Deachman: Opportunities to chat with our WWII vets won’t last forever

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Robert Allan Spencer was 101 when he died on Aug. 28 this year, following a brief illness.

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I met him once, in 2015, when the then-95-year old former lieutenant-colonel pinned his Second World War service medals to his coat to march with other veterans at the Remembrance Day ceremony at the National War Memorial.

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We last spoke over the phone when he turned 100, on Nov. 9, 2020, when family, friends and colleagues paraded outside his Sandy Hill apartment building in a COVID-19 pandemic–distanced birthday tribute.

He was kind, thoughtful, witty, whip-smart, open and engaging.

He showed me his New Testament, the one he had in his left breast pocket when a piece of shrapnel cut across his chest, from his right shoulder to his left elbow. The shell fragments sliced through his leather jacket, uniform and undershirt, cut his binoculars in two, severed the strap of his water canteen and took a nick out of his bible.

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He told me of other close calls, such as the time that fate, in the form of another piece of shrapnel, instead struck the tank driver standing right beside him, ripping through his heart and killing him instantly.

Spencer spoke of the incessant fear he felt as a 23-year-old trekking across France, Germany, Belgium and Holland with the 15^th Canadian Field Regiment of the Royal Canadian Artillery. “We knew what we were doing, and we knew it would cost lives,” he said. “Of course you’re afraid. You’re afraid all the time.”

And yet he talked about the inevitability of signing up to serve following his graduation from McGill University. There was no question of going or not going. “I joined because that’s what you did,” he said. “There was a war on. All of us at McGill knew we’d join up after we graduated.”

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His story, he insisted, wasn’t special. “It simply mirrors thousands of others who went and served.” But his story was different in one important aspect. “I got to come home afterwards.”

Unlike many other veterans who returned from combat, Spencer was glad to tell his story to others. It was a great privilege for me to listen, and to also share his story with others. Such opportunities don’t last forever.

When John “Jack” Babcock died in 2010, Canada was left with no known living veterans from the First World War. One of these years, the same will be true of Second World War vets, and with them, unless they’ve been recorded for posterity, their first-hand accounts. Korea will be next, then one day, we’ll find ourselves honouring the last Canadian soldier to serve in Afghanistan. And in between, we’ll remember the innumerable people who have served Canada, and continue to do so. 

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We remember them to honour their sacrifices, and to honour our own history. As Robert Spencer said to me seven years ago, people need to know what he and so many others went through, and how they made this country—and this world— better.

With his words in mind, here are just a few other veterans we’ve lost in the last 12 months:

Rémi Hayes
Rémi Hayes died on Sept. 28, a day before his 97^th birthday and two weeks ahead of his wife, Hèléne Bourassa. Hayes rarely spoke of his war service, or at least not the unsavoury aspects of it. Those memories too easily conjured the smell of death, he explained to his daughter Julie.

He was still a teen when he signed up, choosing not to join friends of his who hid in the bush around Buckingham. Que. for months to avoid being sent overseas. He served in the trenches in France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany as machine-gunner with Le Régiment de la Chaudière, a francophone regiment. He liked to say that they were not as renowned as the famous 22^nd Regiment, or Van Doos, but they were the toughest. 

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Still, there were moments. He worried that his regiment would have to leave in a hurry in the middle of the night, and that he’d accidentally be left behind. One night, he was awakened by voices that he thought were members of his regiment. But just as he was about to speak to them, he realized they were German soldiers walking close to the front line. “If he had opened his mouth that night,” said Julie, “he would not have been with us today.”   

Only days before he died, his daughter Johanne asked him if he was afraid to die. “I am a war veteran,” he replied. “I went to war, saw what I saw, did what I had to do and came back. I am not afraid to die.”

Conrad A. Namiesniowski
Conrad A. Namiesniowski, who died on Aug. 21 at the age of 93, wasn’t even a teen yet when he first became involved in the war effort for the home guard in Wales, delivering messages on his bicycle as a “runner.” He was also an Army Cadet in his youth.

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That was after his family fled Poland, via Marseilles, France, through Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Greece. They eventually made their way back to Britain, where his father, a Polish naval officer, joined the Allied forces.

Although Conrad never served in active combat, he’d seen enough of it by the time he enlisted in the Canadian Armed Forces in 1952.

As a youngster, he’d survived the strafing by German planes of his street in Warsaw, after which he and his mother were put in a camp for enemies of the Reich. After his father rescued them and got them safely to England, Conrad survived when a bomb near him failed to detonate on a London street. 

He and his parents moved from England to Vancouver Island in 1949, and Conrad signed up for the forces three years later, partly to help pay his way through school. After graduating from UBC, he joined the Artillery Regiment. He was posted to Shilo, Man., where he met and married Marjorie Joan Giffin, an army nurse, in 1956. They had three children, Conrad R., Kristina and Andrew. 

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He later became Canadian Military Representative to NATO headquarters in Brussels, and transitioned to international negotiations. He was awarded the Order of Military Merit. After retiring from the Forces in 1986, he joined External Affairs, continuing in international work until transferring to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service as a strategic analyst.

Yet he was far more than the positions he held. He was a strongly principled man, a gentle scholar, and a loyal family man, according to his son Conrad R. Apart from helping him get a leg up in a new country, he joined the military, his son says, ”because he was inspired by his father, who was a war hero, and because that, as an immigrant, he thought it was a good way to give back to the adopted country that was his home.”

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In the eulogy he delivered, Conrad R. noted that his father often quoted many different sources, including this favourite from Winston Churchill: “We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.”

“And we know,” Conrad R. noted, “he gave it his all.”

Alexander Polowin
Three years ago, when he was 94, Alex Polowin compared being in battle to preparing for a boxing match.

“Most of our battles were at night and we’d come out there and all of a sudden starshells fly over your ship,” the D-Day veteran told The Canadian Press. “Starshells light up the sky to bring out your silhouette.

“You’ve got fear in you, you’ve got to hate that person. You get that adrenaline rush forced on you in boxing. But this was natural.”

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As a young teen in Ottawa, Polowin watched his mother cry when she received news that her siblings — Polowin’s aunts and uncles — had been murdered by the Nazis that occupied Lithuania, from where the Polowins emigrated when he was only three.

And so he enlisted in the Royal Canadian Navy shortly before his 17th birthday. His father, unable to read or write English, was unaware that his son lied about his age, and signed Alex’s enlistment papers.

Aboard the destroyer HMCS Huron, Alex fought in the Battle of the Atlantic, survived half a dozen convoy journeys between Scotland and Russia, and took part in D-Day and the Battle of Normandy. Along the way, he earned the French Legion of Honour, the Atlantic Star, the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal, the Soviet Peace Medal, the Order of Ushakov, and Canada’s Sovereign Medal. 

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Three days after the war ended, his two uncles visited him in a dream. “They hugged me and kissed me and told me they were proud of me,” he told the Citizen in 2017. 

He returned to Ottawa where he married and had three sons, Howard, Cary and Sheldon. He enjoyed a long career in sales and insurance. The city named a street after him in 2017.

He was also heavily involved in the Memory Project, a veterans’ speakers bureau organized by Historic Canada, speaking on hundreds of occasions at schools, retirement homes, and just about any place where people wanted to hear his story. “If we aren’t around to tell them,” he once said, “how are they going to know?” 

bdeachman@postmedia.com