true story: tom church and the liberation of holland

NOTE: THIS STORY IS BASED ON TRUE ORAL ACCOUNTS OF WORKING CLASS LIFE as told to Fisher Lavell
 
I try to envision him there in a Dutch field hospital in 1944, not the grizzled old man, Tom, sitting across the table from me, whose reminiscence is spare and plain. But Tommy, a boy of twenty-one, far from home; his strong, young leg blown away and what is left of his knee, shredded and bloody. The mattress is dank-smelling and dull, crusted here and there with clots of dried liquid—he does not want to know what. Surrounding him is a decimation of strapping, youthful bodies, a din of moans and prayers, the next shipment of life-saving drugs, uncertain.
 
Later, upright, the awkward man-hewn leg strapped to his hip, and newly learned to walk again, he had bought the pair of wooden shoes, a treasured gift for his baby sister, Violet, my mother. Hand-carved by a young Dutch woman named Greta—the meticulously painted blue windmills, the lone tree billowing beneath it. Majestic, golden, unbowed.
 
Greta had lost everything; her mother to starvation fever, young husband shot dead in the countryside stealing apples to feed their three-year old daughter, Yrena, who sickened that March anyway. And Greta had recovered her dead father’s carving trade, enough at least to fashion the wooden cross, inscribed Yrena 1942-1944, above cherubic hands clasped in prayer.
 
Tommy could see the depth of sorrow in the young woman’s eyes, could feel the gratitude from her heart to his when he handed over the last seven guilders he had to his name, then cradled the precious shoes, so marvelously light and strong and strange, to his heart.
 
They were stolen from his gear as he slept, fitful and fevered, on the rough crossing back to England.
 
My uncle Tom, the old man in his plaid cotton shirt and time-worn suspenders, is unperturbed by this. But I, listening to his story, am miffed. “Stealing from a wounded soldier?” I say, eyebrows vexed. “What kind of person would do such a thing!”
 
“Musta ben another boy,” he explains, graciously. “Whoever took ‘em. Musta ben a soldier too, prob’ly hurt and homesick and desperate to bring back something good. Something good outta all the bad. So I ain’t sore about it, not now anyways. I cried like a kid at the time!”
 
From my view looking back, he was a kid at the time.
 
I try to think of him before that, landing on the shores of Normandy on June the ninth, three days behind the D-day troops. Neck-deep in cold salt water, his two strong legs thrashing, finally able to right his balance under the eighty-pound pack slung onto him. Tommy. Dirty blonde hair all crazy curls, eyes like Manitoba sky on a summer’s day—blue, calm, promising.
 
Or back before that even, at the staging area on the Salisbury Plain. “We knew something was coming,” he says. “Turned out to be D-day, though we didn’t know it yet. We didn’t know what, and we didn’t know when. Just knew it was something big, and it was coming.”

THE SALISBURY PLAIN

He says that when he first ran away from home at seventeen so he could lie about his age and get into the army, he was just in it for the three square meals a day. They had come from such poverty and hard times that the idea of becoming a soldier, getting fed well, wearing the uniform, and having a new pair of boots, sounded like a splendid deal. He’d sign up, he thought, the war would be over by Christmas like everyone was saying, and then he’d just come home again, new boots and all. Girls in town who wouldn’t give a Church boy the time of day were google-eyed over every man in uniform.
 
But by the time he had gone through basic training with the Princess Pats, more training in Ontario, and then shipped out to England from Truro, Nova Scotia, it had finally sunk into him that he was going into battle. And it had dawned on him, and everybody else, that people were going to die.
 
So when his friend Chris from back home in the Swan Valley, came to see him and said he should transfer over to his outfit so they could be together, Tommy turned him down.
 
Because he thought, if he was going to have to see people die, or if they were going to see him die, he didn’t want them to be people he knew and cared about. He didn’t want to have to see his friends die. Didn’t want to have to see people he knew get shot or blown up, and he didn’t want them to see him that way either. He thought, if that was what was coming, and he knew by then that it was, then he’d just rather be with strangers. That wouldn’t be as awful, to have to see a stranger die.
 
So he told Chris no, he would just stay put.
 
There were 50,000 men by then, amassing on the Salisbury Plain, ready, it was May, 1944, and minds and courage were frayed. And then, Chris came to see him again, scared shitless, and with this plan about a blighty. A blighty was a self-inflicted wound, not something serious, just something you could do to yourself so you’d be no good to go into battle. Shoot yourself in the foot, literally. Something like that. That way, you’d get out of it, you’d get to go home and no one would be the wiser.
 
But Tommy told him no. He said, “Look Chris, I’m scared, everyone’s scared, but I mean, this is what we came here for.” By then they had started to hear about the horrors the Germans were doing to the French people and the Dutch and others. And he said, “Chris, this is what has to be done.”
 
Tommy felt bad for Chris, he didn’t blame him for being terrified, everybody was, and he was scared as hell by then himself. But he just didn’t believe it would be right. Chris really pressed him too, and they had a big argument. “You think yur better than me!” Chris screeched, and he went away mad.
 
A few days later, Tom got news that Chris had been hurt while cleaning his gun and was being sent down to London before being shipped back home, He got an Honourable Discharge and he never went across.
 
Tommy didn’t judge him, but he just wouldn’t do what Chris had done. And the rest is history, as they say.
 
Within days, there was an immense movement, all the D-day troops went over, and then, on the third day after D-day, Tommy’s squadron was called up and over the Channel they went, landing at Juno Beach on the French shore. There were thousands upon thousands of Allied troops, they had won the day and driven the Germans back, and thousands were heading east towards Berlin. Tommy’s outfit would go north on foot, up the coast of Normandy, to the liberation of Holland.
 
I try to think of him, just a boy, marching up dusty roads, crossing fields and small streams, walking, striding, two solid legs carrying him onwards, curly blonde hair tousled by breezes, eyes blue and clear, heart strong.

DUTCH CATTLE GRAZING (NETHERLANDS)

The Dutch people were a beautiful people before the war, he says. They kept dairy cattle and were famous for their milk and cheese and beautiful, healthy children. But those people, when the Canadians came, were in a terrible state. For three years, they had been occupied, the Germans had taken over their businesses and farms and food, and upon their retreat, whatever crops they hadn't eaten, they burned.
 
The Dutch people had been starving, literally starving, for years.  “And if you’ve seen that old black-and-white footage of what the Jewish people looked like when they were found, the few who lived through the concentration camps, just human skeletons with sunken eyes and swollen bellies, well, that’s what the Dutch people looked like when we found them.”
 
Arriving in the Dutch towns and villages, marching or driving, people were just crazy about them, cheering and making parades, patting their backs or arms as they went by. “They just loved us Canadian boys,” my uncle says. “And they were so grateful, it was kind of overwhelming. Here we were, just a bunch of poor prairie boys, not treated particularly well in our own country, welcomed and loved and treated like kings by these poor Dutch people. It was an amazing thing.”
 
But then, of course, the Canadian soldiers had to be billeted there too. They had marched hundreds of miles with only army rations, often running out before reinforcements could get to them, canned Spam and that sort of thing. So then, as they marched through Holland, at each town, a few of them would be billeted at homes and farm houses here and there. And those people, who had been starving, would feed them. The army made arrangements to pay them and kicked in some food too, and then the Dutch families would feed the Canadian soldiers.
 
He says he remembers sitting on benches at those long wooden tables in the farm kitchen, him and a few other fellows, eating. The man and wife would sit with them, and they’d have plates but not much food on them, just being polite, pretending to eat. And they’d load up the Canadian soldiers’ plates with steaming food, because that was their food that the army had paid for. And the children, little children of all ages, would be leaning up against a wall or peeking around a doorway, watching. “Watching us eat, with their hungry eyes,” my old uncle says.

“Well, I couldn’t do it,” he says. “Little children. Starving. And we were sitting at the table, eating.” So while he was eating, he would take things, potatoes, chunks of meat and cheese, an apple, and he would slip them in his pockets, so he could sneak them out and give them to the children later.
 
“Don’t get me wrong,” he says, “we needed that food. We were pretty close to starving ourselves. Not like the Dutch were, but we had been on the move for months, marching, running, hiding, digging in, and we had had to fight, shooting and being shot at, bombs flying, and it wasn’t over yet. And all that time, we were carrying heavy gear, eighty pounds or more. It was hard physical work and we had all had to tighten our belts, literally, more than one notch. But how can a man sit and eat, with children going hungry?”
 
So he would go out to the yard after supper, lean up against a shed, and light a smoke. And the little kids would come out, shy, with their big eyes. And he’d wave them over, and give them his supper, as much of it as he could spare. And he was not the only Canadian boy who did that either, he’d see other guys from his outfit, over by the barn or leaned up against a tree, giving away their supper to the little Dutch kids.
 
Tommy was wounded three different times in the liberation of Holland. The first time was on the hike up the Normandy coast, a mine had exploded nearby and he took some shrapnel in the leg. One big rusty shard in the right calf and a bunch of nicks, cuts, and burns on the outside of the leg and thigh. Him and his sergeant dug out as much shrapnel as they could, and then they had a couple fellows hold him down while they pulled out that big shard.
 
“Jesus! I screamed and wailed and begged them to stop,” he admits. “I thought it was the worst pain possible at the time. . . Little did I know.” 
 
They put on sulpha powder so it wouldn’t go to gangrene and bandaged it up pretty good, and his Sarg told him he could wait on the side of the road for a field ambulance if he wanted. But they were half ways up the coast and Tommy didn’t want to leave the guys in the lurch. He said he’d be fine, he would just be gimpy for a day or two. He walked another thirty miles before the pain abated.
 
“It was just the first couple days it almost killed me,” he says. “But I had a chunk of wood I kept tucked back between my teeth, and I could chew down on that when it got real bad, and keep on going till the next time we took a break.”

WAR MEMORIAL MONUMENT, CHARLOTTETOWN, PEI

​The second time he got hit was after they’d already reached the Netherlands.
 
“We were up north of Rotterdam, we’d been picked up by the rest of the Second Canadian Corps, a good bunch of fellows, we’d been joking and talking. Maybe I was too comfortable, distracted and had let my guard down, but anyways, it was early evening, we were posted around the central area and I figured I’d roll a smoke. I guess it was a grenade, but all I knew was there was a whiz and a thunk, “Jesus! Jesus!” some guy was yelling, and the next time I opened my eyes, I was laying in a hospital tent somewheres, cold as hell, head all bandaged up, with a headache that would kill a moose.”
 
He was there for about two weeks and the pain was starting to let off a bit. He wasn’t seeing double anymore and he’d gotten over that thing where he wanted to throw up every time he tried to walk. They said he got a pretty nasty hit, there was still shrapnel in his skull the doc said was too deep embedded, it would be more dangerous to try to get it out. So they just left it in there. He told them he’d be fine, he just wanted to get back to his outfit.
 
Well, the commander came in and he said, “Son, you done your duty. You don’t need to go back no more. As far as the Canadian army is concerned, you’ve earned your Honourable Discharge. You can go home. Just wait here till the next supply run is heading south and jump on. You could be there with your family in a month.”
 
Well, he told the C.O. he didn’t want to do that because all them guys in his outfit were still out there. Still getting shot at and dodging bombs, still sleeping in the cold. How could he go home and leave them here? He told the man no, he better get back to them damn fools in his outfit, or they might get themselves killed without him.
 
“Well alright,” the C.O. said. “If you’re that determined, we won’t stop you.”
 
So he hitched a ride with the next supply shipment going north instead. It took him days but he finally caught up with the Second Canadian Corps just north of the Hague, and him and the guys traveled with them a few more weeks.
 
“That last time,” he says, “we were on reconnaissance, and clearing in the area north of the Maas River. They’d been rounding up any Germans still around and we were checking for stragglers. It was October, I remember, just a miserable cold, wet drizzle in the air, and we were out in the woods on this hillside, and there was a deserted cottage and some out buildings. So a bunch of our guys went to check the out buildings and me and this other young fella, his name was Les Dawson and he wasn’t much older than me, a good guy all round, well, me and Les went to check inside the cottage.” 

GERMAN HOWITZER, 88

​“And pretty much as soon as we got in there, we could hear that German Howitzer begin to fire. That’s their big 88’s, the big guns. When you hear that thing, you know you only have seconds before it hits. But we didn’t really know exactly where it was going to land, outside where the other guys were, or on the cottage, or what. But, so me and Les heard the report and we both threw ourselves down on the floor. And as I dove down, the place had been all trashed and there was this long wooden table laying on its side and I threw myself that way and kind of got behind it. Only thing was, my leg sticking out.” 
 
“And it was a direct hit, I guess, on the cottage. Total direct hit. I don’t remember anything very well after that, but there was the damage of the explosion, the roof smashed right in, half the floor gone, and then  shrapnel everywhere. I was knocked senseless, but apart from that, I wasn’t bad. Because I’d been mostly behind that big table by the wall. Except my leg that was sticking out, which was bad.”
 
“But Les, my buddy there, well, he wasn’t behind nothing, there was jist him and the 88. He must have been dead right there on the spot, the moment that thing hit.”
 
“I looked down and I seen my leg, or where my leg used to be, I guess. And it meant nothing to me,” he says. “I actually didn’t feel a damn thing at that time, that’s how shock works. And then I was out again. I woke up in a French field hospital, that’s where they did the operation, and that is where the pain began. Jesus, I thought I would die just from the pain alone. . . But I still to this day can feel that damn leg at times, phantom leg as they call it. Sometimes the little toe still itches me mercilessly.”
 
“Oh,” I say. “So that is a real thing.”
 
“Yes,” Old Tommy says. “So that was it. That was it for me and the war, the liberation of Holland, and everything. I didn’t make it home for many months after that, because of all the surgeries I still needed. But I did eventually make it.”
 
I don’t really know what a person should say at this point. But I want to say something. “You lost a lot, my dear uncle,” I observe. “What a journey, what – what a gift you gave. What a sacrifice.”
 
“Yes,” the old man says quietly, looking away towards the small window. “Too much really. More than a man should be asked to give.”
 
I reflect upon the story my uncle has told, sitting amicably in his small dining room, the light of one small window going softly to gray. He refused to go into battle with boys he knew, because he didn’t want to see them die, choosing instead to go with strangers. Then wound up caring so much for those strangers, now friends, that he clawed his way back to them, not once, but twice, when he was wounded and could have gone home.
 
He lost his leg and more than that, for the love of strangers who had become brothers. A movie trope based on truth.
 
Beyond the window is a blood-red hummingbird feeder and a small yard; tame roses, big garden, and a wooden flag post, painted white, flying the Maple Leaf.
 
“But after all that happened over there, all that was lost, the leg, everything, I’m still glad we went.”
 
Our hands rest casually on the plastic cover of his dining room table, and he reaches out and slaps the back of my hand affectionately, blue eyes twinkling clear as ever. I grin quietly back, turning my hand so I can fondly take hold of his old paw.
 
“I wish I hadn’t lost my damn leg!” he concedes. “I’d give a lot for that. I’d give almost everything, I guess. But those were beautiful people, the Dutch people, and it was a crime beyond imagining what was done to them. It was not right. And what we done there, the Canadian boys, liberating those people and driving the Germans out, well that was a thing worth doing.”  

CANADIAN AND DUTCH FLAGS AT TYNE COT WAR CEMETERY, BELGIUM