons. Evelyn has never been able to bring herself to watch any Holocaust movies, and tries to avoid any topic of conversation which could remind her of her murdered brothers and sisters. Her husband is named George, and his parents were members of the French resistance. At one point, his father was captured by the enemy. George's mother spoke fluent German, so she dressed as a maid and infiltrated Nazi headquarters to bust her husband out. If you pitched that story (or the story of my Grandpa's friend and the submarine) to Hollywood movie producers, they would tell you that it was too unbelievable. Sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction, and the crucible of WWII produced some of the most remarkable stories I've ever heard, along with some of the most horrifying cruelty and suffering humanity has ever perpetrated.

My grandparents have sadly all passed away, but they still live on in the memories of those of us who love them. This is lamentably not true of my great-grandfather, since he gave his life for his country more than 75 years ago and no one who knew him is still alive today. That is one of the main reasons it's essential for us to commemorate heroes like him on Remembrance Day; for every story passed down by soldiers, there are many more that die with them. Because he was killed long before any of his grandchildren were born, we don't even have a moniker for David Cameron and I can only refer to him by name or as mom's grandfather, Grandma's dad, or Nana's husband. This will be true of my father as well, and I can't help but wonder if the anxious uncertainty of his battle with cancer and the pain of his eventual death were at all similar to what my grandmother and great aunt experienced while their dad was overseas. It's important for us to acknowledge that it was not only the soldiers themselves who were impacted by the horrifying realities of combat; whether they were lost forever or returned as broken husks of the men they once were, the lingering aftereffects of their suffering continue to ripple through generations of their families.

Even in tumultuous times like those in which we currently find ourselves, we must resolve not to lose perspective. The Greatest Generation had to endure the Depression and then wage a protracted war against fascist imperial forces despite overwhelming odds. Millions of young men like my grandfathers sacrificed their innocence, their faith, and their mental health to ensure that freedom would not be lost from the face of the Earth, and millions more like my great-grandfather gave their lives. I wouldn't be here today if my Poppy hadn't fired before that German soldier could shoot him, or if the bullet that hit my Grandpa had been a foot higher or six inches to the left. Both men risked their lives for years on end, and I'll never stop feeling grateful that they made it home. Nor will I ever forget the importance of the victory they achieved at an unimaginable cost.