Falling Leaves and War
By Peter Ewart
Thursday, December 10, 2009 03:45 AM
By Peter Ewart
Winter is socked in hard in Northern British Columbia. But strangely, a few withered leaves cling to bare trees. Inevitably though, the frigid winds will blow, and they, too, will fall. And there they will lie on the shimmering whiteness, until they disappear under the next dusting of snow.
And so it goes with the generation that fought in the Second World War. Every few days or so, we see the photograph of another soldier from that time staring out from the obituary pages of the newspaper or web journal. Sometimes in their military uniforms; sometimes not.
My uncle Mark Gregory passed away two years ago and his obituary was there. My father died a long time before in 1976. Both of them served in that glorious, monumental and terrible war that will resonate in the annals of history for all time.
As it happened back in 1939, my dad and uncle were working together cutting trees way off in the mountains of the Okanagan. Coming back into town, they learned that war had broken out. Immediately, they went down to the recruiting station and enlisted in an event that would change their lives - and the world - forever.
Uncle Mark ended up fighting in North Africa and Italy. The Italian campaign, which sometimes gets overlooked by historians and Hollywood movies, was a bitter, long and hard struggle all the way up the Italian peninsula against an entrenched and determined enemy.
On patrol one night in the Italian countryside – patrols had to be conducted in absolute darkness – he fell down an unmarked well and broke his back. Somehow his fellow soldiers got him out and somehow he survived.
My father was in France and northwest Europe as part of the “Canloan” program, whereby over 600 Canadian soldiers volunteered to be loaned to the British Army, which was short of junior officers at that time. The Canloan soldiers went through some heavy combat and were highly respected for their fighting ability and enthusiasm. By the end of the war, over 70% had been either killed or wounded.
When I was young, he told me a story once of how his platoon was pinned down by heavy enemy fire in a wood. He and another soldier crawled away to reconnoiter the enemy’s positions, while a couple of others stayed behind. When they returned, their young comrades were dead, picked off by crack German snipers high up in the trees.
A fierce battle broke out, and then it was my dad’s turn. Suddenly, he was knocked off his feet by a great force and his face ground into the dirt. When he regained his senses, he realized, to his amazement, that he was still alive and, more than that, was unhurt. He rejoined the battle and it continued until the Allied forces prevailed and the wood was cleared of Germans. Later, when unpacking his rucksack, he noticed a deep indentation on the shovel blade he had been carrying on his back. It was from a sniper’s bullet.
As a young boy hearing this story for the first time, I remember the realization dawning on me just how close I had come to never being born.
Both my uncle and father received various medals and commendations for their service – my father the military cross for bravery. But I never heard them brag or boast, let alone talk, about these medals.
Indeed, they rarely talked about what had happened during the war at all – as kids, we had to coax stories out of them, especially after they had a drink or two.
Unlike certain puffed up generals of today, my father and uncle did not call the enemy “scumbags.” Instead, they just referred to the German soldiers as “Jerries,” and had respect for their fighting prowess There was no glee or exaltation when they threw a grenade or shot a German soldier. It was just war and it had to be done.
There was another story my father once told that us that has always stuck in my mind. As Germany began to lose the war, Hitler, in his madness, threw young boys and old men into combat. By that time, the Canadians and other Allied forces were quite seasoned and experienced. My father described how, on several occasions, they had faced advancing Germans who seemed unusually wild and fanatical in their attacks. He and his fellow soldiers mowed them down to a man, nonetheless.
Afterwards, when they surveyed the battlefield, they discovered that many of these soldiers were from the Hitler Youth, some barely 13 or 14 years of age – which coincidentally was the same age as I was at that time I heard the story. When he finished the tale, which he had told in a matter of fact way without embellishment, he stopped talking, and was quiet for a while.
Neither my father or uncle were what today are dismissively called “peaceniks.” Make no mistake, like other Canadian troops of that time, they were as tough as nails. Indeed, politically-speaking, my father had so-called “right wing” views on pretty well everything. Yet in all the years that I knew them, I never heard them advocating war or invasion.
They never boasted about “kicking butt” or “nuking” other countries as is so common today. They knew war, and they knew that the white crosses in the fields of France and Belgium can seem to stretch forever, and that beneath these crosses and markers, lay many of their friends and fellow soldiers – all of them young and in the prime of life - who never came back.
I believe that, to my father and uncle, the idea of systematically torturing enemy prisoners - as has happened in recent years at the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay prisons, and now, as recently revealed, in Afghanistan - would have been disgraceful.
In the War, various countries were part of the anti-fascist forces and they all had their own reasons for participating. Nonetheless, objectively speaking, they each made great sacrifices, whether it was in the fields of Normandy, the mountains of Italy or the steppes of Russia.
At the heart of the anti-fascist struggle was the belief that countries do not and must not have the right to launch aggressive, unprovoked or pre-emptive war against other sovereign countries.
This is, of course, exactly what the Nazis did when they invaded Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the Soviet Union. Each time, they had a pretext or excuse. But, it all boiled down to one thing - naked aggression
In the Nuremberg Trials that followed the Second World War, which tried the Nazi leadership for war crimes, Robert H. Jackson, the American prosecutor, stated that: “To initiate a war of aggression …is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” The principles coming out of the Nuremberg Trials established that those leaders who carry out such acts were guilty of war crimes.
It is a sad commentary on the state of affairs in the world today that this principle, that was paid for in rivers of blood during the Second World War by millions of soldiers and civilians, has since been trampled into the ground again and again.
Of course, the strutting politicians and swaggering generals of today do not call their activities “wars of aggression.” Instead, they use the terms “preventive war”, “pre-emptive strike” and “just war”, and they concoct all sorts of pretexts to justify and excuse what amounts to actual acts of aggression.
The U.S. has officially adopted the doctrine of “pre-emptive strike”, as has Russia, Israel and the various countries that belong to NATO, including Canada. Some of the neo-conservatives around George W. Bush, have taken the doctrine even further to advocate not only launching “pre-emptive strikes” against countries considered to be a “military threat”, but also those who simply pose an “economic threat”.
Despite his receiving the Nobel Peace Prize and all the accolades associated with it, U.S. president Obama has not repudiated the doctrine of “pre-emptive strike.” Some American commentators are now labeling him “Bush-lite” and “son of Bush”.
As more and more countries sign on to the doctrine of “pre-emptive strikes”, it is not too hard to see where this is all going. Sooner or later, the conditions for another catastrophic world war will be created.
That is especially true when we look at the callow political leadership of today. It is quite amazing that the main “champions” of the Iraq War – George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and other “neo-conservatives” – all were able to avoid military combat, and in some cases, any military service whatsoever, during the Viet Nam war. Yet they were the most rabid proponents for invading Iraq.
It is as if their enthusiasm for launching wars is in inverse proportion to the amount of time they have actually spent in combat. I wonder how many soldiers of my father’s and uncle’s time would have relished sharing a foxhole or being in a tight spot with any one of these windbags who are so quick to volunteer other people’s children for some dubious far away war?
The greatest responsibility that a country and its political leadership has is to get things right in terms of war, to ensure that war is not the first, but rather the last resort. We owe this to the generations that came before and those that are still to come. Above all, we owe it to those presently in uniform, many of them young, like my father, uncle and their fellow soldiers once were, as they are the ones who will face the bullets and the bombs. They are the ones who may never come back.
Winter winds and snow will pass. New leaves will bud. What kind of Spring will it be? That is our generation’s task to determine. Let’s make sure we get it right.
Peter Ewart is a writer and columnist from Prince George, British Columbia. He can be reached at: peter.ewart@shaw.ca
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Posted by: diplomat on December 10 2009 9:38 AM
From my perspective the wars of guns and tanks and bullets is the wars of the past as far as our country and the security of Canada is concerned. Yes we still need that kind of hardware to protect our sovereignty at home, but those aren't the weapons of todays wars.
Todays wars are fought with the weapons of information, finance, perceptions, education, and the infiltration of politics to change our laws from within to our future detriment. Mostly through finance and management of perceptions through media control we can be willingly herded into policies that past generations would have fought wars to defend against.
I believe we have concentric rings of classifications to membership, either wittingly or unwittingly, in the conspiracy for a zionist financial supremacy over the sovereignty of all nations and people. Each ring involves more detail and more 'buy in' requirements on objectives, but all ultimately working toward the same goals that build a shadow governing power over the will of the people. A hidden from the public power that limits real options and only allows choice on the options that further the unfinished business of greater monopoly over society and the economy for connected interests to the central bankers.
A hidden power that fixes the 'justification' required to take a nation into war when needed.
Todays threats come from unaccountable financial markets, unaccountable police and crown, unaccountable interference in our election process, biased media ownership that is concentrating 'opinion', the government bureaucracy itself and sometimes the privatization of that bureaucracy or essential infrastructure... and the apathy of awareness by a public that feels they no longer have a part to play sustaining things like our constitution, rights, and norms that are the foundations of our society.