CALGARIANS CLOSELY CONNECTED TO VIMY RIDGE
He was a newcomer to Canada who knew only a few words of English. Yet when the opportunity to serve his adopted country came, Masuro Tamashiro didn’t hesitate.
Not that the powers-that-be made it easy for the 34-year-old Japanese immigrant. When he tried to enlist, the Vancouver area labourer was told that the British Columbia government was accepting only Caucasian Canadians.
“These were men who said, ‘This is our country, too. We want to fight with you,’” says Tim Tamashiro of his grandfather Masuro and 221 other JapaneseCanadians on the West Coast who volunteered for the First World War. “But the door was closed to them.”
They found an open door on the other side of the Rockies. Masuro and his fellow wouldbe soldiers travelled to Alberta and enlisted, before going on to participate in several key battles, including Vimy Ridge.
Tamashiro is a local musician who is also famed across the country as host of the jazz show Tonic on CBC Radio 2. Not many, though, are aware of his personal connection to Canada’s instrumental role in the First World War.
On April 9, commemorative events will be held at the National Vimy Memorial in France and at Ottawa’s National War Memorial, to mark the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge. One of the highlights of the events in France will be the unveiling of the new Vimy Visitor Education Centre, a project from Veterans Affairs in partnership with the Vimy Foundation. One supporter of the project is the Cal Wenzel Family Foundation, founded by the Calgary home builder.
Also among the many Calgarians involved in the marking of this 100th anniversary is photographer Dianne Bos. She spent two years travelling the battle sites in France and Belgium where Canadian soldiers fought, capturing images with her pinhole camera. Her show, The Sleeping Green. No Man’s Land 100 Years Later, opened in Paris last week, while some of her photographs are also included in the War Stories 2017 show at the Military Museums’ Founders Gallery, which opens April 9.
“We wanted to take a personal perspective, tell the stories through a first-person voice,” says Rory Cory, senior curator/director of collections at the Military Museums. “This is something for the community,” he says, noting many exhibit items are possessions of Calgarians who fought overseas from 1914 to 1918. For info, go to themilitarymuseums.ca.
Vimy Ridge was a horrific battle, wounding more than 10,500 Canadians and killing 3,600 from April 9 to 12, 1917. Yet it was, according to the official website of the Vimy Foundation, the one “that paved the way to an Allied victory, and solidified Canada as an independent nation.”
“It makes you puff your chest out a little,” says Tamashiro, who will represent his grandfather at the Ottawa event. “The moment that ridge was captured, Canada became a country.”
His family story, while unique in certain aspects, is one familiar to many in this part of the world. In what was then billed as “the war to end all wars,” more than 400,000 Canadians left the comforts of a peaceful nation to travel to a foreign land to fight.
In the spring of 1914, Albertans were first focused on local happenings rather than the start of a war an ocean away. Less than a month before the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the AustroHungarian empire, the Dingman No. 1 well at Turner Valley struck oil, a discovery that kick-started a short-lived economic boom in the city.
Yet it didn’t take long for patriotic fervour to win out. As Reported in the Herald, a book published by the Calgary Herald in 1982, detailed Calgarians joining in the nationwide euphoria on Aug. 4, 1914, when it was announced that Great Britain had declared war on Germany.
“Cheering crowds gathered outside The Herald to wait for bulletins and listen to a brass band playing patriotic tunes,” went one newspaper dispatch. “Newsboys rushed madly to all quarters of the city, flooding the streets with the pink sheets and boarding street cars where the papers were eagerly snapped up.”
By war’s end, more than 40,000 Calgarians would fight, with 1,300 never making it back.
Tamashiro’s grandfather had a front-row seat to such catastrophic loss. By war’s end, 54 of the 222 Japanese-Canadians who enlisted had died; 92, including Masuro, came back injured.
Despite such sacrifice, some of those returning fighters were among the 22,000 JapaneseCanadians later forced into internment camps during the Second World War.
Just as his journey to Alberta allowed him to fight decades earlier, though, Masuro’s decision to settle there after military service also freed him. “They were vegetable farmers in Bashaw,” says Tamashiro of his grandfather’s peaceful postwar life in the central Alberta town with wife Kami and their 11 kids. He died in 1973 at the age of 91.
“He never really talked about it,” he says of the man from the Japanese prefecture of Okinawa who chose to fight for Canada a century ago. “But we knew he was proud of his service to this country. I’m incredibly proud.”