VICTORY, VICTORIA-STYLE, 75 YEARS LATER
In May 1945, Victoria residents celebrated Germany’s surrender in the Second World War with “exuberance and a feeling of deep thanksgiving.” It’s hard to imagine how they felt after six years of war and 10 years of the Great Depression.
Seventy-five years ago, Victoria exhaled. It wasn’t like Halifax, where VE-Day rioters damaged 564 businesses and looted 162,000 bottles of booze. If our city let ’er rip, it was in a Victorian kind of way, greeting the news of Germany’s May 1945 surrender with what the Daily Colonist described as “exuberance and a feeling of deep thanksgiving.”
War-weary people poured from their homes, packing Beacon Hill Park, hanging out of office windows and perching atop downtown buildings as hundreds of hornhonking, bunting-clad cars — including a roadster dragging a swastika flag from its back bumper — paraded below. Air raid sirens wailed. Ship and factory whistles around the Inner Harbour joined the chorus.
Of course they did. You think the last couple of months have dragged on? Imagine being one of the pre-boomers, enduring the kind of hardship few Canadians have known since: the decade-long Great Depression, followed by the Second World War.
That’s 10 years of go-hungry poverty, followed by six in which one million of Canada’s 11 million citizens pulled on a uniform and marched into the meatgrinder that would kill 42,000 of them. Want to talk physical-distancing? When all those sons and brothers went overseas, it would be years before their loved ones saw them again — or not.
Never mind toilet-paper panics. Wartime Canadians routinely put up with scarcities of all types, with some goods — sugar, coffee, tea, butter and meat — only available through a rationing system that didn’t disappear until 1947. Silk was for parachutes, not stockings. Gas shortages meant tally-ho carriages replaced Victoria’s sightseeing buses and businesses did deliveries by horse and buggy.
So, yes, while victory in Europe didn’t mark the end of the war — Japan wouldn’t surrender until August — it was the end of the main event, and Canadians were going to dance, or at least fall on their knees in relief.
While VE-Day falls on May 8, the date that documents were signed in Berlin, the German military actually surrendered at Allied headquarters in Reims, France, a day earlier. The time difference between Europe and B.C. allowed Victorians to celebrate on May 7.
The Daily Colonist gave us snapshots of the day. A huge neon letter V shone from the illuminated front of the legislature building. As Victorians took to the streets, the walking wounded at Mount Tolmie Military Hospital asked for passes to join in the fun. Thanksgiving services were held in all Greater Victoria schools: the singing of O God Our Help In Ages Past, followed by the Lord’s Prayer and the reading of Psalm 46. Liquor stores were closed, but people could shop for decorations: “A little girl handed a coin to a store clerk for a small flag with the remark ‘My daddy will be coming home soon.’ ”
One story crowed about Victoria’s war effort. Not only was there a disproportionately large military presence — the Canadian Scottish Regiment, the air base where Commonwealth crews trained at Patricia Bay, the greatly expanded Esquimalt naval base — but two shipyards launched frigates, corvettes and other vessels.
In a Yates Street plant, hundreds of civilians workers, most of them women, churned out parts for Catalina flying boats and B-29 Superfortress bombers. Volunteers salvaged rubber, metal and other goods, or sewed and knitted for the Red Cross. A Victoria-based provincial government workers’ tobacco fund paid to keep overseas servicemen smoking to their hearts’ (though not lungs’) content.
It wasn’t until page 11 that the Colonist made room for the day’s casualty report: Lance Cpl. Albert Clevette of Langford, badly wounded in both legs and his abdomen while fighting with the Canadian Scottish in Germany. Victoria’s Lt. Kenneth Wardroper, also of the Canadian Scottish, “dangerously ill” with shell fragments to the stomach. Alberni-born Lt. E.O. Copas, killed in Holland.
Real people, loved by other real people. Now multiply that by one million, or 11 million, and try to understand why the war was the most important event in the lives of those who went through it.
Even 50 years later, VE-Day resonated strongly. On May 8, 1995, nearly 1,000 veterans paraded down Government Street to the cenotaph. At that point, wartime memories were real for close to half the adult population. That’s why the TC ran an eight-page 50th-anniversary supplement that day. And that’s after the paper had already, on each of the 50 publication days leading up to May 8, profiled a Vancouver Islander who had lived through the war.
The profiles — brief anecdotes, really — were all written by reporter Patrick Murphy. He offered up poignant stuff, all these people passing on memories as vivid to them as the day they happened. Alex Effa could still hear the ticking of a boobytrapped bomb he disarmed in England. Poet Hanna Jazlowiecki (Black Hanna in the Polish resistance) remembered the hunger of the 63-day Warsaw uprising. Lois Stanley could still hear the knock at her Empress Avenue door, the arrival of the telegram everyone dreaded: Her airman husband was missing over Essen. “I was sure he would come back.” He didn’t.
Most of the people Murphy interviewed have since died. A few remain, though. One of them is Sidney’s Chic Goodman.
Asked about VE-Day this week, Goodman talked instead about something that happened a few days earlier as his South Saskatchewan Regiment fought its way into Germany. His Bren gun carrier hit a mine, killing the other three soldiers on board. Goodman flew high in the air, knocked unconscious but otherwise unharmed.
Imagine making it all the way to the end of the war, only to be killed. Goodman had already been wounded, in the Scheldt estuary, in October 1944. He had seen plenty of his friends fall around him. He spoke of a company commander, a Victoria man, ordering him to remain behind as that man dashed off to rescue a platoon, only to be killed. More of the brutality of war was thrust in Goodman’s face in April 1945 when he helped liberate a concentration camp.
So, ask him what he remembers of the end of the fighting, and he says this: “I went to sleep that night knowing I was going to wake up in the morning.” No shells were going to explode, no bullets would pierce the walls. It was a feeling he hadn’t had for ages. When peace arrived on VE-Day, Chic Goodman had just turned 19 years old.
Last year, Veterans Affairs estimated that of the one million Canadians who served in the Second World War, just 33,200 were still around, 7,500 of them in B.C.
VE-Day might just be a fading date in the history books to most, but for a few it’s still a reason to exhale.