Canada in World War 2 | Retracing my Grandfather's Steps

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My Wife's Family in the Holocaust:

SOURCES:
- A History of the West Nova Scotia Regiment by Thomas Randall (1947)
- Documents held by my mother, including notes from talks she had with him during the final years of his life

CREDITS:
Charts & Narration by Matt Baker
Animation by Syawish Rehman
Audio editing by Ali Shahwaiz

[UsefulCharts]

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[JWashington]

My Grandfather was a Tuskegee Airmen during the war, the amount of grandpa war lore I got from him was amazing. He’s 95 now giving lore to my 9 year old son.

[Halfife]

My great-uncle fought with your grandfather! He was a part of the Royal Canadian Regiment and was actually killed at Moro River (just a couple days before the battle of Ortona). He's buried in the cemetery shown at 18:49. My middle name is in honour of him, and I'm very proud to have it.

[onewingedangel]

My grandpa was a Red Cross volunteer in the Pacific and was held as a POW in the Philippines for three years. According to my grandma, he was a survivor of the Bataan Death March, and let me tell you, that trauma lasted long beyond his lifetime. History really has a way of worming its way into people's lives.

[JudazRex]

Thanks to your grandfather!❤️
My great-grandfather was a resistance fighter in Denmark🇩🇰 he started In 1943

[vonPeterhof]

My great-grandfather served in the Red Army in Stalingrad, where he got wounded and died several months after his discharge. The story passed down via my paternal grandfather, who was still a young child at the time, was that he was sent home after his wound and gradually got worse until he died, but after having checked his name in a Russian online database of WWII era documents it turned out that some time after the initial wound he was judged fit enough for service in the rear and got transferred to the Moscow region.

On my mother's side of the family I also have Volga German ancestors who got deported to Siberia and Central Asia shortly after the German invasion, but my great-grandmother managed to avoid getting deported for some time by being employed as a military translator for the Red Army General Staff. Apparently sometimes the German troops would use regional dialects like Bavarian or Swabian for code-talking purposes, and my great grandmother was from a Swabian-speaking Volga German community, so she could help with the "decoding".

[Artur_M.]

What an amazing video! I love how you connected your family history with the big picture history or explained some matters of the military organisation (for viewers who might not be well-versed in it) concisely and clearly. If I was in your place, I would probably either forget that not everyone knows what a regiment, brigade, division and corps is, or take too much time explaining it.

I was also happy to hear at 11:15 that your grandfather was onboard the Polish ship MS Batory. An ocean liner turned troop transport and hospital ship, MS Batory had a distinguished service during WWII, earning the nickname "lucky ship." She was named after the King Stefan Batory (Stephen Báthory). Interestingly Batory also transported treasures from the Wawel Castle, evacuated from Poland, to Canada for safekeeping (through Halifax, Nova Scotia, no less). The treasures included the coronation sword _Szczerbiec_ - the last surviving piece of the Polish regalia. As you explained in your Famous European Crowns video, the rest of them were already destroyed by Prussians during the Partitions.

[ATC]

I’m from the Netherlands, Zwolle to be specific. Zwolle was also liberated by the Canadians. Leo Major was a big part of our a liberation and has a street named after him. In 2005 he was also acknowledged as a honorary member of the city. Every year on the fourth of May we mourn the dead on Remembrance Day and on the fifth we celebrate and thank those people for our liberation. It is crazy to hear your grandfather was in Nijkerk which is a town very close to Zwolle, ofc I don’t know if your grandfather is still alive but pls thank him for his service and know we will always be thankful and remember what those men did for our liberation!

Ps. great video, loved to hear the story❤

[daltongalloway]

Glad you’re feeling better! My grandfather was also in Italy during the war (he was American). He was shot in the chest durning one of the battles south of Rome. The bullet missed his heart by a couple inches. They didn’t remove it and he carried that bullet in his chest till the day he died. RIP to all our grandfathers who fought for our freedoms

[AnimalCrackers]

Incredible story and a beautiful tribute. My own grandfather was in the US Army as a mechanic under the 238th Engineers in Company B. He outlined his trek from Omaha Beach to Cherbourg, Liege, Aachen, Eischwellen, getting pushed back during Battle of the Bulge, back to Eischwellen, Duren, Brauwellir, Cologne, Konigswinter. He was the first from his company to drive a vehicle across the Rhine River.

[vishnufatania]

It is great to see you back Matt! But more importantly, I hope you're feeling better - We love your videos as fans and appreciate the effort you put in them, but please don't forget to prioritise your health. That comes first, and we'll be here for when you're ready to upload more videos - wishing you a happy Christmas and healthy 2024 :)

[schs]

Awesome tribute to your grandfather.

In 1913, as a young man, my paternal grandfather immigrated from Germany to the US with two of his older brothers, leaving two other brothers in Germany. Though my grandfather did not serve in either the Germany or US military, during the WWII's Battle of the Bulge, my uncle fought on the Allies' side while his first cousin fought on the Axis side. WWII was a cruel, terrible war that affected my family in a unique way.

[urubu]

The Italian campaign is one not well covered, and I enjoyed how you presented those battles and movements. I'm grateful for your grandfather and all those who fought for liberty in WWII. May we learn from the past and never allow such tragedies to happen again.

[QemeH]

I don't know if I should talk about where my grandfather fought in the war in the comments... because I am german and let's just say there is a good chance my grandfather directed attilery fire onto your grandfather... O_O

He didn't talk about the war much and when he did he loved to tell us the story of how the war _ended_ for him and how he (after technically deserting during the collaps) was lucky to be captured by the canadians because they treated their prisoners well. He talked on and on about exchanging chocolate from the red cross packages for cigaretts or similar stories, but in the end I never had the courage to ask him what he REALLY did during the war. All I know is that he was a forward observer for an artillery unit because of his training as a (civil) land surveyour before the war and that his job was, in his words, to "triangulate the flash in the dark faster than the time it took until the second flash" (i.e. walking fire onto enemy artillery positions before they could fire again).


I'm absolutely sure he wasn't a fanatical Nazi and I'm pretty sure he wouldn't have taken up arms if they didn't threaten his parents - but I don't know what he knew, what he did and who he did it to. Sometimes I regret not asking him when he was still alive, but other times I'm glad I can live in this ignorance and just keep this whimsical story of the end as his part of the war... It's a difficult thing to grapple with as a german who did not see the war for himself.

[For those who are interested in the "whimsical" story of the end - here it is:

They were holed up in the bell tower of a tiny town's church to have a better vantage point over the land in front of them. The last days had been constant fighting, but today it was relatively quiet. The front lines, according to their command in artillery distance in front of them, had suspiciously not fired a single shot. Then, when night fell and it got so dark that you could count every star, they sudenly observed a vehicle with full headlights on just *booking* it across the plane. Disregarding roads, hills and divets as well as hedges and fences some kind of jeep just plowed through the countryside heading right for them. My grandfather immediately awoke his company and they debated a lot about who this "idiot" might be: Can't be a german, he would not be driving with lights towards a german position making air targetting way too easy. Can't be an american, he wouldn't suicide in a single jeep behind enemy lines. So, they thought, it must be one of those damn italians who apparently didn't north from south. But, after a few minutes, the jeep came crashing into the tiny town and to all of their surprise it was the well known aid-de-camp of their division commander. Alone. He stopped the jeep, yelled up the tower: "The war is over! Save yourselves! The yanks broke through?" So, naturally, the political officer (an SS man) shouted back down to him: "Where have they broken through? And kill your lights, man!" The man in the jeep just laughed and replied: "Everywhere, you idiot!" This did NOT sit well with the SS man, who was used to being feared even among higher ranks because of his outside-the-ranks power, so he immediately sprinted down the tower to talk to this impertinent solider. To the day he died, my grandfather did not know what these men talked about, but they argued for a short while, before the SS man entered the jeep on the passenger side and they both just f*cked off in the same mad dash across the hills.

Now, my grandfather and his buddies all looked at the sergeant of their troop and expected an answer, a direction, anything. But the sergeant just shrugged and said in a very solemn voice: "Well, boys, it has been an honour fighting with you. I let every one of you make their own judgment, but I just heared the messenger of my immediate superior tell me that the war was over and I'm going home." The troop didn't take a second to agree with him, so they all burried their weapons and german emblems, stole clothes from houses in the village that had been abandoned during the fighting and tried to escape by pretending to be italian civilians. This ruse worked quite well and they evaded multiple allied formations this way, but at some point a clever canadian commander noticed that their "italian" sounded a lot like the german language and so they were taken into custody and identified, which led to them being in a POW camp for a comparatively short time.]

[Rhartman]

My great grandfather served in the US Army Air Force as a mechanic in the Pacific Theater, specifically in China and Burma (Myanmar). My grandmother recently found a letter, some photos, and a book with US and Chinese marching songs that her father sent her when he was stationed in Shanghai. It was really special looking through them with her. His younger brother also served in France, but sadly didn't survive the war.

[GBOAC]

Cool video! My grandfather was an officer in the Dutch army when the Germans invaded. He was initially placed under house arrest but later deported to a POW camp in East-Prussia, where he spent several years. Sadly it permanently changed him into a closed, jaded personality. The problems from that trickled down to my father and his siblings and are still felt to this day. My grandmother’s family didn’t fare much better with many family members lost in the extermination camps. War really is the worst thing mankind has ever invented.

[untruelie]

Only one of my Great-Grandfathers was a soldier in WW2, he was a german soldier on the eastern front (the others had "jobs important for the war effort" - train service and building parts of submarines - and were thus exempt from military service). I don't know any details about his experience, but it clearly was a hard time, since he came back with what we today would call a severe case of PTSD. Before the war he had been a friendly person, but afterwards he had completely changed and often flew into rages. He had to deal with this on his own for the rest of his life, since there was no psychological support for ex-soldiers in East Germany (and neither the West for that matter). Also, before the war he had been more or less a communist (there is even a story in my family about smuggling illegal leaflets in a stroller), but after he came back from the war, he didn't want to have anything to do with communism anymore, because he had seen how bad the living conditions for the people in the Soviet Union were (that was what he said). I think he later joined the socialist unity party of the GDR nonetheless, but I guess it was more for fitting into the state and not because of ideological conviction.

It's quite difficult for me to deal with his story. I would like to know more about him, but at the same time I can't overlook his part in a criminal military/regime. I don't know what bad things he might have done on the eastern front, or what he was involved in, but at the same time he was a human person who got dragged into something that was largely beyond his control. I think his story is a good illustration of german history in the 20th century in general. He was, as I said, a communist, but once (I think in 1932) he voted for the Nazis - because he saw himself "as a worker, but first and foremost as a German", as my grandfather, his son, explained to me. I guess he later deeply regretted his choice. He didn't live to see the reunification of Germany, but he still lived through some cataclysmic changes in (german) history. He was born under the rule of Emperor Wilhelm II., lived through the Weimar Republic and the Nazi period and died in a communist state. And his father, my great-great-grandfather, lost his small store and all his savings during the 1923 hyperinflation.

Also, a cousin of my great grandmother on the other side of my family died in Stalingrad. As far as I know, his last letter to his parents involved the sentence "We will not get out of here anymore." The same great-grandmother had already lost her father during WW1. In fact, both my paternal grandmother's grandfathers died in WW1, one in 1914 and one in 1918.

[sharplisa]

My maternal Grandfather was a Lancaster Bomber pilot. He served in the RCAF 419th "Moose Squadron. Stationed at Middleton St. George, UK. He flew his Lancaster back to Canada in May 1945. My dad's uncle Clarence "Sonny" Sharp was killed at Dieppe, August 19, 1942. His rank was Sapper with the Royal Canadian Engineers. They would have been the first onto the beach. I have several more cousins that served in the Navy, Air Force and Army but too much to include here.I'm so very lucky my family shared all the stories over the years, including WW1 family connections. I am proud to have visited many of their graves overseas. Especially Sonny's resting place at Dieppe and My Uncle Thomas' grave near Vimy Ridge, where he was killed during WW1., coming off the ridge a few days after the battle was won. Thank you for making this video Matt. It's so important this is remembered and the stories passed on.

[cristiancarnevale]

My Great Grandfather was an Italian soilder, he fought in Albania until the end of the war, after the armistice of the 7th of september he was captured by german soilders and he finished in a prinson camp, after the end of the war he managed to return back in Italy.

[mdeell]

I've been a member of the West Nova Scotia Regiment for going on 23 years! Great job on the video!