Blog Background 1
[Lt. McFetrick, C.O., and SLt. Galoway lead the class of '41
across the C.N.R. bridge on MacNab St., Hamilton, Ontario.]
My father started his military march as a raw recruit in the Royal Canadian Navy Volunteer Reserve in Hamilton, 1941. He continued his training in Halifax, volunteered for the Combined Operations organization and soon marched in Scotland and England, where he prepared for the Dieppe raid and Allied invasions of North Africa, Sicily and Italy. Before completing his military march he served two years at a Combined Ops training camp on Vancouver Island. He was discharged on September 5, 1945, after declining the call to participate in the Pacific theatre of war, and one day before his 25th birthday.
Now, about seventy years after his discharge - 'honourable, with no black marks' - I am doing the marching, so to speak, as I follow his faint footsteps across Canada and abroad to learn more about his adventures, and to discover more about the man, now deceased, that I daily recall as a tireless, honest worker and good, supportive father.
I am also doing a bit of writing related to my travels, research and discoveries as other children of war veterans have done before me. One might say I have 'caught the bug' after discovering my father's hand-written Navy memoirs in a tired-looking file folder in November, 2011. I read one page, then another, and because I was ready at the time to read more and dig deeper I did so. And I haven't stopped.
'Caught the bug,' indeed.
Photo from HMCS Star, A Naval Reserve History
Photo donated by my father, Doug Harrison
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