Naval Gazing: Deciphering Our Father's War

Growing up in Toronto in the 1950s and ‘60s, my younger brother Michael and I were typical privileged baby boomers entranced by books and movies on World War II. We knew the drill: The Guns of Navarone. The Cruel Sea. The Caine Mutiny. The Longest Day. The Great Escape. Nothing escaped our notice.

When Mike, age 11, polished off the 1,200 page epic, “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich”, I followed suit. Our curiosity was bottomless, our older sister Shelagh’s understandably less so – this was a boy thing. But like many veterans of “The Good War”, our father Jack remained largely tight-lipped about his experiences overseas. Although he was a highly successful doctor and we lived in an affluent neighbourhood, he was a remote figure, “absent in his presence”; although we didn’t understand it at the time, he was struggling manfully to live up to the great expectations of his eminent, yet remote, father, an international figure in public health.

A rake-thin jazz hipster flashing an Irish wit, Jack radiated an alluring glamour, and yet his puzzling emotional quarantining from his own children left us at a loss. One Saturday afternoon, my brother and I were goose-stepping down our driveway, slapping our palms in Seig Heil salutes against each others’ foreheads, imitating The Three Stooges; our father stuck his head out the door to rightly chastise our ignorance and foolishness.

Suddenly it hit us: our father had fought Hitler, and it was no joke. Only as we edged out of childhood did we begin to realize that our vicarious enthrallment with the war was an indirect attempt to crack the mystery of our ghostly father. Why was he the way he was?

In closets and drawers, we budding detectives unearthed our first clues: a moth-balled naval officer’s uniform, a clip of miniature medals, and a navy blue canvas duffel bag monogrammed with gold lettering, all caps: “SURG. LIEUT. J.L. FITZGERALD.”

What secrets did they hold?

Then, one day, we hit real paydirt: a scrapbook of documents, newspaper clippings and black and white photographs. On the deck of a Canadian frigate, young, bearded sailors proudly brandished machine guns. Helmeted crew clustered around the ship’s mascot, a cat called “Stand Easy.”  Another sailor pointed to a German shell splintered on the shield of an Oerlikon gun. And there was our father, a bespectacled officer in a beige, toggled duffle coat, standing watch on the conning tower, scanning the storm-tossed North Sea with a pair of binoculars.

 Intriguing.

 But as Diane Arbus famously observed: “A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know.”

Then, as we delicately unfolded the aging documents taped to the black pages of the scrapbook, the cat jumped out of the duffel bag. At last, the war story our father could not bring himself to tell us.

 After graduating from the University of Toronto medical school in 1942, Jack enlisted in the Royal Canadian Navy in February 1943 -- a strange choice, given his fear of water. Trained in Port Arthur-Fort William on Lake Superior (now Thunder Bay), he was assigned as a surgeon-lieutenant on a newly commissioned frigate, HMCS Annan.  

Joining an escort group in Londonderry, the Annan protected convoys in coastal waters around the United Kingdom. On October 16, 1944, the frigate encountered the German U-boat 1006 in the North Sea south of the Faroe Islands. A depth charge attack badly damaged the submarine, forcing her to surface. As Annan approached, U-1006 fired a torpedo, but it detonated prematurely, causing no damage. After launching flares to illuminate the area, Annan opened fire, killing six German sailors while three Canadians were wounded in the returning barrage. After 44 remaining crewmen abandoned ship, the sub was sunk by two depth charges.

Due to a news blackout, the skirmish was not reported in the press for another six months. On April 3, 1945, just weeks short of the end of the war, the front page of the Toronto Telegram saluted the victors with a picture of our father standing beside Dr. Stuart MacDonald -- the son of Lucy Maud Montgomery, author of the beloved Anne of Green Gables books -- transferred to assist with the treatment of the wounded.

In the scrapbook, we found a detailed, type-written four page account, written by our 27 year old father, describing how he dosed the survivors with morphine, transfused bags of blood plasma, and “probed and picked steel out of Gerries for many hours.” It was slowly sinking in: our father was less a warrior than a healer.

During our childhood, veteran army, navy and air force friends of our father routinely dropped over to listen to big band jazz on the stereo. As rounds of cocktails loosened their emotional valves, Mike and I eavesdropped on the harrowing, first-hand stories not found in the Toronto Telegram. 

One time, our father let slip a terse anecdote that left a lasting impression. He confessed that in dread of a torpedo attack, he always slept in his clothes, joking with his buddies to allay the terror he felt. One day on deck, when he spotted what he thought was a torpedo, he swung one leg over the railing, ready to jump, but it turned out to be a large fish foaming the waves.

Then came a darker tale, not reported in the press: as dozens of German sailors floundered in the frigid, oil-slicked North Sea, a crew-cut, trigger-happy young machine gunner on the Annan raked the water with bullets, killing and wounding some of the defenceless enemy.

In those two telling moments, I realized that our father possessed a conscience; that he was not afraid to admit he felt afraid, vulnerable or ashamed; that warfare is a pendulum of emotion, swinging from tedium to terror, hilarity to bravery, camaraderie to isolation, pride to guilt, the waves breaking on the shores of the next generation. That heroism bequeaths a complex legacy, not easily split into winners and losers.

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I’m sure it’s no coincidence that I became a journalist and an author. Interviewing strangers for a living proved a kind of “talk therapy”, generating conversations not possible with the stranger who was our father.

After impressive success as an allergist, Jack was sunk by a mid-life crisis.  Retiring early after two suicide attempts and separating from our long-suffering mother, he retreated into a one-bedroom apartment, a casualty of a lifelong inner war. Scanning the horizon for our distant father with my own pair of psychic binoculars, I spent years unpacking the sources of his multiple pre- and post-war traumas, culminating in the publication of my 2010 memoir, “What Disturbs Our Blood: A Son’s Quest To Redeem the Past.”

I learned that upon graduating from medical school in 1942, our father had married Caroline Leuthold, a glamourous, red-headed heiress from Spokane, Washington. A son, John, was born in May, 1944, while Jack was patrolling the North Sea, six months before the sinking of the U-boat. When Caroline died tragically in 1947 at age 27, our father lost custody of his son in a complex, highly publicized trial rigged by the plutocratic Leuthold family. Jack was deemed an “unfit” parent (not entirely untrue, as it turned out), but the verdict must have stung as deeply as a German bullet. We did not meet our half-brother until after our father’s second marriage to our mother collapsed in the 1970s.

We owe “The Greatest Generation” an enormous debt for the preservation of our privileges and freedoms, including the privilege and freedom to dissent. As a peacenik child of the Cold War 1960s who has never known war except through the safe screen of the mass media, I was free to challenge conventional narratives and explore the hidden costs imposed on stoic, heroic, emotionally scarred men -- particularly my father’s father, a national medical hero who, as I eventually learned, served in France in 1918, but met a tragic fate, kept secret for decades.

The ironies and paradoxes abound. If the torpedo of U-1006 had sunk the Annan, I would not have been born to write these words.  If Jack had lived to read my books, no doubt they would have felt like a depth charge flushing him to the surface. The eternal tug of war between fathers and sons.

For decades, my father’s totems gathered dust in a closet. Now in my seventies and childless, I realized they deserved preservation in the Naval Museum of Halifax. As I packed up and shipped off the medals, duffel bag and scrapbook, I realized I was releasing the last of Jack’s poignant personal effects, and ripples of compassion, sadness and pride flowed through my body. Eighty years have passed since my father’s “good war”, and we now live in a world even more dangerous than his own. But if I have learned anything of permanent value, I know that, like Odysseus, the bravest men are the men who cry.