Cheslatta man part of D-Day landings
Abel Peters spoke openly about his experiences
Seventy-five years ago today, Abel Peters was jammed shoulder to shoulder with other Canadian soldiers in a landing craft crashing through the waves of the English Channel.
His rifle was clutched in his hand as he sprang into the cold water. The tide was low and the bullets were hot and thick as he clambered and stumbled through the sharp wire, the invisible hail of machine guns, the blasts of shells, and the terror of his friends’ bodies butchered where they stood by the Nazi onslaught from the hills ahead.
Peters had landed on Juno Beach in one of the deadliest days of human history – D-Day, 1944. The allied forces, including those of Canada, picked that moment to break through the coastal defences of Germany. The Allied death toll altogether was close to 4,500 dead and double that wounded. Peters was not one of those casualties.
This rifleman from Cheslatta territory in the B.C. bush, born on Sept. 16, 1922 at Cheslatta Lake, had a Nazi bullet with his name on it, but that would come later. So would a great betrayal by the very nation for whom he faced imminent death. But first he had to plod through hell with his Allied brothers on that catastrophic day. He originally enlisted in the army in 1943 in the 102nd Northern British Columbians which became part of the Winnipeg Rifles.
“We jumped into the water and had to keep my rifle way up over my head,” said Peters said of his experience, before his death in 2012.
“Oh, boy I was scared and everything so confusing.
“So many boys never made it to the beach.” The wholesale objective was to link at least five of the key Nazi strongholds on the first day. The only one to achieve breakthrough on time was Juno Beach, under the pressure of Peters and the Canadians.
On this, the 75th anniversary of that first fateful day – the beginning of the end of the Nazi regime – the Cheslatta Carrier Nation is on guard for Peters, one of their own, and one of Canada’s heroes of the Second World War.
“He said it was chaos for a couple of days,” said Mike Robertson, the senior policy advisor for the Cheslatta Carrier Nation and a lifelong Peters friend. Unlike many traumatized veterans of war who stoically buried the memories of war, Peters felt it important to tell the stories and express the feelings of that ghastly month, and its aftermath.
On July 8, 1944, after 28 days on the battlefield, Private Peters was shot by a German sniper at the Cannes Airfield. He received extensive head and arm injuries from multiple gunshot wounds, but he survived the attack.
His left arm ended up being one inch shorter than his right arm because of his injuries and a metal plate was installed in his head “which was pretty risky business in 1944,” Robertson said.
After months of rehabilitation and recovery, Peters was well enough to reenter Canadian life. His first job out of hospital was at a sawmill in Quesnel, but even there the war managed to wound him again. The head injuries caused him to experience occasional blackouts, and when one occurred on the job, he fell into a saw and severely injured his hand.
This required more rehabilitation, but again he was undaunted.
“He was a wounded soldier so that entitled him to a small pension,” Robertson explained. He used his pension to buy a little sawmill and he set it up at the original Cheslatta village. He ran it. That sawmill, the Coombs Brothers bought that, and it is still there in Grassy Plains; they moved it out when they flooded it.”
That is, they moved the mill away from the flood waters as the Crown governments of the day built the Kenney Dam to generate electricity for Alcan’s smelter in Kitimat. That was in the early 1950s and caused masses of water to swell the size of Ootsa Lake and erase much of the Cheslatta people’s primary territory.
Peters, being bilingual in English and Dakelh as well as a voracious reader and map enthusiast, acted as a translator and negotiator during that event, not that the Crown engaged in true negotiations. Decades later official apologies and other restitution had to be made for the forced clearance of and dirty dealings against the Cheslatta community, and the drastic alterations to their traditional landscape.
“He was very, very, very angry,” said Robertson. “But there was no prouder veteran.”
Peters was the grandson of famed Aboriginal leader Chief Louie, one of 10 children born to Thomas Peter and Rose Louie. He had a brother who also enlisted in the Canadian Armed Forces but it is unclear, said Robertson, if he went overseas during the Second World War.
Peters also became chief of the Cheslatta, as well as an elected councillor.
He married May Jack and together they raised 12 children.
Robertson said Peters appeared over the years in many news stories and documentaries including The Nature of Things, CBC Journal, The Fifth Estate, the CBC series A People’s History of Canada, Eighth Fire, and independent documentaries Cost Of Too Much Power, No Surrender, and Finding Our Way.
“A reporter once asked Abel, ‘After all the tragedy and pain that Alcan inflicted on your land and people... you must really hate Alcan.’ Abel said, ‘No, I don’t hate Alcan, but that doesn’t mean that I like them,’” Robertson said.
Abel Thomas Peters passed away peacefully on Aug. 15, 2012, just short of his 90th birthday.