Dr. C.M. Johnston's Project

James A. Young

Readers of the 1945 Lampadion, the yearbook of Delta Collegiate Institute in Hamilton, Ontario would have seen an entry for Lieutenant J.A. Young under the heading “In Memorium” [sic]. It read in part as follows:

…[He] proceeded overseas in August, 1943, and in November was sent to N. Africa. He was sent to Sicily and Italy and was attached to the Perth Regiment of Canada as Sniper Platoon Commander. He was killed in enemy territory at Monte Cassino, April 20 th , 1944.

Given the difficulty of gathering anything like complete casualty information at that time this entry, put together by conscientious student researchers, was reasonably accurate, as the following pages will ultimately try to show.

James Allan (Jim) Young was born in Hamilton on 6 March 1917, at a time when the outcome of the Great War (or World War I), which had been raging for three years in Europe, was still in doubt. His parents, Mr. and Mrs. Adelbert James Young, could scarcely have imagined that this horrific conflict, supposedly the war to end all wars, would spawn within a generation an even wider global struggle, one that would claim the lives of their son and thousands of other young Canadians. Like Jack Yost [HR] Jim was raised in the Delta district of Hamilton's east end – in his case, on Park Row Avenue South -- and was educated first, at Memorial School, dedicated to the fallen of the Great War, and then at Delta Collegiate Institute (DCI). Both had been the district's educational landmarks ever since opening their doors in the postwar ‘twenties to the east end's growing student population. At Memorial Jim and his fellow pupils were constantly reminded of the sacrifices the previous generation had made. Each panel of the gallery overlooking the school's spacious auditorium was emblazoned with the name of a major Great War battle. Encircling the auditorium was honour roll after honour roll commemorating the 60,000 Canadians who had served and died in the conflict.

After completing his primary school requirements in these mnemonic surroundings, Jim proceeded in 1930 to Delta Collegiate. There he soon made his athletic mark in football (then often called rugby) and track and field, notably in the shot put. On the football field he played at both the junior and senior levels. A 1936 Lampadion group picture shows him with the senior team that carried DCI's red and white colours into battle against other local high school squads, including that of Hamilton Central Collegiate Institute, their principal rival. Standing some six feet and weighing nearly 180 pounds Jim must have been a formidable opponent at outside wing, the position he most preferred. The impressed yearbook editor described him as a “good player … who got a kick out of scoring touchdowns”. The Lampadion also disclosed that “Willie”, his unaccountable nickname in certain quarters, “used to get a smile from a certain [unnamed] girl every morning at auditorium”, where the student body assembled for announcements and the principal's heads up message before going to classes.

In his final years at Delta Collegiate Jim was among those senior students whom juniors tended to “look up to” – to quote one recollection. His activities off the school grounds doubtless reinforced that respect. He regularly attended the meetings of the popular Tower Club, a young men's organization which gathered at Ryerson United Church and, among other things, invited inspirational speakers and assorted civic leaders to address the group. Its all-embracing programs drew youth from various denominations in the city, including Jim, an Anglican, who ordinarily worshipped with his family at the Church of St. Peter's.

Jim spent six years at DCI (presumably he was obliged to repeat a year) and graduated with his senior matriculation in 1936. He then had his future to ponder. Would it be the working world or university? It seems unlikely that his family would not have helped to support him had he wished to continue his schooling. But perhaps he had had enough of school at that point and wished to share the business experience of his father, who by this time was a purchasing agent for a local firm. In any case, after he matriculated Jim decided to enter the workplace and do clerical work, first at the Sawyer Massey firm in Hamilton and then at the Ontario Hydro Commission in Toronto. On his army service record he indicated that he had also been a “furnace operator”, presumably at the Hydro.

After three years of low level tasks, however, he resolved to return to the books and go to university after all. He opted for the conveniently located McMaster, which had moved from Toronto to Hamilton's Westdale district in 1930, the year he had started high school. Armed with his work savings and the comforting knowledge that he could reduce expenses by living at home, he registered at the University in late September, 1939. This was some two weeks after Canada had followed the lead of the United Kingdom and France by officially declaring war against Germany, a grim reprise of 1914. Though the war must have been a nagging presence, Jim and his fellow registrants were understandably preoccupied with their immediate academic concerns.

An eager and ambitious Jim, intent on a business not a teaching career – as he made plain on his admissions application -- enrolled in Honour Political Economy (now simply Economics). He obviously expected that an advanced four-year degree program would enhance his opportunities at the higher levels of the business world, at the very least qualify him as a “sales manager”. He bit off more than he could chew, however, and soon enough had to rein in his expectations. After failing two courses in his first year he was required to switch to the less demanding three-year Political Economy Option. Those three years out of school may have eroded his study habits.

Meanwhile, he had already taken the plunge into campus athletics. As at DCI he went out primarily for football. Again he excelled at the outside wing position, becoming so indispensable in a Varsity game against the arch-rival Aggies” of the Ontario Agricultural College that he was dubbed the “sixty minute man”, especially adept at intercepting passes and scoring touchdowns. A team photograph taken in 1939 shows him in the stellar company of upperclassmen Nairn Boyd [HR] and Charlie Szumlinski [HR]. On his own successful class team of '42 Jim served as both manager and “husky pulverizer”, to quote the Silhouette , the student weekly. In a game against the “frosh”, however, whose team was inspired by the aggressive play of Harry Zavadowsky [HR], he was injured and had to be carried off the field, a misadventure from which he quickly recovered. In 1941 he was awarded his 1 st Grade Athletic Colours in recognition of his achievements on the gridiron.

Indoors, he became an active member of the Political Economy Club, whose agenda included bringing in local entrepreneurs (at least those hardy and inventive enough to have survived the ongoing Depression ) to address the respectful membership. Other visiting speakers and guests included his professors' colleagues at neighbouring institutions who regaled club members with talk of their specialized work in the discipline. Jim, older and more mature than most of his classmates, clearly enjoyed these occasions, and equipped with some knowledge of the working world was in a position to make his own substantial contribution to the club. In his graduating year he was rewarded with the chairmanship of its finance committee.

Jim's extracurricular efforts, however, could only unfold when his academic responsibilities and other campus duties permitted, such as his service with the McMaster Contingent of the Canadian Officers' Training Corps (COTC). Membership in the COTC, which had been formed on a voluntary basis at the war's outbreak, had been made obligatory in 1940 when the military situation overseas took a disastrous turn for the worse. France and the Low Countries had been speedily conquered by the German Blitzkrieg and Britain was faced with the hitherto unthinkable, the prospect of being invaded by a triumphant enemy.

In this ominous setting Jim elected to serve as a cadet in the COTC, that is, with the intention of qualifying for an army commission. Stipulated training days throughout the academic year, lecture programs, and at least two summer weeks at the military camp at Niagara-on-the –Lake constituted the basic regimen for Jim and other aspiring McMaster officers. In November, 1940, as a COTC cadet, Jim was attached to the Non-Permanent Active Militia and assigned to the 2 nd (Reserve) Battalion of the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry (RHLI). His maturity and enthusiasm must again have been in play because within a year – on 25 September 1941 -- he gained his militia commission, becoming a newly appointed 2 nd lieutenant. The following spring he graduated BA from McMaster, his Marmor “Obit” sanguinely announcing his “plans… to become a big vice-president of a going concern”.

Like classmate Gordon Holder [HR], however, he promptly put aside such grandiose aspirations and on 8 May 1942 enlisted for active service in the Canadian army. Again like Holder, because he enlisted before his final spring examinations he was excused them, his satisfactory class work counting toward the degree requirements. Soon enough the McMaster Alumni News had occasion to run a story of his departure for an officers' training school at Gordon Head, British Columbia. In an accompanying photograph, Jim is poignantly pictured with McMaster classmates and fellow officer cadets Gordon Holder and Robert Heard [HR] as they were about to entrain for the same destination on the West Coast. For his part, after completing the requisite course at Gordon Head, a gratified Jim had his militia rank confirmed. At this point he was dispatched eastward to Camp Borden, the army's principal training station, for an advanced instructional course. When completed on 12 September 1942 he was promoted lieutenant, infantry, in the active army. After a series of training and instructional exercises at Borden and Simcoe, he was in July, 1943 granted an embarkation leave. His days in Canada would soon be over.

Following his leave with family and friends, Jim was off to an East Coast Transit Camp, the last stop before his embarkation for the United Kingdom on 25 August 1943. After an uneventful and comparatively speedy crossing he reached his destination on 1 September and shortly cabled his relieved parents. He was immediately posted to the 4 th Canadian Infantry Reinforcement Unit (CIRU) and then assigned on a temporary basis to the 1 st Battalion, RHLI, in whose reserve battalion he had once served as a McMaster officer cadet. On 23 October he was dispatched to an Officer Refresher Course and after completing it was attached to the Irish Regiment of Canada and assigned to an exercise dubbed “Collie”. This apparently was a preliminary to his posting to the Mediterranean theatre of operations and the ongoing campaign in Italy, which had commenced the previous September. Jim would be in for another long sea voyage, which would now take in the western Mediterranean, before he arrived at his Italian destination on 1 December 1943.

He would soon be caught up in the bloody and tortuous fighting that characterized the Italian campaign. A leading military historian has bluntly described what Jim and other Allied soldiers, British, American, and Commonwealth, were up against at that point:

[T]he situation in Italy was disappointing compared with the high hopes that accompanied the landings there …. The invading … Allied …armies had lost heavily and become palpably exhausted by their successive frontal attacks up the leg of the Italian peninsula, on the left and right sides respectively of its shin bone – the Apennine mountain range. Their slow crawling progress … had become all too like the battering-ram process of the Allied armies on the Western Front in the First World War”.

This then was the “disappointing situation” in which Jim Young would soon find himself.

As it turned out, he was not with the Irish Regiment for long. In late December, 1943 he was assigned as a reinforcement officer to the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment (“Hasty P's”), which was heavily engaged in the Moro River operation near Ortona on Italy's east coast. “From the opening of the Moro battle … until April 20, 1944”, writes the Hasty P's' historian, “the Regiment was seldom out of close touch with the enemy, and never out of reach of the enemy guns. For five months it existed under the most adverse conditions of war”. By that date, April 20 th , however -- coincidentally and sadly the last day of his life -- Jim was no longer with the regiment. Reassigned yet again but with reinforced battle experience, he was now serving on the Cassino front with the Perth Regiment of Canada, which he had joined in early March, 1944. This was some two months after the hitherto “unblooded” Perths had fought their first action at the Battle of the Arielli River, one of many that Allied forces would have to fight in their grinding march up the mountainous and river laced Italian peninsula. The Perths had arrived in Italy the previous November after being stationed in England for the better part of two years. They now formed part of the 5 th Canadian Armoured Division, which in turn was attached to the British 8 th Army, the celebrated formation that had played a crucial role in eliminating the enemy threat in North Africa.

When Jim joined the Perths in March, 1944 they were in the midst of being withdrawn from the line after weeks of heavy fighting in central Italy. The ground they had recently fought over, to quote a regimental account, “had stagnated into a muddy wallow, [again] reminiscent of the battlefields of WWI”. A series of training exercises, in which Jim doubtless participated, were then laid on for the Perths. They were primarily designed to achieve a higher level of co-operation between tanks and foot soldiers and to sharpen the troops' proficiency in “boatmanship” and river crossing, an essential in a country like Italy. After these exercises were completed the regiment was transferred in early April to defensive or holding positions near Cassino, which lay some 140 kilometres southeast of Rome. This new location was near the site of the lofty and ancient Benedictine monastery – Monte Cassino – whose glittering white architecture had once made it the most impressive landmark in the area. Now, however, it was reduced to a shambles, having been massively bombed a few weeks earlier by the Americans in the mistaken belief that the enemy was using it as a strong point.

Meanwhile, the Perths were one of many Allied units which remained in their designated holding positions, awaiting further orders. In that interminably rocky and hilly terrain that was Cassino, “we found ourselves”, wrote a Perth veteran in his vivid war memoirs, “living more and more the life of lizards and insects”.

We scurried amongst the rocks as insects do when disturbed at the upturning of a stone. We clawed our way into cracks and crevices wherever this was possible, worming our bodies into these narrow spaces in the jumble of boulders to the rear of our positions…. The piles of stones in which [we] sheltered became … living room …bedroom … kitchen, and when Nature called, … toilet.

Although Jim and other junior officers may have fared marginally better than the rank and file they too would soon have need of all the so-called sangars or stone breastworks they could assemble.

Looming in front of the regiment, to quote the memoirs again, “was the massive and ominously dark bulk of Mount Cifalco”, on whose “shadowed slope” German artillery observers kept a sharp eye out for any Canadian activity on the hilltops below. And when it was spotted an enemy barrage was almost immediately unleashed, principally from the dreaded .88, the best weapon by far in the German armoury. “[T]he hilltop, the rocks, and the sky above”, the graphic Perth memoir continues,

blasted apart in a flaming surge of ear-shattering thunder. Shrapnel and stone fragments buzzed like bees in fields of clover, ricocheting off the sangars in angry tones. And then all around them, mortars whuffled down, their deeper crunch far more terrifying than shellfire…. To the men, eyes wide with fear, and hands cupped over their ears it had to be the very end of time.

In the merciful intervals between bombardments, the Perths shored up their battered sangars, engaged in ceaseless patrol activity, and did the best they could to combat the numbing tedium that often enveloped their lives.

As the days wore on, however, nearly everyone began to sense that the routine of holding and defending positions was about to end and that some kind of major Allied offensive was in the works. “During the whole of April [1944]”, as a Canadian military historian confirmed, “the anxious calm which precedes great battles covered the Italian front”. But behind that calm façade elaborate schemes of deception were hatched to confuse and distract the Germans and to mask the preparations for the coming assault. Meanwhile old routines were not abandoned. Periodically, as noted, units such as the Perths sent out scouting and “recce” (reconnaissance) parties to gather intelligence or determine the lay of the land over which the regiment might have to fight. On some occasions the patrolling was punctuated by the “tac-tac-tac-tac of a Bren [gun] or the rapid answering fire burp of a Schmeisser [machine gun]” as rival patrols encountered one another. On others little or no effective contact was made with the foe. In either case these constant exercises seem to bear out one Perth soldier's comment that on this otherwise static front “90% of the fighting is done at night ….”

Jim Young would learn about this nocturnal warfare at first-hand when on 16 and 18 April 1944 he led potentially dangerous forays into enemy territory. The outcome was recorded in the regimental war diary. In the first instance, a miserable rainy night, his patrol “reported that there were no enemy” at their specified objective, a road junction, though some houses in the vicinity “were definitely occupied as they heard movement in this area”. “Also heard 2 rifle shots”, the report continued, “coming from the [the nearby village of] VALLELUCE”, one of several struggling to survive in that rugged and war-torn stretch of country. In the second instance, two nights later, in weather mercifully improved, Jim's scout platoon again detected the enemy moving about, this time laying cable and driving what sounded like a mule supply train along a mountain trail. Not long after that, however, the patrol had reason to “suspect an enemy ambush” – a not uncommon occurrence -- and decided to withdraw to their own lines. They may have anticipated, as other wary Perth patrols had, the sudden intervention of a large enemy “fighting patrol”, which would have outnumbered and outgunned their smaller scouting force.

Before Jim undertook his missions he may well have harboured the emotions of a fellow Allied officer also serving on the Cassino front. Before that officer and his men went into action, he painfully remembered “stomachs drawn in to try and compress the disquiet of fear that seemed to knot intestines like a balled fist. Fear, fear of fear, and the shame of feeling afraid. That merciless enemy born of memory and imagination that can twist your mind until your body shrinks with the tingle of apprehension”. That “merciless enemy” somehow had to be kept at bay just as the physical one on the other side of the battle line had to be subdued. This grim fact of life (and death) fellow combatant Jim Young had probably come to accept, though, to quote the pardonable praise of the McMaster Alumni News, he habitually approached every task, however onerous, with “cheerfulness and certainty of success”. Whatever the emotions and thoughts he bore into battle, on the night of 19/20 April 1944 – a “fair” one weather-wise -- Jim again set out at the head of select members of his scout platoon on an intelligence-gathering patrol, his third in four days. The exercise, like the ones that had gone before, smacked, like so much else in the Italian campaign, of the kind regularly conducted on the stagnant Western Front in the Great War.

After the event, Jim's corporal, G.L. Fenwick, submitted an account of what happened when the party, hitherto unscathed, was making its way back through a war-battered village near Cassino, quite possibly the hapless Valleluce. Fenwick's statement was unadorned and matter of fact:

… [W]e were returning from a patrol under Lieut. J.A. Young at about 0130 hrs. [20 April]. We had searched several houses believed to be occupied by the enemy and found them vacant. We came back from [one] house to the path that we went up on and Mr. Young knelt down about 15 yds. from the house. He told me to go back and bring up the other men…. I just turned around when a shot rang out. Mr. Young fell. I turned around and waited for about a minute and opened fire although I could … see no movement …. The rest of the men knelt down beside Mr. Young. We unarmed [sic] him and found that he had lost a lot of blood from a rifle bullet wound just over his right eye brow. I took off his wrist bracelet and [Pte.] Corbett examined his heart. I felt his pulse and there didn't seem to be any throb at all. Then we went to locate [Pte.] Jones whom we found had also been hit by a bullet. We took him back about 50 yds. and applied a field dressing and brought him back to our lines ….

The mortally stricken Jim Young, on the other hand, was in no condition to join the wounded though presumably mobile Jones. The lieutenant was already in his death throes and making, according to witnesses, a “deep gurgling sound in his throat”. In the circumstances Cpl. Fenwick concluded that “if he was not dead when we left him he would not have lived more than a few minutes”. In any event, he stated that “there “was nothing that could be done”. Because of their dangerous exposure to enemy sniping Jim's men were “unable”, Fenwick added cryptically, “to remove his body”, and it was regretfully left in enemy territory. Other members of the patrol, including Private D.C. Kean, corroborated Fenwick's account. As fate would have it, however, there was no further sniper fire reported and the short, violent episode that claimed Jim's life came to a close when the rest of the scouting party reached the safety of their own lines.

That was not the end of the episode, however. The survivors of the night patrol made a point of writing Jim's parents and speaking of his “gallantry”. The compiler of the regimental war diary, which incorporated the essentials of Fenwick's post mortem statement, added his own private plaudits, which echoed what the Alumni News had once said of Jim: “Lieut. Young was as an exceptionally good officer, keen and efficient in his work” “Although he had only been with the unit one month [sic]”, the diary added, “his loss will certainly be felt by all members of the regiment”. It was bitterly ironic that just two days after Jim's death the Perths conducted a planned withdrawal from the line and were replaced by the unit to which he had once been attached, the Irish Regiment of Canada.

The lethal encounter in that Italian village in the early hours of 20 April 1944 was typical of what often occurred in the campaign and was starkly reminiscent of the fate that befell Jim's fellow McMaster alumnus, Kenner Arrell [HR], who had been killed in action near Ortona four months earlier.

James Allan Young, who has no known grave, is commemorated in the Cassino Memorial, situated within Cassino War Cemetery, which is located in the Commune of Cassino, Province of Frosinone, Italy. It lies one kilometer from the hill on which stands the restored monastery of Monte Cassino.

C.M. Johnston

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: The following provided valuable help, supplying recollections, information, documentation, or archival assistance: John Bonk, Sharon Kean (Private D.C. Kean's daughter), Andrea McRae, James McRae, Kenneth Morgan, Darlene Pounder, Stanley Scislowski, Norman Shrive, Sheila Turcon, and Gavin Watt. Stanley Scislowski, a Perth veteran, wrote the fine war memoir quoted in the text and cited below, and furnished other welcome aid. Andrea and James McRae similarly obliged, kindly making available their extensive and informative Perth Regiment archives (see McRAE below).

SOURCES: National Archives of Canada / Wartime Personnel Records: Service Record of Lieutenant James Allan Young, and Questionnaire on a Missing Officer or Soldier: Lieut. Young, J.A., Statement of Cpl. G.L. Fenwick, concurred in by Ptes. Kean, D.C., White, J.A., Corbett, A.H., 21 Apr. 44; Commonwealth War Graves Commission: Commemorative Information, Lieut. James Allan Young; Delta Secondary School (formerly Delta Collegiate Institute) Library: Lampadion, 1936, 26, 30, 1937, 69, 1945 , 37; Delta Alumni Society Archives; Canadian Baptist Archives / McMaster Divinity College: McMaster University Student File 7742, James A. Young (admissions application, grade reports and standings), Biographical File, James A. Young (includes newspaper and magazine obituaries); McMaster University Library / W. Ready Archives: Silhouette, 10 Nov. 1939, 1, 4, 18 Oct. 1940, 1, 3 Nov. 1944; Marmor, 1941, 65, 105, 1942, 30, 35, 51; McMaster Alumni News , 27 Oct. 1942, 5 July 1944, Hamilton Spectator , 7 July 1944. McRAE: War Diaries of the Perth Regiment of Canada (obtained from the National Archives of Canada), 4, 7, 9, 12, 16, 18, 20 April 1944; Perth Regiment Letterbook, 47, 54, 59, 60; Stafford Johnston, The Fighting Perths (Stratford ON: Perth Regiment Veterans' Association, 1964), 71-2. Stanley Scislowski, Not All Of Us Were Brave (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1997), chap.4 (“In the Mountains at Casino”), supplemented by an excerpt from his memoirs sent to the author, 30 July 2003; Farley Mowat, The Regiment (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1973, 2 nd ed.), 161 (Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment); G.W.L. Nicholson, Official History of the Canadian Army in the Second World War, II: The Canadians in Italy, 1943-1945 (Ottawa: Queen's Printer, 1956), 367-70, 390-1; B.H. Liddell Hart, History of the Second World War (London: Pan Books, 1973 ed.), 547.

Internet:
“The Perth Regiment of Canada, 1939-1945”, 1-4 (from the history of the Perth Regiment webpage, www.mayoff.com/perth-history.html;
Roger Smith, Up the Blue: “Fear and Fear of Fear – Cassino”, 1, www.ngaiopress.com/fear.htm;
“The Order of St. Benedict, Monte Cassino”, 1-2, www.osb.org/gen/monte.html.

[ For a related biography, see Kenner Sawle Arrell ]