Howe awarded with medal
SASKATOON — Somewhere in France, as D-Day waned and Canadian troops laboured to push the Germans back, Walter Howe abandoned half his hearing.
The 93-year-old Canadian veteran is deaf in his left ear, the damaged inflicted by those big, concussive guns that boomed away as he drove in front of them to deliver ammunition.
“Those big guns would never stop firing,” Howe, a driver with the Canadian Third Division, mused Friday.
On the coffee table in Howe’s Delisle living room is perched a box, and in that box is a brand-new medal, and with that medal is a letter from the government of France, congratulating him on being appointed a Knight of the National Order of the Legion of Honour — “the highest of our national honours,” the note says.
Howe, whose nephew is hockey great Gordie Howe, met and married a Dutch girl after helping to liberate Holland. He returned to Saskatchewan and took up farming, raised five children, who provided 13 grandchildren and 22 great grandchildren.
Howe tried to join the army in 1941, inspired by brother George who was already over there, but got turned down because of his eyesight. He’s a stubborn fellow, though; Howe memorized the chart, tried again, got in.
By the fall of 1942, he was in England, and after D-Day in June of 1944, he found himself in the thick of the fight — driving a three-ton truck loaded with, as he puts it, “food, ammunition, infantry.’’
“I forget whether I had ammunition or infantry (after landing at Juno Beach within a day or two of D-Day), but I drove my truck off in four feet of water onto the beach,” Howe said. “And it wasn’t too long after that I lost my hearing.
“I had a spare driver, and he was useless. He went berserk. Oh, he just went berserk. He wanted to run. But where are you going to run to? Back into the sea?”
So Howe soldiered on, literally, moving with the troops through France, Belgium, Holland, Germany.
After Canadian troops liberated Holland, he lingered a bit, waiting for orders to move up. He went to a house for coffee one day, daughter Aaltje walked in from errands, and they fell in love — handsome liberator meets pretty teen, both having already survived a world of trauma.
“I had an uncle killed — they killed him in a concentration camp,” recounts Aaltje, now known to all as Ellie. “My best friend’s mother died; she had nothing to eat but tulip bulbs. Yeah, I felt it. My brother was in Poland for a little while. He refused to work for the Germans, and he got beat every day. When he got home, mom had to burn all his clothes, they were so thick with lice.”
The war ended, and Walter married Ellie before heading back to Canada. She followed a year later — baby in tow, speaking nary a word of English, during a problem-plagued journey that seemed like it would never end.
“The only thing we knew how to say,” she says now, “was ‘I love you.’ ”
Both settled in. Ellie cried sometimes, but within six months or so she’d picked up enough English to feel comfortable. Life in Canada got easier.
Walter and Ellie will celebrate their 69th wedding anniversary near the end of this month. Both look proudly at the new medal that’s just arrived, but Walter’s not one to make a fuss.
“I landed on the beach, with thousands more. They all should have it,” says Howe, who had never talked much about his wartime experiences until his greatgrandchildren started grilling him.
Daughter Rita Pfoh is the one who got things going with the Legion of Honour. She filled out an application she’d learned about at a January Legion meeting, and in July learned that he’d been accepted. It was then that she told other family members, but they kept it secret from Walter for a while longer.
hey were hoping to present it to him on Remembrance Day, but it didn’t arrive in time.
But it’s there now, with a letter noting he can “proudly wear this insignia, which attests to your courage and your devotion to the ideals of liberty and peace.”
“He plays (his war experience) down terribly,” says Rita, who has learned much about what her father went through by listening to him answer questions posed by her curious grandchildren. “I saw Saving Private Ryan, the movie, and I said ‘please, God, don’t let dad see this.’ Dad did see it. I said ‘OK, dad, what did you think of it?’ He said ‘it’s one of the first movies I’ve seen that was even close to being real.’ I said ‘close?’ He said ‘it was worse than that.’ ”
Even now, Howe prefers not to dwell on what happened during those longgone days of 1944 and 1945.
“You don’t want to be reminded,” he said. “But a pal you were with there, if you meet him, you’ll talk a long time.”