The View From Here

Remembrances

Walter Kish

November 11 Remembrance Day services have always had a special meaning for me because my late father was a veteran.He enlisted in 1944 and served with the Canadian Army in Europe until July of 1946.Because of his fluency in many Eastern European languages, he was asked to stay on after the war ended and serve in the occupational forces as part of the Army’s Public Relations Group.

He was always extremely proud of having served.After returning back to civilian life, he joined the Legion, and I can still recall as a young boy watching him march every Remembrance Day with his Legion beret at a jaunty angle and wearing his medals shining resplendently on his chest.

He was one some estimated 40,000 Ukrainians that served in the Canadian Armed Forces during World War II.All too often when we speak of Ukrainian participation in the War, we think only of those that fought either in the Ukrainian underground, the Galician Division, or as part of the Soviet armed forces, and forget that a significant number of Ukrainians fought as part of the Canadian, American, British and even Polish armies.

It is an unfortunate fact that, aside from the activities of a few Ukrainian branches of the Legion, the contributions of Ukrainians in Canada’s armed forces is little acknowledged or recognized even within the Ukrainian community.This oversight is made even more ironic when one considers that if it weren’t for the efforts of one particular Canadian Army officer of Ukrainian origin, many of the large wave of DPs that came to Canada after the War might never have been able to find refuge here.His name was BohdanPanchuk and he was a Captain in the intelligence unit of the RCAF.When he discovered the plight of the millions of Ukrainian refugees and forced labourers in newly liberated Germany, he set to work in assisting them in every way possible.In the words of LubomyrLuciuk from his book Searching For Place, Panchuk “played a pivotal, if not the singularly most important role among that relatively small group of Ukrainian Canadians who set up, directed, and in the end, shut down the Ukrainian Canadian refugee relief, rehabilitation, and resettlement operations among the Ukrainian displaced persons in postwar Europe”.To me, it is shameful that he is so little known and honoured, particularly by the major Ukrainian nationalist organizations that indirectly benefited so much from his tireless efforts.

Canadian Ukrainians distinguished themselves on virtually every front of the War.Few people know for instance that there was a large contingent of Ukrainians serving with the Winnipeg Grenadiers who defended Hong Kong when the Japanese invaded.Six Ukrainians died in the fierce fighting and another 75 or so were taken prisoner and suffered greatly in Japan’s notoriously brutal POW camps for most of the war’s duration.

Ukrainian participation in Canada’s armed forces though, stretches back much further than just World War II.During the First World War, some ten thousand Ukrainians volunteered for Canada’s Expeditionary Force and some two thousand fought in the trenches of northern France and Belgium.This number is truly astounding considering that Ukrainians had only started immigrating to Canada some two decades earlier, and at that time, there were only some 170,000 in total in all of Canada.One, Corporal FilipKonowal, earned the British Empire’s highest military honour, the Victoria Cross, for his exceptional bravery.

And although the volunteer MacKenzie-Papineau Battalion from Canada that fought on the Republican side against the General Franco and the Fascists during the Spanish Civil War during the 1930s wasn’t officially part of the Canadian Armed Forces, one should note that an estimated one third of this gallant force was of Ukrainian origin.

As a community, Ukrainian Canadians should be justifiably proud of their contributions to the military defence of not only their adopted country, but indeed the free world at large.It is disappointing that we make so little effort to honour those that have sacrificed so much on our behalf.