When asked what he wants the younger generations to consider on Remembrance Day, Sooke veteran Murray Donald, who was in the Second World War and the Korean War, gave a thoughtful answer.
“I believe in remembrance but I don’t believe in glorifying war, because it’s not glorified to me. I’m proud to have served because I had to.
"But it's hell," he added. "I knew a lot of people from younger days, they got to go overseas and didn’t come back."
Donald, now 98, grew up in the prairies of Alberta during the Great Depression, and witnessed his mother’s struggle as a widow with five children.
During that time, his family didn't have any money but as farmers, they had lots of food, he recalled. Unemployed people who rode on the railroads used to knock on their door and ask them for produce.
When the war began, Donald saw uniformed sailors walking in the streets, and seeing the promise of a new life, he realized he wanted to be one. "I thought, that's what I want to do," he said. "I thought it was a good, secure job for me."
So at 18, out of a desire to support his mother and gain security, he joined his three other brothers in the military.
Donald ended up in the Royal Canadian Navy, and had the important job of training soldiers on a ship in the Bay of Fundy. The RCN greatly expanded during the Second World War and became the "main thrust of Canada's war effort," according to Veterans.gc.ca. One of its main missions was to target German U-boats, which had made cutting off allied shipping a top priority, preventing supplies from reaching Europe.
Canada played a major role in the Battle of the Atlantic by escorting more than 25,000 merchant ships safely to their destination. However, the Navy was not without its casualties; the RCN lost 14 warships to enemy attack and another eight ships to accidents at sea during the war.
By the end of the Second World War, Canada had one of the largest navies in the world with 95,000 men and women in uniform, and 434 commissioned vessels.
Donald remained in the Navy, going on to serve as a petty officer in the Korean War in 1951, a war which killed 516 Canadians. Because North Koreans didn't have a navy, the RCN did not carry out ship-to-ship battles. Instead, ships like the one Donald was on would fire at targets on shore, from three to four miles out to sea.
When asked if it was frightening being on those ships, Donald reflected on that time.
“You have no fear when you’re younger, or at least I didn’t. When we got fired upon, it scared some people. We were at the gas station, so we were fired upon, but some of my crew got quite scared and had shaking hands. But luckily, they missed us.”
Notably, Donald ended up being aboard the same ship as a man named Ferdinand Waldo Demara Jr., who later came to be known as "The Great Imposter." Demara was an American whose impersonations included a civil engineer, a sheriff's deputy, an assistant prison warden, and a naval surgeon.
While aboard the HMCS Cayuga, a Royal Canadian Navy destroyer, Demara masqueraded as a young Canadian surgeon named Joseph C. Cyr. At one point he performed surgery on 16 Korean combat injuries – including a major chest surgery – after speed-reading steps for the procedures from a textbook. Shockingly, all the men survived.
A movie was eventually made on Demara titled The Great Imposter. "They made it a little bit more dramatic, but it made quite the story anyway," Donald said.
Donald navigated 25 years of the highs, the lows and the downright interesting times in his naval career, all the while proud to serve his country. He went on to marry and have children and grandchildren.
