Tim Gadbois remembers as a child playing with a tiny wooden ship.
The well used toy eventually fell apart. It was only later that the Cornwall resident realized the toy was in fact a replica of the Emden, a German World War II ship.
It was one of the many war souvenirs, his father, Garnet, had collected.
While working as a cook at a detention centre in Lethbridge, Corporal Garnet Gadbois, came to know a German prisoner of war, who was a talented woodworker. “He traded it for two packs of cigarettes,” relates Tim Gadbois.
The POW had fashioned an intricate portrayal of the ship on which he had served. “It had unbelievable detail. The guns swivelled,” recalls Gadbois. Ropes were made of catgut.
The ship was named after the German city of Emden, a significant place for the Stormont- Dundas-Glengarry Highlanders. After playing a pivotal role in the D-Day invasion, and battling across Europe, the Highlanders had reached Emden on VE (Victory In Europe) Day.
“My father didn’t discuss the war,” says Gadbois, although the wooden ship did lead to a conversation about his posting in Lethbridge, at Internment Camp 133, which was the second largest internment camp in North America, with 13,341 POWs immediately moving into the camp when it was completed in November 1942.
“I discovered a part of the war I didn’t know,” says Gadbois. He notes that in addition to soldiers, internment camps in Canada also held Canadian citizens – members of German, Japanese and Italian communities – who were imprisoned in the name of national security.
“It’s a part of our history that we have forgotten,” Gadbois observes. “It is something we would not want to talk about.”
In the years following the war, some Canadians who were interned and had their property seized were compensated by the federal government. The Japanese Canadian redress movement led to an official apology from then-Prime Minister Brian Mulroney in 1988. The settlement included a payment of $21,000 to each surviving individual affected by the policy.
Garnet Gadbois, whose brothers Aubrey and Adrien also served during WWII, volunteered for the army at the age of 23 in 1941. Growing up on a farm in Tyotown, “He didn’t know what he was getting into,” remarks Tim Gadbois.
He and Vivian Leroux were married on Christmas Day of 1941. It is unclear how Gadbois ended up in the medical corps. A vivid memory is one of the trans-Atlantic crossing aboard a troop ship. “He was vomiting all the time.”
Gadbois would spend the rest of the war working at a military hospital in England.
The father of three, who was discharged in 1946, passed away at the age of 54 in 1973.
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