We will remember them

Posted By Douglas Gloin

Posted 2 months ago

You can spot their surnames today in the phone book and on local road signs: Skuce, Luckasavitch, Shalla, McGuey, Skebo, Chippior, Biernaski, Popkey, Yantha, Cybulski, Maika ... and many more.

But the men and their times are gone. They perished in sun-burnished Italian fields, in French hedgerows, and on deadly beaches where holiday crowds had once frolicked. They died trapped in burning bombers in the night skies over Europe. They fell in Normandy, on the drive toward Falaise, or in the First World War trenches at Ypres, Passchendaele, Vimy. There are many more of these names, too.

Overwhelmingly, the men of the Madawaska Valley area joined the army and the air force. They went to war for different reasons. Many felt that the cause was just and their duty was clear. Others sought adventure, a chance to test themselves, or simply wanted to escape the back-breaking work of the logging camps and farms. The late John Hudder, who fought in both Italy and Northern Europe during World War II with the venerable Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment (the "Hasty Pees"), once told me that he signed up in large part out of taste for adventure and to break free of the drudgery of the family farm in Rockingham.

Many of the fallen simply vanished, blown to pieces by shellfire or incinerated inside their aircraft. Others sank wounded into the cold brown waters of the Dutch and Belgian polders, or beneath the sea's unforgiving waves.

Earl Lynch was one. The 20-year old Whitney man, a private in the Essex Scottish Regiment, disappeared during the fighting in the polder lands.

RCAF Pilot Officer Peter Maika of Barry's Bay was another. A crackerjack navigator who fought hard to get an overseas posting – the air force wanted him to teach his considerable skills to other navigators – he vanished with the crew of his B-24 Liberator over the Bay of Bengal in the last days of December, 1944. It was his second operational mission. He hadn't even been in action long enough to pin on his combat wings.

Wilno's Sergeant Basil Skebo was also lost. The 19-year-old wireless operator/gunner's Wellington bomber disappeared into the blackness of night during a September, 1944 navigation training mission off the coast of Norfolk, England. Basil's brother Patrick, also an air gunner, died when his Lancaster bomber was shot down on a disastrous night raid on Leipzig, Germany in February, 1944. He is buried in Holton War Cemetery in the Netherlands.

The boys' father and mother, Martin and Hanna Skebo, were not the only parents in this area to endure the deaths of more than one son overseas.

In World War I, John McHerness and his wife, who homesteaded in the Combermere/Maple Leaf area, lost three sons in the trenches. The youngest, 26-year-old John Albert, died in the trenches in September, 1916. William David, the oldest, was killed in late April, 1918, and the middle brother, Benjamin Wells, died in the bitter fighting in August, 1918 – less than three months before the armistice. All three are remembered at Canada's Vimy Memorial at Vimy Ridge in France. None has a known grave.

Two Skuces, both called Richard, also perished in that war. They were cousins. Richard F. Skuce of Craigmont died in 1916 at the Battle of the St. Eloi Craters, part of the Ypres Salient in Belgium. Richard R., who was from the Bark Lake area, was killed around Vimy Ridge in June, 1917.

The Biernacki family of Barry's Bay lost two sons. Philip, whose name was spelled Biernaskie on his enlistment papers, and Frank, who used Biernaski on his, both spent long periods in England before joining in the great Allied offensive in northwest Europe in 1944-45. Philip was killed on August, 1944 as his regiment, the Cameron Highlanders, drove toward Falaise. Frank fell on April 28, 1945. His unit, the Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry Highlanders, was in the vanguard of an assault across the Dortmund-Emms Canal on the Dutch/German border when an artillery round struck the boat he was in. His death came two days before Adolf Hitler's suicide and scarcely a week before the Germans surrendered.

But bitter irony is a constant in war, which bears no regard for timing, age, kinship or any of the things we hold dear in less violent times.

Perhaps few deaths were more cruelly tragic than that of Hubert Popkey of Combermere, a sergeant in the Canadian Provost Corps who was killed by a mine blast on July 1, 1945 -- about seven weeks after the end of hostilities. Until then, he had survived combat throughout the entire offensive in northwest Europe.

And then there was Edward Yantha of Bonnechere, who died when RAF and RCAF bomber crews mistakenly dropped their ordnance on Canadian soldiers massing for an attack on the Germans during the breakout from the Normandy beaches after D-Day; or Ken Shields of Whitney, a wireless operator/gunner with the Royal Canadian Air Force's 419 "Moose" squadron. As a bomber crewman, Shields was engaged in one of the most dangerous jobs in the war, yet he died after being struck by a bus near Harrowgate, England.

Abbie Cybulski, who came from Barry's Bay but lived in Renfrew, was murdered. Just days after D-Day, Cybulski's Sherman tank was knocked out near Le Mesnil-Patry in Normandy and he was captured by soldiers of the 12th SS Panzer Division. He was marched away and a short time later, an SS trooper shot him in the back and left his corpse on the field. Several other Canadian prisoners were also murdered by the SS during the fighting in Normandy.

Florian Chippior of Wilno was killed in action in the battle for Boulogne in September, 1944. The next day, the Canadians chased the last of the German defenders out of the city.

Some of the fallen were killed in some of modern history's most famous battles. Felix Shalla and Edelore (Ed) McGuey, both from Whitney, lie in cemeteries overlooking Juno Beach, where the Canadians landed on D-Day -- June 6, 1944. McGuey, of the Queen's Own Rifles of Canada, was shot down with two other corporals while accepting the "surrender" of some German soldiers in the late afternoon of that historic day. The Germans raised a white flag, and then machine-gunned their would-be captors as they approached. The three were members of the Queen's Own Rifles of Canada. Shalla, a combat engineer, died of wounds suffered while storming the beach.

Jack Heintzman of Whitney, who joined the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment when he was still too young to be sent overseas, is buried beside the Adriatic Sea in Italy's Moro River region. At 19 years of age, and two days before Christmas, 1943, Jack died in the bitter struggle to wrest the town of Ortona from the Germans, a battle dubbed "Little Stalingrad" by the newspapers because of the costly house-to-house fighting that took place there. John Hudder, who was there, resorted to a rare use of profanity in describing Ortona. "That was a bad goddamned place," he said while shaking his head slowly. "Nobody can say that wasn't a bad goddamned place."

Frank Luckasavitch, another Rockingham farm boy, is believed to have been vaporized by a German artillery round in the fight for Fresnoy, a sequel to the Canadian victory at Vimy Ridge, in June, 1917.

Another son of Wilno, Adolph Cybulskie, 19, was killed on one of the last great night air raids on Germany in February, 1945. Today, he rests near the old 1936 Olympic Stadium in Berlin's Charlottenburg district, near where the Halifax bomber in which Cybulski was the mid-upper turret gunner was shot down in flames.

Cyril Coghlan, a farm boy from Sabine Township, died in August, 1943 after being severely wounded while trying to escape his German captors during the invasion of Sicily. He is buried in Tripoli, Libya.

The men dealt with the constant prospect of death in different ways. Some simply told themselves it would happen to the other guy, not to them; while some expected to die, accepted it and focused on the task at hand. Others relied on their faith.

The late Ed Maika of Barry's Bay once described a vision he had before the war while out in the bush one day. In it, he learned he would travel to distant lands where he would endure great hardship, danger and turmoil, but that he would ultimately return home. Maika fought his way from Sicily up the boot of Italy and then joined the First Canadian Army in northwest Europe for the final offensive against the Germans. He survived it all, and returned to Barry's Bay to raise a family with his war bride. That vision sustained him through some of the darkest days of the war, he said.

The randomness of death came home to John Hudder in a sunny Italian field as he walked side by side with a close friend. An artillery round struck between them, blowing the friend to pieces while leaving Hudder unscathed. Sixty-two years later, he still wondered at how and why he was spared.

The spectre of death did come upon Pilot Officer Earl Beach, a 19-year-old Killaloe man who was a bomb aimer for the Royal Canadian Air Force's 419 "Moose" Squadron. Beach's Lancaster bomber was shot down on a raid over Dessau, Germany on March 7, 1944. When his personal effects came home to his family, they included a notebook in which Beach had sketched a gravestone. On it, he had etched his name in pen, leaving the date blank. His body was never found, leaving his mother Alice to hold out hope to the end of her life that Earl might be alive, that he had perhaps been knocked on the head and was unable to remember who he was.

We know the gains that Canadians and people throughout the world won through the sacrifices by those who served in the two World Wars and Korea, on peacekeeping missions throughout the globe and in Afghanistan today. Remembrance Day is a day set aside to think on those gains, and this is altogether fitting.

But we should also take time to dwell upon what we lost, and continue to lose in today's conflict in Afghanistan. Ed McGuey was described as a natural leader of men. Jack Heintzman was a dedicated and caring brother who is still deeply missed by his little sister Gwen these many years since. Philip Biernaskie and Cyril Coghlan left behind war brides and young children. Killaloe's Earl Beach was a distinguished student who had set his sights on being a doctor; and his disappearance left his mother clinging desperately to the hope that he was still alive until the end of her own life. Peter J. Maika, also an academic achiever, had mused about entering public service or politics. The McHerness family lost all of their sons, and Benjamin Wells McHerness left behind an English war bride. The list goes on, and it is this that is the incalculable and terrible price tag of war: Lost lives, lost loves, lost parents, lost achievements ... and the shattered promise of what could have been.

As the English poet John Donne once wrote:

"Any man's death diminishes me,

because I am involved in mankind,

and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls;

it tolls for thee."

Douglas Gloin is a former editor of Barry's Bay This Week. His Remembrance Day special section "Lest We Forget," which appeared in this paper in November, 2005, won two national community newspaper awards.