‘Too dearly loved to be forgotten’
Earl Piche was only 23 when he was killed in action. His grave in the Netherlands is one of several thousand cared for by Dutch volunteers
“We had a chap killed this morning and just across the road from where I am sitting they are burying him now. The padre just finished saying the sermon; God, it’s so sad. … They have found a nice spot for him though and have a white cross with his rank, name and no. on it and R.I.P. for Rest In Peace. They give the fellows as nice a funeral as possible but it will be so wonderful to be home again and to get away from the feeling that around each corner, someone wants to take a shot at you, and to get away from all this killing and be amongst friends again, if only it would hurry up.”
This excerpt is from Pte. Earl James Piche’s last letter home to his wife, Elizabeth. Two days later, on April 11, 1945, while riding atop a tank as part of an assault on the town of Breddenburg, in northwest Germany, he was fatally shot in the neck by a sniper. He was 23.
Four weeks later, Germany surrendered, ending the Second World War in Europe.
Initially buried at Börger, in Germany, Piche was re-interred a year later at the Holten Canadian War Cemetery in the Netherlands, in Plot 9, Row C, Grave 12. He is one of almost 5,000 Canadian soldiers who lie buried in one of the Netherlands’ three Canadian war cemeteries — Groesbeek and Bergen-Op-Zoom are the others. An additional 1,000 Canadians lie buried in other cemeteries throughout the country, while a further 99 have no known grave.
The inscription on his headstone reads “Too dearly loved to be forgotten,” a sentiment surely applicable to all our war dead, but one that, as time and distance conspire to further remove us from the wars that our ancestors fought, seems increasingly difficult to keep.
But thanks to a small group of Dutch volunteers, and with help from some interested Canadians, the faces and stories of many of the thousands of Canadians who died during the nine-month campaign to free the Netherlands from German occupation are being saved and told, so that future generations will, hopefully, not forget.
The umbrella group is called Canadian War Graves.NL, which brings together efforts by groups at each of the three cemeteries to put photographs and stories to the names on the headstones.
“We want to pay respect to the young men who sacrificed their lives for our freedom,” said Alice van Bekkum, a Dutch woman and member of the Royal Canadian Legion Branch 5: Liberation of the Netherlands, in an email.
Van Bekkum’s interest in the stories of her country’s fallen liberators grew from a solitary soldier’s grave she discovered 15 years ago in the small cemetery in Gorinchem, where her parents are buried. The headstone of H.C. Magnusson, the lone soldier buried there, offered little information about him beyond his rank of sapper, the date of his death — Nov. 14, 1944 — and that he was a member of the Royal Canadian Engineers. Not even his given name — Harold — was included.
“It looked lonely,” van Bekkum recalled in an interview with the Fredericton Daily Gleaner. “I wanted to know what led him to be buried here, alone.”
Van Bekkum, who hosted veterans and the families visiting the graves of the war dead in Groesbeek, only 10 kilometres from her home in Milsbeek, began to research Magnusson, and was fascinated to learn that he actually died about seven weeks before his listed date of death, during the battle of Arnhem in Operation Market Garden. As British and Canadian soldiers attempted to relieve Allied paratroopers dropped behind German lines, the storm boat carrying Magnusson suffered a direct hit. His body floated about 80 kilometres downstream and into the Lek River, where it was discovered, along with the body of a Polish paratrooper, by two 11-year-old boys and handed over to German authorities.
Van Bekkum discovered, too, some details of Magnusson’s life: his premature birth, for example, with his twin sister, Hilda, in Saint John, N.B., in 1922 (Harold signed his letters to Hilda, “Your better half”). Veteran Kenneth Briggs from Saint John, who stayed at van Bekkum’s, tracked down relatives of his, who were surprised to learn he was never a prisoner of war, as they had believed. She got a piper and trumpeter, and arranged a ceremony at his grave, which was attended by two of Hilda’s daughters.
“It makes me very happy I could tell his family he did not die as a prisoner of war like they always thought,” van Bekkum said.
Her curiosity grew and she began to research the six other members of Magnusson’s 23rd Field Company, who were killed that same night. From there, she founded, together with two members of RCL, the Faces to Graves Foundation, aiming to tell the stories of all of Canada’s war dead at Groesbeek Canadian War Cemetery.
“It is important to continue the tribute to the fallen soldiers; now their comrades cannot do that anymore.”
A FACE FOR EVERY NAME
Volunteers at Holten cemetery had already begun a similar project years before, called A Face for Every Name. So far, says volunteer Edwin van der Wolf, about half of the 1,355 fallen Canadians there have at least had photographs found, and many have also had their life stories compiled. Visitors can see them on a touchscreen display in Holten’s visitors’ centre.
“I got involved because I lived for a while in the ’60s in the house of my grandfather in the town of Deventer,” he said in an email. “He often told us how the Canadian Army, in heavy fighting, liberated his quarter on April 10, 1945. I even have a photo of an English tank of the 7 Royal Tank Regiment, which co-operated with the Canadians, in front of his house just after the liberation.”
Groesbeek has posted four life stories as an example on its website. According to van Bekkum, it’s the aim of these groups to collect all the stories and photos of Canadian soldiers buried in the Netherlands and to create a website where anyone can see them.
They’re aided by a few volunteers here in Canada. One, Ottawan Lorne Richardson, is a New Brunswick ex-pat who was struck by the story of Magnusson and offered van Bekkum assistance researching here in Canada as she delved into the other members of the company.
“Very often even the families don’t know all the stories of their loved ones, so this is important for that,” Richardson said.
“And for the Dutch, it was a lifeand-death situation. They had lived under Nazi occupation and it wasn’t pretty. They were starving to death. And the Canadians came in and gave them their freedom, and the Dutch cherish that. And I think they’re honouring their parents as well, seeing the joy that they had in being liberated.”
The Faces to Graves project is an ongoing process that may never be completed.
Reflecting on the enormity of the task and her drive to continue, Van Bekkum raises a topic recently spoken about by her church pastor. “He talked about faith and confidence. He said: ‘In this world, it is so important to have an ally to care for you.’ Immediately, I had to think about the allies who even fought for us. Isn’t that something to appreciate? We keep their memory alive by telling their stories. We want to build this virtual memorial with warmth and respect, like a candle that will continue to burn. Wouldn’t that be a nice sign: We can win wars with love.”
THE STORY OF EARL PICHE
Earl James Piche was born on Jan. 15, 1922, in Ottawa, the son of Ernest Joseph and Minerva Lena Jahn Piche. He had a brother, Gordon, and four sisters: Mona, Eileen, Grace and Muriel. He grew up in Britannia, attended Baptist church, and enjoyed dancing, reading and sports — hockey in particular. A handsome man with dark wavy hair; a riveter by trade.
He married Elizabeth “Betty” Hope Blyth, and the pair had a son, Earl Gerald, in 1942 in Toronto, where Piche was training with the infantry. After postings in Cornwall, Hamilton, Camp Borden and Debert, he shipped out to England on May 1, 1944, and nine months later went to Europe, where he fought in Belgium, Holland and Germany. He was awarded the 1939-45 Star, the France and Germany Star, the Defence Medal, the War Medal 1939-45 and the Canadian Volunteer Service Medal and Clasp.
Betty was 22 and working in a Britannia flower shop when a telegram boy arrived on a bike one day and asked for her. She knew right away that Earl was dead; the telegram envelope had three red stars, indicating the worst possible news.
She was too upset to open it at the store, so the shop owner, Mr. Warren, phoned her brother, Ross, who immediately came and took Betty to her parents’ home on Violet Street, where she and Earl Jr. lived. Ross opened and read the telegram to Betty, who was devastated.
Earl’s final letter to Betty arrived weeks after the telegram announcing his death. One of her family members intercepted it, and Betty only read it years later.
She eventually remarried, wedding Bill McRae, with whom she had five more children and a happy 60-year marriage. Her first-born, Earl Piche, took his stepfather’s name, and enjoyed a distinguished career writing for, among other newspapers, the Toronto Star, the Citizen and the Ottawa Sun. All he could recall of his birth father, he said only two years before his own death in 2011, was the smell of his aftershave when he leaned into Earl Jr.’s crib to kiss him.
“And I have this vague recollection of him tossing me up and down in the air.”
Caitie McRae, Earl McRae’s daughter, was contacted by Richardson in 2014 and asked if she could provide some information on her grandfather for the project and Holten’s visitors’ centre.
“I did it to carry on Earl’s legacy,” she says. “And I knew how much it would have meant to my dad. My dad received all these awards and accolades throughout his career, but the one that meant to most to him that he spoke of constantly was the Friendship Award, from the Royal Canadian Legion. It’s their highest civilian honour, that they give to someone who does quite a bit for the veterans.
“When my dad received that in 2002, I remember him tearing up, which I’d never seen him do before, and he hung it on his wall right next to his desk.
“He always considered Bill McRae his dad, and they were very, very close, but I think there was always this thing in the back of his head that he didn’t get to know his dad. What mannerisms came from him? Did he get his writing from Earl Piche? My dad was a hopeless romantic, which probably came from Earl Piche. That sort of thing. So there was always this idea of wanting to know more about Earl.”
Earl James Piche, in Holten Canadian War Cemetery, Plot 9, Row C, Grave 12.
Too dearly loved to be forgotten.