Albertans remember fathers’ WWII battles to liberate the Netherlands

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Eight decades ago, in 1944, after the Allies’ bloody landing on the beaches of Normandy and hard-fought battles to get into the heart of France, they advanced from Paris toward the Rhine River.  

But one Godforsaken patch of ground — and water — was in the way.

Here are the accounts of six Albertans and their wartime connection to the Scheldt and the Liberation of the Netherlands.

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These men were tight-lipped about the war, hesitant to burden their families with the horrors, and hoping to forget it themselves.  

Their accounts are told by their grown children exploring their fathers’ wartime roots with the non-profit In Our Father’s Footsteps.

Where the Rhine, Meuse, and Scheldt rivers meet — in their conjoined homelands of northeast France, west Belgium, and southwest Netherlands — there’s a “Golden Delta” more than 350 km long. In October 1944, as part of the Second World War effort to retake mainland Europe, the Allies had to clear enemy forces from the banks of the Scheldt estuary.

The Germans wouldn’t make it easy. They flooded the estuary, necessitating amphibious assaults.

The Allies knew there would be high casualties for taking the low ground.

The First Canadian Army, with Polish and British forces under its command, was given the job.

The five weeks of waterlogged conditions were said to be reminiscent of the First World War’s grim, mud-soaked bloodbath.

At a great cost of 12,873 Allied casualties (killed, wounded, or missing) — 6,367 of whom were Canadians — the Scheldt was cleared by Nov. 8, 1944, allowing the Allies to bring fresh resources to the receding front line.

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The hard-won victory finally opened up the port of Antwerp, a critical staging ground for the eventual defeat of the Nazi regime.

Our father’s footsteps

Gilbert Hunter went back to the Netherlands for the 40th and 50th anniversaries of the Dutch liberation.

“As a result of those experiences, he began to open up, and late in life, he wrote a war memoir,” said his daughter, Karen Hunter, the Guelph-based founder of In Our Father’s Footsteps.

A gift to his family in his 85th year, “he told us that everything that we would want to know about his war experiences, we would find in that memoir,” Hunter remembered.

After Gilbert Hunter died, his daughter had spiritual journeys — climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, walking the Camino de Santiago.

And it occurred to her that touring the path of Canadian troops based on her father’s memoir through the Scheldt could be another such journey. With the help of the Dutch couple who billeted her parents on their visits, she formed a plan to walk in his footsteps to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Dutch liberation.

Soon enough, Hunter decided to share the idea with other descendants of Canadian soldiers, especially after she went to Holland ahead of time and experienced for herself “the incredible gratitude of the Dutch for their Canadian liberators.”

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The first journey, set for 2020, was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

When it did happen two years later, 100 people took part. Along for the ride was the Canadian Remembrance Torch, a ceremonial instrument developed by engineering students at McMaster University and lit from the Centennial Flame on Parliament Hill.

The 2025 IOFF journey marking the 80th anniversary of the Dutch Liberation will be the last, Hunter said.

An expected 140 participants will be divided into platoons for the 12 days, each with a leader, a flag bearer, and a medic.

They’ll stay in a former Second World War Canadian field hospital.

This week, it was announced that honorary Canadian Lt.-Gen. Richard Roemer — a 100-year-old Second World War veteran — will be the event’s patron and participate however he can.

“It’s a very unique, one-of-a-kind immersive event,” Hunter said.

Picked off from 1,000 yards

In 2022, Jean Gallup and her sister, Susan Stahl, took in every march through the towns where the children of those who suffered bear gratitude to the children of those who sacrificed.

The trip was very emotional, said the resident of High River, Alta.

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It wasn’t just the 97-year-old Dutch veteran, proud under his sharp beret, his chest overflowing with medals, or the fair-haired tykes raised to wave flags at the roadside, lest they forget.

It wasn’t even dining at the same table with Ottawa-born Princess Margriet of the Netherlands and her husband Pieter van Vollenhoven, a nod to Gallup’s Dutch ancestry.

It was about her dad, Wayne H. Arnold, a young man from Empress in southeast Alberta, who saw a world of loss and victory long before he even met Gallup’s mother.

“Just knowing that my father might have walked there,” Gallup said.

Arnold joined up with the Calgary Highlanders at the Depot 13 enlistment station.

In the days after the landings at Normandy, the sharp-eyed Arnold was holding position in a tiny French village near Caen when he spotted periodic flashes from a bombed-out church steeple.

“Our relief for guard duty came and I said that one of them could go back to sleep for a while as I wanted to watch this flash,” Gallup’s dad remembered in his humour-tinged memoir, published on canadianletters.ca.

“I finally decided that this flash had to be a mirror in the hand of a German. The flashes were irregular, which gave me the idea of somebody sending a message. Also, following the series of flashes, the mortars of the Germans, which we called Moaning Minnies, would be fired into our lines. Finally, I drew a sight with my rifle and fired.”

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He never saw any more flashes.

Allied intelligence officers found a dead German soldier lying on the ground below the church steeple. With a sniper’s accuracy, Arnold had nailed him square between the eyes — from 1,000 yards away.

In that summer of 1944, Wayne Arnold encountered a friend, a dispatch rider he knew from training in England.

“We were so glad to see each other that we hugged and then we stood each with an arm on each other’s shoulder and compared notes. All of a sudden Scott fell to the ground … he had been hit with 20-mm ammunition, blowing his legs off at the knees,” he wrote.

Arnold immediately went to work to stop the bleeding, before stretcher bearers bore the lad off to hospital. That was the end of Scott’s war, though he survived the loss of his legs.

Later, Arnold participated in the Netherlands campaign. His memoirs recall climbing atop a windmill to watch a battle through binoculars, a memorable Christmas with “exceptionally nice” Dutch locals, and an unnecessarily dangerous effort to retrieve a 150-pound pig that had been shot in No Man’s Land.

You can read Wayne Arnold’s memoir here.

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Tragedy in Antwerp for Alberta farmer

Maureen Liviniuk of Edmonton was on the 2022 footsteps’ tour, celebrating her father, Peter Dechant, who was a farmer in Alberta’s Peace country, hailing from North Star, near Manning.

“We wanted to understand what had happened and see what my dad might have faced when he was in the war. It was kind of a learning exercise,” Liviniuk said.

“Most people think a holiday is going to be fun and exciting. This was the most meaningful trip I’ve ever taken.

“Every day we would meet people who had been in the war, or their parents had been in the war, and they were so grateful. We also visited all the military cemeteries, and just seeing all of the crosses and all of the boys who didn’t come home makes you appreciate those who did,” she said.

Her impression of the Dutch?

“Warm and wonderful, and so grateful to this day. You can hear me getting emotional,” she said, a tear catching in her voice.

“Their kids are taught in school to be appreciative of the Canadian sacrifice.”

He was reluctant to speak about the war, but before Peter Dechant died, a six-hour autobiographical recording was made — including a half-hour about his war experiences — “a very wonderful gift,” his daughter said.

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On a lighter note, he recounted being briefly detained by Americans who thought he was a German spy.

Canadian, of German extraction, he was tall and blond — and he spoke German.

“It took him a while to convince them that he was a friend,” Liviniuk said.

Dechant told of driving in Antwerp when a bomb exploded in front of his jeep.

“He talked about the carnage, about a little girl who was killed, and that was pretty emotional for him,” Liviniuk recounted.

“The one guy who was in his jeep was standing up looking over the glass, and his eardrums got shattered. And my dad was driving, so he was shielded behind the glass and he was safe, but this little girl that was very close to them, was killed.

“It was that close to being the end of him, and it had an impact on him for a very long time.”

Turnips for a month

Dick Olver has the Second World War in his DNA.

His mother and father both served overseas.

They were a couple of kids from southwestern Ontario who met in a young people’s group at Canon Davis Memorial Church in Sarnia.

His mother, Marie Turner, enlisted in the women’s army “and was in the first company to go to England. She arrived there just a little bit after D-Day,” the Calgary resident recalled.

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Her brothers went, too — Olver’s uncles Harry, Jim, Tom, and Red.

By the time the young Marie got to her clerical post in Britain, her sweetheart and her brothers were already fighting on “the continent.”

Young John “Jack” Olver had been a pipefitter’s apprentice, and he ended up repairing big guns.

After combat had ended, he’d go out to the battlefield and salvage what was fixable.

And there were some hardships.

“Once, about the winter of 1944-1945, he was caught for a week in the basement of a house, and all they had to eat was turnips,” his son said.

When he returned to Canada, John Olver became a pipefitter in Alberta’s burgeoning oilpatch.

Marie died young, and John remarried Ida Rothwell, who had been a Canadian Army nurse in France, Belgium and Germany.

Walking in his father’s footsteps in 2022 with IOFF, Dick Olver and his fellow war tourists found a field where a number of Canadians had been killed and buried.

They met an elder who had honoured the dead there all her grown life.

“She’d been in her teens and she used to go out there and put flowers on the graves,” he said.

Now in her nineties, the flower-bearer was there to greet them — in a wheelchair — and it was her grandchildren who placed flowers on the graves.

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Along the journey, a pipe and drum band would often turn up to escort them through a town.

“We’d be walking through the town and, and people would be out with Dutch and Canadian flags, very welcoming,” Olver recalled.

In one town, the village men’s choir sang on one corner. Then on another corner, the ladies’ choir serenaded them.

Then a mixed choir.

On the town windmill, two blades bore the Dutch flag, and the Canadian flag was painted on the other two.

From war to wedding

Archie Gray, a farmer from Barrhead, Alta., set out to help win the war. He brought home a more personal victory.

First to Edmonton to sign up with the British Columbia Dragoons, Gray eventually took part in the final stages of Netherlands campaign — but first experienced the war via Algiers, and then Italy, which became a launchpad for retaking Western Europe.

When it comes to veterans talking about their war experience, the “Greatest Generation” often reverted to the strong, silent type. And Archie Gray was no exception, said his daughter, St. Albert resident Louise Seymour.

“He was a man who didn’t speak a whole lot and never spoke about the war,” she said.

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She walked in his footsteps to hear what he wouldn’t say.

“I was always very curious about where he was, what he did,” she said.

Trained to be a tank mechanic and driver, Gray met the lovely Rose Anne de Jonghe in Belgium when he was billeted at her family’s home as his unit stopped to regroup and fix equipment.

They fell in love in a single month before he headed to the Netherlands.

In Holland in April 1945, Gray helped tie up loose ends. By early May, the country was secured.

He worked for the United Nations’ Relief and Rehabilitation Association until he was discharged.

Home to Canada by February 1946, he applied for Rose Anne’s immigration.

They wed in April 1947. Technically, she couldn’t be called a “war bride.”

While visiting Holland, their daughter basked in the inherited glow as she traced the path to victory.

“I was very touched by the warmth of the Dutch people and how it almost this gratitude to the Canadians for liberating them.

“It’s almost in their genes now, even the young people — every age,” Seymour said.

A bluebird in a heart tattoo

For intrepid motorcycle dispatcher Claude Joseph “Buster” Ball, there was but one thing left to do to get ready for the D-Day landing in Normandy.

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He went with six buddies to get a tattoo.

The brothers in arms opted for a stylized bluebird in a heart on their arms. The other fellows had the name of their girlfriend or wife inked in. The still-single Buster’s tattoo said “Mom.”

Ball landed in Normandy in the afternoon on D-Day, and like the other surviving troops, made his way to the Western European theatre.

He was in the Dutch town of Arnhem “during that bridge fiasco,” when somebody threw a grenade at Buster and blew him off his motorcycle.

He wrecked his knee and got a concussion — but kept his tattoo intact.

“I knew that he had medals, and he did tell me one of his medals was for flying without a parachute,” recalled his daughter Carla Fahlman.

“That’s when he was blown off that bridge.”

The Allies were defeated in the Battle of Arnhem, suffering heavy losses and failing to secure the town’s road bridge. The battle was depicted in the 1977 film A Bridge Too Far.

In Holland, Buster met his wife-to-be, Johanna, in a literal walk on the wild side.

“My mom and her girlfriend were sent out to a farm for a while to live during a really bad bombing, and they decided to come home, and they were walking through a minefield, and my dad and his partner found them in the minefield,” Fahlman said.

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“He rescued her, and I guess they scolded them for walking where they shouldn’t.”

Cupid took it from there.

Of the seven fellows who got the bluebird-heart tattoo together, Joseph “Buster” Ball alone made it home to Canada.

Back in Lethbridge, Alta., the couple wed, and he secured a career with Alberta Government Telephones.

When shrapnel emerged from his body periodically, he’d have to go to the doctor to have it taken out.

And there were other signs of scars.

“My brother and I would fight over who had to wake my dad up from his nap, because he always woke up fighting,” his daughter recalled.

Claude Joseph “Buster” Ball is gone but remembered.

His daughter went to Holland for the 70th anniversary of the liberation, and she’s going with In Our Father’s Footsteps in 2025, in hopes of learning more about her father’s war journey.

And his granddaughter bears a bluebird-heart tattoo.

Building bridges, dodging bullets

Bob “Buck” Burrows was a sapper and a truck driver with the Canadian Engineers — demolitions and bridge-building.

After a brief stint at Edmonton’s Prince of Wales Armoury, he was sent to Petawawa, Ont., for training.

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Good thing, too — that’s where he met his wife-to-be.

Deployed to Western Europe on June 11, 1944, he missed the initial bloody rush, joining the Allied troops going from France to Belgium to Holland.

“He always talked about Holland. He liked the fact that he helped liberate that country, and the Dutch people were always so good to them,” said his son Derek Burrows, a resident of Leduc, Alta.

One of his squadron’s specialties was the temporary Bailey bridges. They were crucial to get troops across the rivers of Western Europe after the German army destroyed many crossings, playing for time on their doomed retreat to the Rhineland.

In a letter to his fiancée Mary, Bob described slippery roads and driving while ill with boils on his head.

“It is sure no fun going out to work and having to dodge bullets all the time. I sure had a close one the other day, and believe me, it did not take me long to move away from that area. … It sure is surprising how fast one can move when they have to.”

Bob promised to build Mary a house with two doors.

“Don’t worry, dear, as this war won’t last long … and I will be home dodging dishpans and kettles. Haha!

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“I don’t think that old boat will be able to go fast enough for me when I know I am on the way home … Here’s hoping to see you real soon, dear, with the best of my love to you, darling.”

He signed off, “From yours, as ever, Bob, SWAK XXXXXXX.”  (Sealed with a kiss.)

Mary got that house with two doors when Bob “Buck” Burrows came home from the war and settled in as a — wait for it — long-haul trucker.

Derek Burrows was there when his father spent an evening over the kitchen table, swapping stories with Tom, an army mate from Spirit River in northwestern Alberta.

“I wish I could have had a recording of everything they said,” he said.

“They still didn’t talk about anything gory. They didn’t talk about killings. They talked more about the training and the stuff they used to do.

“He always told me, ‘You never want to experience war like I did.’ So he saw stuff that would probably curl your hair.”

Bob’s grandson Robert — named for his granddad — will be walking alongside Derek in his grandfather’s footsteps in 2025. An avid history buff, he loves “chasing stories.”

“That’s the best part about history, is learning the things that once happened and relearning what has happened before,” said Robert Burrows, an Edmonton resident.

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“There’s so many things that get forgotten as things progress because other people don’t write it down, or it never gets passed to the next person, or someone doesn’t remember it.”

Edmonton Journal reporter Jackie Carmichael is the author of two books on the First World War — Heard Amid the Guns and Tweets from the Trenches.

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