The Welshman and the Canadian

      War torn in 1943, London was never a place to escape to but more a place to escape from. But the troubled Welshman, homeless, ragged and mentally ill, had somehow made it there from his home in South Wales. Starving and forlorn, he wandered the streets seeking scraps here and there amidst the debris of bombed out buildings.  Such was the mental state of the stranger that there was little awareness of such things. His only concerns were for food and shelter. So it was with some relief that he found himself in a shattered home with some scraps of bread close at hand. He devoured them ravenously, never realising that they had been covered in rat poison which ate away at his liver and resulted in his death some days later.  He found himself in his mid-thirties, a victim in a London mortuary. 

  It was in death that the life of the Welshman began.

    The Canadian was born in the province of Alberta but had done most of his growing up in Vancouver in British Columbia. One of his claims to fame was that he had never missed a day of school in his life.  He was lean, fit and athletic, a soccer player.  He was well mannered and polite. He worked in the family’s glass business. He enjoyed the company of his fellow males and had been brought up with an excellent sense of right and wrong. It was no surprise to anybody that when the war clouds finally broke over Europe in September 1939, he was eager to volunteer. After all Britain to him was still the ‘old country’, his parents still spoke in the Scottish brogue with which they had grown up. He was not going to fight in some foreign war. He was going to do his bit for King and Country. He joined the regiment known as Lord Strathcona’s Horse, although the horse element was long since gone. He was destined to spend his war in an armoured truck.

   It was late in 1943 when the young man finally found himself at the sharp end of the war in Italy. His diary revealed some hard fighting with the loss of brothers in arms, harsh sounding billets, inconsistent food and the occasional finding of alcohol.  He survived Italy, Holland and Germany and found himself on his way to stay with relatives in Scotland at the war’s end although he would have preferred to have been whooping it up in London on VE Day (Victory Europe). He was, however, on a train headed north.

It is perhaps stretching things a bit far to link the fates of the Welshman and the Canadian together. But, Dear Friends, I felt impelled to do so.

Glyndwr Michael and Gordon Pennicuick never met and certainly never knew of each other’s existence. Yet the former may have saved the latter’s life.  Italy, ‘The soft underbelly of Europe’ as Churchill would have it, was anything but soft in 1943. It was heavily protected by Adolf Hitler’s Germans and Benito Mussolini’s Italians. Both dictators knew that inevitably the Allies would invade and seek to liberate the continent. They were unsure of when and where. But Italy seemed a suicidal place to make a landing.  Deception was needed.

   The body of the Welshman was given a new identity. He became a major in the Royal Marines. He was furnished with papers and amongst them were secret plans to suggest that the planned invasion of Europe was going to take place in Nazi occupied Greece, not in Italy.  The body was then secretly jettisoned from a British submarine off the coast of neutral Spain with the well planned belief that it would fall into the hands of the network of German spies who were operating with impunity out of that country. It worked. Hitler fell for the ruse and diverted many of his troops from Italy to Greece in anticipation of an invasion. It did not come. Instead the allied forces landed on the island of Sicily to less resistance than would have been the case were it not for the body of Glyndwr Michael. They fought their way up the spine of Italy to a successful conclusion. It was a masterly piece of deception which helped mitigate the threat to the invading troops amongst whom was Canadian Gordon Pennicuick.

    My father-in-law, Gordon Pennicuick, died in 1999. I came to know him fairly well. He trained for war, he fought a war, he survived a war. He was away from home for 5 long years and more.  If he had not come through there would have been no Irene and no Alison and no Grant Davidson.  Glyndwr Michael was a catalyst in his life, he was the saviour of many, he mitigated and facilitated, he paved the way, making a difficult task less so. A dead Welshman, anonymous at the time, somehow saved countless allied lives.

  Of course, Dear Reader, the here and now is most important to us but sometimes looking back at the there and then, one  feels a flutter of something passing overhead, maybe a gentle breeze or a bird on the wing, or the draft of a mythological fate reminding us that there but for the grace go I.  I felt such a moment as Irene and I watched “Operation Mincemeat” on Netflix the other evening.  This was a plan that could so easily have failed and in so doing may have changed the fates of many. In our opinion it wasn’t a great movie, which is a pity.  (Having Colin Firth and Matthew Macfadyen teaming up was a bit weird as they have both played Mr. Darcy in adaptations of “Pride and Prejudice’!) But the point was well made, the history was accurate and the facts spoke for themselves.

    It is humbling, is it not, to realise that so much in life is luck; being in the right place at the right time; surviving the foul, thriving on the fair. But for a split second, an awkward turn on the joystick, a momentary lapse in concentration, a fatal wrong decision I might have known my Uncle Billy who was shot down and killed over Ravenna in Northern Italy on December 17^th 1944, the same month as Gordon Pennicuick first set foot on Italian soil. The fates of two young men, one tragically taken away before his 21^st birthday and one living to the ripe old age of 84. ‘Twas ever thus.