Harvey Wittenberg has lived a long time and accumulated a lot of memories. But his are a soldier’s memories, the kind that still leave him unsettled decades later.
Take, for instance, the day in late 1945, a few months after the end of the Second World War, when the then-young soldier entered a notorious German concentration camp. On that day, Wittenberg, a corporal with the remaining Canadian occupation forces, drove a Jeep load of senior Canadian military officers through the gates of Auschwitz, one of the most infamous of the network of extermination camps the Nazis built in Polish areas they’d annexed as part of the Third Reich in the early years of the war. More than a million people died in the camps, many in the gas chambers. Ninety per cent were Jews.
“It was a horrible place to see, the ovens, the mass graves,” says Wittenberg, recounting some of his experiences with the Canadian Army between 1939 and early 1946. From the time he was 18 until he was 20, he took in some of the most vicious fighting — the battles of Caen, the Scheldt, Antwerp, and Nijmegen among them — of the war.
“It was hard to realize that people could make others suffer so much. But they did. I saw it. I’ve never forgotten it.”
But then, paradoxically enough, he’s also grateful to be able to remember. In late December, the French government made Wittenberg a Chevalier (or Knight) in the Legion of Honour, the country’s highest decoration and one that originates with Napoleon in the early 1800s. The honour was part of an initiative undertaken by France on the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings in June of 1944 to recognize about 600 surviving Canadian veterans who participated in the campaigns to liberate France from Nazi occupation.
Wittenberg likes to think his medal is a collective honour, that in accepting it his friends are being honoured and remembered, too.
“It came as quite a surprise to me I would be honoured in this way. I appreciate it very much, but there was a lot of men I knew in the war who should be getting it. If there was only some way I could reach them and say, ‘Here. I’m getting this for you.’
“I accepted it on their behalf.”
Still vigorous at 94 — a bit hard of hearing, certainly, but still possessed of a firm-timbered voice and a strong handshake — Wittenberg readily recalls his wartime experience, and, like any veteran of war, still wonders why he survived when so many others didn’t.
“In a unit you train together and become like a family. It hurts very, very much to lose someone. That was the hardest part of the war for me. I had a lot of friends who didn’t make it home.”
Wittenberg’s own service goes back to 1939 when, at the age of 17, he signed on to the reserve list of the Army Service Corps. A year later, at 18, he walked into a recruiting office on Queen Street to enlist for active duty. By June of 1940 he was in England with the 2nd Canadian Infantry Division.
The next two years were spent in training, shuttling from camp to camp around the British Isles. He learned to handle practically anything with wheels from motorcycles and jeeps to three-ton troop trucks.
On Aug. 19, 1942, the 2nd Division provided most of the soldiers for Operation Jubilee, the famous — and still much debated — raid on Dieppe. Of the nearly 5,000 men and officers who pounded ashore, 3,369 where killed or wounded. Many others were taken prisoner.
Wittenberg counts himself lucky not to have been among either the casualties or the captives. He’d stayed in England, his only role being to load equipment on the landing craft used in the raid.
Two years later, however, following the Normandy landings in early June of 1944, Wittenberg was in France, hiding in roadside ditches or basements of shattered buildings as German fighters and bombers hammered Canadian troops during the fighting to capture the French port city of Caen.
He earned a mention in dispatches for coolly leading a group of men to shelter during one bombardment, but he mostly remembers the hellish noise — he attributes his poor hearing to the perforated eardrums he suffered at the time — and picking up the remains of comrades who’d taken shelter under a truck when a bomb hit it.
“Sometimes my mind goes back to the war,” he says. “I don’t think anyone who has served can ever really forget it. You can’t really shut it out of your mind. Sometimes I still dream of things that happened in the war.”
After the Battle of Caen and the capture of Verrières Ridge, which dominated the road to Falaise, Wittenberg’s division fought its way across the Belgian border, crossing the Albert Canal in late September and moving on to the Scheldt Estuary. The fighting in the fall of 1944 was fierce: the 2nd Division lost 3,650 men in 33 days of combat.
After a relatively quiet winter in the Nijmegen Salient, the 2nd Division took part in some of the last major battles of the war, advancing along the Nijmegen-Kleve Road to attack the Siegfried Line and finally crossing the Rhine River into Germany itself.
“Nijmegen was scary. The Germans broke through and we were surrounded for a short while,” Wittenberg says, recalling the sight of German soldiers shooting Allied soldiers as they descended in their parachutes at one point. “The Germans killed them before they even landed.”
Wittenberg’s division suffered some of its heaviest casualties during these final months of the war. Between late February and March of 1945 — a month before the war ended on May 5 — at least 300 men were killed and more than 1,100 wounded.
Wittenberg stayed in the army until late 1946, working as a “paper pusher”, helping with the disbanding of army units and the return of troops to Canada. It was during this period that he visited Auschwitz.
“We’d all heard so much about it. I had to see it for myself. They showed us where they burned the bodies in the ovens, and the mass graves. The smell was something awful.”
The memory of that visit still haunts him, particularly when he hears of people who deny the Holocaust. “I find it difficult to believe anyone would say it never happened.”
Wittenberg eventually returned to Canada himself and remained in the Canadian Armed Forces. He was still a young man and decided to start his own band on the side. This was the era of big bands and swing music, and the Harvey Wittenberg orchestra made a name for itself in the Ottawa area and as far south as New York state. He fondly remembers Louis Armstrong joining him on stage one night at a venue in Gatineau to play his trumpet.
He eventually married — at age 40 — and had two sons, Sean and Chris. When the swing era died out, he turned his paper-pushing skills to work for a local fence company to support his family. He divorced in the 1980s and has never remarried. In retirement he took up painting, among other activities, and writing his memoirs — he’s filled five large three-ring binders so far — as a legacy project for his grandchildren.
At 94, Wittenberg is well aware that there are more years behind him than ahead, but he still looks to the future. Perhaps not surprisingly, given his experience, he’s views the future with some trepidation.
“I’ve had the opportunity in my 94 years to see some big changes in the world, but when I think of my grandchildren (he has six) I wonder what kind of world they are going to face. There’s going to be another war. That’s inevitable.”
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The Legion of Honour, from Napoleon to now
Significance
The Ordre National de la Légion d’honneur is France’s premier order and decoration. It is awarded to “French citizens and foreigners, civilians and military personnel, irrespective of rank, birth, or religion,” Encyclopedia Britannica reports.
History
Napoleon Bonaparte, then French first consul, created the order in 1802 to recognize military and civilian merit, despite opposition from those who felt it should be purely a military award. Later, as emperor, Napoleon nominated some 48,000 people for the order. During the Restoration the award lost prominence, ranking below military and religious orders. It later regained its place as the nation’s highest decoration.
Levels
The legion’s five classes, in ascending rank: knight, or chevalier (unlimited members), officer (4,000), commander (1,000) grand officer (200), grand cross (80). Note that the rank of knight does not correspond with the British titular honour, which is accompanied by a title (“Sir”) and postnominal letters (i.e. KBE).
Design
The original badge bore the head of Napoleon surrounded by oak and laurel wreaths. Louis XVIII replaced Napoleon with King Henry IV of France, and Napoleon III restored the original design, but with the female head of the Republic in place of a regent. The reverse side carries crossed tricolours and the motto “Honneur et Patrie.”
Additional medal
Recipients of the award for wartime service also automatically receive the Croix de Guerre, France’s highest military honour.
Recipients
France named all surviving Canadian veterans of the First World War to the order in 1998, and now is doing the same for veterans of the Second World War. Among other Canadian recipients are figures in politics, entertainment and business, including Lucien Bouchard, Robert Bourassa, Jean Charest, Paul Desmarais, Céline Dion, Réne Levesque and Ben Wieder.
Sources: www.blatherwick.net, www.britannica.com, Citizen files