Review: Agents of Influence – A British Campaign, a Canadian Spy and the Secret Plot to Bring America into World War II, by Henry Hemming/Will Chabun

 

Agents of Influence/Henry Hemming

A world turned topsy-turvy, a hotly contested presidential election, an isolationist demagogue and murky rumours of interference by foreign intelligence services.

Sound familiar?

 

It was the summer of 1940.

At the core of this book is a Prairie kid named Bill Stephenson. Life in Winnipeg had been rough. His father died when he was four and his hard-pressed mother, with two other children, decided the boy would best be raised by friends, as was common in their mutual Icelandic tradition. His new family was kind, but young Stephenson was clearly affected by this.

He joined the Canadian army during the First World War before transferring to the Royal Flying Corps. He served with distinction until he was shot down and sent to a German prisoner of war camp, where he swiped a locally made can opener and mused about patenting it outside Germany.

When he returned to Winnipeg, Stephenson’s war record brought entrée to many circles but all this was dashed when one of his business ventures collapsed in 1922. He moved to Britain; his only asset was that little can opener, which he patented under his own name. This gave the capital to launch more business ventures, ones that did well enough to make him wealthy even as the depression of the 1930s went on.

To protect his enterprises, he organized an informal commercial intelligence network across Europe. Through this, he encountered British MP Winston Churchill, who was impressed by Stephenson’s grasp of the threat from resurgent Nazi Germany. Stephenson drifted into the orbit of MI6, the British foreign intelligence agency. After Churchill became prime minister in May 1940, he was sent to New York as what could be called the regional manager for all British security services in North and South America -- areas that so far in the war had very low priority for Britain.

That changed in June 1940, as France collapsed and the British Expeditionary Force was chased off the European continent at Dunkirk. Suddenly, getting money and arms from the United States became top priority for Britain -- and for Stephenson.

This book, written by a man whose grandfather was a close friend of Stephenson, describes the next 18 months in the life of Stephenson and the United States.

Among American voters, only one in 10 that summer thought the U.S. should aid Britain, and there was a growing “America First” neutrality movement getting money and encouragement from the German embassy. Working without pay, Stephenson spent his own money leasing and fitting out offices in central Manhattan, into which a steady stream of British intelligence officers, propagandists and public relations operatives came. (Mindful of the widespread American aversion to upper-class British accents, Stephenson hired plenty of Canadian secretaries. Local folklore holds that some of these women worked in the Saskatchewan civil service as late as the 1980s.)

American president Franklin D. Roosevelt, in 1940 seeking his third term, was also worried by Hitler’s war machine but had to tread carefully because of the coming election, with the Republican party in the thrall of isolationists who wanted nothing to do with Europe and its rivalries. The GOP presidential candidate, businessman Wendell Wilkie, was also wary of Germany, but wanted to keep his party behind him. Still, FDR was able to arrange a deal to send 50 elderly destroyers to Britain (Canada got seven of them) and to create a draft (or conscription) system.

Britain’s fortunes looked worst around the end of 1940. Its economic situation was desperate and isolationists were riding high, thanks to the entry of Charles Lindbergh, aviation hero – and also the son of a fiercely isolationist Republican Congressman into the debate.

Lindbergh’s logic was that Germany’s armed forces were too powerful to be beaten. The best America could do would be to seek a peace deal in Europe. German atrocities? What atrocities?

Around the same time, Lord Lothian, Britain’s highly competent ambassador to the US, died of natural causes, and was replaced by a dud. The German embassy was already active in stoking the isolationist mood and had several “tame” congressmen speaking on this issue and even sending out pamphlets on it. (More on this later.)

The only good news (for Britain and Canada) was the re-election of Roosevelt, who began work on a “lend-lease” program. As he put it, imagine your neighbour’s house was on fire. You are a good neighbour, so you loan him your hose to put it out. You don’t want payment, only the return of the hose. Similarly, he proposed to ship weapons to Britain -- providing they someday be returned. Giving more aid to Britain improved America’s chance of staying out of the war, he argued.

Then, a dramatic development. Free from electoral politics, Wilkie appeared before a Senate committee to counter Lindbergh’s appeasement testimony, and also went on a fact-finding tour to Britain, where he met everybody from the king and queen to factory hands. He returned fired up for a fight.

Meanwhile, Stephenson’s people continued their work, setting up or bankrolling pro-British organizations and digging up dirt on German diplomats and isolationist politicians. More good news came when Roosevelt authorized American troops to set up a base in Greenland (hinting that Germany wanted to grab this Danish territory) and authorized the US Navy to carry out armed patrols in the western Atlantic. Conversations from that period indicate Roosevelt was secretly expecting for a German attack on American warships, thus bringing US public opinion to his side.

When isolationists, by now operating under the “America First” brand, held a rally in Manhattan in April 1941, Stephenson’s staff arranged for pro-British organizations to picket it. Fighting broke out and sympathetic newspapers devoted plenty of space to women protesters roughed up by America Firsters – the insinuation being they were Nazi brutes.

By now, support for Britain was at 20 per cent – and rising.

Stephenson’s workers got astrologers to predict bad fates for Nazi leaders. Lindbergh soared in influence, then came back down toward earth, his wings clipped by rumours and accusations planted by Stephenson’s men, and also by his own hubris: in one speech he went “off message” and lashed out at Jews for antagonizing the Nazis. Blame the victim.

Stephenson, meanwhile, played up stories of (rather rare) British military successes and invented others that could not possibly be checked out. British executives in two major polling companies, Gallup and Roper, occasionally planted softball questions that increased the apparent support for American intervention against the Nazis.

Meanwhile, things were not going well for Lindbergh. He was accused of admiring Nazi Germany. And when the air conditioning failed as he spoke in a Philadelphia arena in May 1941 he impulsively suggested “Jews” had turned it off. Widespread outrage did not stop Lindbergh from talking about American’s “Jewish problem,” implying they were setting themselves up for a backlash by opposing Germany and backing Britain.

More problems were ahead. With help from Stephenson’s allies, a New York advertising specialist confirmed that the German embassy’s “tame” congressmen had been using their “franking” or mailing privileges to send out huge volumes of pro-German brochures. This went viral in New York, then across the rest of the country and prompted Roosevelt to close all German consulates.

Stephenson’s British Security Co-ordination then twisted in the knife by faking a letter indicating a German plan to stage coups in several South American countries. This British-Canadian forgery was blamed by Berlin on Roosevelt, who knew nothing of it and became enraged at the accusation. No connection, but Roosevelt announced in May 1941 that a national state of emergency existed and sent US Marines to garrison Iceland, and the US Navy to escort convoys originating in the US as far east as Iceland.

Mid-September saw a US destroyer drop four depth charges on a U-boat, which replied by firing two torpedoes. Nobody was hurt, but tension clearly was rising.

That same month, Lindbergh fatally overplayed his hand. In a speech carried nationwide by radio from Indianapolis, he spoke about “a Jewish conspiracy to bring the US into the war.” Stephenson’s allies had infiltrated the meeting and the radio audience heard not only Lindbergh’s remarks but frequent booing. The national response was near-total outrage at Lindbergh’s claims. There were even calls for his name to be removed from bridge and monuments.

FDR’s support now was up to 67 per cent.

The next month, the destroyer USS Kearny, operating in the Atlantic, was torpedoed by a U-boat. 115 American sailors were killed. Lindbergh left the America First movement and by November FDR’s support was up to 85 per cent.

Then came Japan’s Pearl Harbour attack. America rose up righteous anger. Germany, for whatever reason, declared war on the US a few days later, and the rest is history.

In an attempt to redeem himself, Lindbergh (too old for active military service) signed on as a technical representative with Lockheed Aircraft and went to the south Pacific in 1943 to tutor young pilots on setting their engines to get the best possible power and endurance. It is widely reported that Lindbergh unofficially flew in combat and unofficially shot down a few Japanese aircraft. But the taint lingered. Even today, there is a movement to get Lindbergh’s name taken off San Diego’s airport.

American author Philip Roth got a good novel out of a hypothetical situation: suppose Lindbergh had moved earlier and won the Republican presidential nomination in 1940, and then the presidency. It paints a picture of rising anti-semitism and even a plan to forcibly resettle American Jews into the American West and Southwest. Lindbergh disappears in 1942 and the ensuing chaos sees anti-Jewish riots and, out of the turmoil, the re-election of Roosevelt.)

Back to reality. A major theme of this book is how British intelligence helped get the US into the Second World War. Nobody complains about that. The carbon-copy Russian operation to embarrass and defeat Hillary Clinton in 2016 is, by those who acknowledge it took place, shocking. So what’s the difference?

The answer, of course, is the end game. Stephenson and his crew were assigned to halt the Nazi war machine; Russia’s meddling was about defeating Clinton, a strong critic of Russia’s meddling in Ukraine and the Baltic states, and thus avoiding economic sanctions and travel bans for Russian strongman Vladimir Putin and his henchmen. Can they even be compared?

“Both campaigns were probably approved by the respective leaders, Churchill and Putin, and were successful in the sense that the goal they had been working toward came to pass,” wrote author Hemming in his summary. “To what extent these covert operations were directly responsible for this is an open and contentious question. Cause and affect in the field of influence campaigns will always be hard to measure exactly. But a lack of precision is not the same as a lack of impact.”

-        By Will Chabun

Spies of No Country —Behind Enemy Lines at the Birth of the Israeli Secret Service by Matti Friedman. Submitted by Will Chabun

 

If you are looking for amazing tales of Israel’s highly professional Mossad secret intelligence agency, then you will be disappointed.

This book actually is about the origins of the Mossad, before it was anything but sophisticated.

Let us go back to 1941, when our side was losing the Second World War. German troops were in the western suburbs of Moscow and fighting a back-and-forth battle with British Empire troops in the North African desert. By the end of the year, Japan had entered the war, capturing huge chunks of territory in the Dutch East Indies, Malaya, Burma and threatening India.

Serious people feared the Germans would thrust south from the Black Sea and meet the Japanese in India.

Britain’s Special Operations Executive, fearing the worst, began organizing “stay behind” squads that would gather intelligence and commit sabotage in case Palestine was occupied. Having no love for the Nazis, young Jews – many of whom spoke fluent German -- there signed up.

Fast forward to 1947, when the Second World War was barely over and those European Jews who had survived the Nazis and their holocaust were trying desperately to get to a safe place. Palestine filled the bill as Jews had lived there since antiquity. But there were also many Muslims (who naturally were less than interested in sharing their barren land with outsiders) and the whole place had been run under a mandate given to Britain by the League of Nations after the collapse of the rickety Ottoman Empire in 1918.

Drained by the vast cost of the Second World War and the financial and human price of keeping Arabs and Jews from killing each other, the British in mid 1947 announced their intention to leave the troubled territory in several months. The new United Nations then decided to partition Palestine between Arabs and Jews. No details. Run along and make nice, chaps.

There then followed a period when Palestine essentially had no government but much hostility between Arabs and Jews, the luckless British stuck in the middle. (If you watch the recent Australian TV series A Place To Call Home, you know that the core of its story is the prickly, sometimes violent, relationship between the wife of a Jewish physician jailed and tortured by the Nazis, and the widow of a British diplomat murdered by Jewish terrorists in Palestine.)

Soon the armies of five Arab states mobilized to attack Israel. Against them were several Jewish armed groups, ranging from the Palmach (made up of hardline socialists) to the Haganah, whose members drew their inspiration from the US and western Europe.

 

It was in this period that Jewish resistance leaders (including those trained by the SOE five years earlier) decided they needed not only a ragtag army but a ragtag intelligence service to discern the mood and intentions of the Arabs around them.

Jewish (remember that the state of Israel did not exist yet – hence the name of this book) resistance leaders had one advantage. The Jewish population in Palestine, then as now, was a mix of people from Europe and also from the Arab world. For centuries, there had been substantial Jewish communities in Syria, Turkey, Lebanon and Iraq – Friedman says Baghdad was one-third Jewish in the early 1940s. These Jews could speak Arabic and local dialects and were familiar, sometimes very familiar, with Arab cultural practices. And by 1947, these same people were facing violent pressure to leave the Arab world. They provided a ready-made pool of recruits for the young intelligence service under the name “the Arab Section”.

Their training was minimal, their communication systems stunningly crude -- no more than letters, sometimes even written in code and mailed from places like Beirut. One recruit foolishly talked about his assignment with his stepmother – who quickly told everybody in their village. Another, a man of considerable talent as a spy, was able to extract a promise from his controller that he wouldn’t have to kill anybody. The Arab’s Section’s “headquarters” was a corner of a shack near Tel Aviv.

Author Friedman, got onto this story through a retired Mossad agent who said the section’s last member might be willing to talk about his adventures. He was indeed – and Friedman was able to find written and oral histories left by the spy’s colleagues in the section. He also found information in declassified files and in two histories of the Mossad written in Hebrew, but never circulated beyond Israel.

The author makes the points that casualties among these agents were quite high and there is no empirical way of assessing their effectiveness. (Friedman figures the high point of the Beirut agents’ work was getting a bomb aboard Hitler’s former yacht, being converted in Beirut into a warship. Their bomb went off late – so late that all manner of other, non-Jewish groups and factions were blamed for the blast.)

Assessing their contribution, Friedman says, “they were one of the ‘seeds’ of the Mossad. They were the ‘school’ that came up with Israeli intelligence doctrine – not by learning it from someone, but by trial and error.”

    -Will Chabun

Canadian Forces vs. Covid 19

 Hi

As you may know, the Canadian Armed Forces is not permitted to have parades in this environment of COVID related bans. This impacted what my troops would be doing on 11 Nov.

I therefore came up with a plan (blessed by higher) to send small detachments (x5 soldiers) from the Regiment which I serve to take post as Vigils at the cenotaphs some of the small towns in NB ( New Brunswick) that were not having their usual 11 Nov ceremonies. The rest were permitted to mark the date with some act of remembrance on their honour.

For the Vigils, four soldiers took post, under a Det Comd, at 1055 and dismissed at 1105. No involvement with anyone else; just in and out, observing physical distance and mask rules. CO and I also just happened to meet up on the street corner in front of a cenotaph in a town an hour or so away. We also just happened to be in Dress Uniform, and I just happened to have a wreath in my hand.....................so, we figured we should not waste the opportunity!

What I observed yesterday was a couple of hundred determined Canadians who assembled loosely on their own, observing distance dictates, at a town's war memorial and paid their respects. Up yours, COVID.

We will remember them.

regards,
Darrell

Submitted by Dwight Mercer

BOOK REVIEW: The Creation of a National Air Force – the Official History of the Royal Canadian Air Force Volume II, by W.A.B. Douglas.

At the end of autumn in 1920, the senior officers of the new Canadian Air Force (“Royal” was not added for another four years) convened a meeting with their bureaucratic peers.

Invited were senior representatives from the federal departments of Agriculture, Interior (which oversaw surveys, parks, fighting forest fires and running Indian reserves), Fisheries, Mines, Marine & Fisheries, Justice (with oversight of the newly created RCMP), the Post Office and on and on. The armistice that ended the horrible First World War was only two years in the past and a great many Canadians felt there would never, could never, be another war of such intensity.

The airmen reasoned that if they wanted to keep their little air force intact in some way, they would have to find ways of serving their civilian peers and maybe even some commercial interests.

This book, covering the following 25 years of Canadian military aviation history, is heavy reading, all right. 797 pages including 200 pages of footnotes. It is part of a three-volume history of this subject. The first volume covered the First World War and the last one the exploits of Canadian airmen overseas from 1939-45, both those serving in the 45 Canadian fighter, bomber, patrol and transport squadrons sent abroad plus the even larger number of Canadians who served in Royal Air Force units, the RCAF and RAF having been designed to be virtually interchangeable.

Three major themes emerge in this book: the continuous fight to keep the Air Force intact with some semblance of military capability throughout the 1920s and 30s, the massive training establishment built up in Canada between 1939 and about 1941, only to be dismantled as the end of the war approached, and finally the Home War Establishment of combat aircraft created to defend Canada’s Atlantic and Pacific coasts from raids or even landings by hostile forces. We know now that these never came unrealistic, but that it the wisdom of hindsight. The very best sources of information in 1940, when Britain was on the brink of a Nazi invasion from across the channel, put things in different light. Canada had to build up a military infrastructure to protect the East Coast and shipping from attacks by German U-boats and surface raiders. 

Considerable ink is devoted in this book to the vicious little campaigns against German U-boats operating in the Gulf of St. Lawrence in the summer of 1942 (we lost) and again in the autumn of 1944 (we forced them out, but not without considerable losses).

The RCAF’s Eastern Air Command was perpetually starved of equipment, not because Ottawa was too cheap to pay, but because the Anglo-American councils that allocated new aircraft attached little significance to the threat to Canada. Only in the summer of 1943, when American military aircraft production hit its stride, was Canada able to obtain some very long-range Consolidated Liberators rigged for anti-submarine patrols and attacks. Problems in acquiring foreign aircraft were behind the push a decade later to design and build the CF-100 jet interceptor in Canada, and the horrifically expensive and complicated Avro Arrow project.

An unsung hero from those dark days was Squadron Leader N.E. “Molly” Small who was not only a pilot and unit commander in an Eastern Air Command antisubmarine squadron, but a sophisticated student of his craft, devouring the latest combat reports on how the larger and wealthier RAF Coastal Command was fighting the U-boat menace. One lesson was that aircraft should be freed up from having to escort plodding convoys and instead searching the waters where intelligence (gathered from code-breaking and radio direction-finding work) indicated U-boats would be operating. Small was also keen on the idea of giving Eastern Air Command aircraft a paint job that made them hard to see from the conning towers of German submarines: an off-white belly and fuselage sides mimicking the gulls that were so hard to discern above the ocean.

On the West Coast, things were equally frightening with small numbers of antique aircraft trying to patrol the B.C. seacoast after Pearl Harbour in late 1941. If the fall of France in 1940 was frightening, then the six months after Pearl Harbour was even worse as the Imperial Japanese Navy rampaged across the Pacific, easily capturing Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Borneo, the Dutch East Indies and even launching raids into northern Australia. (Personal note: I once met a woman who grew up in the northern reaches of Queensland in Australia when the Japanese were bombing Darwin and sinking ships along the coast. Her parents figured their Italian ancestry would bring no favours from the Japanese and thus had buried their valuables on their farm and kept a car fuelled and packed in case they had to flee.) 

This book also tells the story of the how the Department of National Defence in early 1942  turned down a request for money to build airfields in the Queen Charlotte Islands for fear they would be easily and quickly captured by the Japanese and used to launch air raids against Vancouver and Victoria.

The second part of this historical equation is about British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, the Canadian franchise of the world-wide Empire Air Training Scheme. Reduced to its basics, Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King was leery indeed of taking Canada into a war that might create a conscription crisis like the one in 1917, which came close to tearing apart the country. His solution was to offer Canada as the place -- relatively close, but not too close, to embattled Britain, and conveniently near the American industrial powerhouse -- in which huge numbers of military aviators could be trained.

The national numbers of this project are staggering, so let us look at this a little differently. In the summer of 1940 alone, air training schools opened at Moose Jaw, Saskatoon, Regina and Prince Albert (two each). The next year, schools opened at Caron near Moose Jaw, Dafoe, Yorkton and North Battleford. 1942 saw schools open at Weyburn and then Estevan -- and in 1943 at Davidson, although in 1944 it began closing along with other schools, for the Axis powers clearly were on the defensive.

A little bit of estimating tells us that on any given day in, say, 1942, there were about 1,500 little airplanes carry trainees over Saskatchewan.

This air training plan was designed to evolve throughout the war. Around the middle of 1942, it was clear that multiengine training for bomber and transport pilots needed higher priority, and increasingly sophisticated navigational gear meant there would have to be specialized training for aviators. Thus, the two air observer schools in Saskatchewan, in Prince Albert and Regina, closed and freed up their hangars for pilot training. (Regina also was home to No 2 Initial Training School, where young airman were tested for their physical, psychological and physiological ability to fly and fight at high altitudes) and a large explosives depot on the western edge of the city.

Across Canada, these flying training schools graduated more than 131,000 aviators in different trades. Thousands more went through air force technical training schools. It was a remarkable feat for a country of only 14 million people.

Barney Vs. Hitler

Local Aviation Historian Will Chabun shared the following anecdote involving his daughter Rebecca:

"Rebecca had bought a CD from the HMV store that used to be in the Southland Mall. She brought it home, removed the plastic wrapping and discovered — horrors! — a CD by another pop star had been incorrectly inserted into the advertising jacket and plastic case.
No problem. Rebecca and I got in the car and drove over to the mall. It was quiet and the young guy at the till listened as I explained our problem and asked for a swap out. He was very courteous and full of apologies, which led me to ask if that sort of thing happened often.
Turned out it did, he said. It seems that when the big record companies are putting together CDs their assembly  line would have a certain number of pre-recorded CDs and a certain number of plastic containers with liner notes. Usually, things worked out, but every now and then the assembly line would be short one or even more items. But the assembly line couldn’t stop to sort these out, so they were fixed as customers brought them back.
The young guy behind the counter said the strangest such error  he ever handled revolved around a young mother who had bought her son a CD of the songs from Barney the Dinosaur.
Imagine her surprise when she opened up the CD — and it turned out to be “The Collected Speeches of Adolf Hitler.”

Indeed.

Operation Exodus

From about 26 Apr 45 to about 12 May 45 the RAF and RCAF conducted “Op Exodus” which was to fly all liberated Commonwealth PW captured in NW Europe back to Britain. The operation was started by 5 Group of the RAF and the first RCAF crews involved were members of 405 Squadron later joined by other RCAF Squadrons as late as 08 May 45. Manifests were supposedly kept to account for all PW to prevent war criminals and other unwanted folks from getting into England.

If you have any information on OP Exodus, please contact me by email:

Warren James

wsjxxx@gmail.com

Cheers, Warren James

The Madcap Project to bring Geerman Technology to Canada

By Harold Skaarup 

Harold Skaarup is a retired Canadian Forces intelligence officer.

German V-2 Rocket, one that came to Canada
While researching the locations of surviving war trophies brought to Canada in 1945, I spoke with retired Captain Farley M. Mowat about his post war task of collecting German weapons and equipment that was of interest to Canada. He was very detailed in his response.
When the war ended in Europe in May 1945, Captain Mowat was serving with the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment in the Netherlands. He was assigned to Intelligence duties, and eventually succeeded in locating, identifying and collecting over 700 tons of German equipment, documents and material which he then shipped from Antwerp back to Montreal.[1]

Captain Mowat ‘s five-man team gathered up major examples of German armour, artillery, support weapons and equipment from a variety of locations in Western Europe and he arranged for their transport back to Canada on an American Liberty ship, the SS Blommersdyke. The majority of this shipment was sent to the Canadian Armament Research and Development Establishment (CARDE) based at Valcartier, Québec. After examination, some of the kit was moved Camp Borden, Ontario, where a few of the larger armour and artillery pieces remain on display, while a number of other pieces were dispersed around the country.

The team collected a significant number of large scale weapons that made it back to Canada which have since disappeared, including Panzer III and Panzer IV tanks. A Sturmgeschütz III they recovered was used (briefly) as a target on the ranges at CFB Petawawa, but was later salvaged and is now on display in the Canadian War Museum (CWM) in its heavily damaged state. The Wirbelwind self-propelled four-barrelled Anti-Aircraft (SP AAA) gun system mounted on a Panzer IV chassis currently displayed at the Base Borden Military Museum was included in his list, but the Panther that was on display at CFB Borden (now restored in the CWM) was not. The Panzer V came up from the USA in time to be placed on display on Parliament hill on Victory in Europe (VE) Day.

Other German equipment brought back by Captain Mowat’s Intelligence Collection Team included one 8.8-cm FlaK 37 AA Gun, now on display in the Canadian War Museum (CWM) in Ottawa, and one 8.8-cm PaK 43 AT Gun, which is now on display on the grounds of the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ontario. Other Canadian units managed to bring back significant items as well, likely including an 8.8-cm PaK 43/41 AT Gun on display at Lisle, Ontario, and a second 8.8-cm FlaK 37 now on display on the grounds of the Royal Military College and a third on display at CFB Petawawa.

A good number of German artillery pieces captured or collected by Canadian military units overseas can be found on display at CFB Borden, Ontario, CFB Shilo, Manitoba and the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa. A few pieces may also be found at CFB Petawawa, Ontario, CFB Gagetown, New Brunswick, and CFB Valcartier, Québec.

One of two Sturmgeschütz III tracked self-propelled tank hunters that were on display at Shilo has recently been relocated to England, while another went back to Germany. One of the most interesting items from Captain Mowat’s SS Blommersdyke shipment that is presently being restored in the CWM is a very rare Fieseler Fi 103R Reichenberg IV piloted version of the V-1 cruise missile. In 1945 Captain Mowat visited a firing range near Meppen, Germany, which had been used by the Krupp arms manufacturer as an experimental gun establishment to test new guns, shells and projectiles. “At least a hundred huge steel tubes were on the firing line, many mounted on railroad carriages. One...was a 60-cm siege howitzer...estimated to have weighed a hundred tons.” The Intelligence Collection Team “took samples of everything”, including a 12-cm tank gun meant to arm the gigantic 90-ton German tank nick-named the “Maus” (Mouse). The gun was brought back towed on a flatbed trailer by a 60-cwt truck.[2]

The 1944 Molch (Newt) one-man submarine as well as two Enigma encryption machines has also survived intact from the SS Blommersdyke shipment. Not all of the Serial Numbers of the equipment found on Captain Mowat’s list match items with a similar description found in the CWM, so there are likely a number of other sources of origin for some of the items listed here.

Captain Mowat knew he was not responsible for all of the German equipment brought to Canada. He had apparently arranged for a “14 tanks and self-propelled guns” including a “Royal” Tiger II a Panzer V Panther and a range of Panzer tanks from the Mk II upwards most in running condition. In his list of items intended for transport, he had “23 special purpose vehicles ranging from an amphibious Volkswagen to a 15-ton armoured half-track personnel carrier.” Artillery in the collection included 40 types of artillery pieces ranging in size from 2-cm to 21-cm, and embracing an airborne recoilless gun, a “squeeze barrel” anti-tank gun, infantry guns, anti-tank guns from 8.8-cm up to 12.8-cm, field guns, medium guns and heavy guns, all of which were in firing condition. In his Progress Report to LCol Harrison, OC 1 Canadian Historical Section, HQ First Canadian Army on 10 July 1945, he noted that “Railroad guns up to 32-cm” were available but would “demand some time to move”.[3]

By 22 July 1945, the team had added a 63-ton Jagdtiger tank in operating condition to the collection as well as four 2-ton acoustic sea mines, four 24-inch acoustic torpedoes, a 45-foot long 12-ton V-2 rocket and 18 truckloads of various Wehrmacht equipment. [4]

The King (Royal) Tiger and Panther tanks were to be loaded on tank transporters and brought to the dock for loading on the SS Blommersdyke, but the American flatbed crews brought them to another site and they were subsequently transported to the USA. One of the significant items he did manage to bring back was a V-2 rocket with a particularly interesting story attached to it.

Captain Mowat had spoken with the leader of the Dutch resistance in his area, Colonel Tyc Michaels, who informed him of the location of the Rheintochter Anti-Aircraft missile factory, which had been bombed out. During the investigation of the contents of the factory, his team collected some documentation and a few missile parts that made it back to Canada. He also learned of a trainload of ten V-2 rockets which were sitting on railway cars in a railway siding hidden in Germany. “The missile was located off the right of way on the north south line running along the Weser River west of Nienburg, Germany. It was the only one of about ten that had not been shot up or burnt by air attack. As the V-2 at the time of ‘procurement’ was forbidden by 21 Army Group to Canadians this piece had an interesting several months hiding in woods and being disguised as everything from a privy to a submarine, to keep it from the prying eyes of the British High Command.”[5]

Just before the order forbidding the acquisition of any rocket material was sent down, Capt Mowat had dispatched Lieutenant R. Mike Donovan, a Canadian Intelligence Corps Officer, to see if he could acquire one of these V-2s from the British who occupied the sector.[6] Lieutenant Donovan set out from the team’s home base at Meppen in the Netherlands and over a three day period drove to a railway siding “somewhere near Hamburg” where ran into a British detachment guarding a number of railway flatcars each carrying a V-2 rocket. The British were not keen on parting with such important war material to “colonials” and wouldn’t let him get near the site. After an initial recce of the scene, he noted through his binoculars that “an access roadway ran alongside the rail spur and that the last V-2 in the train was partly concealed in a pine woods through which the trail meandered to join a secondary road not far beyond.” Lieutenant Donovan drove back to Ouderkerk and joined by Lieutenant Jim Hood set off again with a 12-ton 16-wheel Mack breakdown lorry with a tow-hook, made a brief detour to Bremerhaven where they liberated a German one-man mini-submarine trailer and then drove to a forest within two miles of the V-2 rail-car site, where Lieutenant Hood hid with the rig and himself. They were also bearing a “30-litre demijohn of DeKuyper’s gin.”

Lieutenant Donovan drove on in a jeep and presented himself again at the guard post. He offered to share his gin, and while pretending to get loaded himself, proceeded to get the British Infantry guard group drunk. Just before dusk, he told his drinking partners he had to relieve himself, and went back to his jeep where he used a small Number 38 radio set to tell Lieutenant Hood the coast was clear. Lieutenant Hood and his work crew quietly as possible eased the Mack and its trailer up close to the railcar with the chosen rocket. There in the dark, the Canadian soldiers stealthily managed to break the chains and “rolled it off the flatcar and down a bunch of timber skids on the trailer”.[7] (This could not have been an easy task in the dark, as the rocket is the size of a modern day SCUD missile similar to those the author examined near Policharki, in Afghanistan).

While Lieutenant Hood was crawling cautiously away with the black-painted V-2 rocket prize, Lieutenant Donovan was leading the British guards in a singing session. When he felt the coast was clear, Mike disengaged himself, but left the still well-filled demijohn with his British choir. He caught up with his crew on the highway and sped ahead of them, stopping at each checkpoint along the way to warn the barrier guards that a bomb disposal crew was coming through with unexploded ordnance, and as a result and he and his crew barrelled back the way they came and delivered the rocket to Ouderkerk in Holland.”

On discovering the V-2 outside his window the next morning Captain Mowat had the rocket moved into a large storage hangar. In order to keep the collected war prize concealed, Captain Mowat had carpenters build a small wooden conning tower, which they installed on top of the rocket, boarded over the fins and installed a wooden propeller. Once the mock tower and propeller were in place, the team proceeded to paint the complete V-2 rocket in navy blue. Curious inquirers were told that the device was an experimental submarine. In this form, the V-2 was kept hidden until it could be loaded on the Liberty Transport Ship SS Blommersdyke which eventually left port carrying over 700 tons of collected German war prizes and steamed across the Atlantic to Montreal.[8]

On arrival, Captain Mowat spoke with the Chief of General Staff (GGS), Major-General Howard Graham, an officer he had served with in the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment, to explain in detail what they had imported. Shortly afterwards, a Lieutenant-Colonel arrived from the Canadian Armament Research and Development Establishment (CARDE) based at Valcartier, Québec, along with a work crew which hauled the V-2, trailer and all, back to Valcartier. There, the V-2 was dismantled. As the science team was examining the rocket they made the interesting, if somewhat disconcerting discovery that the warhead was still filled with its high explosive material. The liquid explosive compound inside the rocket’s warhead had hardened and had to be removed by the scientists by carefully drilling a hole in the nose cone and inserting a hose to wash it out.

The V-2 was blueprinted and then disappeared from the story for a few years. In 1950 it was placed on display on the grounds of the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto. After this, it disappeared again. There is a very strong possibility that this V-2 is buried on the grounds of the former RCAF Station Picton, Ontario. Locals in Picton who grew up during the 1960s recall the V-2 and other old equipment being bulldozed into the base landfill site. The hunt is on...

Submitted by Will Chabun