Dr. C.M. Johnston's Project

Ruthven C. McNairn

Ruthven McNairn appears to have been an almost compulsive diarist, a boon to any biographer. Wherever he worked, whenever he traveled, and whatever he undertook in the Canadian Army during the Second World War, he invariably kept a detailed journal of his activities and experiences. But altogether apart from compiling aide memoirs for their own sake, he was intent on producing the grist for the career mills he had early on determined to fashion for himself: journalist and novelist. Ruthven, known as “Ruff” to his family, was born on 24 August 1914, barely three weeks after the outbreak of the Great War in Europe (later styled the First World War), the grim predecessor of the even more global conflict that would eventually engulf him. He was born into an academic family, the third son of William Harvey McNairn, a geologist by training, and Hester (Wilson) McNairn, who named her newborn after a distant cousin. He joined two siblings, Robert and Norman, and would be followed by another brother, Ian.

Their maternal grandfather, Robert Wilson, a McGill University graduate, had been an alderman and engineer in Winnipeg before becoming a land surveyor in Canada’s expanding West. The region’s harsh environment, however, burdened Robert with a severe respiratory ailment that forced him and his wife, Margaret, nee Colquhoun, to seek refuge in the more salubrious setting of Denver, Colorado. They were accompanied by their daughter, Hester, who had been born in Cornwall, Ontario, where the family had briefly resided with the mother’s Colquhoun relatives. The parents stayed on in Denver and took out American citizenship for themselves and Hester after the father became a city engineer. Periodically Hester paid summer visits to the Colquhoun family in Cornwall and ultimately decided to settle in Canada and take out dual citizenship. Her parents and the Colquhouns had the means to educate her at a private girls’ school, St. Margaret’s, in Toronto. While there she became acquainted with William McNairn and his family, who happened to be distant relatives of hers. She and the equally smitten William were soon courting – to use the popular contemporary expression – and in due course married.

By this time the groom had received his master’s degree in geology from the University of Toronto. In 1909, on the recommendation of his academic supervisor, he was appointed to the faculty of McMaster University as a special lecturer in geology. A Baptist institution, McMaster had in 1890 opened its doors on the city’s bustling Bloor Street, close by the Varsity campus. The McNairns, at Hester’s urging, eventually took up residence on Brunswick Avenue in the area known as the Annex, long popular with professional and university people. From that new home the young Ruthven ventured into his primary education at the nearby Huron Street Public School where he showed not only a literary but a marked mechanical bent that impressed brother Norman, who recalled that his younger sibling “was constantly buildings things for the family”. Ruthven’s school years were highlighted by a summer vacation spent with his parents in England visiting relatives in Cheshire, where he was pleasantly acquainted firsthand with the ways and customs of the “Old Country” his parents had often told him about.

Once his primary education was completed, he was enrolled at Central Technical School, one of the many institutions set up after the turn of the century to train skilled recruits for Canada’s burgeoning industries. Central Tech, as it was called, also provided Ruthven with a full range of high school courses, the only kind of program that would have satisfied his parents. His secondary school education was interrupted in 1930 when McMaster University, his father’s employer, departed Toronto. It had long been seeking a more spacious campus than the one afforded on Bloor Street, and readily accepted a generous offer from the citizens and corporation of Hamilton to locate there. This meant that that Professor McNairn and his family would have to pull up stakes in Toronto and migrate to what its boosters still liked to call the “Ambitious City”. Though Hester was hospitalized in Toronto at the time, the rest of her family, Ruthven included, arrived on schedule to witness the laying of the University’s cornerstone on its sprawling new estate in Westdale, a posh section of Hamilton developed a few years earlier. Unlike many of his colleagues, Professor McNairn chose not to live in the freshly minted Westdale, instead renting a large house on Bay Street South in the older and imposing southwestern section of the city, one that may have reminded a gratified Hester of the Annex district the family had left behind in Toronto. Recovered from her hospital stay, Hester was soon at home in her new surroundings, attending meetings of the faculty women’s club and presiding over teas arranged for female undergraduates.

Meanwhile, almost without missing a beat, her adolescent son was able to resume his high school career at the technical school that functioned alongside collegiate and commercial counterparts in the comparatively new institution named Westdale Secondary Schools. After completing the necessary requirements in early 1933, Ruthven, as had his brothers Robert and Norman before him, prepared to move on to McMaster University. But before that happened, the restless high school graduate took time out in February, 1933 to embark on another travel adventure, not to England this time but to sunny California. To add to the drama and excitement, he chose to go with the aid of his hitchhiker’s thumb. Having a choice in the matter initially set him apart from those unfortunates on the road, who, unlike him, had no other option in the Depression-wracked ‘thirties. His subsequent experiences after reaching California have the ring of a John Steinbeck tale. His hitchhiking jaunt in the State was interrupted by the local police who arrested and jailed him on a vagrancy charge. On learning of his son’s plight, a concerned Professor McNairn bailed him out and provided for his passage home. Ruthven appears not to have used the funds for public transport but took instead a so-called bootleg trail back to Ontario, by which he meant some unconventional or unauthorized route. It must have been a relieved McNairn family that welcomed him home in June, 1933.

Some weeks later in the waning days of summer, the seasoned traveler applied for admission to McMaster. One of his well disposed referees was Professor Roy Bensen, a family friend and popular philosopher on the McMaster faculty. After Ruthven’s acceptance and registration, he entered the three-year Mathematics Option. He spent only one year in it, however, and switched to the more demanding Honour Mathematics and Physics (Course 10). Within two years all that changed when Ruthven abandoned the sciences and migrated again, this time to the more congenial General Arts Course, which provided the literary and cultural studies that fuelled his other interests. The transfer also enabled him to devote more time to the extracurricular diversions he wanted to explore. And he explored with a passion. Before he graduated he had served on the executive of the Dramatic Society, as secretary of the Modern Literature Club, circulation manager of the Silhouette, the student weekly,and managing editor of the Marmor, the student yearbook. Many years later an admiring classmate remarked that these mounting responsibilities “said it all” about Ruthven, the undergraduate.

On stage he performed in “Big”, a comedy later turned into a Hollywood film about a male adolescent who wishes successfully to be turned into instant manhood so that he might impress female teenagers. Ruthven also ventured into adjudicated year plays, such as Year ‘38’s production in October, 1936 of “Torchbearers, in which he played a well received Mr. Hossenfross. In a front page account of the event, the Silhouette rhapsodized about this “hilarious comedy” depicting appropriately “backstage life in amateur theatricals”. It then went on to warn its readers that “you’re cheating yourself if you fail to see it”. Thanks to the efforts of Ruthven and his fellow thespians the production was later judged the winner in the annual inter year competition and, as reported in the Silhouette’s ”Theatre Notes”, was duly awarded the Dramatic Society Shield. For his portrayal of Mr. Hossenfross Ruthven gained an honorable mention. In his graduating year he went from actor to director when he “masterminded – the Silhouette’s word – the theatrical efforts of his fellow Seniors. In the meantime, his impressed younger brother, Ian, had followed in his thespian footsteps at McMaster.

As secretary of the Modern Literature Club, the second string to his extracurricular bow, Ruthven may have composed the wry piece that accompanied its group picture in the 1937-38 Marmor :

Passing from one house to another for its meetings, the Modern Lit has seen a fairly successful year. The society is informal and allows people to get up and wander around during its sessions or stretch out and go to sleep if they so desire.

Somehow in the midst of this inertia the club’s members found time to prepare and deliver papers on selected literary themes and to invite scholarly speakers to address them on subjects of their expertise. Thus Professor Victoria Mueller of St. Michael’s College in Toronto regaled Ruthven and his clubmates on the latest trends in the literary world while a McMaster “man of letters” – the club’s description – the economist, Humfrey Michell, spoke on the “Adventure Novel”

With thespians like Ruthven on the Club’s executive, theatre also occupied a prominent place on the agenda. Members periodically went “en masse” to Toronto to take in say, a Sean O’Casey play or to applaud performances by Ethel Barrymore of the celebrated American theatrical family. With sophomoric enthusiasm the Marmor piece ended on this high note:

it is felt by every member of the club that nothing short of an interplanetary collision involving the sun, the moon, and all the fixed stars could alter in 1939 what has been for so many years a certainty – a brilliant Modern Lit.

Lighthearted as all this was, most club members had some inkling that the next few months might turn out to be the witness of a catastrophic collision of another sort, a world war that could profoundly affect their lives. As Ruthven wrote later in a memoir, “the talk of war seemed …. to be a far off thing, that could never touch us. Yet our hearts told us that the day must come, and loomed ever more imminent ….”

When Ruthven graduated in 1938 a friend and classmate, before reviewing his extracurricular accomplishments in a Marmor obit, remarked that after “a varied career in Toronto, Westdale Tech., and various elsewhere’s, Ruthven came to McMaster because he and McMaster were both Scotch”, a remark that may have been greeted with groans in the McNairn household. In any case the adventuresome Ruthven still had other “elsewheres” to explore, including Mexico, which he visited on the very eve of the war’s outbreak. With an eye to his literary aspirations he subsequently corresponded with a press about the possibility of publishing a manuscript he was preparing on his travels south of the Rio Grande. Though the press’s response was mildly encouraging the conditions and possible difficulties it set out seems to have discouraged Ruthven from pursuing the matter. When not engrossed in writing projects, he liked to explore the Great Outdoors and with his brothers made camping and fishing trips to Algonquin Provincial Park, a favourite getaway as well for friend and fellow McMaster alumnus, Charlie MacDonald [HR].

Adventures, however, had to step aside for reality, namely the search for gainful employment, which was often hard to come by in the bleak economic climate of the ‘thirties. Though he seems to have given no thought to teaching or the law, careers often sought by hopeful university graduates, he did obtain stop gap employment, thanks to a maternal uncle, who ran an insurance and real estate business in Cornwall. His manager had fallen ill and Ruthven was taken on as a temporary replacement. Though grateful, he was happy enough to leave after the appointed time, having found both the work and Cornwall uncongenial. He returned to Hamilton and after some searching landed a job as a warehouse clerk with Wood Alexander and James, a prominent hardware firm in the city. Whether or not he had a liking for the work, the mechanically inclined Ruthven was probably more at home with hardware than with real estate.

By this time the war had broken out and then turned ugly and ominous. It was the summer of 1940, the shocking days of Blitzkrieg, the fall of France, and the desperate Battle of Britain. In these dramatically changed circumstances Ruthven rethought his options. On 1 November 1940 he decided to join McMaster’s Canadian Officers Training Corps (COTC) and train on a part time militia basis with a local regiment, the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders of Canada (Argylls). Ruthven’s training schedule included, besides night sessions, two afternoons a week that required time off from his job, a wartime necessity his not altogether pleased employer had to live with. Some three weeks after he joined the COTC he was promoted corporal and taking readily to the regimen on his way to becoming a platoon commander, a position he attained before the year was out. After completing his COTC training in 1941 he did not immediately enlist in the Army, hoping instead to get a posting in the Navy, the service fancied by younger brother Ian. But after repeated overtures yielded no results Ruthven entered the Army after all.

In Toronto on 11 May 1942 he formally enlisted for active service and on the following day was posted as an officer cadet to the officers’ training program at Gordon Head, British Columbia. On August 14th, after successfully serving his required stint on the West Coast, Ruthven was dispatched as a full fledged second lieutenant to Camp Borden in Ontario for further instruction, the upshot of which was his promotion on September 12th to lieutenant, infantry. He was no longer a so-called one pip wonder. While waiting to be assigned to an active service regiment, he instructed at a series of training centres in Kitchener, Listowel, Guelph, and Simcoe, all happily within reach of home and its missed amenities. He also made an effort in his spare moments, and they seemed to be ample, to keep his writing ambitions alive, with the welcome aid of “How to Write” by Stephen Leacock, the celebrated Canadian humourist and economist. He even found time to compose and submit a story to the lofty Saturday Night though that literary magazine did not publish it. He had better success with lesser publications and even managed to sell a piece or two. Even in the service he was trying to stake out a literary career.

On 1 March 1943 Ruthven recorded that in Simcoe he greeted friends and fellow lieutenants Robert Dorsey [HR] and James Young [HR], whom he had met at Gordon Head. Though both McMaster graduates like Ruthven, their undergraduate careers had unfolded after his. In mid-March, two days after he and Young came to share quarters in Simcoe, Ruthven accepted a berth with the Algonquin Regiment, which had recently been serving in Newfoundland. The unit, whose proud motto was “We Lead, Others Follow”, was obviously now being groomed for service overseas. Its home base was North Bay and it was largely made up of rugged miners, lumberjacks, prospectors, and railway workers.

After being ordered to report to Toronto “at once” for the mandatory medical, Ruthven informed the family, who, he said, took the potentially fateful news in its stride. Then he was advised, by way of an anti-climax, that there would be a delay in the overseas deployment of the regiment. While cooling his heels, Ruthven learned that Bob Dorsey was already in the midst of on his own embarkation leave. Then out of the blue Ruthven’s turn came. On April 3rd, while visiting with family, he was told to regard that as an embarkation leave. He spent part of the next few springtime days preparing and registering a will, collecting a new uniform, and packing the belongings he would need on the journey to come. On April 7th, in Toronto’s cavernous Union Station, he bade his parents goodbye in what he called a “simple leave taking” and then boarded a train for Debert, Nova Scotia, the penultimate jumping off point for a trans-Atlantic crossing.

After a lengthy and slow rail trip via Moncton, New Brunswick, he finally arrived in Debert two days later. He complained in his diary that there had been “no one to meet him” at the station, a situation soon remedied, however. He was also made aware that there was to be no imminent departure from Canada presumably because of a shipping shortfall, a not uncommon occurrence. As a consequence, Ruthven spent some two months at Debert, during which he was assigned a task that, given his mechanical inventiveness, he knew that he “would like very much”. In short, he was made a pioneer platoon commander, which meant that he was put to work on a variety of exercises ranging from the construction and camouflaging of defence works to road and bridge building. Among other things, mine laying (and clearing), demolishing obstacles, and stringing barbed wire were also essential parts of the intimidating job description. As well, Ruthven made a better acquaintance with such weapons as the Bren gun and the versatile carrier that mounted it, a standard vehicle in every unit. He also took part in “war games” featuring live ammunition and led “recces” (reconnoitering sorties) into imagined enemy territory. All of it proved to be time well spent, even if part of it may have been contrived to keep him busy and occupied in the long pre-embarkation interval.

Ruthven was periodically tested on his proficiency and invariably placed at or near the top of his class, earning him frequent compliments from his commanding officer (CO). In his off-hours Ruthven appeared to mix well with his fellow officers, who in time came to call him variously “Luff”, “Mac”, or “Rufus” for short. Though he allowed himself an occasional beer, he steered clear of the “monster drinking bouts” that seemingly characterized the frequent parties in the officers’ mess. A more pleasant experience was meeting up with the similarly disposed Charlie MacDonald, whom he had not seen since their days together at Gordon Head.

In mid-May, rumours spread at Debert that the peace time luxury liner, Queen Mary, had arrived in the nearby port of Halifax and would soon be ferrying Ruthven and hundreds of other servicemen to an English destination. The inflated rumours turned out to be false though certainly the required shipping of one sort or another would soon materialize. As June opened the camp grapevine reported that a departure was definitely in the offing.In this case the grapevine proved correct. On 11 June 1943 Ruthven was one of many who took the train to Halifax and were greeted not by the Queen Mary but rather by a smaller though well appointed liner cum troopship, the Empress of Scotland (formerly the pre-Pearl Harbor Empress of Japan). They almost immediately went aboard and Ruthven, for one, found that he had been assigned a comfortable berth in first class on A deck. The next day tugs gathered and nudged the ship out of Bedford Basin so that it might begin its Atlantic journey. The Empress of Scotland, like the Queen Mary, sailed without escort of any sort, its considerable speed deemed capable of outpacing any predatory U-boat -- or so it was hoped. In any case, a thoughtful Ruthven, fully aware of the potential dangers ahead, mused as many others must have: “I wonder if I will ever see my country again”.

On its way out to sea the Empress of Scotland passed an incoming convoy protected by a small aircraft carrier, a defensive tactic recently adopted to reduce the hazards of the crossing. Ruthven made comparatively few diary entries during the week-long trip, except to record the high tension that often gripped the ship, especially when it fired its guns and lifeboat drills were ordered. These may well have been tests rather than responses to a perceived U-boat attack but apparently that did little to ease the minds of many of the ship’s military passengers. Recurring seasickness brought on by rough seas, added to their woes though in this department Ruthven noted that he was not among the afflicted. While his diary entries may have been relatively sparse, a reflective shipboard letter home was not. Discussing his reasons for enlisting, he wrote:

Not for adventure … not afraid of what people would think if I did not. Only the family counts. Will back me to the hilt no matter what. Not hatred either, feels sorry for the [Germans] because they missed the love and gracious living that makes my life so worthwhile ….want to strike a blow for what I believe in …. "

The diary took on renewed life when Ireland was finally sighted on June16th, the signal that the ship was now on the last leg of its long journey. Ruthven was soon able to take in the scenic hills of Donegal, pass by Belfast and then the next day travel across the Irish Sea to the mouth of the Mersey River where the ship briefly moored. It marked Ruthven’s return to the land he had visited years before as a callow teenager. On June 18th the Empress of Scotland sailed down to its final destination, the busy and strategic port of Liverpool. As the city came in sight Ruthven was struck by the “forest of chimney pots” and by the bomb damage, though, he told his diary, it was not as severe as he had anticipated. After their last overnight stay on the ship, Ruthven and his fellow passengers marched off it and before noon boarded trains for London and points beyond. On the way they passed through Sheffield and after crossing the Black Pentlands enjoyed a much needed meat pie and the customary beaker of tea.

As they rolled through London’s environs and approached the heart of the metropolis, Ruthven noted the marked excitement that rippled though the whole train, affecting even the most blasé and worldly among them. All along the route an “enthusiastic populace” royally greeted this fresh batch of overseas arrivals, one woman on her kitchen stoop vigorously waving and crying at the same time. Blitz-worn Londoners needed, as one passenger observed, all the morale-boosting they could get. There was bomb damage everywhere but in Ruthven’s words, it appeared to be “old scars” and much of the wreckage had obviously been cleared away. He and the others so assigned arrived in due course at their new home, the training camp at Heathfield in East Sussex, where all were given a “hot supper”. Later Ruthven set about organizing his gear and then ventured out to inspect his new surroundings. The next morning he and his colleagues were given a stark no-nonsense introduction to this new phase of their military life. They were, in short, given a “going over” from the British brigadier in charge of the camp, who outlined in a “tough though fair” way what was expected of these untried newcomers. Ruthven also got occasional sleep-robbing reminders of what the British people had long suffered: the ominous drone of enemy bombers overhead, the crunch of bombs nearby, and the booming of the “ack ack” (anti aircraft fire).

In due course Ruthven was given a platoon to command, albeit not yet a pioneer one. At its head he was sent out on long route marches and periodically ordered to the camp’s firing range where, he wrote with his self-effacing candour, that his men did well as marksmen, even if he did not. In his evening hours, apart from catching up on administrative paper work, he made a practice of tuning in to the radio in the officers’ mess, and at least once was regaled by the notorious Lord Haw Haw, the derisive name given to William Joyce, the disaffected Irish-American who broadcast Nazi propaganda. Characteristically Ruthven stayed tuned for the best part, the follow-up recordings of “very good German music”. In late June he heard overhead another welcome kind of music, this one orchestrated not by the Germans but by “the hundreds of [RAF] bombers coming home” from a major raid on the enemy. Though Ruthven would not have known, it was in all likelihood the massive assault on the already battered Ruhr city of Cologne.

In his off-duty hours he took advantage of summery days to walk into the surrounding countryside, which seemed far removed form the horrors of war so evident in much of the urban landscape he had travelled through, a contrast he remarked on in his letters home. On his rambles he closely examined the church architecture and ancient dwellings that lay along his path. This was a practice he would religiously repeat at his various postings around the country. The venerable social institution known as the pub was not neglected either, affording him not only refreshment but cordial and informative conversations with its civilian patrons.

Throughout, Ruthven’s diary recorded the downs as well as the ups of this phase of his service. The downs included bouts of numbing boredom brought on by lackluster camp routine and a recurring conflict with the Heathfield quartermaster who was inexplicably reluctant to supply all the equipment that Ruthven thought he needed for his platoon. The down days were offset by the always welcome letters and packages from home, and by such good war news as the Allies’ successful invasion of Sicily after the defeat of Axis forces in North Africa. Then in mid-July 1943 he escaped the humdrum of camp life when he was ordered to London to take a course, unspecified in his diary but described in a letter home as “easy to take and stimulating”. It amounted to a series of lectures on current events and particularly on “French national and international life” given at Chatham House, the home of the Royal Institute of International Affairs. Better still, his Chatham House commitments allowed him time to rubberneck like any peacetime tourist. On the almost mandatory visit to Canada House he and the small party with him were received by Vincent Massey, the magisterial Canadian High Commissioner, described in some irreverent quarters as more English and aristocratic than the English aristocracy.

After the brief sojourn in London, it was back to the Heathfield regimen. It was relieved to an extent by his unaccustomed resort to the camp’s sports field. Organized athletics had never been Ruthven’s forte at school and university but to let some diversity into his life he went out for volleyball and though he denigrated his initial efforts he came to enjoy a reasonable proficiency in the game. An even more gratifying diversion was in the offing. Toward the end of July he received word that he and his platoon were to be detached to a pioneer training facility near Ripon in Yorkshire, a part of the country he had never laid eyes on before. It promised to be a pleasant experience in more ways than one. Within days of his arrival he happily told his diary that “Everyone here is very friendly toward Canadians”. To top things off, in early August he was alerted to the whereabouts of a shop whose back room offered tasty and varied meals apparently provided by way of what passed for a local black market. In this case as in others, he prudently declined to enquire about the provenance of the menu.

Meanwhile the pioneer training proceeded in good weather and foul, though Ruthven reported that his men “didn’t give a hoot” one way or the other and readily took to the instruction. The customary functions of a pioneer platoon were soon laid out, notably in graphic lectures given by those who had learned the hard way on the battlefront. When off duty, Ruthven made a point of storing up “Yorkshirisms”, the engaging oddities of speech that peppered the conversation of friendly locals. He also noted that that the recent fall of the Fascist regime in Italy had boosted their morale to the point where some of them were predicting the imminent end of the war. A skeptical Ruthven was not so sure, though he did write his parents that at least “we can’t possibly be beaten now, a comforting thought”.

The remainder of August was given over in part to night schemes and more training at a mine laying school. The challenging schedule was interrupted on August 21st when Ruthven left for King’s Lynn in Norfolk on an unrelated assignment, as he put it, “looking after Brigade Headquarters”, an off-hand remark that masked a major structural development. The brigade in question was the recently formed 10th Brigade [hereafter brigade], whose designated components were, among others, the Algonquins, which explained Ruthven’s posting, the Argylls, the Lincs, and the South Alberta Regiment (29th Armoured Regiment). The brigade in turn would shortly be folded into the newly created 4th Armoured Division [hereafter division]. A year hence, once the fighting had commenced in Normandy, all these formations would be incorporated in the 1st Canadian Army, which became a truly international force when British and Polish divisions were added to the roster.

On his way by rail to King’s Lynn Ruthven had an unusual conversation with a fellow passenger, a Polish officer, who had escaped from German captivity and made his way to England to fight another day. Ruthven would have liked to believe his optimistic story that German civilian morale was plummeting as a result of Allied bombing, which ultimately proved not to be the case. After his arrival at King’s Lynn and the assumption of his administrative tasks, Ruthven found that he had sufficient free time to do what he liked best, touring the environs of his new station. In this case, it meant above all visiting Sandringham, the royal estate. In early September, with the guidance of a friendly police escort, Ruthven took his men on a visit to the legendary residence of kings and queens. Whether or not the troops were impressed, their commander, for all his high expectations, told his brother privately that he was disappointed with the visit.

Meanwhile the war situation had briefly taken on a new look with the fall of Italy’s Benito Mussolini, which in Ruthven’s words, made “the whole world seem better”. But few in Britain – perhaps not even the skeptical Ruthven – could have anticipated the bitter and protracted fighting on the Italian front where for months on end the Allies would face fierce resistance from the entrenched Germans, who resourcefully used Italy’s rugged natural features to enhance their defensive power. In any case, for Ruthven the news from the Mediterranean was further sweetened by a welcome leave that he decided to spend in Glasgow, which garnered mixed reviews in his diary. Then it was on to Liverpool, where he stayed at the local officers’ club before journeying to visit the relatives he had first seen as a touring teenager years before, among them, the people he knew as Uncle Eric and Aunt Robin. Robin, his mother’s sister, was Edith Roberta Wilson, who had met her English-born husband, Eric Billington at McGill University, where they had both been students. Their nephew would visit them often during his service overseas.

On 18 September1943 Ruthven’s all too short leave ended and he returned to King’s Lynn, where at a conference he had the pleasure of re-connecting with Charlie MacDonald, who a month before had arrived in Britain with a Hamilton regiment, the Argylls, with whom Ruthven has briefly served in his McMaster COTC days. He may have been pleased too when he was considered for a possible staff appointment, which could conceivably offer fresh and varied challenges. At this stage, however, he much preferred to stay in the trenches, so to speak, and continue with the pioneer work that he enjoyed. In early October that commitment was put to the test when he was dispatched to a new camp near Thetford in Norfolk, where, among other unnerving tasks, he was ordered to dispose of an anti-tank bomb thrust into his hands while he was seated beside a stack of high explosives. He promptly and safely did what was expected of him. Far more disturbing, from his point of view, was the discovery that his pioneer platoon was to be used as a “regimental convenience” that is, put to any task that needed doing at the camp, a state of affairs that did not sit well with its impatient commander. Moreover his men lacked proper equipment and transport, which added to the malaise and prompted a frustrated Ruthven to apply for a transfer to another unit.

Though Ruthven was given some encouragement in this direction, the transfer did not occur. All the same his concerns may have persuaded his superiors to review his situation. The upshot was that before long he and his men were put to work over several months on the schemes and exercises for which they had been trained and assigned new ones, including more or less realistic war games. Ruthven, who already drove his own jeep, also qualified as a truck or lorry driver and participated in lengthy cross country convoys from one training camp to another. One took him through London on its way westward to Wales. For a time he was also stationed near Tumbridge Wells in Kent where he and his platoon continued to hone their pioneer skills in defence work and road and bridge-building. For Ruthven these extended exercises sometimes had to make room for court martial work in which he served as either prosecutor or witness, depending on the circumstances. During this interval he was often summoned to serve as a temporary company commander, a responsibility that ultimately helped to pave the way for his promotion to captain. These and other duties sometimes told on him physically and he complained periodically of being weary and in need of rest and recreation. Thankfully his CO’s wife came to the rescue and introduced him to some of the local gentry, who entertained him at dinner and other “socials”.

Although bitter fighting was now raging in Italy there was still no action on what the Great War generation had called the Western Front. But everyone was made well aware that the day would come when that theatre of operations would open up. One reminder came in a broadcast by Prime Minister Winston Churchill, which Ruthven picked up on the mess radio. Churchill bluntly stated in the course of an address on the nation’s prospects that 1944 “was to be the bloodiest year of the war”. This dire warning coincided with another downturn in Ruthven’s mood, brought on by a growing sense that he was “not getting anywhere at all” in spite of the round of activities in which he had recently been engaged. On his off-hours he tried to lift his spirits by indulging in what had now become a ritual: touring the countryside adjacent to the posting of the moment. One of these was at a camp near Cambridge where for the most part he reported “quiet days” with little to do apart from standard unit chores. The exception was the day that opened literally with a bang, when he was called upon to blow up a store of leaking hand grenades. Other days were less explosively interrupted by inspections from visiting brass, occasions when he had to get his pioneer platoon up and “running smoothly”. While this may have provided some satisfaction, other situations did not, particularly when he was stationed at Thetford where his “situation was so poor” -- no specifics given – that again he briefly thought of applying for a transfer.

The only bright ray in the gloom was the celebration of his first Christmas in Britain, which he spent on leave with his delighted aunt and uncle at Wyke End, their home near Chester. He luxuriated in a few relatively carefree days, taking his customary rural hikes, listening to classical music on the radio, and participating in the discussion of among other esoteric topics, the state and purpose of English public schools. On the day before Christmas however, the war intruded with the broadcast news that there was a “new change of [Allied] command”. Henceforth, Ruthven wrote, “I will come under Gen. [Dwight] Eisenhower”, the American commander who would ultimately lead the Allied forces on the long awaited invasion of the Continent.

Christmas Day, when it finally dawned, was greeted at Wyke End with what Ruthven called “general hilarity”. He was treated to a “most amazing dinner”, so amazing in fact that he itemized its ingredients: “a 19 lb turkey , all sorts of vegetables, mince pie, plumb [sic] pudding, two kinds of sauce, jelly, and a moose [sic], followed by candy”. Presents were also produced for the pleased Canadian guest, among them, a thoughtfully purchased Roget’s Thesaurus, made to order for the aspiring writer. As the Yuletide festivities were ending, the war again intruded but this time with the cheering news that the long pursued German battle-cruiser Scharnhorst, a dangerous surface raider,had finally been sunk.

In the dying days of December 1943 Ruthven’s leave came to a close and he bade goodbye to Wyke End. He caught the train back to camp where, after taking his supper, he eagerly examined the mail and gifts that had accumulated in his absence, a process that sent him to bed “very happy”. The happiness did not last into the New Year, once he returned to the duties that had brought little but ennui in their wake. The upshot was his application for what he had rejected before, a staff position that could deliver him from his current circumstances. The application went nowhere, however, when his CO brusquely advised against it, telling him that he and his talents were far better suited to what he was already doing. So that was that, and a resigned Ruthven dutifully turned to the tasks long assigned him. Sometimes the routine was mercifully leavened by the opportunity to give lectures to junior and non-commissioned officers new to the pioneering game. Even more pleasant diversions were arranged by the friends he had made in the neighbourhood of the camp, who treated him to home cooked meals, parties, and good conversation on their estate, “Bedales”,

Meanwhile, in part to keep himself occupied, he signed up for a series of written tests and participated in special field exercises, which, he happily reported, he had passed easily. While so engaged he had a visit from a friend and staff officer, who claimed to know the planned pattern of the forthcoming cross-Channel invasion, a vital piece of intelligence that came from what an impressed Ruthven called “the horse’s mouth”. But given the monumental secrecy that cloaked that operation the information is arguably open to question. Truthful or not, at least it briefly relieved the boredom of camp life, In his search for novelty, Ruthven mobilized his mechanical prowess for the purpose of building a better land mine than the one currently in use. Alas, the Army Board of Inventions that reviewed his plans thought otherwise and a chastened Ruthven had to find other ways of making his army life more productive. A less welcome diversion was an enemy air raid on nearby Brighton, which at one point brought a Heinkel 111 bomber right over the startled camp. Though the Luftwaffe’ s nightly Blitz on London and other cities had virtually ended itwas still capable of delivering a punch.

Toward the end of January Ruthven made use of a short leave to go to London and pay his respects at Canada House and visit a tourist must, the National Gallery. Then it was on to Hampshire to rendezvous with friends before his return to camp on the 31st. As mid-winter dawned, he found himself immersed once again in the nuts-and-bolts training, which had become almost second nature. But as the days wore on there were unmistakable signs that extraordinary events might unfold in the not too distant future. One clue was provided by the hundreds of Allied four-engined bombers that flew overhead in daytime on their way to strike at targets in Nazi-occupied France and the Low Countries, the probable site of a future D-day landing. Other clues were the lectures delivered at the camp by seasoned officers well versed in the street fighting tactics that had characterized the recent Ortona campaign in Italy. Even more personally compelling, however, was the program laid on for Ruthven’s and other units after their arrival at a camp near Inverary, Scotland on February 13th.

Ruthven was soon made aware of their mission in a series of what he called “most fascinating lectures” given by veteran officers on the art and science of the combined operations planned jointly by the Army and Navy. They entailed attacking make-believe enemy beaches from a variety of specially designed assault boats and landing craft. For all concerned this had to be the clearest signal yet of their eventual role on what Ruthven called “the big day”. Night exercises and mock battles with live ammunition were also realistically arranged, thankfully producing, according to a relieved Ruthven, only one casualty, a hapless sheep that had wandered into the line of fire. Though his ten days at Inverary were filled with hectic activity, he could not help but soak in the scenic grandeur and historical landmarks of this particular “elsewhere”, notably its picturesque glens and lochs, not to mention the imposing castle of the Duke of Argyll. It stood out in sharp contrast to the inelegant Nissen Huts that housed the Canadians during their stay in this otherwise “bonny land”, the phrase an admiring Ruthven entered in his diary.

Their Inverary exercise completed, a stimulated Ruthven and his men entrained for the South, reaching London only to learn that it had recently suffered an air raid. This produced lengthy traffic jams out of Waterloo station, which delayed their return to camp. A few days after they had settled in, they had another reminder of what lay ahead. They were given an inspirational update from General Bernard Montgomery, the by now legendary victor in the Western Desert campaign against Axis forces. As was his custom, reported Ruthven, Montgomery invited his listeners to gather about him in such a way that every soldier could watch his performance. This heavily freighted visit was shortly followed by an even more momentous ceremony on March 7th, a divisional inspection by King George VI. Taken together, these “thrilling” visitations meant, as Ruthven put it, that “events were moving fast [though] no one knows how soon the day will be”. Again “the day” did not have to be spelled out.

Ruthven and the regiment were soon engaged in what had become a ritual by this time, a series of intensive training courses and exercises, which they carried out very much to the satisfaction of their CO. Yet it was not all smooth sailing. Ruthven suffered through two misadventures that month. First of all, a nasty encounter with an exploding smoke bomb made his uniform unwearable though caused him no injury. This potentially hazardous incident was followed a few weeks later by a debilitating bout of dysentery that laid him low for several days. When he recovered he found recreation and relaxation in the friendly setting of Bedales. He also caught the occasional movie, including what he called a Soviet propaganda film on the fighting in the Ukraine, to which his critical eye gave a failing grade. In early April he spent a short leave in London, visiting Westminster Abbey and presumably inspecting its Poets’ Corner before going on to the Houses of Parliament.

Returning to camp, he was stunned to learn that three of his men had done the unprecedented and the uncharacteristic, that is, gone AWOL (Absent Without Leave). He had already told his parents that the Algonquin rank and file were “a very good bunch -- amazingly few orderly room cases”. When he censored their mail, he had discovered an inward sentimentality that belied their outward toughness, and moreover a “native intelligence” that had sadly gone uncultivated. Nor was he unfamiliar with this type, having rubbed shoulders with such men on the long trail to California so many years before. In any case, he may have put the rare absenteeism down to a sagging morale brought on by tedium, anxiety, unrelenting bad weather, inadequate food, and foul conditions at the first tent camp they had been obliged to occupy. Ruthven’s diary was silent on these points though he did record that he was “tired silly” from trying to improve conditions for his men. These almost parental efforts apparently prompted many of his men, who were several years his junior, to call him Pop behind his back. His fatherly image must have been reinforced by his ubiquitous pipe and bushy moustache. In the midst of all this the regiment received word on April 11th that no more leave was to be granted. Three days later Ruthven enigmatically told his diary that he had been given “a very important [but undisclosed] date”. War”, he added, “seems very close”.

On April 17th the regiment was moved to a better camp in Kent between Uckfield and Maidstone. From that base, Ruthven recorded, it ventured out to have “fun with assault boats on the Medway where the tide was 12 feet”, arguably more exciting than their Scottish experience. While this training was underway the men were awestruck by what would become almost routine in the weeks ahead: “the tremendous number of planes” flying by day and night to bomb enemy targets on the Continent, presumably the pre-invasion softening up operation. In view of his forthcoming combat challenges and responsibilities it was just as well that Ruthven received much needed prescription eyeglasses

In early May he and his men were transferred to a new camp, this time to a “hutted” one that freed them from their dreary life under canvas. Indeed Ruthven found himself comfortably quartered in a large house along with other officers. He also welcomed the opportunity, given his own experience as a bagpiper, to chat with the pipe major of the Argylls, who were based at the same camp. Unfortunately his friend, Charlie MacDonald, was no longer with the regiment, having been transferred to Italy. Then on May 17th there was a burst of activity at the camp, a prelude to the imminent arrival of Canada’s Prime Minister, Mackenzie King for which a full divisional inspection was arranged. Ruthven joined others to line both sides of a roadway down which the Prime Minister strode in the company of an impressive entourage. During the subsequent march past Ruthven observed the “biggest collection of red tabs and gold braid [he] had ever seen”. The following day was much less ceremonial. He joined a new assault team in the South Downs on another combat readiness scheme. Then it was off to yet another camp, this one at Bexted, not far from Tunbridge Wells, which Ruthven the bibliophile shortly visited to canvass book shops, Back at camp, he and his men were kept busy over the next several days doing routine tasks and readying what Ruthven called the “cook trucks”, the mobile field kitchens that would follow the troops into battle. Toward the end of the month he wrote of the “odd orders and counter orders coming in from time to time”, perhaps encoded messages having to do with the imminence of D-day. In any case he did not elaborate apart from remarking that the messages were “enough to drive a man silly”. The silliness passed when he took time out in pleasant warm weather to visit an ancient Celtic encampment. From there he could leisurely watch ships in the Channel and planes droning overhead. In spite of the relaxing diversion his nerves must have been on edge because when he returned to camp he found himself shouting at his men, the sort of behaviour that always riled him.
Such thoughts were banished on May 29th when the division received yet another distinguished visitor, this time the popular Allied commander, General Eisenhower. Ruthven recorded that despite the “blistering day” everyone was on hand to take in the general’s easy informality and warmed to the encouraging and low-keyed pep talk he gave the troops assembled around his jeep. Though cheering in its own way, it also had dreaded overtones.

All the same, June opened quietly for Ruthven, highlighted by pleasant distractions, a visit to Hayward’s Heath and later a “most interesting party with Polish airmen” serving with the RAF. He went on to say that the Poles had a “very special mission in the morning but didn’t say what the job was”. Everyone within earshot must have silently ventured a guess.The date of the party was June 5th, the day originally picked for the invasion but postponed to the following day because of inclement weather. As a result, apart from the party with the Poles, June 5th was described as a “very quiet day” in Ruthven’s diary. Whether he realized it or not, it was the proverbial calm before the storm. Right on its revised timetable the storm broke in all its fury. On June 6th Ruthven entered “D-day” in his diary and added characteristically, “I did not believe it until I heard over the air.” He later recorded the response in his part of England: “great excitement” and “hysterical civilians”. Finally the long awaited “Great Crusade” or “Second Front” had commenced on the beaches of Normandy, the designated target area in France.

For over a week Ruthven’s D-day entry was followed by much sparser and unrelated ones about quiet days and regimental business. Perhaps he was too excited or agitated to write more about June 6th and its immediate aftermath on Juno Beach, the Canadians’ landing site. On June 15th, however, his diary sprang to life again with the news of what “our likely role will be” once the regiment was in Normandy. “We would punch a way out when the moment arrived”, he continued, “and be prepared to hold our ground for up to two weeks while the Infantry Div[ision]s. cleared up to us”, a tactic designed in part to neutralize the stiffening German resistance beyond the secured Juno Beach. Ruthven was also told that they would have the support of some 600 Sherman tanks, the workhorse armoured vehicles, which, however, were proving inferior to the new German Panzers coming on stream. He ended the diary entry with the story that Eisenhower “gave Nov 11th as the end of the war with Germany. Montgomery said Christmas.” If such statements were actually made, events made a mockery of them.

On June 16th Ruthven made an even more dramatic entry after he sighted his first German “buzz bomb”, the V (for Vengeance) 1 weapon, the recently developed pilotless rocket armed with a high explosive warhead that would plummet to earth with devastating effect when its programmed motor died on cue. He also wrote of the “brilliant AA [anti-aircraft] show”, which managed to destroy one of the intruders in midair. Another, however, exploded on the ground as planned, damaging, among other things, a nearby pub and, to quote Ruthven, slightly injuring some officers “bending their elbow”. Two weeks later the combat war edged still closer to the Algonquins when Ruthven recorded that the rank and file were “read a warning order for a move overseas”, which could only mean across the Channel.

July opened with another series of buzz bomb attacks, several of which struck the Tunbridge Wells area though the diary makes no mention of possible casualties. Even so, the recurring assaults made for jumpiness and sleepless nights and may account for the absence of diary entries until July 12th, when Ruthven wrote of “traipsing all over the country” on field exercises that featured the deployment of artillery, tanks, and “troops from all over ….” At about the same time an advance recce” (reconnaissance) party, which included Intelligence Officer William McKeon [HR], was dispatched to Normandy to prepare the way for the unit’s arrival on the battle front. On July 17th Ruthven recorded that “things are humming and a move seems imminent”. Very early the next day the long anticipated move began, which all knew was the first step on the road to Juno Beach. They “rolled up” first to London, where Ruthven was amazed by a sight that had not been seen in months, the massed barrage balloons put up to help thwart the mounting buzz bomb threat.

From London they moved to a marshalling area on the Thames where on the 19th buzz bombs landed all about them, though happily, as Ruthven noted, “at an appropriate distance”. Things were soon humming again and they left the marshalling area to board M.S. Coombe Hill, the vessel that would eventually ferry them to Juno Beach. Then a delay set in caused in part, as Ruthven explained without comment, when “stevedores argued as to whether they would work or not”, a remarkable debate given the circumstances. After the labour dispute was sorted out, the Coombe Hill finally got underway and moved down the Thames to join a convoy that would ultimately take the Canadians along the Channel coast to Southampton. For part of the trip the convoy had to brave the German guns thundering over the Straits of Dover and still more buzz bomb attacks. The latter, however, had run into heavy Navy anti-aircraft fire, whose fallout had often ended up as shrapnel on the decks of the Coombe Hill. After their arrival unscathed in Southampton they were told that their trip across the Channel would be delayed because of the heavy traffic and congestion on the beachhead. The congestion was speedily eased, however, and the very next day, July 24th, Ruthven and the other assembled Canadians finally made their cross-Channel trip.

For Ruthven the crossing was an “amazing experience”, inspired by the armada heading for Juno Beach, made up of “ships of every conceivable size and shape including “antique canal barges, packed with tanks and all sorts of … junk”. He witnessed the Royal Navy doing its job too, notably HMS Lord Roberts, which was “popping off shoreward every now and then”. The Luftwaffe, not to be outdone, however, swooped in -- ineffectually as it turned out -- to drop what Ruthven called a few “eggs”, triggering a furious reaction of Ack Ack. At noon on July 25th Ruthven and others boarded an LCT (Landing Craft, Tanks) and headed for shore in the company of Shermans packed into the hold. They “touched down in a dry landing”, he thankfully recorded, “and drove inshore for a couple of miles”. Reminiscent of Gordon Sloane [Hr], he was seized with the “strange feeling to be in France at long last”.

It was well after dark on their landing day when they reached a concentration area and rendezvoused with the advance recce group. In due course, after more men had been assembled, the group provided what Ruthven deemed a helpful preview of what lay ahead once they engaged the enemy. He came out of it with the comforting feeling that “we’re well enough trained and equipped to do the job”. Certain other developments in the here and now, however, provided less comfort. He was unnerved by the spectacle of three drunken company commanders “[who] … didn’t know what was going on. What a way to start an action”. To add to the agitation, German aircraft managed to slip through and bomb their encampment.

At the tag end of July the regiment went into the line and according to Ruthven’s diary, promptly suffered some casualties when the enemy mortared their positions. A short time later, after the regiment was ordered to advance, he marked the occasion with a fuller than usual diary entry:

acted as LO [liaison officer] betweenL& W [Lincs] and us to call them clear as we passed our start point. Then I went on foot to dispersal point to report our men and vehicles passed the brigade dispersal point. I was on the road … when all hell broke loose. Iwas scared silly and jumped for a ditch but it was only our artillery. Next time all hell broke loose I held my ground until a chunk of shrapnel hit the ground near me. This time it was Jerry. I lost my transport for a while in the dark but finally got settled down ….

The Algonquins and their sister units were now facing their objective, the German strong point of Tilly la Campagne, which lay south of the recently captured town of Caen. Ruthven reported that they “came in for a shelling … no one hurt”. For the time being – from August 1st to 4th -- they contented themselves with taking up a static position, from which they conducted “aggressive patrolling”.

For Ruthven, however, these same early days in August proved to be comparatively quiet, at least in the daytime. Even so, the enemy continued to shell and mortar intermittently and inflict casualties. As a result, Ruthven told his diary, he prudently spent much of his time near the shelter of a “magnificent slit trench”. Then on August 4th, he was suddenly thrown into the equation when he had to replace a recce officer assigned to investigate a possible enemy minefield. Hurriedly pulling on his equipment and seizing a mine detector, he sallied out and was soon in close contact with the enemy, so much so that at one point he wrote, “we were on one side of a tree and Jerry was on the other”. After this erie encounter they had to crawl all the way to their objective, which they did not reach until dawn had almost broken, all the while operating in the open and exposed to falling flak. A daylight search for mines was not in the cards but the information he brought back about the enemy’s position gratified the CO. A fellow officer later remarked on how coolly Ruthven had conducted himself in a potentially volatile situation.

On August 8th the regiment’s static situation was about to change. Ruthven wrote that a “big move was afoot” and that a change of orders made him a part of it. He collected his men and together they set off in half tracks and scout cars to join the whole division, which had assembled in sprawling fields near a village called Ifs, Though Ruthven made no mention of it, the regiment was about to embark on the four-day operation called Totalize, a combined infantry and armoured thrust to help close the so-called Falaise Gap, through which the retreating German 7th Army was desperately seeking to escape entrapment.

After the Canadian advance got underway it was slowed by stiff enemy resistance and Ruthven and his men had to crawl across a battlefield strewn with corpses. What had happened was that the regiment had got off on the wrong foot and stumbled into battle-hardened enemy forces well endowed with powerful Tiger and Panther tanks. These and supporting German infantry had virtually bottled up forward elements of the regiment and though their comparatively green soldiers and tankers fought resolutely, they were overwhelmed. The losses were heavy and sobering, two companies decimated and upwards of fifty Shermans destroyed, a costly tactical reverse that no amount of training could have prepared anyone for.

After midnight on the 9th Ruthven recorded that some good had come out of it, however minimal. He wryly told his diary that

a lone German… fired two rounds at us for the glory of the Fatherland, then came in with his hands high moaning ‘Kamerad’ -- a pitiful specimen.

Ruthven woke at dawn to find that the remainder of the Algonquins had moved on, leaving behind some weapons. He and a few others went in search of them but failed to locate their quarry until evening. On the following evening after virtually no sleep, he was told by a runner that he had to find D Company at a place called St. Hilaire and press them to move on to their assigned target. After reporting to brigade he was sent back with reinforcements to what he called “a very nasty spot” subjected to heavy shelling and mortaring. To make matters worse, for the regiment as a whole, its respected CO, Lieut.-Colonel A.J. Hay, had been severely wounded in the fray,

On August 14th, a few days after the ill fated Totalize petered out, Ruthven was among those platoon commanders leading the Algonquins into an FUP (a Following Up Point) where they would join other elements of the brigade in the new operation known as Tractable. This formed part of the assault to close the Falaise Gap once and for all. It stood a greater chance of success because the British were attacking in concert and the Americans, who, having achieved a crucial breakout of their own, were rolling up the Germans from the southwest. Tractable started off impressively with what Ruthven called an armoured dash across the plain, ten vehicles abreast, and paused after reaching high ground while forward elements under shell fire cleared the Laison River. Then the Algonquins’ turn came to cross it, which they did successfully in the late afternoon of August 14th. At this time an amused Ruthven recorded that “a Jerry MO drove up in a Buick and gave himself up”. He was shortly put to work tending to injured civilians caught in the crossfire. (The fate of the Buick is unknown.)

Once across the Laison, the regiment temporarily moved into a wood before resuming their advance and joining up with the other units that had already moved on, including an associated Polish force. Over the next three days the situation often became confused and the front constantly shifted under attacks and counterattacks. Even so, Ruthven could write that in spite of fierce enemy resistance and artillery fire the Canadians managed to make headway, passing through shattered villages in the environs of Falaise, battered for weeks by friend and foe alike. Finally in the early hours of August 18th the fanatically defended town was taken.

The capture of Falaise turned out to be an incomplete victory because the Gap itself was far from closed and a stream of Germans continued to flow through it. To try and dam this flow as well as provide a barrier against any possible enemy attempt to liberate their comrades, the Algonquins and other units moved eastward along the edge of the Trun valley, “covering quite a bit of ground”, as Ruthven noted on August 18th. On the way they entered Marais la Chapelle, where fellow Algonquin Wm. McKeon, part of an advance group, had boldly shot up German troop trucks with a Bren gun. This may have had something to do with the “enthusiastic welcome” and the large quantity of wine the rest of the regiment received from local civilians. On the following day Ruthven and his new CO, whom he sometimes found “difficult”, did a recce in a jeep along the edge of the Trun valley and found a site commanding the German escape route. a strategic landmark dubbed Hill 240. This accomplished, Ruthven settled down for the night on the grounds of a chateau.

In the early hours of August 21st he was assigned mine laying duties, presumably to impede or hem in the enemy withdrawal. He soon discovered that he had been given “bad information” that landed him in the close vicinity of a large group of desperate Germans. As he put it, he “cached the mines” and returned post haste to his unit for further orders. By this time all hell had broken out when decisive action was taken against the fleeing Germans. From their vantage point above the escape route the Algonquins, other Canadian units, and the Poles poured down sustained fire on the massed enemy. Overhead the skies were filled with Allied aircraft, which turned the valley into a shooting gallery in which German personnel were slaughtered wholesale and hundreds of their vehicles torn apart.

Yet the attempt to bag the bulk of the Germans fell short as thousands managed to make good their escape. Still it was a triumph for the Allied forces to relish. The Gap was finally closed when Canadian, American, and Polish forces met up at Chambois, the chokepoint. That same day, however, as Ruthven recorded, the Algonquins lost their colourful intelligence officer, Bill McKeon, who was struck down by his own artillery while interrogating a batch of German prisoners, one of the many rounded up that day. So called friendly fire had tragically dogged the Canadians on their way to Falaise when Allied bombers and RAF Typhoons had mistaken them for the enemy in the melee below.

On the day after the Chambois link-up, Ruthven at last enjoyed a “good sleep and no disturbance” after nights of disrupted slumber in “soggy clothes”. Later on a recce he took a prisoner, “a lad with a bad wound in the leg, got a stretcher and told [other] Germans to carry him” to a dressing station. Still later he moved through the valley of destruction with his platoon and witnessed close-up the scale of death and carnage inflicted on the German 7th Army. He recorded in his diary that it was “the bloodiest sight I have ever seen”. Gory and horrific though it was the scene marked a major German defeat and transformed what had once been a tenuous Normandy beachhead into a solid and expansive launching ground for an ultimate assault on Nazi Germany itself. Ruthven’s own gratification with recent events was bolstered when he and others out on a minesweeping operation were warmly greeted by freshly liberated “Francoises”. “Very inspiring”, he wrote, a superlative he seldom used.

Gratification and inspiration soon gave way to other feelings. The next day, August 24th d Ruthven and two of his men were ordered to find and deal with a small group of Germans reportedly holed up in a barn close by a chateau Ruthven happened to be visiting. With some difficulty they made it to the objective and were opening fire when a friendly scout car complete with Bren gun drove by and scored direct hits on the barn. According to Ruthven’s diary, this was enough to flush out the Germans, a lieutenant and ten rank and file, “all badly scared”. Warpath, the regimental history, put it more grandly: “under the field generalship of Lieut. McNairn and Sergeant Handyside and Private Moffat a classic pincer movement was executed on the group who insisted on resisting until the last minute”. No reference was made in this account to the scout car’s intervention. There was more excitement toward the end of August, an inconclusive grenade battle, this time with a packet of die-hard Germans and a successful attack on an enemy-held village, an action in which Ruthven served as liaison officer. He also returned to his old trade, doing recces, removing mines, and clearing roadblocks, thankfully with no enemy interference. As August was closing he capitalized on “quiet days” by catching up on his sleep.

September opened with a flurry of activity, caused by what Ruthven’s diary described as a “mad move … and a long drive … to the northeast”. By the 3rd, with Ruthven sometimes at the wheel, the Algonquins had reached Remy, where the enterprising pioneer platoon leader donned his rations officer hat and “arranged eggs for the whole regiment”. Unfortunately before justice could be done them in a field kitchen, the regiment and an irritated Ruthven were whisked off again, this time bound for St. Omer, close by the Belgian border. They would soon be joining other formations to do battle with the enemy on the Channel coast and beyond.

In the interval a grateful Ruthven recorded on September 5th that on the banks of the River Somme, scene of a bloodbath in the Great War, he enjoyed his first proper bath of another sort since leaving Caen over two months before. In the midst of his welcome ablutions he and other Algonquins who had joined him provided a spectacle of sorts for local civilians of both genders, who had solemnly gathered to watch the proceedings. The Somme bathing was followed over the next few days by what he called liquid mess dinners, in which, given his moderation in such matters, he may have only marginally participated. A few days later the otherwise solemn bath-watchers may have been among the civilians who gratefully greeted him and the other Algonquins when they moved into liberated St, Omer. Indeed he wrote that he “could have had the whole town” but in what sense he did not divulge.

Meanwhile the war was not standing still. The rest of September and much of October and November were taken up with recurring “recces” against enemy positions to determine their strength and defensive power. Invariably they led to fierce and bloody firefights. Ruthven and those whom he led discovered soon enough that a determined and resourceful “Jerry [had] decided to hold out”, making progress painfully slow. This would be the recurring pattern over the autumn months as the Algonquins and the rest of the brigade battled their way through Belgium en route to the Netherlands. It was said that on any given night, even while the fighting raged around them, Ruthven and his pioneers had to work their perilous way into enemy strong points to defuse booby traps and other hazardous devices. Occasionally other officers did not measure up. For example, the misdirected efforts of a “drunken [Canadian] officer” fatally exposed his men to enemy fire, a story that would never have been reported in the Hamilton Spectator read by the McNairn family.

At any rate, for every two or three days and nights of combat and terror there seemed to be for Ruthven at least one day of relief, usually taken up with varieties of administrative work. He was serving, for example, on courts of inquiry investigating various charges brought against soldiers, helping to keep the regimental war diary when the officer regularly assigned the task was otherwise engaged, and preparing battle schemes for his own pioneer platoon. One such scheme, on which he had lavished time and thought, was brusquely dismissed by his CO, who obviously thought it too dangerous to execute. When a disappointed Ruthven expressed his regret the CO cynically responded, “Like hell you’re sorry”.

Although there were occasional lulls in the fighting there was no shortage of “turmoil” – Ruthven’s recurring word – the kind that felled a friend and fellow officer and demolished his own jeep, vacated just minutes before. His diary entries are peppered not only with “turmoil” but with “hot days and nights”, a reference that had nothing to do with the weather, which incidentally had turned seasonally cold and rainy. At times sleeplessness, not to mention unlaundered battle dress, almost became a way of life, except when he enjoyed the occasional 48-hour leave that allowed him to get cleaned up or when he was ordered to attend tactical conferences where he could snatch forty winks between meetings.

At one of these Ruthven may have been briefed on the role he and his platoon would play in the forthcoming campaign to clear Germans out of Belgium and to strike into neighbouring Holland. The operation unfolded in the last two weeks of October, 1944, with the division advancing in concert with British and American counterparts. At the regimental level, Warpath notes that Ruthven and “his merry men” gave expert instruction on mines and booby traps” to each company in turn, which was just as well because the route ahead was infested with these lethal devices. The operation went well on the whole with comparatively few casualties and by the end of October the Canadians were in action on the Dutch side of the border. Though the Germans were in retreat they were fighting a dogged rearguard action all the way. At one point, according to a fellow officer, Ruthven volunteered to take over a rifle platoon that had lost its commander. He held this post for three demanding weeks until officer reinforcements arrived on the scene.

The Germans eventually brought their measured retreat to a halt on the defensible north banks of the Maas River, a tributary of the Rhine. There the new front line was more or less stabilized when the Canadians moved up to the Maas in force. While the Algonquins and the rest of the brigade were settling in and familiarizing themselves with their new surroundings Ruthven on a short getaway had a chilling introduction to the scale of German atrocities when he drove to a concentration camp, which he was told had a “horrible reputation”. In late November he enjoyed a more pleasant experience and an early Christmas present, when he was promoted acting captain, a rank that would be elevated to a full fledged captaincy three months later.

By early December he and the regiment were billeted in the sizeable Dutch town of Waalwijk. It was close by the Maas, which with its many dykes posed a sizeable problem for an attacking force. The town was also astride the so-called Buzz Bomb Alley traversed by the deadly rockets the Germans had deployed elsewhere. In this somber setting Ruthven was put to work on a hodgepodge of jobs, lecturing junior officers, doing court work, and conducting recces along the Maas, in the hope of gaining information about enemy defences. On December 12tht his situation threatened to become more explosive when it was reported that the Germans had crossed the river and occupied a house on the Canadian side. Ruthven was told to organize and command a counteraction. But before he made his move he carefully checked on the exact location and found that the house in question was actually on the German side of the Maas. He immediately ordered a stand down, which must have come as welcome news to his men. Even so there was, according to Ruthven’s dairy, aggressive and “nervous” (his word) patrolling by both sides over the next few days. Then a week before Christmas relief came in the form of a three-day leave to Brussels where he did his usual museum stalking and general sightseeing.

All his varied activities, pleasant or otherwise, were abruptly overshadowed, however, by electrifying news from the south. In a bold thrust aided by bad weather that grounded Allied aircraft, the Germans had in what became the so-called Battle of the Bulge punched a large and menacing salient into the American front in the Ardennes. This set off loud alarm bells everywhere along the Allied line. Its immediate effect on the Algonquins and sister units was the cancellation of their traditional Christmas Day. It was pushed back to the 24th so if needed they could move out with other units the next day to help form a defensive screen against a possible German breakout to the north that could threaten the key Allied-controlled supply port of Antwerp. Ruthven was not part of the initial deployment and enjoyed as best he could his second full Christmas away from home. Subsequently occupied by a variety of administrative tasks, he did not rejoin the regiment until December 31st.

By this time, however, good news had flooded in from the Ardennes. The critical Battle of the Bulge had turned in the Allies’ favour as the bad weather retreated and the skies cleared for avenging Allied aircraft to do their work. For its part, the brigade was gratified by the effective way all its parts had been defensively deployed in the crisis. This sharply boosted morale and inspired a New Year’s Eve party that arguably made up for the disrupted Christmas festivities. Ruthven, who was otherwise engaged, made no mention of the party in his diary.

New Year’s Day, 1945 dawned “cold and clear”, banishing the foggy and dreary weather that had stalked the Maas for some days and reduced operations on both sides. Now things would be different for the immediate future and allow operations to begin in earnest. The object was to gather as much intelligence as possible on German troop ands armoured dispositions. Ruthven, who was involved with planning these operations, was billeted in one of the undamaged houses set aside for officers and NCOs. His diary noted that he moved in with the approval of “a delightful little old man and his charming wife”.

This comparatively idyllic state of affairs was soon badly shaken. Ruthven’s diary indicated that the Luftwaffe, particularly its strafing Me-109 fighters, were still a menace, not to mention the Wehrmacht on the ground, whose bitter resistance had hardly slackened. On January 3rd, while the regiment was being reorganized, Ruthven was put in command of HQ Company though he had “no idea why and no one could tell him” as the company was scattered far and wide leaving him with little to do. The regiment itself was also strung out along a canal near the Maas, affording it a more advantageous position. Anxious to gather more intelligence for himself, Ruthven interviewed a “very good Belgian major”, who proved a storehouse of information about the enemy and the area. On January 12th Ruthven wrote that there was a ‘flap” and much confusion over the so-called folding boats that would presumably be used in river crossings. The flap was subsequently resolved.

In the meantime the Algonquins executed their best sorties yet against the Germans. On January 18th and 19th so-called fighting patrols deeply penetrated the enemy side, inflicted casualties, and most importantly took a highly informative prisoner. As it turned out, these vigourously pressed schemes were intended to mask the brigade’s real purpose, a long planned operation out of the liberated Dutch city of Nijmegen. Every thing hinged on convincing the Germans that when the main Canadian push was eventually made it would be headed north toward Utrecht. If the plan worked, the enemy would instinctively concentrate his forces accordingly and leave more or less exposed the route the Canadians actually selected for their operation. To keep up deceptive appearances. aggressive patrolling was strictly maintained throughout. Apart from keeping the uncertain Germans on edge, it raised the regiment’s morale and proved as well the value of the recent intensive training, in which Ruthven played a role.

On one occasion he reached into his thespian bag of tricks and produced a rare kind of stage show. He arranged for the nighttime use of damaged but still serviceable assault boats and had them filled with discarded oil drums masquerading as soldiers and released them on the river. At the same time, members of his former pioneer platoon clung to a demolished bridge and put together a screen of smoke pots to further confound the Germans. To add to the theatrics, the Canadians noisily fired off every gun at their disposal, hoping to hide the fact that the bulk of their artillery and ordnance had been shifted to the Nijmegen operation. For their part, the Germans, apparently fearing a full-scale assault, responded with their own weaponry, much to the amusement of the Canadians, who, having taken proper shelter, suffered no casualties.

Meanwhile plans were going forward for the actual planned advance. As noted, it would be launched from Nijmegen and head not northward but for the Reichwald in Germany, in a different direction altogether. In early February Ruthven, who was recovering from a bout of boils, was assigned the grim task of preparing casualty kits for the forthcoming battle. He subsequently joined others to be inoculated against typhus and the like, sure signs that the Nijmegen operation was already underway. On February 17th, the regiment was moved to an assembly area preparatory to joining the offensive. Ruthven did not immediately accompany them, reporting instead that he made two trips to brigade, either to receive orders or report on the Algonquins’ state of readiness. On the 22nd his turn was about to come. After an erratic ride in a convoy to the Nijmegen area, he finally arrived at his unit’s assembly point. He described his new surroundings as very poor, by which he meant that the nearby town was so battered that almost no houses could be used to accommodate the men, who consequently had to resort to hastily dug slit trenches.

The Algonquins and the other Canadian units were soon acquainted with their role in the upcoming “show”, another of Ruthven’s recurring words. The operation was apparently so complex that it was necessary to explain it in turn to each platoon commander and his men. This was achieved by means of an unprecedented and elaborate sand table model of the projected battlefield. Each element had to understand its own role as well as those of the others. This novel teaching technique spiked morale in all ranks. A few days later Ruthven was greeted with a stirring spectacle: “the biggest op I have ever seen for the Hochwald Gap Show”, so called because it would be played out in a large open space dividing an extensive German state forest. The operation was hopefully dubbed Blockbuster and would be the Canadian complement to the British and American assaults on the formidable German defences west of the Rhine. This would involve the whole of the Canadian 1st Army, the international war machine in which the division and the brigade were important cogs. Ruthven marveled at the Canadian armament and ordnance assembled for Blockbuster, an array of “armour, artillery, flails [for detonating mines], crocks etc,” which seemed to go on forever.

On February 27th these resources went into action, accompanied by the Algonquins and the rest of the brigade. Ruthven shortly announced to his diary that all seemed to go well for the overall Canadian effort. Reports soon came in that a considerable number of German prisoners had been taken, many of whom had been surprised by the sudden appearance of the Canadians, a tribute perhaps to the success of the Maas deception strategy. The heady initial success, however, was short lived as the Germans, fighting with their backs to the wall and on their own soil, recovered and reacted with a ferocity the Canadians had never before encountered. Soon Ruthven was writing about “much flurry and confusion” as the battle progressed, though he provided no details. But as the hours ticked by there was ample cause for a growing concern. Stormy weather effectively grounded Allied aircraft and played havoc with communications and timetables. This sometimes forced the infantry to operate in exposed daylight hours, a boon for enemy gunners. The destruction by German artillery of a large depot of much needed Sherman tanks was another blow. Notwithstanding the courage and daring of the Canadians, officers and men alike, these varied setbacks seriously compromised this phase of Blockbuster, which had failed to advance beyond the Hochwald Gap. The downcast Algonquins and their comrade units had suffered a costly and tactical reverse in the five-day battle that ended on March 3rd. That Ruthven spent all of March 5th preparing more casualty kits tells it all.

The weary and frustrated Canadian survivors returned more or less to their starting point and had to settle for the job of holding the shoulders of the Hochwald Gap. Clearly morale had to be rebuilt, a task undertaken by senior officers, who went out of their way to treat their troops as heroes. Much reorganization had to be done as well in the wake of the maelstrom. Weapons of all kinds had to be replaced, particularly the workhorse Shermans. Green reinforcements had to be absorbed and indoctrinated, notably the so-called Home Defence soldiers (derisively dubbed Zombies at home) who had at last been dispatched to the fighting front. Keen Algonquin observers would soon testify that these new arrivals acquitted themselves as well as any other replacements. Ruthven’s diary incidentally makes no mention of this development.

The Algonquins and the rest of the brigade enjoyed but a three-day respite before Blockbuster was resumed and they were on the move again. Meanwhile the Rhine scenario had changed significantly. On the Canadians’ right, the Americans in conjunction with the British had reached the Rhine and were heading north in pursuit of fleeing Germans bound for the escape corridor that led to the Wessel Bridge over the river. On March 6th the Canadians made their own move, their ultimate objective the same strategic bridge. That day they were fully engaging the enemy, who was well aware of the possible danger to their retreating forces in the Anglo-American sector. The Germans responded by confronting the Canadians with a highly inventive and desperate resistance that capitalized on every piece of high ground they held. As a result, once again, over the next four days of battle, Blockbuster was to prove no cakewalk for the Canadian divisions, brigades, and regiments that took part,

At the regimental level the Algonquins and their brigade comrades had to slog their way under heavy fire of all sorts into fortified towns and villages, engage in deadly house to house fighting and as well, storm and control strategic crossroads and other vantage points. All the while they had to overcome the usual snafus of combat such as communications breakdowns, missed rendezvous, and skewed timetables. Throughout the regimental HQ closely followed the advancing troops, sometimes in a Sherman tank requisitioned for that purpose. Ruthven was very much a part of this, serving as an alternative adjutant and intelligence officer whenever these were indisposed or otherwise committed. Among other vital tasks, according to eye-witnesses accounts, he was expected to restore, wherever it had failed, the communications system so essential to keeping the brigade command in touch with a situation consistently in flux. But all Ruthven told his diary was how busy he was.

The Canadians’ varied operations cost them dearly, with many companies and platoons decimated. At times it must have seemed that the resumption of Blockbuster would share the fate of the first venture out of the Hochwald Gap. But there was to be no such unhappy outcome this time around, in part because of the more effective use of tanks in concert with infantry and the deployment of smaller and more effective battle groups. In any case, on the night of March 9th the main enemy body, having either served it’s purpose or suffered too many losses, decided to withdraw and take the escape route over the Wessel Bridge.

The fight, however, was not yet over. Die-hard Germans, holed up in a factory, refused to accept defeat. But after being subjected to flame-throwers and an ear-splitting artillery barrage, they sensibly changed their minds. As Warpath put it, “the last stand of the German army west of the Rhine was fading out but appropriately with all the trimmings of a Wagnerian opera”. Ruthven, music lover and frequent contributor to the regimental diary, seems to have his literary fingerprints all over the passage. In the meantime, the Canadians in the course of mopping up operations had secured the escape road and dealt with the last German stragglers.

Though the Algonquins had lost many a comrade in the fighting, they could still hail their triumph. They had made Blockbuster pay off and purged their sector of German resistance. After the battle ended, the rejoicing troops received other good news, namely that they were to be moved out of the line and resettled in a training area close to their old Dutch stamping grounds. The move began on March 12th and was recorded in Ruthven’s diary along with information that he was “under the weather”. Even so, he characteristically soldiered through it and helped organize the return trek to Holland. According to Warpath, some Algonquins enlivened the journey by donning liberated silk hats and hauling along such spoils of war as chickens and pigs by the crate load.

Once arrived at their hospitable Dutch destination the regiment embarked on a comparatively blissful two week period devoid of combat, in which they could enjoy the luxury of hot baths and haircuts. All the same, they were put through a rigorous schedule of retraining, refitting and reorganizing to make up for the unavoidable disarray of battle conditions. They also received fresh replacements, who were promptly indoctrinated into what they would have to undergo on the front line. The regiment as a whole was lectured on the likely battle role it would play. For the rank and file, however, it was not all retraining and lectures. A variety of athletic events were wisely arranged on a regiment-wide basis, in part to forge bonds between veterans and newly arrived replacements and reinforcements.

Ruthven too had his hands full for he repeatedly wrote about “busy days” in his diary. The preoccupation with Blockbuster had played havoc with regimental records and the war diary, and it was his task to sort them out and to compile accurate casualty lists. He may have had a hand in organizing a highlight of the stay in Holland, the regiment’s first formal hollow square ceremony at which medals were conferred on those who had distinguished themselves in recent combat. Ruthven attended lectures and demonstrations and spent “busy nights” presumably helping to prepare for the regiment’s eventual return to the front. When that move was made he would accompany it in his own jeep, according to his diary entry for March 30th.

By the end of the Algonquins’ two-week leave the Rhine scenario had again changed, this time much more dramatically. The river had been successfully crossed by Allied forces and the Algonquins would soon join the queue of Canadian formations about to stream over a recently built pontoon bridge. The Algonquins turn to make the eagerly anticipated crossing came on March 31st, the day after they had moved into the area. Their destination on the other side of the Rhine was an assembly area scouted and set up by an advance working party. All ranks were energized and still flushed with their recent success. Morale was also fuelled by heady talk that surmounting the Rhine barrier could mean a speedy end to the war. The Canadians might have thought differently had they known that nearly six long weeks of grueling combat would confront them before that happened.

Within a day of their arrival across the Rhine, the Algonquins and the rest of the brigade were set to join a major British and Canadian drive to the north. The aim was to bottle up the Germans still in Holland or force their retreat to the only potential escape route across the Zuider Zee, where they would be sitting ducks for Allied aircraft. Ruthven was very much a part of the northward thrust but he and the regiment were briefly hobbled by vehicle breakdowns. In the first week of April he recorded move after move, sometimes in mud and rain, and talked of “noisy nights and late operations”. He would have to be referring to the fighting that erupted on both sides of the Dutch- German border, in which the brigade was assigned the task of wiping out German resistance in the Dutch communities of Almelo and nearby Wierden. After stiff fighting the brigade took Almelo, much to the delight of its liberated citizens who had long had to endured the Gestapo headquartered there. In a so-called sideshow the Algonquins stormed Wierden on their own and on April 9th, with the vital aid of RAF Typhoons, carried the day.

The regiment was now ready to catch up with the rest of the brigade, which had already struck deep into Germany. It was poised to engage in the so called Battle of the Bogs, which would be fought over an extensive peat bog extending all the way to the much bombed German naval base of Wilhelmshaven, the Canadians’ ultimate objective. Ruthven, however, would be spared the opening weeks of the battle. The day after Wierden fell, he received word that he would be going on a long-delayed leave. He packed up, and after some travel wrinkles were ironed out, eventually left on April 14th.. His diary states that on the next day he met his English- based brother Robert, a fellow Army officer. It must have seemed that he was entering some kind of dreamland, so far removed was it from the bloody battlegrounds he had temporarily left behind. The sensation could only have been reinforced when he joined his aunt and uncle and the rest of his English relatives in the warm embrace of Wyke End. There he spent a few relaxing days, taking in a show or two and catching up on family news.

On April 21st he had to bid goodbye and decamp for London to arrange his return to duty. But feeling unwell he sought out an MO, who authorized a welcome four-day extension of his leave. After two more visits to the MO he began to improve and to clinch the recuperation went on a pleasant visit to his friends at Bedales. He returned refreshed to London, again consulted the doctor to be on the safe side, and then made arrangements for returning to his regiment. He subsequently told his diary that he “was on the move all the next day” before arriving at his post on the evening of April 27th. The following day he recorded that he found many changes and was buoyed by the news that he had been allotted a “new car” to replace the overworked jeep.

The changes were indeed many. By this date the brigade was on the outskirts of a popular resort town in Lower Saxony, the heart of north-west Germany. The town, declared an open one through negotiations initiated by alarmed local officials, was shortly occupied by the brigade. All the same, the latter’s progress to this place had been agonizingly slow and costly over the previous seventeen days. Stubborn German resistance, painfully reminiscent of the last days of Blockbuster, combined with possibly the worst terrain the Canadians had traversed, to put a damper on their offensive. If General Winter had often been the ally of the Red Army in the east, then to a degree General Bog played that role for the Wehrmacht in Lower Saxony. This natural feature frequently disrupted vehicular traffic, particularly the movement of Sherman tanks, which sometimes were so immobilized in the quagmire that the unprotected infantry had to carry the fight on their own. Other natural obstacles included thick woods and marshlands that provided good cover for German defenders. Early on in the fighting man-made impedimenta had also hindered progress. An extensive and stoutly defended canal system, dominated by the lengthy Kusten Canal, had to be bridged or crossed by assault boats, under heavy fire the whole time. Meanwhile any thinly held sections of the brigade’s line were always exploited by sharp German counterattacks. This had led to a series of fiercely fought see-saw battles and viscious hand to hand fighting, before the Canadians restored the situation. With the Algonquins leading the way, the Canadians had finally completed the canal crossings and ventured forward to the area where Ruthven caught up with them on April 27th. .

Though the problems still facing the Canadians did little to lift their spirits, their morale did soar on those occasions when good weather opened the skies to RAF assaults on enemy lines. These had the opposite and desired effect on the Germans’ emotional state, already shaken by their dwindling bench strength of reserves. In the opening days of May evidence began to mount that in spite of small pockets of die-hard resistance the German forces were in disarray and, in the opinion of a brigade historian, deteriorating into a “rabble”. All through May 4th what turned out to be well founded rumours, which made their way into Ruthven’s diary, indicated that the foe was on the point of collapse and about to seek a cease-fire. In these circumstances a planned brigade attack that night was prudently called off to avoid unjustified casualties. The Canadians on the front line learned of this barely minutes before H-hour. They were also told to take up a defensive position out of contact with the enemy and to await further developments, in all likelihood a German capitulation.

The long embattled Canadians already knew that dramatic developments elsewhere had ensured that for all intents and purposes the war itself was all but over. A shattered Berlin was already in the hands of the Red Army, which had made a remarkable recovery since its own dark days in 1941-2. For their part, the Americans and the British, seeking to keep pace, were slicing through the heartland of the Third Reich. With these sweeping events as a backdrop, the brigade heartily greeted the impending end of hostilities on its front. On May 5th, all was confirmed when the official word came down: “All offensive ops cancelled forthwith. Cease fire O800 hours. All units stand fast for future orders”. The capitulation had taken effect not only in northwestern Germany but in Holland and Denmark as well.

That day every Algonquin rejoiced in his own way though some seemed so dazed by the rush of events they were incapable of expressing any emotion. For all, however, it was soon back to business. The logistics of capitulation had to be worked out with the hapless Germans, a process pardonably attended by some brief confusion, which was noted in Ruthven’s diary entry for May 7th. After these matters were satisfactorily settled, the Algonquins moved forward to become part of an occupying force, taking up a position just south of Wilhelmshaven, which had been taken over by the Royal Navy. On the way north Ruthven wrote a simple entry for May 8th: “War over !!”. His only commentary were the exclamation marks, which seldom appeared in his diary. On that date Germany unconditionally surrendered and fighting officially ceased on all fronts. VE (Victory in Europe) Day was proclaimed.

The role of occupier did not sit well with the regiment, least of all the supervision of German civilians, especially the cocky ones who had to be put in their place. Another regimental undertaking of this sort was hinted at in Ruthven’s innocuous entry for May 15th: “Busy day”. He appears to have been involved in unceremoniously bundling off to a POW camp a large body of German soldiers found feigning illness or injuries in a nearby naval hospital. Given these circumstances, the Algonquins were relieved to learn that their days as occupiers would soon be over. As Ruthven reported to his diary, they were ordered on May 25th to pack and prepare to move the next day to Holland, wistfully described in Warpath as the “land of smiles and friendship”. Their specific destination was Wierden, the grateful town the Algonquins had liberated in early March.

On expansive grounds outside the town the men were treated to clubhouses, canteens, sports facilities, and even amateur variety shows. These diversions were supplemented with just enough conventional military drill to keep them fit. But no amount of recreation, entertainment, or parading, ceremonial or otherwise, could dispel the basic question on everyone’s mind: when would repatriation to Canada take place? Ruthven was asking it too and failed to get the response he wanted. On June 1st he told his diary that the Maple Leaf, the Army newspaper, had relayed the “disappointing news about the slowness of demobilization”, a state of affairs brought on by a host of logistical and bureaucratic factors. These included almost endless paperwork and the problematic requisition of the necessary transport, particularly the sea-going variety. Meeting the travel requirements of hundreds of thousands of servicemen bound for Canada and the United States placed a heavy strain on available shipping. The concerned higher brass, who had already sung the praises of their warriors, made a point of showing up and personally explaining as best they could the complications besetting the repatriation program.

The upshot was that many soldiers would have to wait until the New Year for a passage home. Exceptions were made for those who had accumulated sufficient service points to warrant an earlier departure, and periodically these left in small packets. No exception was made, however, for those classified as key personnel, which included a dejected Ruthven McNairn. But his dejection was apparently short lived. He would have to grin and bear it along with the others and again soldier on. He did manage to renew at least one link with home and discharge his civic duty by voting in Canada’s general election on June 4th, though for whom or what he did not say, at least to his diary.

Ruthven soon came to realize that he could use this marking time period to engage the world he had always wanted to inhabit, that of writing and the research that fed it. In a sense he had maintained a connection with that world through his voluminous diaries and reflective letters home. Indeed a week after he had read the glum news in the Maple Leaf, he and a fellow officer, with the ready approval of their CO, set about to create a regimental version of that Army newspaper. They planned to call it the “Teepee Tabloid, appropriate enough for a regiment that bore an aboriginal name. To this literary initiative he and a series of associates and helpers devoted considerable time during the remainder of the stay in Holland. The typewriter Ruthven had acquired a few days after the German capitulation could now be put to work full time along with the Thesaurus he had once received as a Christmas present at Wyke End. After much effort and a little fanfare the first issue of the paper appeared on June 14th. Within a matter of days, the North Bay Nugget reported, a copy arrived in that city. The impressed paper told its readers that the four-page “Tabloid” carried “newsy” items about the soldiers and regimental life, a sports section, cartoons, and numerous photographs. In some later instances Ruthven’s publishing schedules were thrown off by shortages of both paper and eye-catching news. Even so, the enterprise supplied the regimental readership, officers and men alike, with much needed entertainment and enlightenment when it did appear. It served as well as a critical bonding device for those Algonquins still cooling their heels in Holland. The paper was ultimately joined by an even more ambitious initiative, the well received companion piece, the “Teepee Daily”. Both publications also provided Ruthven with a kind of professional release and in their own way augmented the Algonquins’ growing archives.

In late June Ruthven was presented with an opportunity to go beyond these journalistic steps and put together a full fledged history of the regiment, the work to be overseen by a recently struck Historical Committee. Because of his literary bent and his contributions to the regimental war diary, upon which a history would heavily depend, Ruthven, to his great satisfaction, was considered an obvious choice for the job. On July 3rd he embarked on a special mission. His diary records that he and a senior officer flew to London to see Colonel Charles P. Stacey, Director of History, Canadian Forces, and arguably the country’s leading military historian. Ruthven provided no diary details of their conversations in Acton, located in Ealing, a part of London. But presumably he was coached on the fine points of military history and advised on how well executed regimental accounts would serve Stacey’s own comprehensive project, later published as The Victory Campaign. (See SOURCES)

While at Acton, Ruthven squeezed out time to pay a visit to Bedales, still one of his favourite haunts. Then on July 14th he “closed up shop” in Acton and happily armed with a formal leave that extended his stay, he visited a friend in Hayward’s Heath before proceeding ritualistically to the welcoming embrace of Wyke End. Such visits and his extensive travels about the country, particularly his sojourns in London, reinforced his admiration for “all things British” (his father’s words). Before his leave ended this confirmed anglophile successfully applied for membership in the Royal Empire Society, whose impressive library may also have been a factor in his decision. On July 25th, he departed Wyke End, caught a flight out of London Airport and shortly arrived back at his unit. The following day he enlightened his CO on the meetings with Colonel Stacey and gave assurances that work on the history would soon start in earnest. (It was from this same CO that Ruthven later “got hell for cancelling [his] batman’s leave”.)

Beginning in August and over the next several months, he worked on the project, that is, when he was not dealing with more or less routine regimental chores and tending whenever he could to the needs of the “Tabloid” and its sister publication. One task he no longer had to face, however, was censoring the mail of the rank and file though by means of it he had gained a better understanding of the men. Another wartime practice was dropped when he was ordered to turn in his service pistol. It was demobilized, so to speak, well before he was. Still another sign of the times saddened him, the breaking up and dispersal of his old pioneer platoon, with which he had shared so many perils and pleasures.

Though still busy enough with his varied activities, Ruthven had days available when he could get away on his own or with friends and do what he always enjoyed, travelling the countryside in search of antiquities and book shops, especially those with coveted first editions on their shelves. On one occasion he wryly used what could be construed as military parlance to describe the experience: “stopped by a bookstore”. He also made a point of gathering shards of stained glass for his father’s collection and periodically mailed them home along with his many book purchases. In the course of his travels he crisscrossed much of Holland, taking in the cultural as well as the natural landscape all along the way, often staying overnight at picturesque hotels. He once drove as far as Brussels, where he took his time examining its ornate civic architecture. At one time or another he paid visits to Holland’s major cities and art centres where he had “good times” and a chance to gaze upon Rembrandts and the work of other Dutch Masters. He had words of praise for the striking urban merits of The Hague and Utrecht, but none inexplicably for the otherwise renowned Delft. Ruthven frequently ended his trips at Zeist where Robert was now stationed. Sometimes when their leaves coincided Robert accompanied him on his travels, bringing along his good company and the latest news of family and mutual friends.

By this time the regiment had moved to a new rest area near the Dutch town of Bussum where it eagerly awaited news of projected sailing dates for Canada. This probably triggered a characteristically candid letter Ruthven wrote Laurie Connon, a close family friend and peer in whom he could confide:

With possible homecoming looming somewhere in the distance, I am beginning to make tentative plans. I suppose I will go back to my unremunerative life of an unsuccessful writer. It is the only life that attracts me at all. And perhaps, if I keep at it long enough, who knows, I might be successful.

He may also have shared these reflections with Robert when the two of them made a leave trip to Britain, though on a “rough plane ride” that eventually landed them at Biggin Hill, the RAF fighter base of Battle of Britain fame. Then it was on to London, the postwar mecca for all tourists, where they touched base with the usual sights and sought out an advertised lecture on the Soviet Union. Finding the hall already packed, they sensibly set off for a burlesque show instead. After leaving London and its wonders, they travelled north and engaged in vigorous rubbernecking in York, Edinburgh, and Glasgow. It was then on to Liverpool and ultimately the restfulness of Wyke End. Several days’ jarring travel on crowded trains and unrelenting sightseeing may have taken their toll on the otherwise active Ruthven for he only had this to record in his diary: “quiet days around the house”.

When November dawned Ruthven and his brother took their leave of Wyke End and journeyed to Bedales and its trademark “fine welcome”. Ruthven used the occasion to get much needed sun and exercise by working on his hosts’ extensive farm, probably the first time in a long time that he had turned his hand to this kind of wholesome recreation. From Bedales they went on eventually to Portsmouth where they were treated by friends to an information-packed tour of a warship. On their return to London they lightheartedly extended their leave so they could enjoy the cathedral city of Canterbury before returning to Holland. Over the next several weeks the two brothers continued to visit back and forth, that is, until, after some delays, Robert was finally allowed to sail for Canada on 5 January 1946. Ruthven would soon be following in his wake. On the day his brother left England, Ruthven had already been in the country some three weeks, having arrived in Dover on December 15th after bidding adieu to Dutch friends and “closing up shop” at Bussum in a swirl of paperwork and last minute things to do. He had stepped ashore with his carefully packed belongings, including a bound volume of his prized “Teepee Tabloid”.

He then settled in at Haslemere, from which he shuttled back and forth to the major military camp at Aldershot, where orientation lectures were arranged for those scheduled to embark for Canada. For the first time he made no mention of how he spent his Christmas or New Year’s Day, which would be his last overseas. His jam-packed diary could explain the omissions. He was obliged to make his last few entries on military stationery pasted at the back. On January 2nd, he recorded that he had sent “cuts to North Bay”, probably a reference to edited photos for a regimental historical collection. The following day he had time to pay a quick visit to Bedales and say his final goodbyes. On January 6th he made his last known diary entry. He talked about visiting London yet again, seeing a show, and staying at the Canadian Legion.

Some two weeks later he joined the shrunken remnant of the Algonquins and finally set sail for home on an Atlantic no longer infested with U-boats. All the same, the crossing was struck by heavy weather, which delayed the ship’s arrival in Halifax by a day. Thus Ruthven lived to see his native land again, an outcome that had seemed not all that certain on his voyage to England in 1943. The Algonquins disembarked on January 27th and two days later were tumultuously welcomed in North Bay, their starting point so many months before. Their military service was definitively over. So was a relieved Ruthven’s – almost. Apparently he did not join the joyful procession to North Bay but alighted at Toronto to the family’s warm embrace. To everybody’s delight he appeared to be in perfect health and ready to make full use of his 30-day disembarkation leave. In February he and his parents vacationed at an inn in Muskoka, a recreational area he had always enjoyed. On March 11th, while still in the throes of, as he put it, “learning all over again how to act in polite society”, he was formally demobilized and routinely attached to the Reserve of Active Officers. He also received a rehabilitation grant and a clothing allowance that would thankfully enabled him to replace the old civilian wardrobe. He may have been attired in his new “civvy street” garb when he visited yet another “elsewhere”, New York City. He also travelled to North Bay where he happily re-connected with old comrades and helped prepare for the Algonquins’ much anticipated grand reunion.

Ruthven’s career plans as a newly re-minted civilian should have come as no surprise, given his avocation in pre-enlistment times. In a completed questionnaire submitted to his superiors months before, journalism and writing both fiction and non-fiction monopolized his response. To this end he contemplated postgraduate work in the field, now made possible by generous federal educational grants to veterans. The officer who had reviewed Ruthven’s statements added his own commentary, acknowledging his able service as a combat officer and the intelligence and the talents that had made him a valued member of his regiment. The officer might have added that while making this contribution Ruthven had been promoted and mentioned in despatches. In any case, his many attributes, the officer concluded, would serve Ruthven “reasonably” well in his chosen career. Laurie Connon recalled that to expedite that process, he rented a small office in downtown Hamilton where he could give his undivided attention to his varied literary projects.


In mid-June, however, his hoped-for writing career was abruptly put on hold when he came down with a raging fever that sent him to hospital. Initially pneumonia was suspected but on closer examination the doctors, to the family’s horror, diagnosed instead tuberculous empyema, a virulent form of TB. It was a stranger to Canada but not uncommon in Europe, where, in Ruthven’s case, it had gone undetected and therefore undiagnosed before his return home. After the diagnosis, he was transferred to the Hamilton’s Mountain Sanatorium, which for decades cared for tubercular patients. Throughout the ordeal that followed sorrowing family members took turns keeping vigil at his bedside. Professor McNairn later revealed that “when [his son’s] mind was wandering in his last illness he often spoke of his men, ‘I must look after my men. I must get a better place for them’ ”. This was a touching echo of a refrain that he had confided to his wartime diaries. To the very end “Pop” McNairn displayed the strong sense of caring and the deep commitment to duty that had illuminated his life.

On 5 September 1946 the door closed on Ruthven’s promising future “a shock to his many friends”, as the McMaster Alumni News reported. They and the family were struck by a tragic irony. Unscathed after eleven long months of combat overseas he had become a fatal casualty at home. Some two years after a brief Hamilton Spectator obituary appeared, Warpath was published. An Author’s Note paid him a gracious and well deserved tribute: “Particular remembrance and gratitude must be given to Capt. Ruthven C. McNairn, who began the compilation of the material for this work, and whose sad and untimely death has robbed the reader of a far finer work”. Equally moving comments flowed into the grateful McNairn household from his fellow officers and his men, tributes that made their own special contribution to this biography.

Ruthven Colquhoun McNairn is buried in Grove Cemetery, Dundas, Ontario.

C.M. Johnston & Lorna Johnston

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: The assistance afforded by Rev. Norman McNairn and nephew Colin McNairn, Robert McNairn’s son, was indispensable. Not only did they share their own informative reminiscences but generously made available Ruthven McNairn’s vital wartime papers made up of diaries, correspondence, reflections, and memoirs. Colin McNairn also kindly undertook to edit a draft of this biography. McMaster classmate Arthur Shaver (’38) and friend Laurie Connon offered key recollections. McMaster Archivist/Librarians Kenneth Morgan and Sheila Turcon also made important contributions. Dr. Marie Noronha and Marc Sheardown respectively supplied medical information and technical help.

SOURCES: The Ruthven McNairn diaries consulted cover the periods 22 June-13 Sept. 1938; 14 Feb.1943–8 Jan. 1946; 31 May 1944-28 Feb. 1945; The following documentation was also examined: National Archives of Canada / Wartime Personnel Records: Service Record of Captain Ruthven C. McNairn; Commonwealth War Graves Commission, Commemorative Information on Captain Ruthven C. McNairn; Martin Middlebrook and Chris Everitt, The Bomber Command War Diaries:, An Operational Reference Book, 1939-1945 (London: Penguin Books, 1990). 403-4; McMaster Divinity College / Canadian Baptist Archives: McMaster University Biographical File, Professor Wm. H. McNairn, McMaster University Student File 6263, Ruthven C. McNairn, McMaster University Biographical File, Ruthven C. McNairn, McMaster University Library / Special Collections: Silhouette, 1 Oct., 26 Nov. 1936, 19 Mar., 2 Dec. 1937, 17 Mar. 1938; Marmor 1936, 70, 1937, 72, 1938, 26, 65, 68; McMaster Alumni News, 12 Oct. 1939, 27 Oct. 1942, 5, 21 May, 1945, 9 Nov. 1946, 13, 5, 12 Feb. 1948, Hamilton Spectator,6 September 1946 (front page and obituary).

Secondary sources included G.L. Cassidy, Warpath: The Story of the Algonquin Regiment, 1939-1945 (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1948), especially pp. xi, 81, 73, 112, 116, 118, 119, 168,193, 238, 333, 344, 363; C.P. Stacey, Official History of the Canadian Army in the Second World War, III: The Victory Campaign: The Operations in North-West Europe, 1944-1945 (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1966), especially pp. 475, 492-3, 496-501, 508-520; Terry Copp and Robert Vogel, The Maple Leaf Route: Falaise (Alma, ON: 1983), 112 ff; R.A. Paterson, A History of the 10th Canadian Infantry Brigade (DeJong &Co.-Hilversum, 1945); John Macfie, Sons of the Pioneers: Memories of Veterans of the Algonquin Regiment (Parry Sound: Hay Press, 2001)13, 25, 43, 45, 50, 101’ C.M. Johnston and J.C. Weaver, Student Days: An Illustrated History of Student Life at McMaster University from the 1890s to the 1980s (Hamilton: McMaster Alumni Association/Seldon Printing, 1987), chap. 4.

[ For a related biography, see William Allen McKeon