Almost 70 years after he was discharged from the Royal Canadian Navy, Walter Treherne can still remember his six-digit registration number.
“If I didn’t know my number, I wouldn’t get paid,” he said with a laugh, speaking at his home in Stettler this week.
A native of Montreal, Treherne enlisted on May 10, 1943 at the age of 17, joining the 1.1 million Canadians who would serve in the country’s armed forces during the Second World War.
Now, at age 89, he is among the estimated 80,000 veterans from that conflict who are still living today, 75 years after Canada declared war on Germany.
In a new program announced last fall, the government is honouring those veterans with a commemorative lapel pin and a certificate of recognition.
The office of Crowfoot MP Kevin Sorenson distributed the pins to a total of ten Stettler and area residents, who received them in the mail last week.
About 70 pins in total are being distributed to veterans in Sorenson’s constituency, but given the unpredictability of Alberta’s winter weather and the average age of the recipients, most of them are being delivered by mail rather than presented in person.
Speaking to the Independent on Friday, Jan. 23, Sorenson said earlier that day he had met with a group of seven veterans in Camrose to present them with their pins.
He said he was amazed at the stories shared by the veterans, many of whom were just 16 or 17 when they joined the military.
“One guy here had to lie about his age to get in,” Sorenson said, adding that even as their numbers decline, Canada’s veterans of the Second World War are widely seen as heroes.
“You can’t even comprehend it,” he continued, noting that Canadians signed up by the thousands to fight in a conflict in which they had no direct stake. “We stood up for what was right . . . (We stood up) against evil.”
The commemorative pin — a silver disc, featuring the dates of the war’s start and end, the word “CANADA” flanked by maple leaves, and a torch in front of a V for victory — is available to Canadian veterans who served at least one day with the Canadian forces or with other Allied forces, at home or abroad, during the war.
The pin was made available on Sept. 10, 2014 — the 75th anniversary of Canada’s declaration of war — and will continue to be available until 2020, but only upon request by a veteran or someone acting on their behalf.
Treherne, who received his pin in the mail last week, recalled that he enlisted in 1943 because “I was in a small job and I wasn’t really happy with it.”
After a year and a half in training, he went overseas, starting aboard the HMS Kent, a British cruiser. His military journey would take him first to the North Atlantic, attacking the German battleship Tirpitz along the fjords of Norway in August 1944.
“I felt for the people that got killed,” he recalled, “because they didn’t want to be out there neither.”
It was during their return to Belfast that he had his closest call, as an accompanying aircraft carrier, the HMS Nabob, was torpedoed by a German U-boat, resulting in the deaths of 30 men, according to the Royal Navy’s Research Archive.
Treherne met and wed his first wife, Mary, in Belfast, and then boarded the HMCS Ontario, which took him all the way through the Middle East to the Pacific by the war’s end.
He received his discharge in Montreal in 1946, the same year his wife rejoined him with their first child in tow.
Their family grew to include seven children; they would remain in Quebec until his retirement in the early 1990s, heading first to Calgary. He and his wife remained married for 62 years; after her death, he moved to Stettler and married his second wife, Nola.
Treherne said he had no complaints about the way he was looked after by the federal government. His medical needs have increased with age but he said Veterans Affairs has continued to provide for him.
Len Schofer is also among the surviving veterans living in and around Stettler. Now 89, he was 17-and-a-half when he enlisted — “just a little young boy,” in his words.
He grew up in Eatonia, Sask., and enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1943, spending the rest of the war years in training at various stations across Western Canada.
“I wanted to be a fighter pilot,” he recalled, saying that he was inspired to enlist after riding the train to Saskatoon and encountering other airmen. “I figured, if they could go, I could too.”
His two older brothers had also enlisted. Schofer never made it overseas, though, and was discharged in 1946.
He briefly attended university, worked for the railroad in Calgary for 12 years, and then, through the assistance of the Veterans Land Act program, bought a farm near Byemoor.
His daughter-in-law applied for the lapel pin on his behalf, and it arrived last week. He said it was “kind of a nice pin” and also came with a “nice diploma from the government.”
Like Treherne, he said he couldn’t complain about the assistance he received from the federal government, adding, “They’ve been treating me pretty good.”
Mysie Dermott — formerly Mysie McKay, a native of the Donalda area — enlisted in November 1943 and joined the Women’s Division of the Royal Canadian Air Force, where she was given a general duties position.
“Everybody was doing it,” she said, noting that her brothers had enlisted in the Air Force, and she got coaxed into joining as well, after getting approval from her parents. “Otherwise I think I would have ended up going down to Ontario and working in the factories.”
She worked at several different stations in Ontario, serving in mess halls and other short-term roles, and meeting the pilots and gunners who were there for training.
Dermott said she had her first airplane ride there when she was working in a hangar. One of the pilots took her up in a Harvard single-engine aircraft.
She also met her husband, the late Murray Dermott, towards the end of the conflict. He had enlisted in hopes of becoming a pilot, but after testing indicated colour blindness, he worked as a drogue operator, setting targets for gunnery practice.
Mysie received her discharge in August 1945, just as the war was ending, and they were married in 1946.
After the war, he rejoined the Air Force, and they spent most of their married life stationed across Canada and overseas, raising four children together.
After his discharge in 1974, they headed back to Alberta, first settling in Red Deer and later coming to Stettler. Murray died in 1982; Mysie, who turns 92 in March, has remained here ever since.
She said that their severance pay and pensions helped them pay for furniture and later for their first house.
“I was well looked after, I thought,” she said, adding, “I sure wish they would look after the ones that came back from Afghanistan . . . because it doesn’t sound like they’re looking after them right.”
Other Stettler-area veterans to receive the commemorative pin include Clarence Johnson, Audrey F. Cutts, Frank Bates, Dave Nixon, Nelson Bruce Johnston, George Mills Greenfield and William Melnyk, the latter residing in Big Valley.
Rosalind LaRose, who serves as Alberta-N.W.T. District 4 commander for the Royal Canadian Legion and oversees 24 branches across the district, said this week that she hadn’t been aware the government was distributing the pins.
Had they been aware, she said, the Legion would have been happy to host the veterans with a supper and make a formal presentation of the pins.
Still, she expressed her congratulations to the recipients, noting that many of the Second World War veterans surviving today enlisted towards the end of the conflict, so most of them saw relatively little action, if any at all.
“Just the same,” she said, “they were there and ready to go into action if necessary.”
The lapel pin program will continue until 2020. Eligible veterans can fill out a request form online at veterans.gc.ca, call Veterans Affairs Canada (VAC) at 1-866-522-2122, or visit a VAC or Service Canada office.