Triumph at Kapyong. Dan Bjarnason

weeks.

      The poor old Martinez was a liberty ship. Cheap and churned out in their thousands, they were mass-produced to a single design to get quickly across the Atlantic to beat the U-Boats waiting in ambush. They took just a little over a month to build; although one was completed in four days as a publicity stunt. They were a masterpiece of American industrial assembly-line efficiency. About 2,500 were still in service at the end of the Second World War when hundreds were bought up by Greek shipping magnates, such as Aristotle Onassis, and formed the basis of their new empire of cargo fleets. Liberty ships were designed with one single aim in mind: they were no-frills workhorses. What they were not were passenger liners. Onto this wheezing, geriatric rust bucket were loaded almost 2,000 Canadian and American troops and all their paraphernalia of war.

      The Martinez was named to honour a real-life hero, an American soldier, Joseph Martinez from Taos, New Mexico, who deserved a better memorial. The son of dirt-poor farm workers, he was the first Hispanic-American to be awarded the Medal of Honor. Although only a private, he personally led repeated attacks over snow-covered mountains against Japanese positions in the Aleutian Islands campaign, off the coast of Alaska. The Aleutian Campaign was an obscure theatre, little studied by historians and the only part of the Second World War fought on North American soil. It was a war fought in extreme weather, and rough terrain in a place hardly anyone involved in had ever heard of. It was remarkably like Korea.

      But remote and neglected by history as the campaign is, men still died there. Joe Martinez was one of them. As he stormed the last Japanese trench on the island of Attu, Martinez was shot in the head and died the next day. Several army facilities and legion posts in the American southwest are today still named in his honour. Canadians in the elite Canadian-American Devil’s Brigade also fought in the Aleutians. The exploits of this dashing, unconventional unit was the basis of the popular Hollywood movie starring William Holden. Part of the Aleutian invasion planning team was George Pearkes, a gallant Victoria Cross winner from the First World War and who later, as defence minister under John Diefenbaker, recommended the cancellation of the Arrow program.

      Ironically, one of the Patricias who would fight at Kapyong and was aboard the Martinez had also fought in the Aleutians with the ship’s slain namesake: Tommy Prince, an Ojibwe from just north of Winnipeg. Unbelievably brave, Prince fought later in Italy and France and ended the war as the most decorated soldier in Canadian history. However, it is unlikely that he and Joe Martinez ever actually crossed paths during the Alaskan campaign.

      For three miserable agonizing weeks, the struggling little Martinez worked its way across the Pacific and its wretched and retching passengers bobbed like a cork in the rough weather. Few of the Patricias were convinced it was seaworthy. Only the rust, they said, was keeping the water out. Toilet facilities were crude. The food was inedible. The cooks sweated into the meals they were preparing.

      “The weather was some of the worst in memory. Even the ship’s crew were seasick,” remembers Mike Czuboka. “I spent the first week in my bunk flat on my back and next to my rifle. The bunks were six deep and jammed together in the hold. The odour of unwashed bodies and feet was almost unbearable.”11

      John Bishop remembers the creaking of the hull convinced the soldiers they were headed straight for the bottom long before they’d ever make it to the battlefield. Even the captain was seasick.

      “The hull developed a vertical crack along the bulkhead of our hold,” he wrote. “In the roughest weather we could actually see it lengthening as the water leaked in. A warm soup of sea water and vomit sloshed back and forth every time the ship rolled, and when the ship heeled badly to our side it was over a foot deep.”12

      No one mentioned anything like this in those inspiring recruiting ads.