I never quite trusted my father’s stories about World War II. My dad, known as Ron. Officially he was Clarence Roland, but very few men named Clarence ever call themselves that. 

My father always said he signed up the day war was declared. He was 22 and served overseas from the end of 1939 until 1944, when he was invalided home. Afterward, he served for more than a year back in Canada, and was discharged after the war ended in 1945. He was in uniform for a long time—73 months—but he never talked about it much, and some of the things he told me were a little over the top. 

There was the time he fought the heavyweight champion of the army in England and won. Problem was, they fought in a bar and my dad was sent to the brig. The brass had been going to make him a commando, send him to Scotland for training, but now they didn’t. Or sometimes they did, depending on what mood he was in when he told the story.

I was just a kid when he said this stuff, but something about it worried me, and I settled on believing only what my mother told me. Again, it wasn’t much, but I remember one thing clearly. My father would disappear into his basement workshop sometime around Christmas and we weren’t supposed to bother him. My mother said there had been a battle in an Italian town called Ortona. My dad had fought there one Christmas during the war, and it had been awful.

When I was older, I ended up feeling that my father probably suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and my recent reading convinced me that he did. I wrote a review not long ago about a new book called The Wounded Generation: Coming Home after World War II.[1] In its 496 pages, historian David Nasaw provides convincing evidence that a great many World War II vets suffered from undiagnosed PTSD.

England, 1942. My father is in the middle of the second row, the guy with a buddy’s hands on his shoulders

In another new book, Ghosts of Ortona, anthropologist Ian Cosh zeroes in on veterans of the Battle of Ortona.[2] It was fought by Canadian soldiers for 10 days over Christmas in 1943, including troops from my father’s regiment. 

In interviews they did with Cosh toward the end of their lives, some of the vets spun the same sort of stories my father had told: unreliable set pieces that often papered over worse memories, the men tryingto find ways to live with what they had seen and done during the war.

I think we spend the first part of our lives resenting our parents and the later part trying to understand them. 

I know a few people who had happy childhoods and maybe this isn’t true of them. But I keep trying to understand my father—for some reason, my father more than my mother—by reading thick books about the war, and trying to grapple with memories of his toxic pain. 

My father also keeps turning up in my books. It’s not something I plan, but he has a tendency to surface in my work, although sideways, and usually as a fictional character, so it’s both him and not him. Heavy on the not him. It’s another type of exploration, I suppose.

My most recent novel, Far Creek Road, is set in the Vancouver suburb where I grew up, and World War II veterans play a big part.[3] Its protagonist is a girl named Tink Parker, a nine-year-old living a 60s suburban life. But the Cold War is slowly building toward the Cuban Missile Crisis, and many of the suburb’s vets don’t handle trauma well. 

This includes Tink’s father, who served at Ortona—something that popped out when I was writing. Things start to get dodgy when two of their neighbours start an affair. When it’s discovered, the fallout blasts Tink’s world apart. 

After publishing the book, I had a question for my brother. Was our dad anything like Tink’s father?

“Nothing like him at all,” my brother said. “Not even close.” 

Tink’s father is damaged, but also a peacemaker, a gentle and quietly honourable man. My brother was right. But after I started doing book clubs and readings, I was able to assess the novel more objectively, and wondered if Tink’s father is maybe the person our dad wanted to be.

“I have no idea what he wanted,” my brother said. “I never felt I really knew him.”

It’s true our father was a difficult man, prone to sudden rages and disappearances, which weren’t long but tended to have a dramatic build up. He would mutter and glower, a tall man repeatedly clenching his fists as he paced the kitchen. 

“I’m getting out of here,” he would say during one of his rages. “What are you going to do for food? Look at me. What are you going to do when I’m gone?”

Afterward, he’d slam out of the house, get in the car and roar away. I realize now he probably just drove around Vancouver, since he came back a few hours later. He parked in the garage as usual, although at times like these he came in through the basement door. Afterward, he’d bunk in the spare room downstairs next to his workshop. I’d have to leave his dinner on the bottom step of the stairs, then take the plate back up to wash once he’d finished. 

This would go on for a while. I have no idea how long. Days? Weeks? Eventually he’d emerge from the basement and move back upstairs. Under no circumstances did we ever talk about any of this. 

A few years ago, my brother got our father’s military records and sent me a copy. Here was our dad signing up on September 9, 1939, in the Loyal Edmonton Regiment, the way he’d always said. Here he rode a motorcycle around England as a dispatch rider, ditto. 

One of his recurring stories concerned the motorcycle accident that had ruined his back, and it was true he had worsening back problems throughout my childhood. His gait was increasingly unsteady, and he got mad when people thought he was drunk. He didn’t drink, not more than the occasional rum and coke. Maybe a beer in summer. 

It turned out that nothing was written down about a motorcycle accident in England when it happened, not that I could find, although there were repeated reports from doctors later in his service that he complained of back pain. I wondered if there had been a minor accident that only felt significant once his back had started barking. Also whether he exaggerated. Later on the records say he reported suffering several motorcycle accidents.

There was no report of him fighting the heavyweight champion. No brig, no Scotland, no commandos, although one early report said he was very successful in his work in England. It called him officer material and suggested training, but that never materialized. He was promoted to staff sergeant and stayed there. 

And here he was on the front lines for 38 days during the Allied invasion of Sicily. Afterward, he was sent to hospital and apparently developed jaundice when he got there: what we now call hepatitis. Dad sometimes mentioned Sicily and more often the hospital, which was in North Africa. 

“Men put their arms out the mosquito nets trying to get bitten. They wanted to get malaria and get out of it,” he once told me angrily. “What do you think of that, eh? Whaddaya think?”

At other times, he simply said he’d caught malaria in North Africa. If true, this meant he had two liver diseases at once, which would have left him very ill. He told me a pair of doctors had stood over his bed, one saying to the other, “He’s not going to make it,” then moving on. 

He hated doctors. My father would never see a doctor when I was a kid, expressing complete contempt for the profession, even though my mother was a nurse. 

Once again, there was no mention of malaria in the records, although he was definitely in hospital in North Africa, and after five weeks, he’d embarked from “Algiers.” When he was in Algeria, he picked up a little souvenir I’d loved as a kid. It was a tiny book with tooled silver covers and black-and-white pictures inside of minarets, something you might put on a charm bracelet. 

He’d got married before the war and had a daughter back home in Edmonton, so maybe the charm had been intended for one of them. But he got divorced after he got home, and his ex-wife would never let him see their daughter. 

I have no idea what happened to the charm. 

__________________________________

A few months after the invasion of Sicily came the battle of Ortona. 

At Ian Cosh’s book launch, which was a pleasant and informal affair, someone in the audience asked a question. How did the veterans he interviewed reconcile the sympathy they felt for individual German soldiers, which was clear in the book, with the fact Canada was at war with a fascist German state? 

“What comes to me right now,” Cosh replied, “is that I noticed when I was writing this book that I didn’t ask them: What about the purpose of the war, the defeat of Nazi Germany? Why does that not help you? Why doesn’t that comfort you?

My father in England, My mother later wrote on the back of the photo, “No wonder we won the war.”

“But I also felt that it might have ended the interviews if I’d asked.”

“Maybe I could add something,” I put in, telling the man that my father had fought at Ortona. 

My father had loathed Hitler, I said. Loathed fascism. But in North Vancouver, one of our next-door neighbours was a German who had fought in Hitler’s Wehrmacht. The rest of the Canadian veterans in the suburb would have nothing to do with the man, and the women froze out his wife.

But my father always spoke in a neighbourly way with the guy, whose name was Max. One time he told me Max had signed up in the German army when he was a know-nothing kid because he’d wanted to fight for his country. 

My father said he had done the same thing when he was a kid himself, signing up to fight for Canada. The difference was that my father had ended up fighting on the right side, while Max had fought on the wrong one. My father said they had both come to know the right and wrong of it when they were older, but only when they were older. He could just as easily have fought for Hitler if he’d been born in Germany himself.

So, I said at the book launch, I think veterans could carry two competing thoughts in their minds at the same time: that the Nazis were wrong, fascism was egregious, but that the soldiers they were being asked to kill were just young men like themselves. Maybe this was why so many of the veterans Cosh interviewed had felt torn, and had trouble living with the killing. My father seemed to feel that as well.

Because there was that side to my father, too. He was a shop steward in his union and idolized Martin Luther King, who said we’re all born equal. He was devastated when King was assassinated, telling me, “They won’t even let us have him.”

He also had friends on the nearby Capilano reserve, and he rebuked another neighbour one time when the man spouted racist garbage about “drunken Indians.” 

“Well, Jeff,” he said. “I’ve known a hell of a lot of Indians who aren’t drunks, and a hell of a lot of drunks who aren’t Indians.” 

One other thing. 

I’m no longer sure he fought at Ortona.

________________________________

After Cosh’s book launch, I went back into my dad’s military records, which I hadn’t looked at in years. They were quite detailed at first, and as I remembered, the photocopies were hard to read, especially the handwritten ones. He was called a good man for the first few years of his service, nothing standing out until after the invasion of Sicily, which began on July 9, 1943 and ended on August 17, when the German army retreated.

Afterward, his medical records show my father complaining of debilitating back pain. He said it had started in England with the motorcycle accident and got worse in Sicily, where he’d had to load heavy equipment into assault vehicles. One doctor said he had arthritis, but others didn’t seem to believe his complaints. The records contain something I hadn’t noticed before: a diagnosis of psychoneurosis. 

After reading David Nasaw’s book, I know that’s an early term for PTSD. And it began after the invasion of Sicily, where Dad had been in combat. 

He was sent to a field hospital in Italy for five days in mid-September for treatment of his back pain, then sent back “up the line,” meaning to the front. The records don’t say where, but they report that he was wounded on October 3, no details, and sent to hospital in North Africa. The records are sometimes contradictory, but one says he was diagnosed with jaundice as soon as he arrived and declared cured five weeks later. If there was a wound, it must have been minor.

Afterward, he was shipped back to Italy from Algeria, but his problems continued. The most detailed report was written on November 26, 1943, in a Canadian field hospital by Major C.E.G. Gould, a neuropsychiatrist.

Gould diagnosed my father as chronically neurotic; “an overly-conscientious, obsessive personality who has developed hysterical symptoms under stress on several occasions. In my opinion his present (back) pain is on an hysterical basis with an element of exaggeration… He is not likely to stand up under full combat conditions in the future any better than he has in the past. Requires psychotherapy, and following this should be assessed for disposition.”

Scrawled underneath is a handwritten note dated December 9, 1943. “Fit for base unit duties only. Gould.”

I thought of a quote in Cosh’s book from one of his old soldiers, Bill Shaw, who began talking about what he called battle fatigue. “Some of the guys couldn’t take it, and them sent ‘em back behind the line, you know… They got jobs in echelons behind the line and, yeah.” 

There’s nothing in the records I have about where my father went on base duty and no mention of Ortona, although he was in Italy until early January. At that point, he was readmitted to hospital for his psychoneurological condition. After being discharged, he was shipped back to England. 

I remembered now that I’d been puzzled about this when I first read the records, thinking about my father’s disappearance into his workshop at Christmas. I also remembered that my brother had wondered if our father had been sent into Ortona with replacement troops, being a sergeant and used to commanding platoons. 

The battle was bloody, the worst the Canadians had fought so far, and casualties were high. Maybe a small action like sending my father in with a platoon hadn’t been recorded, at least in the documents they’d sent my brother. I thought that seemed plausible and continued to believe he’d fought there. Yet after reading Cosh’s book, I wasn’t so sure, and felt embarrassed that I’d spoken up at his launch. 

The veterans Cosh had interviewed told him stories that conveyed psychological truths, but could be more than a little at odds with the facts. The men misplaced dates, didn’t talk about the bloodier things they’d done, and tended to linger on unimportant details. At least, details that were unimportant to anyone but themselves.

One of the photos in a group my father seems to have taken during the war. I don’t know where this is and he doesn’t name the men.

It’s possible my father was briefly ordered into Ortona with a platoon. It’s also possible he felt guilty that his friends were dying at the front while he was safe at the rear. That might have been the reason he told people after the war that he’d fought there too, at least after he’d moved from Edmonton to Vancouver. 

He might even have lied to my mother, who honestly believed he’d fought there, feeling too ashamed to mention his diagnosis. As a nurse, my mother was comfortable with medical terms. But she never said a word to me about psychoneurosis, even long after my father was dead. 

There are so many possibilities. He might also have wished that he’d been well enough to fight alongside his buddies in Ortona, and fantasized that he had. Or maybe he didn’t want to fight any more. Maybe he knew he was likely to panic and get killed, and maybe get his buddies killed. Yet that might have made him feel even more ashamed, and he doubled down on the lie. 

It’s also possible that he disappeared into his workshop simply to mourn the death of too many friends. In the Canadian war cemetery outside Ortona, there are 1,375 graves—the brutal aftermath of a battle that lasted just 10 days. 

Any of these things could have happened, maybe a number of them, but I doubt we’ll ever know the truth. After reading Ghosts of Ortona, I’m all right with that. Veterans tell war stories, and if they convey psychological rather than literal truth—well, I’m a novelist. Who am I to criticize? My father probably wanted to be better than he was able to be, but so do we all.  

One final note. I did a video call with Ian Cosh about his book for the previous post, and near the end I told him about rereading my father’s military records. He was both interested and sympathetic, and did a bit of research. 

Cosh found my father’s name in the July, 1944, issue of The Fortyniner, a journal put out by the Loyal Edmonton Regiment.  He’s on a list of men who’d been invalided back to Canada the previous March. 

“Pte Ellsworth Swelin, Hughenden, was returned home and in May was receiving treatment in the University hospital for wounds received in Sicily. Pte. Strome was wounded in the head by a shell fragment. His address is in Saskatchewan, but he enlisted in Edmonton. C.S.M. Green, original member of the 1st Bn. was wounded in Sicily and spent many months in hospital. Pte. D. Dougan, first member to be wounded was at the station to greet his returning comrades. Lt. E. M. Mason of the 1st Bn. was making his second trip back and left the battalion just prior to Sicily. Pte. W. L. Squires Peace River, who left the battalion with a wound in his left eye from the fighting at Ortona on Christmas day and Pte. Wilfred A. Moreau got back with the same party, also in this party was Pte. J. Cardinal, Heinsburg, S/Sgt. C. R. Krueger, 11906 127 Ave., Pte. J. Cyganiewich, Fahler.” 

Also in this party, it says, my father listed without a glorious wound from Sicily or Ortona, shuffled home as a psychoneurotic, meanwhile suffering from a genuine back problem that no one believed he had. 

Oh dad, I thought. Poor man. Poor, poor, tortured man. 

I long ago forgave him for his part in my rather difficult childhood, and only wish that he’d managed to forgive himself.

[1] You can read the first part of my review of The Wounded Generation by clicking here. 

[2] The first part of my review of Cosh’s book appears here. You can order Ghosts of Ortona from your local indie, or online here.

[3] You can order Far Creek Road from your local indie or through this link.