Memoirs of Gordie Bannerman - World War II

• The summer of 1941 was coming upon us and with it a few Ontario flies and mosquitoes. Also, a lot of parade ground bashing is what we used to say, The drilling of new recruits coming to fill up the regimental ranks as quite a few of our early numbers were found to be medically unfit for active service. These chaps then found themselves in base depots doing the everyday chores. Some were discharged outright and the rest of us threw ourselves into learning the art of being a soldier, and a good one at that.

  As the summer progressed there was a lot of moaning in the ranks that there had not been any leaves since Christmas and there were no sign of any. Well the men in 60 Battery that was made up of a high proportion of chaps from Kenora and Portage Prairie, decided to go absent without leave. So the great exodus began with up to twenty at a time of 60 Battery personnel taking off for home. This was really something and I forget how many did take off but it was in great numbers causing the Colonel to be really upset to say the least. The battery commander of 60 Battery was really on the spot. Well the upshot of this was all personnel going as we called it, AWOL, that had returned home to mother, girl friend, or wife or just took off because his buddies did, eventually turned themselves into the nearest Provost detachment on about the 30th day absent so that they would not be classed as deserters, After turning themselves in, and they were arrested and placed under guard and escorted back to Petawawa camp having their way paid. On arrival at our regiment they then had to be signed in to our guard house. The paper work then went into high gear getting the correct charges laid against each of these men. In due course each of these chaps was to appear before his Battery commander, Major Greenlay. Then the accused and the guard sergeant that signed them in on their return was marched, usually by the RSM or the battery Sergeant major, before Greenlay who would dole out the punishment to these chaps. Usually they were stripped of rank and given pay and allowance loss, and confined to the regimental area for a specific time. Mind you if you were a guard Sergeant from another battery that signed these chaps in. Major Greenlay tried his best to make you, the innocent one in all this, guilty as hell even though you were doing your job. if you had not signed them in they would have been absent even more time. I guess the Colonel was on his backside as 90 percent of all the absentees were from his battery. Most of us did not have good thoughts about Greenlay for his attitude to we Sergeants from the other two batteries who were only doing our job. The real loss to those that stayed was we did not get a day longer leave when the regular leaves came up. It was that crime did pay, and most of us felt it should not have. But as the years went by we forgot all about that episode, until you get doing what I'm doing now, then you wonder ????

  But that was 61 years ago. How many of the absentee chaps still survive? Major Greenlay has passed away. He became the Colonel of the 11th Field Regiment RCA and served from the summer of 44 to the end of hostilities in that capacity. A jump ahead, he was the only Colonel that served in Italy for that period that did not get the DSO. He apparently was rude to the Brigadier, maybe justly so but this may be hearsay ...

  Gordie