When Scotty boldly went
QUESTION Was James Doohan, who played Scotty in the original Star Trek series, a war hero? James montgomery Doohan saw action on D-Day as a lieutenant with the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division and was injured — with a fluke saving his life.
he was born on march 3, 1920, the youngest of four, to an Irish immigrant couple in Vancouver, British Columbia. they later moved to sarnia, ontario, and James attended a technical school where he excelled in mathematics and science.
In 1938, he enrolled in the royal Canadian army Cadet Corps, and when the war started, he joined the royal Canadian artillery and was commissioned as an officer, before being sent to england in 1940.
on D-Day, June 6, 1944, Doohan and his men were meant to land under cover of darkness on Juno Beach, but the sea was so rough, they were delayed and landed in daylight. the bad weather had also reduced the accuracy of the aerial attack on the coastal defences, and these were largely intact instead of being destroyed as had been planned.
Doohan led his men across an anti-tank minefield, shooting two german snipers in the process, and took up a defensive position for the night on higher ground.
at 11.30pm, he was crossing between command posts when a nervous Canadian sentry mistook him for the enemy in the darkness and fired six shots at him from his Bren gun. one shot shattered Doohan’s right middle finger, so he went to have it attended to at a medical post.
after treatment, he was about to leave when someone pointed out his leg was bleeding where four of the shots had hit him. the sixth shot had hit his chest and been stopped by a silver cigarette case his brother had given him.
his finger had to be amputated and, in his later career as an actor, he was careful to conceal the fact that one of his fingers was missing.
out of action for a while, he retrained as an air observation pilot for the Canadian artillery. as well as air-spotting duties, Doohan ferried high-ranking officers by plane. on one occasion he had to transport an extremely overweight officer. Doubtful that his single-engine auster plane could take off in the space available with the amount of weight on board, he had a fence taken down and the aircraft pushed back through the gap to give a longer run.
after the war, Doohan, who had a fine voice, hoped to train as a singer, but he couldn’t afford the lessons, so turned to acting instead. opera’s loss was star trek’s gain.
he could do a wide range of accents and tried out a number when auditioning for star trek, eventually settling on a scottish accent as being the most appropriate for a ship’s engineer.
Doohan died aged 85 on July 20, 2005, from pulmonary fibrosis believed to be the result of exposure to noxious substances during the war.
Denis Sharp, Hailsham, E. Sussex. QUESTION Who are the two witnesses in the Bible’s Book of Revelation? the Book of the revelation of saint John the Divine is the final book of the new testament, and it has fascinated and puzzled scholars for centuries.
With its cryptic, vivid imagery of disaster and suffering — the Battle of armageddon, the Four horsemen of the apocalypse and the Beast whose number is 666 — many have seen it as a description of the end of the world.
although most of the chapters form a chronological sequence of the prophetic events, revelation 11 is part of a section (chapters 10:1 to 14:22) that describes the great tribulation or suffering before the end of the world. In revelation 11, John sees two witnesses in sackcloth who have been granted authority to prophesy for 1,260 days (11:3).
they are given supernatural powers to consume their enemies by fire, shut the sky so no rain may fall during their time of prophesying, turn the waters into blood and strike the earth with every kind of plague (11:5-6).
at the end of the 1,260 days, ‘the Beast that rises from the bottomless pit’ will kill them and god will take them up to heaven. It is thought these two witnesses are the great prophets moses and elijah. moses demonstrated he ‘had the power to turn the waters into blood and to strike the earth with every kind of plague’ (exodus 7:14-21), while elijah in 2 Kings 1:10 demonstrated the power to rain down fire on his enemies. however, this view is not universally accepted.
Peter Collings, Royal Leamington Spa, Warks. QUESTION Why is KFC known as PFK in Quebec? the previous answer, explaining that KFC has been translated as PFK (Poulet Frit Kentucky) in French-speaking Quebec, said it is difficult for anglophones to grasp that the world speaks many different languages.
In fact, many different languages are not tolerated in Quebec.
When I was in Canada 15 years ago, there was a row in Quebec because native american shopkeepers protested they were being prevented from using window displays in their own languages.
‘We are protecting the minority language,’ came the official reply.
‘But we are the minority here,’ the native americans replied.
english is also under threat: Quebec’s language police deemed an english sign by tripadvisor on the window of the Burgundy Lion Pub to be illegal.
In France, for example, the Bretons in Brittany struggle to cling on to their ancient Celtic language. so the world does speak many languages, but there will be fewer of them if the French have their way! A. Griffiths, Stonehouse, Glos.