Reprinted from the Toronto Star (www.thestar.com )
Oct. 24, 2004. 08:06 AM , by Stuart Laidlaw, Staff Reporter
The telling of this story from the Toronto Star shows how most of us have a penchant for leaving it until its too late to find out about our parents' past; and about why some can't talk about their war experiences. - Speedy 7th
Oct. 24, 2004. 08:06 AM
Finding the man war left behind
Army records tell father's story
Canadians set to revisit Italy
STUART LAIDLAW
STAFF REPORTER
War interrupts so many lives. There are those who fight and never come back, and those they left at home. There are those who come back from the war, but leave something of themselves behind.
My father was the latter.
This is not something I learned from long talks with him when he was alive. We rarely had such moments, despite the opportunities. His traumatic memories from fighting in World War II and Korea stayed with him all his life.
They transformed him.
Robert Howard Laidlaw, right, is pictured in a dugout in the Reichwald Forest in Germany toward the end of World War II.
He was never able to talk about those battles, except to expose a chip on his shoulder, formed by bitterness that the Allied forces in Italy were virtually forgotten after the D-Day invasion of France in 1944.
My father is gone now, killed by cancer eight years ago. But there will be a chance for healing this week for 45 veterans from the Italian Campaign who are returning to commemorate their own efforts and to dedicate plaques where their friends fell during the war.
They'll be accompanied by Governor-General Adrienne Clarkson and other dignitaries who will visit battlegrounds, cemeteries and villages.
About 93,000 Canadians, 40 per cent of the Canadian army of the day, saw action in Sicily and mainland Italy between 1943 and 1945.
But they were dubbed the "D-Day Dodgers" for missing out on the Allied push to Germany in Normandy on June, 6, 1944. The term's origin has been commonly attributed to the American-born British Conservative MP Nancy Astor.
Some of the bloodiest fighting of the war took place in Italy and Sicily as the Allies fought their way through the mountains to Rome while the Germans ? even after Italy had been liberated ? struggled to keep the country's airstrips and industrial centres out of Allied hands.
Canada suffered 25,264 casualties, and left 5,900 soldiers buried in 17 cemeteries across Italy, some of which will be visited by the returning vets this week.
I know my father would have wanted to go. Maybe it would have been a way for us to start talking about the war and for me to understand him a little better.
I knew little of the man he was before the wars until recently, when I began sifting through his war records. I learned he was a sensitive boy of "modest means" whose schooling and music lessons were cut short for lack of funds. A "tall, wiry-looking youth," he played the violin, built model airplanes and was a "moderate athlete" who played football, hockey, rugby and baseball, the records told me.
My father had worked as a warehouseman at the Canadian Pacific Railroad and as a "runner" (stock boy) at Eaton's in Winnipeg. He grew to become a man of "superior army ability," but with few skills to help him in civilian life. He had a scar on the back of his left middle finger.
By the time he left the army, 25 years after he first enlisted in 1942, he was a hardened career soldier.
I know all of this from the paper trail his military career left behind. As anyone with even a small connection to the army can attest, the military loves its paperwork. And the seemingly mundane details in these documents offer stolen glimpses of a life spent in service.
Through casualty reports, periodic interview notes by superior officers and service records, I have been able to fill in the blanks in my understanding about a man I lived with for 18 years but knew little about.
"Opportunities for social and other development somewhat limited by the small income earned by this father who is a painter and decorator by trade," one Capt. D.M. Slater wrote in a personnel selection record, as my father signed up at the Winnipeg Recruiting Office.
Such observations make me wonder about the man my father could have been, had he been born into privilege. All I know is the man he became ? a distant parent who found it hard to share his feelings or talk about his experiences. His sensitivity seemed only to come through in the care he poured into his beloved rose garden.
The papers also offered glimpses of my two grandfathers, men I never met. Both fought at the Somme in the World War I. My father's father was shot twice. It was my father's thick service record that I found most engrossing. The notations are sparce, and sometimes amusing, but poring over those 48 pages, I am able to piece together a picture of my father, the man who was my template for all men.
Most startling are the parallels to my own life and the lost opportunities to connect with him on common interests and experiences while he was still alive.
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It was the little things. As a teenager, I played rugby, moderately well. I built model airplanes. My own musical aspirations were cut short by my father's modest means.
I worked in warehouses and was a runner at the S&R Department Store in Kingston. I even have a scar on the back of my left middle finger from an on-the-job injury. Like him, I got it by the time I was 17.
I'm left wondering why we weren't able to use those common links to build a better relationship while we still had a chance. It's not like there weren't opportunities.
There was the summer I spent in my father's cab, after he left the army in 1967. I was 6, and we couldn't afford day care, so I spent my days riding around Kingston in his cab. I tried asking him about his war years, but the answers were short, when they came at all.
Then, there was the fishing trip we took in the summer of 1974, in hindsight, a late-in-the-game attempt at building a father-son connection. But I had already begun to pull away. We spent long days in the boat and in the cabin north of Kingston on Varty Lake, but rarely spoke.
Neither one of us followed sports much, so we lacked the usual safe topic of conversation between fathers and sons. We talked about lures and fish instead. We ate in a diner when we caught nothing. We chased loons.
But the nights were early and the silences long.
Now, I wish I could have that trip back. Instead, I read and reread the records of my father's quarter-century in the army, piecing together snapshots of the man he was at various stages of his life.
Every promotion, posting, address change, birth of a child, illness and discipline is recorded.
On June 8, 1960, a Capt. D.P. March described him as "definitely a career soldier" in an assessment for a posting to Churchill, Man., where I was born soon after in the army hospital.
All of this digging into the past reminds me of my brother-in-law, who is currently perusing archival records to research his own family. Through such documents, he is trying to recreate the lives of ancestors who lived more than 100 years ago. It feels odd for me to be doing the same thing for a man I once shared a home with.
My father told his minister, Douglas Blair, of Brockville, about experiences he never told his family. Twice the radio on his back was shot up, saving his life; another time, the crackers on his belt stopped a bullet; a German soldier he was helping to an aid station turned on him, but my father got to his pistol before the enemy could reach his rifle. There was the time a close friend ? an Albertan named Johnny Donnick ? was hit by a shell while making tea in Florence.
And, as it turns out, my father and his platoon were under attack by a German Panzer division when a young private, Ernest (Smokey) Smith, opened fire with an anti-tank gun one day at Cesena in October, 1944.
Canada's last living Victoria Cross winner, Smith held off multiple attacks that day. He'll be in attendance this week as a plaque is unveiled to honour him.
I learned about my father's connection to Smith just this week while talking to my father's minister. Blair, an army chaplain for 20 years, says soldiers typically had a tough time talking about the war.
"There's just no way to communicate the horror, the fear, the closeness of soldiers," says Blair, who helped my father document some of his memories. "It was beautiful just sitting down with him and hearing these stories."
I can only imagine.
Doug Hildebrand, curator of the Military Communications and Electronics Museum in Kingston, says he's noticed a jump in the last few years of veterans' children coming to the museum in search of answers.
"I get an awful lot of what I call `Find my dads,'" he says.
In his reluctance to talk, even to remember or to confront the demons war left behind, my father was in good company. Author Farley Mowat waited more than 30 years before writing his account of the Italian Campaign, And No Birds Sang, saying it took him that long to confront his own painful memories.
That's how war affects people. It closes them tight as a defence against the horrors they have seen. It affects their families and anyone else they might otherwise get close to.
In the end, it seems their defences make it tough to build the very connections with others that might help them heal.
With my father and I, these connections were never made ? at least, not while he was alive ? and I am left only with the military's paper trail and the bouquet of roses that I leave for him at a cenotaph every November.