Empires Lost: Cold War Memoir

By Michael G. Bergen

What was the Cold War, and are we on the verge of another, or worse?

I was born amidst the Nazi V-1 and V-2 raids on London and Croydon, England, during WWII. My mother, father and I survived that worldwide conflict and settled in Montreal, Canada, in 1945. That year saw the end of one war and the beginning of another: the Cold War between old Allies in the Eastern and Western Blocs, between Communism and Capitalism.

Two of the first to recognize the dangers of that new conflict were the authors and survivors of WWII George Orwell and Winston Churchill. Orwell used the term, Cold War, in an essay in October 1945. Churchill coined the Iron Curtain as the physical boundary between the two sides, or Blocs, of the Cold War in a 5 March 1946 speech in the US. I was a child during the first ‘Proxy War’ of the conflict between communist North Korea. China and the Soviet Union backed the Communist North. The United Nations, the US, and the Western Allies, supported Capitalist South Korea from 1950 to 1953.

By 1961, when I joined the Royal Canadian Navy as a sonarman to find Soviet submarines, and John F. Kennedy became President of the United States. Nikita Khrushchev was the Soviet premier, and Fidel Castro was the Cuban premier. The Cold War was in full swing with those leaders in command. I was immediately thrown into my new role on a NATO exercise off Gibraltar, among others. However, the war and my new occupation reached their pinnacle during the Cuban Missile Crisis on the Grand Banks in October 1962. What would this war’s outcome be? Would Kennedy, Khrushchev, Castro, and I survive, and would the Cold War increase the dangers to a world otherwise at peace?

This 4th book of The Rutherford Chronicles relates the author’s personal experiences with the last major crisis of the 20th Century. He searched for Soviet submarines during the Cuban Missile Crisis and for America’s most advanced US Atomic Submarine. He saw a divided Germany and the Berlin Wall. He witnessed the fight against Apartheid and the formation of Nelson Mandela's government in South Africa. Finally, he witnessed the collapse of the USSR, and the end of the Cold War and the mighty British Empire.

Are we in danger of a similar conflict today, or worse, WW3?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael G. Bergen
• Release date: May 14, 2024
• ISBN: 9781067231576

Michael G. Bergen

Michael Bergen was born in England and grew up in Canada, though he has lived in Europe and South Africa for most of his adult life, and it was here that The Rutherford Chronicles first sprang to life.History was always Michael's first love and sparked an interest in his own family heritage. This led, following meticulous research, directly to his writing of The Rutherford Chronicles, a series of four books based on the lives of his ancestors, their friends and families and the broader world in the turbulent years of the early to mid 20th century, and culminating in the final novel, based on his own experiences during the Cold War of the second half of that century.The Rutherford Chronicles follow the lives of ordinary people thrust into extraordinary circumstances, and events controlled by their much better known and more powerful contemporaries on all sides of the conflicts, many of whom are referenced within the pages of the books.Part 1, Empire Discovered, begins during the Second Anglo-Boer War in South Africa and continues into British India. Reedsy reviewer Pixie Emsley says "An absorbing and unusual look at the Anglo Boer War, one of Britain's costliest in terms of money and men, as well as women and children."Part 2, Empire and War, takes place in the trenches and German POW camps in WWI. Reedsy reviewer Pixie Emsley says "A revealing insight into Britain's involvement in World War I told from the viewpoint of a prisoner of war, with all the horrors of war."Part 3, Empire and Tyranny, is about the interwar years following WWI, including the tragic times of the Great Depression. It is also the story of WWII through the eyes of a soldier of the Royal Canadian Artillery in England, Scotland and Italy and his marriage with a Rutherford daughter.The last book, Part 4, Empires Lost, follows events during the Cold War, based on Michael's own experiences during the later half of the 20th century.

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Empires Lost: Cold War Memoir | The Rutherford Chronicles - Part 4Title Page

First published by Michael G. Bergen, 2024

Copyright © 2024 Michael G. Bergen

www.michaelgbergen.com

978-1-0672315-8-3 (print)

978-1-0672315-7-6 (e-book)

Cover Design and Typesetting by www.myebook.online

All rights reserved.

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted

in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other

electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of

the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews

and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

For my family and descendants,

and anyone else interested in those uneasy times.

A tumultuous family journey

through the 20 th Century

Halcyon days, now wars are ending,

You shall find wheree’er you sail,

Tritons, all the while attending

With a kind and gentle gale.

Henry Purcell, The Tempest

CONTENTS

The Early Challenges

1. My Childhood and the Onset of the Cold War

1945-1955

2. Adolescence and the Arrival of JFK

1955-1961

3. Maturing in a Cold War Navy

1961-1964

The Reset

4. The Transformative Years

1964-1969

5. Starting my Career in a Divided Europe

1969-1983

6. Surviving the Soviet-Backed South African Proxy Struggle

1983-1994

The Resolution

7. The End of the Cold War

1989-1994

8. The End of the Last Great Empire

1997

9. A New World, A New Millennium and a New Life

1997-1999

About the Author

THE EARLY CHALLENGES

CHAPTER 1

MY CHILDHOOD AND THE ONSET OF THE COLD WAR

1945-1955

Rocky Beginnings

Iwas born into the British Empire during World War II and spent the first two years of my life with my British working-class family in Croydon, south of London. My grandparents, parents and millions of others lived through three wars, the 1918 Flu pandemic and the Great Depression, or the Great Slump, as the British called it. They also avoided typhoid fever, polio, smallpox, cholera, and the other common fatal diseases of their time. They survived the Blitz or Nazi ‘lightning war’ before my birth. It’s estimated that between October 1940 and June 1941, over 30,000 high-explosive bombs and parachute mines exploded in and around London. The end had not yet come for them. It marked only the start for me.

I lived in that violent world with my mother, grandparents, aunts and cousins as a baby while my Canadian soldier-father was away on the battlefields of Europe. When I was a year old, the Nazis began their vengeance weapon attacks on British and European targets. We all survived the V-1 and V-2 attacks in those last years of the War. More V-1 ‘doodlebugs’ hit Croydon than anywhere else in the country, falling short of hitting their London targets through intentional deception by the English government. On the flight path of the V-1s, Croydon took 142 hits, one or two near where we lived. Once, I was told, a doodlebug engine stopped overhead. Knowing this warning before it fell, our mothers threw my cousin Douglas and me under the dining room table and dived after us, waiting for the explosion.

Croydon also had a few hits by the more powerful and deadly V-2 rocket that followed in the war’s last months. The V-2 was a streamlined four-storey ballistic missile with advanced technology designed and developed under the leadership of Wernher von Braun. Powered by a rocket engine burning alcohol and liquid oxygen, the V-2 blasted its way to the edge of space. It returned to Earth at supersonic speed with 1,600 pounds (725kg) of high explosives. The V-2s were unstoppable. They travelled at the speed of a rifle bullet (3,400 mph, 5,760 km/h), and no one could see them, let alone destroy them. They exploded on their targets before the sound of their travel arrived. The whip-cracking sound of a blast wave created by the rocket travelling three times faster than sound bounced off the impact point. The chaos of the explosion followed this, with debris and earth thrown skyward. Unlike the V-1s, the V-2 gave no warning. In one V-2 explosion at Chiswick, West London, the rocket destroyed eleven houses and seriously damaged twenty-seven more.

On the 25 th of November 1944 at 12:26 p.m. on a busy shopping Saturday, a German V-2 rocket bomb made a direct hit on a crowded Woolworths store in London’s New Cross. One hundred and sixty-eight people died outright, some of them in the neighbouring Co-op and some at their desks in nearby offices. Of the victims, thirty-three were children, including babies in prams. Meanwhile, it injured 123 passers-by, many critically. The Second World War witnessed one of the most devastating losses of civilian life on British soil.

Our survival was fortunate. By the War’s end, just under 30,000 Londoners had died in the various bombings, and over 50,000 were seriously injured. The bombings destroyed thousands of buildings and made hundreds of thousands homeless. Food and clothing were sparse and rationed. It caused fear, injury, death, and destruction and separated family members through evacuations or fathers abroad on the battlefields.

However, the British took it all in their stride and won peace with the help of the Allies on VE Day, the 8 th of May 1945.

Far more than the military died in twentieth-century wars; innocent civilians passed in their millions. Most WWII casualties were non-military. Why do humans start wars and fight without regard for the human and material damage they cause? Why don’t we learn from the disastrous wars of the past? If we can’t learn from the past, what is our destiny?

Peace came. We had survived the carnage, WWII memories faded, and most of us have lived peacefully since then. However, we weren’t entirely out of trouble. In defeating the Nazis, our WWII Ally, the victorious communist Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, occupied and claimed Eastern Europe. Josip Tito and his Communist National Front of WWII partisans declared the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia in 1946. The communist revolutionary Ho Chi Minh of French Indochina proclaimed the independent Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Japan’s defeat in North Korea left a vacuum that a guerrilla leader called Kim Il-sung was waiting to fill. These new post-WWII circumstances didn’t bode well for a peaceful future. The jaws of war spewed a wave of communist control and terror that spread across the planet.

Two days after VE-Day, on the 10 th of May 1945, my mother and I left Croydon. We were part of a migration of thousands of war brides and children of military men from England and Europe to North America. Close to 48,000 British war brides arrived in Canada, including my mother. Some 22,000 children accompanied them, including me. We arrived in my father’s hometown, Montreal, on the 23 rd of May 1945. My father was still in the Netherlands with the victorious First Canadian Division. He entrusted us to his Aunt Beatrice and grandmother, Sarah Downes-Bergen-Jenkins. I don’t have any memories of living with my Auntie Bea, my Canadian grandfather’s sister and her husband, Uncle John. They had three children, my father’s cousins Joan, Beverley, and Fred. They lived in Verdun, Montreal, on the ground floor of a three-storey tenement building typical of that end of Wellington Street, Verdun. My father arrived at the end of July, and the army discharged him honourably on the 4 th of August, 1945. We then visited the apartment on Evelyn Street, where Grandma Sarah Bergen-Jenkins and Grandpa Bill Jenkins had lived before vacating it for us. My father had lived there for many years with his grandparents. My earliest memory is from our family visit. The apartment was empty, and I can still remember the clean, waxed wooden floors and the colour of the walls. I had just turned two years old and stuck a metal hairpin I found into an electrical outlet, getting a nasty shock. Maybe that’s why I still remember it?

I remember nothing else until I got ill at three. My sister Julie was born in January 1946. Yet, despite the joy, it marked the year of my first catastrophe in life. I remember pacing the apartment hallway, crying from the chronic and permanent pain in my knee. I don’t know when it started, mid-year perhaps; I only remember the constant and unrelenting pain. Doctors diagnosed it as osteomyelitis, a rare and fatal disease before Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928. This painful bone infection can occur because of bacterial or fungal invasion of the body. Untreated, this condition can cause extensive damage to the bone and surrounding tissue and have lasting effects. It causes swelling that can damage bone and lead to bone loss, but doctors can cure it using fast treatment with antibiotics, in my case, penicillin. Doctors say the osteomyelitis virus can enter the bloodstream through a cut or scrape. I suppose at three, I had lots of those. Osteomyelitis is rare today but is one of the oldest diseases known to medicine, as far back as prehistory. Before antibiotics, surgeons removed the affected bone, resulting in severe crippling of the patient.

The miracle antibiotic penicillin was initially scarce but was mass-produced to fight diseases in soldiers during WWII. It saved thousands of lives in that war, and it rescued me. As luck would have it, had it not been for the penicillin antibiotic readily available in 1946, I could have died. I feel very fortunate in hindsight to have survived my first enormous challenge in life.

I didn’t think I was lucky then. I still remember the nurses arriving several times daily with monstrous penicillin needles. I was a restless child in the hospital for six months, and since I kept breaking the leg casts by moving around, the doctors put me into a plaster cast from my toes to my chest to immobilize me. I ended up flat on my back for many weeks on end, unable to move unless on wheels, somehow.

I recall being pushed around the ward in a wheelchair by my parents, handing out licorice candies they had brought for me to the other children. It was the only way to interact with them, and I gave away all of them.

Another memory is of the taxi driver dropping me gently on the sofa at home after retrieving me from the hospital after six months. After another six months in a plaster cast at home, my muscles atrophied, and I could no longer walk. Free of the cast after a year, physiotherapists began exercising and coaching me to walk again, but I couldn’t play any sports. I became an outsider since I couldn’t skate or play ice hockey with the other kids in hockey-mad Quebec.

After a year of penicillin treatment, I overcame the disease, and It never returned. My parents cared for me, including getting me outdoors once I was home from the hospital. I remember going out on picnics and even on my father’s fishing boat in my plaster cast. It took me a while to fully recover, relearn walking, and become an ordinary boy.

By age five, I was an active boy again. Two years affected a boy’s formative years, yet my life returned to normal. I never mastered ice hockey, Montreal’s most important sport then and now. I started kindergarten at Rushbrooke School, so at least that part of my life got off to a regular start. Rushbrooke School was a few blocks from where I lived, so my mother first walked me to the school and fetched me.

Soon, I walked to and from school, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends. The streets and alleyways offered multiple routes, and we changed our paths from time to time. Our part of Verdun comprised many blocks of uniform three-storey tenement buildings from the turn of the twentieth Century, with service alleys behind them. The residents put their garbage in the alleys and received some deliveries, such as coal. On our way home from school, we boys looked out for objects of interest in the alleys, or lanes, as we called them. We hauled away discarded electrical devices, appliances, or wooden crates ideal for building. During that time, cars and trucks were scarce. Service vendors still used horse-drawn wagons for garbage collection, coal delivery, milk, bread, vegetables, knife sharpening, and scrap metal. Cars and trucks that drove there exercised caution. We kids could play in the streets or the alleys without the danger of speeding vehicles. However, growing up in such an environment meant knowing the ever-present smell of horse manure. I didn’t mind it; I liked it. Can you believe it? I knew nothing else then, and the pungent smell of horses was part of our lives.

By 1949, we spread our wings and travelled into the countryside along the St Lawrence River. My father bought a large black two-door sedan, his first car, pride and joy. It wasn’t fancy, with chrome enhancements or white-walled tyres, but it was available for weekend drives. I remember my Uncle John smoking a cigar in the car on an outing, which made me feel ill. I also remember our cocker spaniel, Trixie, jumping out of the window of the slow-moving vehicle to give chase to a cat. We used to drive past a Mohawk reservation called Caughnawaga, now Kahnawake Mohawk Territory, to Chateauguay or Beauharnois on the south side of the river. We enjoyed visiting friends, picnicking, boating, and fishing on Lac St Louis. The Martins rented a cottage on the Chateauguay River for a short while, and we visited them there. My Dad and I then escaped the tiny packed house to the St Lawrence River tributary to fish. We were less than 25km from the famous battlefield of Allan’s Corners near Ormstown, where the Canadians won the Battle of Châteauguay against the Americans during the War of 1812.

My earliest recollections of fishing are with my father. I dangled a worm wriggling on a hook six feet into the crystal-clear waters of Lac St Louis. Lac St Louis is a widening of the St Lawrence River before Montreal, classified as a lake. From 1949 until 1955, we spent many gentle hours doing this, with only the sounds of water lapping on the boat’s hull. The occasional call of a water bird or the piercing whine of a distant outboard motor stirred us. The catch from this fishing wasn’t exciting for adults. It comprised sunfish and perch and the occasional bass or pike. We returned the inedible to the lake while taking the tasty perch home for supper. Of course, all the fish caught were exciting for us kids, except maybe for a giant eel cursing my father once caught.

As I grew older, I started trolling a plug or spoon lure behind the boat. My Dad and I could do this for hours with large pike and bass, our most common catches. The most sought-after prizes—the muskie ⁠ ¹ and the sturgeon—always eluded us. My father swore he knew where they were hiding between boulders in the deep, but they eluded us! The muskie was legendary when I was growing up. The heads and mouths with long, sharp teeth nailed to the heavy beams in the old boathouse at Beauharnois showed their ferocity. That was where my Dad had kept his boat from before WWII.

I’ve been hunting them all my life, my dad would say. I know where they are, but they’re not stupid. They know the difference between a baitfish and my lure. I’ve never been able to catch one. We keep trying, don’t we, Michael? One day, we’ll catch a giant.

When winter arrived, we adapted as best we could. We had an enormous amount of snow then. During heavy snowfalls, the snowploughs banked it at the side of our streets in Verdun, creating super playgrounds for us kids. We, children, could climb on the mountainous hardened piles of snow up to two yards high or dig into them, making igloos or forts. That was our daily playground until the snowblowers arrived. These monstrous eating machines devoured the snowbanks, blowing them into large trucks. The trucks then drove the snow to the frozen, steep St Lawrence riverbanks to dump the snow.

We boys played ice hockey with pucks and without skates on the slippery, hardened, snow-covered streets in winter or with tennis balls in summer. We boys hung onto the bumpers and slid along the frozen roads in winter or on roller skates in summer. However, I recall no severe accidents. The city constructed an ice hockey rink and a figure skating rink every few blocks as soon as it became cold enough. They cleared these of snow after storms so that children and their parents could spend many free hours skating. In summer, they converted these open areas into playgrounds or baseball diamonds. We tobogganed on human-made toboggan runs on The Boardwalk by the river. Life wasn’t too bad for us children then. We had cramped apartments without television for entertainment; our only sources of amusement were books and the radio. Children constantly occupied themselves outside on the streets or in the lanes.

My sister became an accomplished figure skater, but I never gained much skill at skating. As a Quebecer, it was a significant setback and a source of embarrassment.

My mother bundled me up in itchy woollen britches that flared at the hips, tapered and stopping at the knees in winter. We wore the same clothes as the children of England during the 1940s. She kept the lower part of my legs warm, with thick woollen stockings to the knees and boots with a warm lining. Funny, I should remember that! I remember the chafing caused by the britches on my thighs and crotch. I hated that irritation and the chafing of wet hands! Our parents taught us that urine was the best remedy, and my mother applied camphor crème.

Our lives in Verdun weren’t fancy then, but it wasn’t an unpleasant place to grow up in either. Most of the housing in the northern end of the city where I lived was 3-storey red-brick tenement-style housing built before WWI. The city classified the north end of Verdun, closest to Montreal, as a downmarket area, but we children didn’t know or even care about that. Our apartment on the first floor was typical of that neighbourhood, with each floor having two apartments. We climbed a curved wooden staircase with simple wrought-iron railings to the first-floor landing to reach it. Each apartment had a street number, ours being 3884.

The apartment had a small salon with a street-facing window. An arch and curtain separated the single bedroom from that space. Our entire family slept in that bedroom initially. A hallway linked the front door past the living room to the apartment’s back kitchen. It had a coal-fired stove and oven, a table, chairs and simple painted wooden cupboards. Off the kitchen was the bathroom with a flush toilet, sink, and bath. We didn’t have hot running water, so we heated baths by adding boiling water from the stove. The kitchen had a door that opened onto a rear wooden landing. Off that landing was a 3-storey wooden add-on building for coal storage and workrooms for each apartment on the three levels. A wooden staircase led to a small dirt alleyway behind the building. That alleyway was where I spent lots of time playing with my friends. We would make roadways on the dirt surface for our toy cars. That may have been where I caught the virus.

A few paces around the corner on Hickson Street was a tiny barbershop my father and I used. The barbershop doubled as a neighbourhood news hub, where a waiting boy could hear the neighbourhood gossip.

Every day of the week, we had identical meals. I don’t remember them all. I recall Friday was fish and chips, and Sunday was the roast day when we could afford it. Other meals included macaroni and cheese, pork pies, bologna sausage slices and chips, cottage pie, etc. They occurred on the same day, unfailingly.

On the front landing in summer, an old man from the apartment beside us, Uncle Bob, sat in a rocking chair and greeted us as we passed. Uncle Bob was unique. He told us fantastic tales about his life in the old days of Canada. He recalled the last free natives and coureurs de bois still plying the St Lawrence River with canoes filled with beaver pelts.

We travelled Quebec’s forests, rivers, and lakes to find the best pelts. It wasn’t easy, boys and girls, he would say. We needed various skills to succeed as a forest runners, from business savvy to expert canoeing. To survive in the Canadian wilderness, we had to be experts in fishing, snowshoeing, and hunting."

Wow, we said. You must have been smart and brave. Could we do that?

Venturing into the bush best suited a person who thought nothing of covering five to six hundred leagues by canoe in summer or dogsled in winter. We had to enjoy living off corn and bear fat for twelve to eighteen months, said Uncle Bob. We slept in birch bark and conifer branch lean-tos in summer and winter. Succeeding as a coureur was difficult. They considered us outlaws, much like Robin Hood and his merry men.

Was it dangerous? we asked, full of awe. What is a league, Uncle Bob?

A league is approximately three and a half miles, Uncle Bob explained. Yes, it sure was dangerous. There were wild and dangerous animals like wolves and bears. And there were the wild natives, although most were friendly to us. The most dangerous creatures were white men jealous of our free lives. We had no other skills, and the hope of making money pushed us onwards. The thoughts of exciting escapades and freedom convinced others to join our ranks.

Surprised, I said, I want to do that too! And I meant it, as did my buddies, agreeing enthusiastically. I learned later that the coureurs de bois had lived and travelled long before Uncle Bob’s time, so he had been telling us tall tales. However, that didn’t matter; we loved his stories, no matter where and when they originated. He told us God caused thunder by loading beer cases onto roller runways in heaven and pushing them towards Earth. We trusted him because we recognized the sound of the beer delivered to the neighbouring shop. It was such a familiar sound, and we believed him completely. It made thunder so much more personal and less frightening.

My mother’s parents were in England. They were with me for my first two years and visited us once in Canada in 1947. I was four and can’t remember them from those visits. We lived with them on a visit to England in 1951. I loved them dearly. Grandpa Rutherford was also a great raconteur and held us kids mesmerized.

My father’s mother and sisters lived in Niagara Falls, and we visited her once or twice. My Canadian grandfather was in Montreal but was a ‘persona non grata’ in our household. I can’t remember my great-grandmother Sarah since she died when I was three or four during my illness. Her passing devastated my father because they were very close. We saw my Great-grandfather Jenkins, the second and younger husband of my great-grandmother. So yes, I had grandparents but didn’t see them often. Grandparents can be instrumental in the upbringing of children. I had my parents, the Martins, and my British relatives’ presents at Christmas and birthdays, which I cherished. The British relatives were significant in our lives, albeit from afar.

I remember a unique annual military event, the Ypres Parade. That memorial procession wound through Verdun every April, with tanks and field guns rumbling along our streets, much to everyone’s delight. It started in April 1919 following the Great War, and it’s still going strong over 100 years later! The Verdun Legion organized the procession with military bands and hundreds of Verdun veterans. The Vets were still alive 30 years after the Canadian involvement in Passchendaele, Somme, and Vimy Ridge battles in the Great War. Many younger WWII vets also marched in their cherished uniforms, embellished with their medals. Participants and onlookers alike enjoyed it. I never understood why my father didn’t take part as a veteran. I can’t remember seeing him in a uniform, even when he took me to a regimental reunion at the armoury years later. Maybe I’ve lost the memory? Perhaps he had grown out of it? I never asked him why not.

That parade was one of my most exciting days, except for Christmas and Easter. I have always loved parades, pomp, and ceremonies; they can make me emotional. My British Grandpa Rutherford and Canadian Step-Grandpa Jenkins fought at Ypres, and three of my Grandmother Rutherford’s brothers died in that war near Ypres. The Germans took my Grandfather Rutherford as a prisoner of war at Ennetières, near Lille and Ypres.

So Ypres and its surroundings were a big deal in our lives. WWI saw the occurrence of four battles in that location. During the First Battle of Ypres in October 1914, the Germans captured my grandfather. The Second Battle of Ypres was in April and May 1915. That’s also where the Germans first used lethal chlorine gas on the Allies. They fought the Third Battle of Ypres, also known as Passchendaele, from the 31 st of July to the 10 th of November 1917. It was a vivid symbol and reminder of the Western Front’s mud, madness, and senseless slaughter. Many men drowned in the ubiquitous mud. Drowned! In mud! Despite heavy rain and shelling turning the battlefield into a quagmire, the Canadians captured the ridge on the 6th of November. Some 275,000 British and Commonwealth troops, including close to 16,000 Canadian casualties. The Fourth Battle of Ypres, known as The Battle of the Lys, was in April 1918, seven months before the Great War ended. There was an unofficial fifth Battle of Ypres, the Advance of Flanders and the Battle of the Peaks of Flanders. It comprised a series of battles in northern France and southern Belgium from late September to October 1918.

I don’t know whether they know the exact number of men lost at or near Ypres. They inscribed the names of 54,896 lost British and Commonwealth soldiers in the Menin Gate. Almost 90,000 men disappeared in the Flanders mud within approximately 25 square miles. They obviously ran out of space on that memorial. Those fallen men, cut down before their lives began, deserve eternal remembrance, regardless of time’s passing.

The Ypres Battles were parts of a bigger disaster called the Great War or World War I. That War cost ten million dead soldiers and twenty million wounded from both sides and on both fronts and the lives of another eight million citizens. In the 1930s and 1940s, the Ypres Day parade was a significant event in Verdun, attracting tens of thousands of onlookers. It still runs today in a much-reduced form.

So, that was my early childhood world, everything I knew for my first few years in Canada. It was an innocent world free of strife for us kids. We learned a few things about past wars, soldiers, sailors, fighter aircraft, and great warships from our books, but not in depth. We knew just enough to feed into our childish games. However, unbeknownst to us, events were taking shape beyond our world that would dramatically affect our futures.

Yet Another World War?

As World War II ended in 1945, another worldwide conflict was already budding as my early childhood unfolded. It was to follow me through the entire 2 nd half of the 20 th Century, so despite its factual nature, I feel compelled to provide some background about its beginning.

From the 4 th to 11 th of February 1945, the Allied leaders met at the Yalta Conference in Crimea in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR or Soviet Union). United States (US) President Franklin D. Roosevelt, United Kingdom (UK) Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, and their top aides were at that conference.

Their primary goal was to decide on the post-war status of Germany, which they were busy defeating. They agreed that the US, USSR, the UK, and France would divide Germany into four ‘occupation zones’. The Allied nations also agreed that free elections would occur in Poland and all countries under Soviet occupation. In addition, the new United Nations (UN) would replace the failed League of Nations. At the Yalta Conference, Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt agreed to meet following the surrender of Germany to determine and complete the postwar borders in Europe.

However, on the 6th of March, the USSR installed a puppet government in Romania. On the 7th of March, communist Josip Broz Tito assumed control as the head of the provisional government of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY). In March and April, the US and Britain fumed over Stalin, excluding them from discussions about Poland. Behind the scenes, Stalin turned Poland over to a Communist puppet government he controlled.

Then, Stalin expressed outrage at inaccurate reports about Operation Sunrise, where the Americans were supposedly single-handedly negotiating a surrender of German forces. He demanded a Soviet general be present at all negotiations. Roosevelt vehemently denied the allegation but closed the operation in Switzerland, and a Soviet general was present at the talks in northern Italy that led to the Nazi surrender there.

On the 12th of April, President Roosevelt died, and Vice President Harry S. Truman took over with little knowledge of existing diplomatic efforts, no knowledge of the atomic bomb, and a bias against the Soviets. Truman first learned of the Manhattan Project after he took the oath of office as the President of the United States,

Germany surrendered on the 8 th of May 1945, VE Day. The Allied leaders met from the 17th of July to the 2nd of August, 1945, at Potsdam to continue the discussions that had begun at Yalta. On the 24th of July, at the Potsdam Conference, Truman informed Stalin that the US had nuclear weapons. At that conference near a shattered Berlin, they negotiated the terms for the end of World War II. The Allies of World War II occupied and administered the entirety of Germany from the Berlin Declaration on the 5 th of June 1945. The Americans occupied most of the South, except for those areas occupied by the French bordering France, the British occupied the North, and the Soviets took over East Germany adjoining the other Eastern European countries it occupied.