While the song might have had its origin in the U.S. Bible Belt, the guys in our Canadian Air Force barrack seemed to know at least a dozen verses, including the scatological. Mind you there were advantages for a kid who had been hauled by his mother through four-foot snow drifts in the morning of Toronto’s blizzard of 1944. It was a time before the Yonge Street subway but we were very relieved to find the old wooden Yonge Streetcars with their pathetic little coal stoves still running.
Mother was only two hours late getting to her war plant. The kid had been left at daycare with four workers devising evil things to do to their sole charge for the day.
It was thinking about those who served in the Second World War that brought up this subject. The home front was no bed of roses but nobody was bombing us or aiming guns at us in anger. We survived while many of those who went in harm’s way did not. Canadians served in the air, on land and at sea around the world. We have a clear image of those who served in the North Atlantic and in the battlefields of Europe but we should also remember those who fell in Africa and Asia.
What we probably do not need is fabrications of valour such as the CBC drama X Company that uses a glimmer of truth to build a bastion to fiction. The training camp on the north shore of Lake Ontario was a basic training centre that sent its graduates on to be further trained and operated by the Special Operations Executive in Great Britain and the American Office of Strategic Services. There were Canadians serving with both and the names of those who did not return remain clouded in secrecy and time.
That basic training school for spies on Lake Ontario was also the home of Hydra, the top-secret shortwave relay centre of signals for the British clandestine war effort. Hydra and Canada’s nascent Communications Security Establishment were launched at that time to give Canada a leadership role in collecting and decrypting electronic information. Today, Canada is part of the Five Eyes surveillance by Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom and United States of their citizens as well as those of other countries.
But November 11 is a day set aside to remember those who have served our country in wars from the Boer War to World War I and World War II, the Korean War and Afghanistan. We might not have always known where they were or why they were there but their sacrifice was in our service. And they earned our remembrance.
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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry
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