When the season began, Gerry and Russ were often playing partners on Owen Sound’s defence. Gerry found the younger man dependable and tough, and liked his quiet confidence and subtle sense of humour. Another player, Perry Wilson from Fergus, Ontario, was a slick forward with a good scoring touch. Russ, Gerry, and Perry soon became inseparable. The Georgians entered the season as one of the favourites, their chief rival the team from Orangeville.
Owen Sound was proud of its sports teams, a feeling surpassed only by the community’s feelings for its army regiment, the Grey and Simcoe Foresters. With a war underway, even a “phoney war,” as newspapers had dubbed it, the city’s expectations of the Foresters were high. The town was home to two Great War Victoria Cross recipients, the highest military award conferred by Great Britain. One was Billy Bishop, the British Empire’s top flying ace and by far Canada’s best-known veteran. Owen Sound’s other Victoria Cross had been awarded to Private Tommy Holmes. Holmes was the youngest Canadian to earn the award, given for his bravery at Passchendaele in 1917. Described as frail and delicate, he appeared an unlikely hero. Two Victoria Crosses in a city of eight thousand was almost unheard of, and it created an air of expectation of great things to come from the young men of Owen Sound.
Many of Owen Sound’s men over the age of forty were veterans of the battles of Vimy Ridge and Passchendaele. They had a keen interest in the new war in Europe and strongly felt that Owen Sound’s young men should enlist, as so many in the city had in 1914. However, when Russ returned from northern Ontario in the spring of 1940, the Foresters still had not opened their ranks for enlistment. Russ knew some local men had travelled elsewhere to join up, but many preferred to wait for the Foresters to put out their call for recruits.
Several hundred local men had been training with the militia for months. They marched two nights a week in civilian clothes through the city, led by the drum and bugle band. But the drills lacked a sense of urgency. That changed dramatically on May 10, 1940, when the German army released its Blitzkrieg on the Western Front.
The lightning attack, spearheaded by German armoured forces, smashed the relative quiet and blew massive holes in the static front. German tanks rapidly pushed through weak points in the Allied lines, threatening to encircle bypassed French and British positions. The speed of the German advance and the collapse that followed was so fast and complete, it was barely more than two weeks from its start until the British desperately evacuated their armies across the English Channel from the Belgian port of Dunkirk. By June 14, Paris was occupied, and the world waited for what seemed the inevitable invasion of Britain. It seemed incomprehensible to Canadians that the British and French armies could be so incapable of stopping the Germans.
In that depressing time, when the French capitulated and it seemed Britain might soon follow, there was a feeling that if Britain were conquered, Canada’s future would be in question. This was not a vague threat. In 1938, the Canadian government and the Canadian military’s joint staff committee considered it possible that in the event of war with Germany that Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal would be bombed, and coastal cities like Halifax, St. John’s, New Brunswick, and Quebec City shelled by naval bombardment by the heavy guns of the German navy.[4]
Following Dunkirk, Britain was pushed back to the defence of the island homeland. The badly mauled British army would need years to replace the masses of artillery, tanks, and transport left in France and Belgium. In the air over Britain, Hermann Göring’s Luftwaffe fought to destroy the Royal Air Force, the final step before a cross-channel invasion could take place. In preparation for such an attack, the Germans were gathering ships and barges on the coast to ferry troops, tanks, and guns across the English Channel.
The first Canadian troops arrived in Britain too late to join the battle against the Germans. Though untested in battle, these Canadians carried the hard-earned reputation of their fathers from the Great War as exceptionally tough fighters. More importantly, the Canadians brought with them troop transportation and artillery, and for that they were given responsibility for being a mobile first line of defence in southern England. When the Germans attacked, the Canadians would respond to German paratroop landings inland, and when that threat was dealt with, would rush to the English coast to push back anticipated landings.[5]
Canada’s military command knew their troops would suffer heavy casualties if forced to fight in coming months. There could be no retreat for the Canadians in the event of an invasion, and the reality was, in 1940, Canadian troops in England were just a smattering of permanent force and militia troops, leading mostly civilian volunteers with only a few months of training. They would likely have been annihilated.[6]
In those weeks when the shadow of invasion darkened the British Isles and Canada, the call finally came for more volunteers for overseas service. When things appeared their worst in 1940, there was no shortage of Canadians impatient to enlist.
In early June, the Foresters finally were allowed to call for volunteers. When the volunteer militia gathered for drill practice that week, commanding officer Colonel Tom Rutherford announced they were being disbanded so enlistment for overseas service in the regiment could begin. Those from the militia who qualified, he told them, would get the first chance to sign up, but those under eighteen would have to drop out until old enough. Speculation quickly spread through Owen Sound about which of the young men would show up at the recruiting office.
Early on June 18, Russ and Perry walked to the militia barracks on 14th Street West, barely a five-minute walk from Russ’s house, and joined the line of men waiting to enlist.
Owen Sound was small enough that Russ knew every man his own age by name. Those in line he didn’t know were men from nearby farms and towns such as Wiarton, Meaford, and Chatsworth. There were some locals in line he may have been surprised to see, smaller men and some who were mild-mannered.
Perhaps he was also surprised at who had not shown up. Where were some of the men with a reputation for toughness? Some of the city’s athletes? With Canada and Britain at risk and relying on Canadian volunteers to step forward, it crossed his mind that he may have underestimated some and overestimated others. Finally Russ and Perry reached the front. They sat beside one another, each with one of the Foresters’ permanent force NCOs, who oversaw their filling out the enlistment form. In a few minutes they were done and were told anti-climactically they would be contacted shortly.
The following Wednesday, Russ and Perry reported back to the barracks. The list of men who had signed papers had been winnowed down, and it was time for those selected by the Regiment’s officers to go through a medical inspection. Russ and Perry were told to strip to their underwear. They stood in their boxer shorts with the other enlistees, waiting to be examined by a doctor. It was a straightforward eye-ear-nose physical exam, testing of reflexes, and listening to heart and lungs. Russ and Perry passed the Medical Board and were sent to the hospital for a chest X-ray. Once it was confirmed there were no signs of lung disease, their enlistment was finally official. Returning to the barracks with the results of their X-rays, the army’s rough reward was an inoculation against typhoid, a thick needle punched under the skin on the chest.
Not everyone who tried signing on was accepted. More than a third of those enlisting in Owen Sound were turned down: In the first week, one hundred eighty men signed up and sixty-nine were rejected. Some were turned down for medical reasons, others were eventually excluded because the officers did not want them in the regiment.[7] It was normal to think the biggest and most brawling local men would be most sought after. But this was not the case with the Foresters. Potential troublemakers were well-known and moved out. Whether such decisions made sense to the community, or even followed military protocol, didn’t matter to Colonel Rutherford. He had seen first-hand during the Great War that discipline and a sense of devotion to comrades were more important than mere physical strength. If an example was needed, he could point to Tommy Holmes, one of the youngest, smallest, and bravest men from Owen Sound to fight in the Great War. The officers also knew that if those they turned down were serious, they could enlist elsewhere. The officers kept only those they considered the best of Owen Sound’s young men.
There was a third group of men in town. These were single men who were physically capable and of the right age,