In the early Sunday morning hours, people in Owen Sound emerged in ones and twos from house after house. They walked almost trancelike along the tree-lined streets, drawn towards the downtown. It had been a hot night, the kind where you lay awake in bed, the sheets sticking to your sweat-soaked back. But many found sleep elusive, not because of the heat, but because of worry. A war ultimatum had been issued. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain warned Hitler to withdraw German forces from Poland, or Great Britain would declare war. Canadians were told by Canada’s Prime Minister Mackenzie King that they would join Britain in such a war.
By dawn a small crowd stood outside the office of Owen Sound’s Sun Times newspaper. Seeing movement through the plate glass window, the crowd pushed forward. Inside, a group of newspaper workers read from a sheet of teletype. When they were done, a clerk approached the storefront and placed the teletype in the window. It was six a.m.[1]
“What does it say?” someone near the back of the crowd yelled.
A man at the window quickly read the bulletin and called out, “It’s war!”
Another man began reading the message aloud. “In a radio broadcast made today,” he told the hushed crowd, “Prime Minister Chamberlain announced that this morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note, stating that unless we heard from them by eleven o’clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you that no such undertaking has been received and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.”
The news spread quickly through the city. There was a sense something awful was coming that would test the country’s courage and resolve. In churches across Owen Sound that Sunday, September 3, 1939, ministers led their parishioners in prayer, asking for “God’s protection and support in the coming war.” When Blanche walked home from church, she thought nervously about the war and her sons. Jack, twenty-nine, was working full-time at Kennedy’s. She was certain Kennedy’s would be an important war manufacturer, as it had been when Charles worked there during the Great War. Jack, she felt, would follow in his father’s footsteps and contribute to the war effort where he was. Verdun had been in Philadelphia for five years, and had recently married. Verdun would not return to Canada, but even had he wanted to enlist, his bouts of severe asthma would have prevented it.
She felt less sure about Russ. He was twenty-four with a rebellious streak and had never found steady work, taking labourer’s jobs seldom lasting more than a few months. He was also her only son born in Canada. Now, more than ever, she regretted not travelling back to her parents’ home in Ohio for his birth. If he was American, he might be less likely to join the Canadian army.
While Blanche and other Canadian mothers worried their sons would enlist, Canadian politicians were worrying like adolescents on the verge of leaving home — wanting to show their independence but craving parental approval at the same time. Or so it seemed when Canada’s prime minister thought he would make a point by waiting seven days after Great Britain’s declaration of war before convening a special session of Parliament to declare Canada was at war with Germany. It was only a slight change from 1914, when Canada was committed to the Great War not by its own parliament, but by Britain’s declaration of war. Canada’s official announcement in 1939 was made in a short news bulletin read over CBC radio, but everyone knew it was a formality. And like many adolescents leaving home, Canada overestimated its readiness, since her permanent armed forces were woefully small and poorly equipped.
Some blamed Chamberlain for the war almost as much as they did Hitler. They felt that war might have been avoided if he had taken a hard stand earlier. Since 1936, Hitler had aggressively ignored the Treaty of Versailles. He had moved the German army into the Rhineland, rearmed Germany, and in the space of six months in 1938 had annexed Austria and taken the Sudetenland. In March, 1939, Germany had threatened to invade what remained of Czechoslovakia (to protect Germans living there, Hitler had claimed). In a misguided attempt to negotiate, the Czech president travelled to Berlin in search of a compromise.
Instead of negotiations, he was threatened with invasion. Prague would be destroyed by bombing if Germany was “forced” to take military action, and the Czech president would be responsible for the deaths of thousands of his countrymen. Without Britain and France to defend them, the Czechs had no hope of changing the outcome militarily. The elderly president chose to save his people from attack by agreeing with Hitler’s demand to create a German “protectorate” over what remained of Czechoslovakia. On March 15, 1939, the German army entered Czechoslovakia, and the country ceased to exist. The past year’s attempts at negotiated settlements with Germany by Britain and France were now seen as a wasted appeasement of an aggressive dictator. The invasion of Poland was the line they had drawn in the sand, and Hitler had crossed it.
The war came almost a decade into the Great Depression. Many Canadian men had seen little steady work through the 1930s, and to some, the war provided cause for optimism. Enlistment at least offered a steady paycheque, and for those opting for overseas service, an opportunity to see the world. Most also believed enlistment would protect Canadian values and way of life from fascism. However, at the outbreak of war, the Canadian army consisted of only 3,000 full-time soldiers.[2] Years of cutbacks to military budgets had left the armed forces short even of boots, socks, and blankets, and weapons were scarcer yet, causing enlistment to be phased in slowly.[3] Owen Sound’s local regiment, the Grey and Simcoe Foresters, was among those forced to wait to begin recruitment.
With war trumpeted in daily newspaper headlines across Canada in the summer of 1939, Russ found part-time work with the Canadian National Railway doing summer maintenance on the rail lines. When he could, he also played for the city’s new senior lacrosse team. He’d been invited to tryout by his childhood friend, Jack MacLeod. The team sweater he gave Russ had “Georgians” (for nearby Georgian Bay) emblazoned across the chest. The team manager was Jack’s father, Jim, and it was he that had introduced many Owen Sound boys to the sport, bringing lacrosse sticks home from a work trip and selling them to neighbourhood boys for fifty cents. Russ was one of those who had shown up with the money and, along with other boys, spent hours throwing a ball high in the air and jostling one another to catch it before it fell to earth. As skills improved, impromptu games took place.
The 1939 season was the Georgians’ first, and at the end it was considered successful. They’d finished behind only the strong Orangeville team. Russ was a dependable defenseman, and Jim MacLeod asked him to return the following year. Players drifted apart, and the lacrosse sweater Jack had loaned Russ was packed away for the winter.
His summer job on the railway ended not long after the declaration of war. Needing work for the winter, Russ decided to head to northern Ontario. In past winters he had worked for an Owen Sound sawmill owned by the American timber baron J.J. McFadden. But it had closed, and two of its managers had moved to work at McFadden’s new lumber mill in Blind River. As many as five lumber camps were needed to feed logs to the Blind River sawmill, and experienced men were sought. When word went out in Owen Sound that McFadden needed men up north, Russ applied and was told to report.
When Russ reached Blind River, he arranged for most of his forty-five dollar monthly paycheque to be sent to Blanche. From the $1.50 per day he earned, McFadden deducted the cost of food and purchases from the camp’s company store. Russ was driven north from Blind River to a camp deep in the northern wilderness.
He entered a spartan existence. The men were housed in large log bunkhouses. Beds were constructed from rough-sawn lumber, each man taking straw from the barn where the horses were kept and piling it on planks inside the wooden bed frame. There was no running water for washing, only metal bowls that could be filled with water heated on the wood stove. Food was the same every day: bread, beans, and fatback. Fatback was nothing more than pork fat. If lucky, you found a thin seam of meat running through it. With the bunkhouse closed up in winter, lit by oily kerosene lamps, no showers for the men, and a steady diet of beans, the air inside smelled like spoiled cheese.
Work began in the dark hours before sunrise, the temperature during winter often -30 degrees Fahrenheit or colder. After breakfast, the men piled onto a horse-drawn logging sleigh,