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Medals, Bravery, Remembrance Day

No medal for my father



imageThe New York Times reported in 1942 that Germany had developed a plan to systematically exterminate Jews. The story was buried far inside the paper for it was preposterous and unthinkable. Many papers ignored it It did happen. It went far beyond the ordinary evil of war. Its inhumanity stunned the senses of the civilized world. What kind of a person would find satisfaction in calculatedly murdering millions of helpless men, women and children? The solution to "the Jewish question" was decided upon and drafted sixty years ago at a buffet luncheon in a posh restaurant on the outskirts of Berlin. They ate well and drank fine wine and the best brandy - then fifteen well educated senior government officials laid plans to murder three million people.

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Thirty years earlier the Great War saw massive deprivation and death, from Compeigne to Cambrai and Galipoli to Ghent. Soldiers from Canada, New Zealand, Australia and other parts of the old British Empire fought side by side. It was brutal and cruel, as wars are supposed to be, but there was a level of civility on both sides that would not accept or condone mass murder. It was a different war. My father was in that war. Although he fought in a number of battles, and was severely wounded--and worse, he left his twin brother buried in France, he did not return home with a medal for bravery. In any ranking of emotion, the fear of being so desperately alone comes ahead of the fear of battle. For as well as leaving his twin in the British cemetery in the village of Anneaux, killed at Bourlon Wood just 43 days before the war ended, he had another reason to be sad. A letter from home told him that his two sisters had died in the influenza epidemic back in Canada. But there were no medals for grief and an aching heart. So it was interesting for me to read about a soldier on the other side who was a hero, and lived to return home when the war ended--with a medal for bravery. A decoration given only for brave deeds on the battlefield. The Iron Cross First Class. An honour seldom given to an ordinary field soldier in the old German Army. This soldier had fought through much of the same area in France and in the same battles as my dad and his twin. There was little difference in their age. The German soldier was born in 1889 in the town of Braunau, Germany. My father was born in the town of Seaforth, Ontario in 1895--six years later. . When the war ended in 1918 my father, Arnold Westcott, was in an army hospital in Surrey recovering from shrapnel wounds to his head and arm. He was serving with the Huron County Battalion in the Somme River fighting near Amien and was hit by an exploding shell in July. About the same time the soldier from the Bavarian 16th Reserve Infantry Regiment was in a hospital in the town of Pasewalk, not far from Berlin. He suffered severe burns in the last battle of Ypres in October. There is no doubt he was either a brave soldier or a reckless and daring fool, for the famous American writer William Shirer wrote of the deeds of this simple German soldier over the four years of the war. He arrived at the front in October, 1914 with only a few weeks of training. Just in time to take part in the first battle of Ypres, a bloody and costly fight for both sides. The British had dug in and blocked the German drive to the English Channel. In four days of fighting, his regiment was reduced from 3,500 men to 600. In October 1916 at the Battle of The Somme, he was severely wounded in the leg. In the summer of 1917, he returned to his regiment and fought in the battle of Arras and at Ypres. The 28-year-old soldier was a dispatch rider through the thick of the fighting in the last ditch German offensive in the spring and summer of 1918. He proudly wore his iron cross first class to the end of his life. But he was an odd duck, as soldiers go. He never received mail or parcels from home, or talked about his family. He never asked for leave. He never complained about the filth of war-- the lice and the mud and the cold, and the stench of the dead. His fellow soldiers cursed him for they found him intolerably aloof. A cold and impassioned, reclusive warrior. A loner. In early 1919, my father came home to Seaforth to continue his apprenticeship with the watchmaker and jeweller he was with before he enlisted. He still had to regularly have his wounds treated at the veteran's hospital in London, 50 miles from home. He married my mother in 1922 and I was born in 1924. He bought the business a year later and together they ran the store on the town`s Main Street for over 40 years. My dad died in 1961 in the veteran's hospital in Toronto. The brain tumour that ended his life was in the exact spot where he was hit in 1918. After the war the German soldier with the Iron Cross First Class found life difficult and hard. His interest since boyhood was to be an artist and possibly move into architectur-- but he had little in the way of skills. What knowledge he had came from his compulsion to read everything he could get his hands on. He had dropped out of high school so his application for college was turned down. His lack of any special skill led him into many dead-end jobs and he gravitated into the rough and tumble life of the street--right at the bottom. He lacked family connections. His father was an illegitimate child, a drunkard, and a minor customs worker in the German civil service. He died of a lung hemorrage at 65 in 1903. His mother was a simple, uneducated Bavarian girl and his father's second cousin. Her name was Klara Poelzi and she was his father's third wife. Her first three children died in infancy. It was her fourth and last child who grew up to win the Iron Cross First Class. His mother died in 1908 of breast cancer. I still remember those cold November days in Seaforth in the late 1920`s, when, as a small boy, I watched my father parade to the war memorial in the town park. Marching with his veteran buddies with his medals pinned proudly on his chest. But no medal for bravery. The couragious German soldier received the Iron Cross First Class on the recommendation of First Lieutenant Hugo Gutman who had ordered him to carry dispatches through the battle area to the German artillery positions. The citation, dated July 31, 1918, oddly enough the date of my father's birthday, was signed by Baron Von Godin and told of his bravery. "As a dispatch runner he has shown cold blooded courage and exemplary boldness, both in positional warfare and the war of movement. He has always volunteered to carry messages in the most difficult of situations at the risk of his life. Under conditions of great peril, when all communication lines were cut, his untiring and fearless activity made it possible for important messages to go through." Although the German soldier proudly wore his Iron Cross First Class for 27 years--right up to the moment of his death, when asked about his war experiences he appeared strangely reticent. Talk about the award seemed discretely veiled as though some hidden mystery was attached to it. Of course he didn't want to talk about it. First Lieutenant Hugo Gutman, who so highly praised him and recommended him for the Iron Cross First Class was a Jew. For the daring young German soldier, who fought in the same areas and the same battles in France as my father and his twin brother would later be known to the world as Adolph Hitler. The evil man whose plan to exterminate millions of Jews was thought to be preposterous and unthinkable took his own life in an underground bunker, wearing his Iron Cross, First Class. See Also:

Remembrance Day

Remembrance Day

Remembrance Day Poems



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Clare Westcott -- Bio and Archives

Clare Westcott served as Commissioner of Metro Police and a Citizenship court judge following a long career at Queens Park.


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