Whistling in the Face of Robbers: Volume Two—1944–1951

By Dahn A. Batchelor

The Life and Times of Dahn Batchelor

My father returned to Canada in the early spring of 1944 and took a train across Canada, and when his train stopped at Quesnel, a mere twenty-six miles from Wells, he changed his mind and got on a train heading south toward Vancouver, with the intention of returning to Toronto, where he previously lived. By a strange coincidence, my aunt who was living in Wells and had been heading south on the same train saw my father get off the train in Squamish. She convinced him to go to Wells. She told him that his family was anxiously waiting for him. He took the next train heading north toward Wells, but my mother knew what he had done after my aunt phoned her and she wasnt pleased at all at his attempt to abandon us again. I and my brother didnt know what he had done. I only learned of it many years later from my aunt. He got a job in one of the towns two gold mines, and this was the first time since my birth that he actually personally gave my mother money to pay for the rent and food.

In the spring of 1944, he bought a large two-story, three-bedroom log cabin in Wells for $500. In 2013, that amount of money would be equivalent to $6,215. The houses in that small town were sold for very little money then. That average house in a city in 1944 would cost $8,870, and in the 2015 market, the average house of that size would sell for at least four hundred thousand dollars.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 16, 2017
• ISBN: 9781514414057

Dahn A. Batchelor

Since the writing of his memoirs and reading them was and is a huge undertaking, Dahn Batchelor decided that he would write them in six volumes—two of them in each of three series. His life experiences’ representing his childhood years is in the series, Whistling in the Face of Robbers. The second series which represented his life as a young man is titled, Patience: The snail will reach the ark, and the third series representing his life as an older man is titled Rising from the Ashes.

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Copyright © 2017 by Dahn A. Batchelor.

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Rev. date: 03/15/2017

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Contents

Introduction

Preface

Previously (from Volume One)

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Chapter Twenty-six

Chapter Twenty-seven

Chapter Twenty-eight

Chapter Twenty-nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-one

Introduction

I have known Dahn for many years and I am always impressed anew with the tireless manner in which he grasps his talents and stretches them as far as they will go, wasting none. Most of us let our gifts slip through our fingers in self-indulgent pursuits but Dahn has always seemed to recognize his ability, and therefore responsibility, to fully develop his own varied and considerable talents and then use them to help others. His life has indeed been interesting, because he made it so. His autobiography is a generous sharing of his experience, rather than any sort of conceit. It is simply part of his philosophy that no part of a life should go to waste, not even the telling of his tale. And in the end, you will find that Dahn has chosen to present to us in his autobiography, not simply his own story, but the story of the two centuries in which he lived in. His life has been well lived and his story well told.

Jack Hope barrister & solicitor

Preface

It was the Roman satirist, Decimus Juvenal (c.60—c.140) who said that if you are poor, you will whistle in the face of robbers. All through my childhood years, I was so poor, I was always whistling. It’s ironic when one thinks about it. My great maternal grandfather was one of the richest men in Canada and I could have been born with a golden spoon in my mouth, but because my mother was date raped (resulting in me being conceived at that time) and because she didn’t remain in her parent’s home, my life as a child began in a field in a two-room shack with no water or electricity, with my crib being the bottom drawer of an old beat-up dresser. It was from these humble beginnings, that I eventually had to make my own way into the world. The only thing I had going for me from my humble beginnings was the gradual development of a creative mind.

A creative life is a meaningful one. However, Bob Sharpe, emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Wales stated: Actions within a life have meaning—life does not. Most human lives are meaningless in that they have no overriding purpose. It does not follow that they have no value or significance. Indeed, they may achieve more and do less harm than those who are devoted to some grand plan. unquote. The vast majority of human beings have no grand plan other than reaching their goals of acquiring their basic needs of warmth, shelter, clothing, food, sex, love and of course, happiness. Seeking to acquire those needs in themselves is not necessarily wrong.

Life without purpose can be meaningless, of that there is no doubt. The late Princess Leila Pahlavi, formerly of Iran, said it rather well when she said and I quote: The most important thing is to find yourself, to find a reason for existing, to find a direction in life, a goal unquote. Unfortunately, despite her great wealth and education, she found no purpose in life and sank into bouts of depression and eating disorders and died an early death on June 17, 2001 at the age of only 31 from a lethal overdose of barbiturates.

Adrienne Clarkson, the former Governor General of Canada when appearing before the graduates of the University of Toronto on June 19, 2001 said in her address: Mediocrity is safe, very easy and therefore, to be avoided at all costs. The purpose of life, it seems to me, is to leave no one and nothing indifferent. It means taking risks, going down paths that are not approved. It means the possibility of loneliness and isolation. It means, in sum, all that is opposite to mediocrity. She later said; ….if the moral stance you take is that you can change things, that you can effect things that you do not have to accept the immediate and expedient way, [then] only with this stance can you even vaguely hope to make a difference. unquote.

I will quote Rick Warren from his book, The Purpose Driven Life in which he said in part: Our unspoken life metaphor influences our lives more than we realize. It determines our expectations, our values, our relationships, our goals and our priorities. For instance, if we think life is a party, our primary value in life will be having fun. If we see it as a race, we will value speed and we will probably be in a hurry all of the time. If we view life as a marathon, we will value endurance. If we see it as a battle or a game, winning will be very important to us. unquote

As I grew older, I gradually realized that living a life as an on-going party isn’t as much fun as living a life as an ongoing scavenger hunt.

As I see it, all our lives are influenced by these aspects of life, some more than others. It’s simply a human trait in all of us. But with some, it goes to the extreme.

Although the majority of the world’s population is satisfied in acquiring basic needs and settling for these needs alone, some of us at some time or another have had ambitions to achieve some grand purpose in life beyond acquiring our basic needs. Many of us have been devoted to some ‘grand plan’ and for this reason, we wish to make a difference and assist in the wellbeing of others and in the process of doing this, we made a name for ourselves. Many of us have been fortunate enough to have left our works and our names behind us to play a role in and be part of history and in that sense, we did this so that our existence on Earth would have a beneficial impact on the future of our fellow human beings.

But as the years went by and I grew older, I realized that having an IQ of 122 was no guarantee of success. There are many Phi Beta Kappas who wear the key around their necks and that is the last thing they ever accomplished that is worthy of attention. Social scientists have established that having a high IQ coupled with a good upbringing and going to the right schools and choosing a lucrative career matters little. There are however five aspects in our lives that brings our goals to the fore. They are: fate, competence on-the-job, ambition, hard work and sacrifice.

A great many persons aspiring to leave their mark have had wretched childhoods and often lived mundane lives until some incident in their lives changed their own directions in life. There is no doubt in my mind that fate plays an enormous role in our lives although it would appear that some people seem to have all the luck. But having a lot of luck is not a sign that one should rely upon. During the American Civil War, General George Armstrong Custer had almost a dozen horses shot from under him and he emerged from the war with hardly a scratch. That is pure luck. It was during that fatal battle of the Little Big Horn where his luck ran out.

Fate being as fickle as it is, my life could have been mundane and insignificant to anyone other than my immediate family, friends and co-workers but when I saw the opportunities that fate was giving me, I ran alongside of fate like a person wanting to hitch a ride on a passing train and I let it take me wherever it was going. Grabbing that proverbial brass ring on that train has taken me around the world and into the lives of many millions of my fellow human beings—and possibly indirectly even yours too. Many people choose to make their mark, beginning in their childhoods and despite their hardships and sometimes handicaps in life; they somehow manage to do just that. My own life comprises of a wretched childhood, hardship, hard work and sacrifice and admittedly, sometimes laziness to boot and on occasion, outright stupidity on my part but thanks to fate and other attributes I spoke of, I have been able to etch my mark on the tablets of history.

My story is that of an ordinary human being, and like everyone else, I have my own failings, idiosyncrasies, talents, desires and aspirations. But as fate would have it, I just happen to be on some occasions, given the opportunity to do something special at the right places and at the right times and that’s what has made my existence have some significance on the lives of so many of my fellow human beings.

If by reading my story, it inspires you to grab that brass ring as the train of fate moves along side of you so that you too can serve your fellow human beings, then my having been here will definitely have an effect on your life also as well as those to whom you would serve and inspire.

There is something I want to add in my preface that I feel should not be left out. I have done something in this book that very few of my fellow autobiographers have done—that is to write about our times. I think it is important that those of us who write our memoirs, take on the responsibility of telling our readers what it was really like to live in our era and what occurred around us and elsewhere when we were alive. If we don’t do this, then the writing of history will be left to those who were born long after the events we write about took place and long after those of us who were around during those events have passed on. There is a responsibility on us to correct any errors being promulgated.

For example, there are some who maintain that the slaughter of almost six million Jews by the Germans is fiction when in reality, it is a fact and the Japanese for many years refused to put in their school text books anything relating to the atrocities committed by the Japanese armed forces between 1937and 1945.

Often statements of leaders of nations bring about these errors also. For example, in September 2001, Tony Blair, the then prime minister of Great Britain while visiting the then President George W. Bush in the White House said to the president: My father’s generation went through the experience of the Second World War when Britain was under attack through the days of the Blitz. There was one nation and one people that stood side by side with us at that time, and that nation was America and that people was the American people, who stand side by side with us now. unquote.

The prime minister was historically wrong. In my September 21, 2001 letter to him, I wrote in part: Anthony Eden, the newly appointed Dominions Secretary wrote the Canadian government on September 6th, 1939 in which he said in part; It is hoped that Canada would exert her full national effort as in the last war, even to the extent of the eventual dispatch of an expeditionary force. On the following day, Prime Minister Mackenzie King told the Canadian House of Commons; We stand for the defence of Canada. We stand for the co-operation of this country at the side of Great Britain and if this house will not support us in that policy, it will have to find some other government to assume the responsibilities of the present. On the 10th of September, 1939, Canada cabled a text of a declaration of war against Germany to Vincent Massey, the Canadian High Commissioner in London. It was Canada that stood side by side with Great Britain during the Blitz. Ninety-seven Canadian airmen flew alongside the airmen of the Royal Air Force when fighting the oncoming German bombers and forty-seven of them died in the air battles. The German bombing of England ended in June of 1941. The United States didn’t enter the war until five months later when Germany declared war against the United States in December 1941. unquote That was the end of my letter to Tony Blair.

George W. Bush made a similar gaffe while visiting Tokyo on February 18, 2002. He said to the Japanese officials: My trip to Asia begins here in Japan for an important reason. It begins here because for a century and a half now, America and Japan have formed one of the great and enduring alliances of modern times. From that alliance has come an era of peace in the Pacific. unquote

It is quite apparent that this president forgot about America’s war with Japan between December 1941 and August 1945. There was no era of peace in the Pacific during those years and certainly no great and enduring alliance between the United States and Japan during those war years.

In all likelihood, both Prime Minister Blair and President Bush knew the real truth of their gaffes and were simply stroking, so to speak, their hosts.

What is really interesting is that when Prime Minister David Cameron of the UK was interviewed on the David Letterman TV talk show, he was asked to translate into English the words, Magna Carta. He couldn’t do it. In English, the two words mean, Great Charter and Cameron was the man who was the leader of the UK.

Without appearing to being too facetious, I am compelled to add that a study in 2002 showed that only 3 percent of the people in the U.K. could name three continents and only 15 percent could name all seven. If Blair and Cameron got the same education fifteen percent of the people in the UK did, then I can readily forgive them for Blair’s gaffe and Cameron’s inability to answer a simple question.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, the former governor of California who was born in Austria made a terrible blunder when he addressed the Republican convention in New York in September 2004. He said that he remembered seeing Soviet tanks in the streets in the province of Styria in Austria after the Second World War.

That was not possible because he was born in 1947 and by that time, the Soviets were gone and the British occupied that province. The tanks he may have seen were British tanks, not Soviet tanks. He probably made that statement to forward the old communist threat for Bush’s election campaign on the latter’s fight against communism.

The dangers of leaders in various nations making false statements publicly is what will make many people believe in the accuracy of what these people in power are saying and it is these kinds of mistaken beliefs where the errors in history are formulated.

Another example of a historical error came about on December 10, 2001. An article was published in the Law Times in which one of its writers wrote: ….it strikes me that before the two world wars, they interned Japanese people and they interned the German people. unquote.

In actual fact, neither the Japanese nor the Germans were interned before either of the two great wars in the Twentieth Century had begun. Germans were interned after the First World War began and it was only after the Second World War had begun that the internment of the Germans and Japanese took place.

Here is another example of a historical error. On December 27, 2001, the narrator of a television history program describing the attack on Pearl Harbour, said, The war with Japan ended with one plane and one bomb. unquote.

During that moment in his broadcast, he was speaking of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima from the American bomber, Anola Gay. In actual fact, the war with Japan ended after a second plane dropped a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki three days after the first bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima. The American bomber that dropped the second bomb was called Bockscar named after the pilot who previously flew it. It was because of the dropping of the second bomb, that the emperor of Japan, Hirohito was able to convince the diehards in the Japanese military to surrender.

Atlas Editions, a Quebec firm that prints very detailed atlases that are put in binders with commentaries on the back side of each atlas stated in the atlas titled, The great lakes of Africa the following erroneous statement with respect to events taking place after colonial days had passed. It said: Some of these events were widely published as was the massacre of Hutis by Tutsis in 1994. That statement was a terrible blunder and did an injustice to the Tutsis. In actual fact, the assassination of president Habyarimana in April 1994 set off a violent reaction, resulting in the Hutus’ conducting mass killings of Tutsis and pro-peace Hutus. Primarily responsible were two Hutu militias associated with political parties: the Interahamwe and the Impuzamugambi. The Hutu Power group known as the Akazu directed the genocide. As many as 800,000 Tutsis and pro-peace Hutus were murdered enmasse by the Hutus.

It’s scandalous indeed to think that so many Canadians know so little about the Twentieth Century. For example, a study in 2002 showed that only 31 percent of Canadians knew anything about the Dieppe Landing in the shores of Northern France during the Second World War in which over 1000 Canadians needlessly died in the battle. And worse yet, when the late Pierre Trudeau, a long-time prime minister of Canada (1968 - 1976 and 1980 - 1984) died in September 2000, many of the high school students didn’t even know who he was and yet most knew who General Armstrong Custer of the Battle of the Big Horn was.

In November 2013, a number of Harvard students were asked what the capital of Canada was and they didn’t know the answer. In September 2003, the TV show, This Hour Has 22 Minutes host, Rick Mercer actually duped ordinary Americans into accepting his ridiculous suggestions such as calling on Canada to legalize VCRs and end the practice of euthanizing senior citizens by setting them adrift on northern ice floes. Admittedly, the Eskimos used to do that to their seniors prior to the Twentieth Century but they stopped doing that long ago. Where did he get the idea that possession of VCRs in Canada was illegal? Some people watching his show might have actually believed that Canadians are that stupid and evil.

Lord William Rees-Mogg in his book The Great Reckoning said in part about what was taught in the United States with respect to history. Surveys of students suggest that they have little or no grasp of the past. They cannot say in what half century the Civil War was fought much less recognize more subtle patterns in history. What Madonna (female singer) said about her latest boyfriend or girlfriend is much more known than what Winston Churchill (prime minister of Great Britain) said about Hitler during World War II. Madonna has had far more press than Churchill, who is a largely unknown figure for those who came of age in the last two decades of the Twentieth Century. (1980-2000) When world historic figures are forgotten a generation after their death, it is a clear hint that popular culture has discounted history almost to the vanishing point. unquote

These examples explain why I feel that we as autobiographers should include in our memoirs, not only the particulars of our own lives, but also the particulars of the local, national and world events that encompassed us and became part of our lives. If we don’t do this, then those authors in the future who later come after we are all gone, and who are writing the history of our times, will not have the advantage of having been here when we were here. They will simply get their information by word of mouth from our decendants who may have not got the information right since it would be second hand information.

Writing one’s memoirs is an adventure even though it is an enormous task. At first, it is enjoyable and entertaining to nostalgically go back into one’s own past but then the book becomes one’s mistress, and later, one’s master. But finally, it becomes a tyrant with demands that seem impossible to meet.

It has taken me many years to search for the historical facts that I have included in my memoirs but I have done this because I want my readers to fully understand what it was really like to be alive during the years of the Great Depression and the wars that followed it and to learn of the discoveries and new appearances and life in general in the remaining two thirds of the Twentieth Century and partway into the Twenty-first Century in which I lived. This book is not only a book of my memoirs but also a history book that explains in detail what was really going on around the world during my lifetime. From my own observations, very few if any autobiographers have chosen to write about their times in their memoirs.

In order to be accurate, I have found much of the historical information I needed for the creation of this book from various books and Internet sources. I strongly urge you to obtain a good atlas or use the maps in the Internet so that you have some idea as to where all the places I have described in this book can be located. It will make it easier for you to see where the events I will be describing to you really took place in the world.

It may seem amazing that anyone at my age (I am in my eighties at the time of writing this book) can remember so much of our lives but it is an interesting recognized fact that the older we get, it became easier to remember the events of our lives that occurred so many years ago.

In one of my published short stories; Bells Across the River, I wrote; What amazing it is indeed that our memories that have been stored up as millions of experiences we have undergone in our lives; will with little effort, come back to us like the after-taste of good wine. Our brains will long retain the fragrance and taste of our memories that have been steeped in our minds; even as our new memories join up and become part of our old memories. unquote

My memoirs that covers two-thirds of the Twentieth Century and the first part of the Twenty-first Century and which includes the historical events encompassing my life that I have concluded that writing about my life and the events that encompassed my life has so much information to write about for this reason, it is too much to include all of it in one book so I have divided my memoirs into six volumes that are in three series—my childhood years, my young adult years and my older adult years. The first series is titled, Whistling in the Face of Robbers, the second series is titled, Patience: The snail will reach the Ark and the third series is titled, Rising from the Ashes. This second volume of the first series covers a time frame beginning in January 1944 and finishing in September 1951.

I hope you enjoy reading this volume of my memoirs. Think of it as a trip back in time as you promenade with me through my own life during the historical moments that encompassed both me and my contemporaries during those years in time.

Dahn Alexander Batchelor

Previously (from Volume One)

For those who haven’t read Volume One of my memoirs, I will give you a very brief background of my life prior to June 1944 where Volume One of my memoirs ends on page 525.

When I was conceived in January 1933, it was during that same month that Adolf Hitler—truly one of the most evil men in history became the chancellor of Nazi Germany.

My father, Louis Vincent Batchelor, was born in 1906 and he turned out to be what polite society would call a real cad. When he was 27 years of age, he was dating my mother, Ruth Alexandra Banfield who was at that time, 21 years of age. On one of those dates when they were alone, my father raped my mother, (a crime that is commonly referred to as a date rape) and my birth came about as direct a result of that rape.

We were all living in Toronto, Ontario and in 1933 we were in the middle of the Great Depression. Life everywhere was bleak unless you were rich in which the vast majority of us were not. Many millions of people were out of work and those who could find work were paid a pittance.

After I was born at 9:15 in the morning of October 27th, 1933 in St. Michael’s hospital in Toronto, my father drove us to what was a two-room shack that had no electricity or water and which was in a farmer’s field in the Town of Scarborough, just east of Toronto which is now and has been for many years, part of the City of Toronto.

We didn’t go to her parent’s home on Avenue Road which was a couple of blocks south of Eglinton Avenue in Toronto and which was a very nice home, because she had run away from her family`s home after she became pregnant as she was fed up listening to my grandmother nagging her incessantly about my mother being pregnant out of wedlock.

Meanwhile my father didn’t remain with us long and he also didn’t support my mother and me. It wasn’t because he was out of work since he actually had good jobs. It was because he was shacked up with another woman and you know that old adage—out of sight, out of mind. My mother had to support both herself and me with what little earnings she got from selling the eggs from chickens that were in the fields that our shack was in.

One of the brothers of my grandfather who lived in Oshawa, (east of Toronto) on occasion brought a hamper full of food to us so that my mother and I wouldn`t starve. Later we moved to better homes in Toronto.

When I was five years old, it was discovered that I had tuberculosis in my left lung so I was sent to a sanitarium in a town which was then called Weston, It is now part of Toronto. The sanitorium which was called the Preventorium and it was the only one in the world that was strictly for children with TB. I spent almost a year in that sanitarium before I was cured.

My mother then took me and my younger brother (who was born in 1936 after my mother married my father just before my brother was born) to two suburbs in Toronto and during those two years, we lived in four houses.

When I was seven going on eight in 1941, my mother took my brother and me to a small mining town in Wells in central British Columbia. My father had previously joined the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) in1941 and shortly after that, he went overseas to fight in the war as a flight engineer in Allied bombers.

At first, the three of us lived in a three-room house in Wells that was furnished and which had both electricity and running water although the toilet was in an outhouse that was in a shed about thirty-feet (9 mrtres) from the back door of our house. We had to bathe in a wash tub. The rent was $15 a month. The house had a small kitchen, a living room where my mother slept and a large bedroom where my brother and I slept. Later, we moved to a larger house that had three bedrooms, a bathroom, and a kitchen. Meanwhile my mother was receiving $70 a month from my father’s pay sent to my mother by the Canadian government while he served in the RCAF overseas. In 2013, that would be equivalent to $1,053 so we weren’t really that poor by then.

My father returned to Canada in the early spring of 1944 and took a train across Canada and when he was a mere 26 miles (42 km) from Wells, he changed his mind and got on the train again and headed south towards Vancouver with the intention of returning to Toronto where he previously lived. By a strange coincidence, my aunt who was living in Wells and had been heading south on a train, saw my father get off the train in Squamish. She convinced him to go to Wells. She told him that his family was anxiously waiting for him. He took the next train heading north towards Wells but my mother knew what he had done after my aunt phoned her and she wasn’t pleased at all at his attempt to abandon us again. My brother and I didn`t know what he had been trying to do before my aunt saw him in Squamish.

He got a job in one of the town’s two gold mines and this was the first time since my birth that he actually personally gave my mother money to pay for the rent and food.

In the spring of 1944, he bought a large two-story three-bedroom log cabin in Wells for $500. In 2013, that amount of money would be equivalent to $6,215. The houses in that small town were sold for very little money then. That average house in a city in 1944 would cost $8,870 and in the 2015 market, the average house of that size would sell for at least three hundred thousand dollars. The three bedroom one-story house I and my wife currently (2016) own and live in is worth approximately half a million dollars.

I am going to take you directly to the Second World War that was by then taking place in Europe, the pacific and in in Asia—a war of such magnitude that hopefully such a war like that one will never again be repeated.

When I have completed that task, I will then go to my childhood years beginning in June 1945 until the beginning of September 1951. Thusly, I am beginning this book in January 1944, I will take you to the events around the world which were incredibly interesting. I am especially referring to events such as the Second World War that was taking place during that era—although the earlier war years were described in Volume One of my three-part series of my memoirs, I working my way up to September 1951 when as a 17-year-old, I joined the Canadian navy.

The first two volumes of my memoirs comprise of the first of the three series (six volumes) of my memoirs.

It will be some time while you are reading the first part of this book before I actually begin telling you of my own life in this book beginning in June 1944 therefore I will take you right back into the Second World War where I left the readers of the first volume of my memoirs. I am doing this because as you read further in this book, you will appreciate that if you had read Volume One of my memoirs, you will see that I haven’t interrupted your excursion onto the battlefields and into the minds of the generals of both the Allies and the enemy. Hopefully you will get some idea of just how that war finally came to an end—both in the European theater and later in the Pacific theatre. When you reach that part of this book, I will then take you back to June 1944 where I will be telling you about my own childhood and what living in that era was really like then.

As an aside, from the time I was born until the time I left Wells, as many as 11 years and two months had passed in my life. (132 months, 528 weeks and 4,081 days).

And now—follow me to the beginning of January 1944 as we promenade back to the Second World War at that time when I was then ten years and seven months old

Chapter One

O n January 4 th 1944, the Battle of Monte Casino in Italy (also known as the Battle for Rome and the Battle for Casino ) was a costly series of four assaults by the Allies against the Gustaff Line in Italy held by the Germans and Italians during the Italian Campaign of World War II. The intention was to create a breakthrough to Rome. The Abby of Monte Casino, is a historic hilltop abbey founded in AD 529 by Benedict of Nursia, and dominates the nearby town of Cassino and the entrances to the Liri and Rapido valleys. It however had been left unoccupied by the German defenders. The Germans decided to man some positions set into the steep slopes below the abbey’s walls.

Galeazzo Ciano, 2nd Count of Cortellazzo and Buccari was also Mussolini’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and the husband of Mussolini’s daughter,

Ciano took part in the Italian invasion of Ethiopia (1935–36) as a bomber squadron commander. Upon his highly-trumpeted comeback as a ‘hero’ he became Foreign Minister in 1936, replacing Mussolini. The following year he was allegedly involved in organizing the murder of the brothers Carlo Rosselli and Nello Rosselli, two exiled anti-fascist major activists killed in the French spa town of Bagnoles-de-l’Orne on the 9th of June 1937. Ciano was skeptical of Mussolini’s war plans and knew that Italy’s armed forces were ill-prepared for a major war. When Mussolini formally declared war on France, he wrote in his diary I am sad, very sad. The adventure begins. May God help Italy!

After 1939, Ciano became increasingly disenchanted with Nazi Germany and the course of World War II, although when the Italian regime embarked on the ill-advised ‘parallel war’ alongside Germany, he went along with Mussolini’s agreement with Germany fairly convinced that it would be OK even despite Mussolini’s terribly-devised Italian invasion of Greece and its subsequent setbacks. Prior to the German campaign in France in 1940, Count Ciano leaked a warning of imminent invasion to neutral Belgium. In the spring of 1943 following the Axis defeat in North Africa, other major setbacks on the Eastern Front, and the Anglo-American assault on Sicily looming on the horizon, Ciano turned against prosecution of the doomed war and actively pushed for Italy’s exit from the conflict. He was silenced by being removed from his post and was subsequently reassigned as the Italian ambassador to the Holy See. This way he could remain in Rome, to be watched closely by Mussolini.

On the night of the 24th of July 1943, Mussolini had previously summoned the Faccist Grand Council to its first meeting since 1939. At that meeting, Mussolini announced that the Germans were thinking of evacuating the south. This led Count Dino Grandi to launch a blistering attack on his longtime comrade. Grandi put on the table a resolution asking the king to resume his full constitutional powers—in effect, it was a vote leading to Mussolini’s total ousting from leadership. The motion won by an unexpectedly large margin, 19-7, with Ciano voting in favor of Mussolini’s dismissal from the party. This meant that Mussolini would no longer be the leader of Italy. Of course this infuriated him since he felt betrayed by his son-in-law.

Mussolini did not think the vote had any substantive value, and showed up at work the next morning like any other day. That afternoon, Victor Emmanuel III, the King, summoned him to the palace and dismissed him from office. Upon leaving the palace, Mussolini was arrested. For the next two months he was moved from place to place to hide him and prevent his rescue by the Germans. Ultimately Mussolini was sent to Gran Sasso, a mountain resort in central Italy He was kept there in complete isolation until rescued by the Germans. Mussolini then set up a puppet government in the area of northern Italy still under German occupation called the Repubblica Sociale Italiana. His government didn’t have any real power however.

Ciano, having been dismissed from his post by the new government, attempted to find shelter in Germany, alongside his wife, Edda and their three children but the Germans returned him to Italian Fascist soldiers and he was then formally arrested for treason. Under German and Fascist pressure, Mussolini had Ciano tried for treason. After the Verona trial and sentencing, a Fascist firing squad, at a shooting range in Verona on the 11th of January 1944, executed Ciano and others (including Emilio De Bono and Giovanni Marinelli) who had also voted for Mussolini’s ousting. The executed Italians were tied to chairs and shot in the back as a further humiliation. Mussolini had previously ignored the pleas of his daughter to spare Ciano.

On the same day that Count Ciano was executed, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt during his State of the Union Address, said that the nation had come to recognize, and should now implement, a second bill of rights. Roosevelt’s argument was that the political rights guaranteed by the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights had proved yp ne inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness. Roosevelt’s remedy was to declare an economic bill of rights which would guarantee employment, with a living wage, freedom from unfair competition and monopolies, housing, medical care, education and social security.

On January 15th, an earthquake hit San Juan, Argentina, killing an estimated 10,000 people in the worst natural disaster in the country’s history. It took place in the province of San Juan, in the center-west area of Argentina, a region highly prone to seismic events. This moderate to strong earthquake (estimated magnitudes ranged from 6.7 to 7.8) destroyed a large part of San Juan, the provincial capital. The earthquake occurred at 8:52 p.m. and had its epicenter located 30 km north of the provincial capital. In 1944 many of San Juan’s houses were made of adobe. (a natural building material made from sand, clay, water, and some kind of fibrous or organic material (sticks, straw, and/or manure) which the builders shape into bricks by wooden frames and then dry in the sun. Many of the people inside the collapsed houses were killed.

The Siege of Leningrad in Russia was a prolonged military operation undertaken by the German Army Group North against Leningrad—historically and currently known as Saint Petersburg which was in the Eastern Front theatre of World War II. The siege started on the 8th of September 1941, when the last land connection to the city was severed. Although the Soviets managed to open a narrow land corridor to the city on the 18th of January 1943, the lifting of the siege took place on the 27th of January 1944, 872 days after it began. It was one of the longest and most destructive sieges in history and overwhelmingly the most costly in terms of casualties.

On Hitler’s express orders, most of the palaces of the Tsars, such as the Catherine Palace, Peterhof Palace, Ropsha, Strelna, Gatchina, and other historic landmarks located outside the city’s defensive perimeter were looted and then destroyed, with many art collections transported to Nazi Germany. A number of factories, schools, hospitals and other civil infrastructure were also destroyed by air raids and long range artillery bombardment.

Civilians in the city suffered from extreme starvation, especially in the winter of 1941–1942. For example, from November 1941 to February 1942 the only food available to the citizens was 125 grams of bread, of which 50–60% consisted of sawdust and other inedible admixtures, and distributed through ration cards. Reports of cannibalism appeared in the winter of 1941–1942, after all birds, rats, and pets had been eaten by survivors. Hungry gangs attacked, killed and then ate people. Leningrad police even formed a special unit to combat cannibalism. This unit’s arrests rounded up 260 Leningraders who were later found guilty of cannibalism and sent to prison. As many as 1.2 million civilians perished during the siege.

Three years after the war ended, in an infamous plot contrived by Stalin, almost every official who had been instrumental in the city’s survival was implicated. All were convicted and executed. What Hitler’s armies left unfinished, Stalin achieved.

On February 8th, the plan for the invasion of France, Operation Overlord, was confirmed. It was the code name for the Battle of Normandy that was to be the Allied operation that later launched the successful invasion of German-occupied western Europe during World War IIOn February 17th, the world’s most beautiful monastery, the Abbey of Monte Cassino was destroyed during the Second World War because of a mistake by a British junior officer. The officer while translating an intercepted radio message; foolishly mistook the German word for abbot for a similar word meaning battalion. His version convinced his superiors this meant a German military unit was using the monastery as its command post, which was in breach of a Vatican agreement between the Vatican and Germany which treated the Abbey as being neutral. The Germans were not in the Abbey at all. Allied generals ordered a huge bombing attack. Only when the planes were in the air did a British intelligence officer, Colonel David Hunt, recheck the full radio intercept. He found that what it actually said was: The abbot is with the monks in the monastery. Unfortunately, by the time the message to cancel the order to bomb the Abbey was sent to the bombers, their bombs had already been released over the Abbey. I am happy to say that after the war, the Abbey was rebuilt. In 1945, there was another misinterpretation about a signal that resulted in the loss of over a hundred and fifty thousand lives. I will give my readers more on that blunder later in this book.

On February 26th 1944, Kurt Gerron (a German Jewish actor and film director) was coerced to make a propaganda film to be viewed by neutral nations showing how ‘humane’ the conditions were at Theresienstadt. After shooting finished, Gerron and the members of Jazz pianist, Martin Roman’s Ghetto Swingers were deported on the camp’s final transport to Auschwitz. Gerron died there. Martin Roman survived. The next day, Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler ordered the gas chambers to be closed. The film, supposed to have been entitled Theresienstadt. Ein Dokumentarfilm aus dem jüdischen Siedlungsgebiet (Terezin: A Documentary Film of the Jewish Resettlement) is also referred to as Der Führer schenkt den Juden eine Stadt (The Führer Gives the Jews a City). It was a propaganda farce.

Sue S. Dauser became a Navy Nurse in September 1917, subsequently serving with Naval Base Hospital Number 3 in the USand in Edinburgh, Scotland during World War I, holding the grade of Chief Nurse for most of that period. Following World War I, she was placed in charge of nursing activities at the US Naval Hospital at San Diego, California. During the 1920s, Chief Nurse Dauser served on board several ships and in overseas billets in Guam and the Philippines as well as in naval hospitals in the US. She tended President Warren G. Harding during his fatal illness in 1923. She was appointed Superintendent of the Navy Nurse Corps in 1939. Serving in that capacity throughout the Second World War, she supervised the great wartime expansion of the corps and its activities throughout the world. Under her administration, the membership of the corps grew from 436 to over 11,000 by 1945. In July 1942, she was invested with the permanent relative rank of Lieutenant Commander. In December, she received the temporary relative rank of Captain, the first woman to receive this rank in the history of the US Navy. In February 26th, 1944, her relative captaincy was changed to actual commission for the duration of the war plus an additional 6 months. Captain Dauser was awarded the Navy Distinguished Service Medal for her work as Superintendent during World War II. It was many years later, Terry L. Gabreski was appointed to the lofty rank as a Lt. General in the United States Air Force.

As the years moved onward, many other qualified women attained high ranks in the US Armed Forces.

Just after 6 p.m. on March 2, 1944, the locomotive No. 8017, reached Eboli, beyond Battipaglia in Italy. At about 11:40 p.m. the train carried many illegal passengers. The tunnel was graded steeply and the freight train grossly overloaded with its passengers. The train stalled with almost all the cars inside the tunnel. The passengers and crew were overcome by the smoke and fumes so slowly that they failed to notice the dangers. As many as 521 people riding the steam-hauled freight train died of carbon monoxide poisoning. There were a small number of survivors that were in the last few cars which were still in the open air who survived.

The carbon monoxide gas that was produced as a by-product of combustion and carbon monoxide poisoning is a well recognized danger when engines are used, or fires occur in enclosed environments. It combines with hemoglobin when inhaled, so the victim dies of anoxia (lack of oxygen). It is still the principal cause of death in mine disasters after a fire or explosion. The burning of low grade substitutes in this train event produced a large volume of odorless, poisonous carbon monoxide gas, was a critical factor of the ensuing disaster.

Narva is the third largest city in Estonia. It is located at the eastern extreme point of Estonia, by the Russian border, on the Narva River which drains Lake Peipus. It is a very ancient city. Heavy battles occurred in and around Narva in World War II. The city was damaged in the German invasion of 1941 and by smaller air raids throughout the war, but remained relatively intact until February 1944. However, being at the focus of the Battle of Narva (1944)), the city was almost completely leveled. The most devastating action was the bombing of the 6th of March 1944 by the Soviet Air Force, which completely destroyed the baroque old town because they thought that the Germans were still in the town—which they were not. After the war, most of the buildings that could have been restored as the walls of the houses still existed were demolished in the early 1950s to make room for apartment buildings. Only three original buildings remain in the old town, including the Baroque-style Town Hall.

Murder Incorporated or the Brownsville Boys; known in syndicate circles as The Combination was the name the press gave to organized crime groups in the 1930s through the 1940s that acted as the ‘enforcement arm’ of the Jewish Mafia and later called the American Mafia—the early organized crime groups in New York and elsewhere. Originally headed by Louis ‘Lepke’ Buchalter, and later by Albert ‘The Mad Hatter’ Anastasia, Murder Inc. was responsible for between 400 and 1,000 contract killings, (the actual figures are not known) until the group was exposed in the early 1940s by informer and group member Abe ‘Kid Twist’ Reles. In the trials that followed, many members were later convicted and executed, and Abe Reles himself died after mysteriously falling out of a window while FBI agents were in another room supposedly protecting him.

Thomas E. Dewey first came to prominence as a prosecutor of Murder Inc. and other organized crime cases. Most of the killers were Jewish gangsters from the gangs of the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Brownsville, East New York, and Ocean Hill. In addition to carrying out crime in New York City and acting as enforcers for New York mobster Louis ‘Lepke’ Buchalter willingly accepted murder contracts from mob bosses all around the United States.

The Court of Appeals upheld the murder convictions of Lepke, Weiss and Capone in October 1942 on a 4–3 vote. Incidentally, this particular Capone was not related to Al Capone. The US Supreme Court refused to hear Lepke’s appeal in February 1943. In March 1943, the Supreme Court reversed its earlier decision and granted a review to Lepke, Weiss and Capone. The Supreme Court upheld the conviction in June 1943. Before Lepke could be executed, New York State needed the federal government to turn Lepke over, as he was currently serving a 14-year sentence in Leavenworth Federal Prison. New York State authorities demanded that the federal government turn over Buchalter for execution. Buchalter resisted, managing to remain in Kansas and out of New York’s hands until he was extradited to New York in January 1944. After his last appeal for mercy was rejected, Louis Buchalter was executed on March 4th, 1944 in the electric chair in Sing Sing. On the same day, a few minutes before Buchalter’s execution, his lieutenants Weiss and Capone were also executed.

On the morning of October 25, 1957, Anastasia (The Lord High Executioner) was assassinated. I will give my readers more on his assassination by other mobsters in a later volume of my memoirs.

On March 10th, in Britain, the prohibition on married women working as teachers was lifted. I remember in the 1960s, members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police couldn’t be married until they served at least three years in the service. That foolish regulation was also eventually lifted.

In March 1944, Anne Frank was listening to a Dutch program from London and heard the broadcaster say that after the war the Dutch people ought to make a national collection of diaries and letters to record what they had been through. It wasn’t for several years that Anne’s diary, in which her story was written in in a notebook, was found on the floor of the attic. Those that read it recognized the importance of Anne’s writings. She had put her own thoughts down in her diary, thoughts about the war, humanity and life with seven other human beings in the attic for two years. It is an incredible piece of literature.

On the morning of the 4th of August 1944, following a tip from an informer who was never identified, the Achterhuis was stormed by a group of German uniformed police (Grüne Polizei) led by SS-Oberscharführer Karl Silberbauer of the Sicherheitsdienst (secret Police). The Franks, van Pelses, and Pfeffer were taken to the Reich Main Security Office in Amsterdam where they were interrogated and held overnight. On the 5th of August they were transferred to the Huis van Bewaring (House of Detention), an overcrowded prison in the city. Two days later they were transported to the Westerbork transit camp, through which by that time more than 100,000 Jews, mostly Dutch and German, had passed. Having been arrested in hiding, they were considered criminals and were sent to the Punishment Barracks for hard labor.

Victor Kugler and Johannes Kleiman were arrested and jailed at the penal camp for enemies of the regime at Amersfoort. Kleiman was released after seven weeks, but Kugler was held in various work camps until the war’s end. Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl were questioned and threatened by the Security Police but were not detained. They returned to the Achterhuis the following day, and found Anne’s papers strewn on the floor. They collected them, as well as several family photograph albums, and Gies resolved to return them to Anne after the war. On the 7th of August 1944, Gies attempted to facilitate the release of the prisoners by confronting Silberbauer (an Austrian SD non-commissioned officer holding the rank of SS-Oberscharführer (staff sergeant), when serving in the occupied Netherlands, he arrested Anne Frank and her family) and offering him money to intervene, but he refused.

On the 3rd of September 1944, the group was deported on what would be the last transport from Westerbork to the Auschwitz concentration camp and arrived after a three-day journey. On the same train was Bloeme Evers-Emden, an Amsterdam native who had befriended Margot and Anne in the Jewish Lyceum in 1941. Bloeme saw Anne, Margot, and their mother regularly in Auschwitz.

In the chaos that marked the unloading of the trains, the men were forcibly separated from the women and children, and Otto Frank was wrenched from his family. Of the 1,019 passengers, 549—including all children younger than 15—were sent directly to the gas chambers. Anne Frank had turned 15 three months earlier and was one of the youngest people to be spared from her transport. She was soon made aware that most of the people were gassed upon arrival however she never learned that the entire group from the Achterhuis had survived this selection. She reasoned that her father, in his mid-fifties and not particularly robust, had been killed immediately after they were separated but in fact he survived the war.

With the other females not selected for immediate death, Anne was forced to strip naked to be disinfected, had her head shaved and was tattooed with an identifying number on her left arm. By day, the women were used as slave labour and forced to haul rocks and dig up rolls of sod. At night, they were crammed into overcrowded barracks. Some witnesses later testified that Anne became withdrawn and tearful when she saw children being led to the gas chambers; others reported that more often than not, she displayed strength and courage. Her gregarious and confident nature allowed her to obtain extra bread rations for her mother, sister, and herself. Disease was rampant. Before long, her skin became badly infected by scabies. Her mother was placed into an infirmary, which was in a state of constant darkness and infested with rats and mice. Edith Frank stopped eating, saving every morsel of food for her daughters, Anne and Margot and passing her rations to them through a hole she made at the bottom of the infirmary wall.

On October 28, selections began for women to be relocated to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. More than 8,000 women, including Anne and Margot Frank and Auguste van Pels were transported. Edith Frank was left behind and later died from starvation. Typhus had also spread through the Bergen-Belsen camp which killed 17,000 prisoners. Witnesses say that Anne was in such a weakened state from typhus, she fell from her top bunk and died as a result of the fall. She died a few days after her sister Margot died from typhus in early March 1945.

In 1947, her father, Otto Frank managed to publish Anne’s diary, titled Het Achterhuis (The Annex), a title that Anne herself had chosen. Anne Frank’s diary has appeared in more than 50 different editions and more that 18 million copies were sold world-wide.

A movie called, The Diary of Anne Frank was produced in 1959 and her story was made into a TV series in 2001.

Otto Frank later moved to Switzerland after the war. He remarried however he and his wife didn`t have any children from that marriage. He died on August 19th 1980 of natural causes and his second wife died eight years later.

Anne had wanted to grow up to be a writer. She never had the chance. Anne also wanted to live after her death through her writing. She has and will forever be alive in her writings. Her voice was preserved out of the million or more children who died during the Second World War that were forever silenced—her voice being no louder than a child’s whisper. It tells how she and the other seven lived, spoke, ate, and slept, and it has outlived the shouts of the murderers and has soared above a great many of the voices of time. In 1974, while traveling through Europe, I visited the Annex where Anne and the others had lived. There was no furniture on the floors of the annex when I was there. To say that I was moved by the experience of being in that annex is an understatement.

There is another story I wish to tell about what happened in the Netherlands during the war that might cheer you up a little.

The Germans in Holland (Netherlands) behaved badly. It was easy to hate them.

The Dutch had a special hateful word for them—Moffe, meaning Nazi or even better, Rot Moffe, which meant rotten Nazi Since one could get shot for saying almost anything to a German he didn’t like, I’m sure if a German soldier had heard you call him a Rot-Moffe, (rotten Nazi) that would have been the end of you.

German soldiers were everywhere in Holland and near the end of the war, they looked rather pathetic. Now as we all know, small children pick up on words they don’t understand and will often repeat them. One day on a streetcar in one of the Dutch cities there was a German soldier all bandaged up on crutches with his arm in a sling and a bandage on his head. A little five-year-old girl who saw the bandaged German soldier and felt sorry for him, spontaneously left the seat next to her mother, walked over to the soldier and started stroking his good arm, saying softly, "You poor, poor Rot-Moffe." Anyone on the streetcar who heard that little girl make that remark and was able to stifle a laugh at that moment must have had incredible will-power.

Throughout February and March 1944, the Allies fought their way through the Siegfried Line, a series of antitank fortifications, pillboxes, and artillery that ran along the Western border of Germany and France. Manned by young boys and old men, the Siegfried Line was a tough line that held the Allies out of Germany since September. On March 7th, the US3rd Armored Division captured the German city of Cologne which straddles the Rhine River.

Tank units of the onrushing US1st Army rolled into Cologne’s suburbs, with all guns blazing at heavy pockets of Nazi resistance. Stalled street cars were hauled out of the way and American foot soldiers fought their way into the city, block by block. Cologne lay in absolute ruins, after having been subjected to a ‘saturation bomb attack’ target for allied bombers for three years. In sharp contrast, the Cathedral stood almost undamaged even though it was right next to the main railway station. German soldiers were rounded up and the Cologne citizens slowly returned to their dead city. Meanwhile the giant Hohenzollern Rhine Bridge was mangled and twisted making it useless for the purpose of crossing over the Rhine River. The Ludendorff Bridge on the other hand was still standing which made it possible for the US9th Armored Division troops and supplies to reach the Rhine River’s east bank in ever increasing numbers.

General George Patton’s US 5th Division crossed the Rhine River during the night of the 22nd of March thereby establishing a six-mile deep bridgehead after capturing 19,000