Historically Speaking

Remembrance Day will surely have had a new significance for students at St. Jude Elementary School this year after a visit the day before from a real live witness to history. Colonel Hugh Bartley (Retired) brought the past to life in the most sincere and moving way with impressions of World War I, learned at his father’s knee, and stories from his own yeoman service as a flyer with Bomber Command during World War II.

His presentation to an assembly of junior and intermediate grade students was facilitated through The Memory Project, a program of the Historica-Dominion Institute. The Project’s Speakers’ Bureau retains 1500 veterans ready and willing to go out to schools – as many as 700 visits each year – to help youngsters understand the calamity of war and the need to remember the courage and sacrifice of those who served – and serve – in Canada’s armed forces.

Bartley enlisted in the RCAF in the spring of 1941, graduated from flight training as a sergeant pilot, and was transferred to England to be attached to the Royal Air Force in January, 1942. After serving as flying instructor for two years, he was commissioned and assigned to the “Pathfinder” Force of Bomber Command.

Introduced by the event’s organizer, teacher Sharon Margetson, the wee, sprightly and soft-spoken 88-year-old, quickly reeled his audience in with accounts of hardship and valour, of the muddy mayhem and unimaginable losses of trench warfare in Flanders in World War I and of the sudden fury and devastation of the more sophisticated weaponry of World War II.

The students were wonderfully attentive and respectful as he explained the poppy as a symbol of remembrance and spoke lines from John McCrae’s iconic poem; as he recounted with pride the bravery of Canadians in capturing Mons to signal the end of World War I and in taking Juno Beach on D-Day to help signal the beginning of the end of World War II.

And they were spellbound as he described coming to grief on a mission over Belgium in 1944: the plane began breaking up in a violent thunderstorm and the crew was forced to jump for it. He remembers coming down head first, hopelessly entangled in the shroud lines of his parachute, and landing in a field of cows…and one bull “who didn’t seem to care much for me.” Rescued by US Army medics, he was flown back to convalesce in England, his head shaved to accommodate a network of stitches in his scalp. His English fiancée didn’t know him until he reassured her with, “Yes, Barbara, it is I.”

And, he says with a twinkle, they’re now in their 64th year of marriage.

His post-war experiences included two years with the Canadian Joint Staff in Ottawa, two years as RCAF Commanding Officer at Fort Churchill, Manitoba (the kids loved stories about flying a DeHaviland Otter on search and rescue missions in the Arctic), a tour of duty with the North American Air Defence (NORAD) system, and an assignment as military attaché for Israel and Cyprus. He retired from active duty in 1972.

Colonel Bartley closed by urging the students, as future leaders of this country, to honour history and to learn from it: to determine what it takes to steer Canada clear of war and towards lasting peace. He is pleased by the public’s acknowledgement of the debt we all owe to veterans for our way of life, and by the continued interest of young people in listening to his message.

At the end of the presentation, two of those young people, students Keeon Divonbeigi and Matthew Richards, expressed the school’s appreciation to its distinguished visitor with heartfelt words and thank-you gifts.