KAWARTHA LAKES-On April 1, 1944, Ernie Wiles turned 18 while attending a high school in York Township, now Toronto. “There was a girl that I went to school with and she wouldn’t let me date her so I signed up to go overseas. It just seemed like the thing to do at that time, they were looking for parachutists, so that’s what I signed up to do.” Once Ernie enlisted, his whirlwind tour of military service soon began.
He completed basic training at Brantford in September 1944. “I went to Camp Shilo in Manitoba, which was the training school for Canadian parachutists. There I received general training on how to use a parachute. You had to make seven jumps in a parachute to earn your wings—it was all done with mock towers and static lines, which ensured that we were safe as we learned. They take you up a tower to simulate a parachute jump, you are hooked up to the wires, then you jump off a scaffold way up in the air. When you land you have to roll so you don’t get hurt. You also have to know when to check the parachute to let any air out when you are going to land. If you flunked out on your jumps, you would be sent back to the infantry, but I had the chance to stick with the parachute crew as we went overseas.” By the end of basic training, his instructors had made sure that the parachutists were landing their jumps correctly, so that they would be safe when the moment came to do it for real.
“Once our training was done, we would move on pretty quickly—we were on a boat headed over to England. The soldiers heading over would be part of the invasion beginning at D-Day. In Britain we stayed just outside of London, and continued our training in paratroop school. There were soldiers from many different countries in Britain at the time—the United States, England, Scotland, Canada and so on. We would all be sent to a certain spot when the time came.”
“While we were training in England, the odd time we would go to London to the bars and pick up all the girls we could. It was our chance to see London. For leave we would get about a five-day pass, it was not very long. They didn’t want you to be too far a way, when the call came and they would want us to shape up and be ready to go into Europe.”
When the call did come, “I had no idea where I was going. We were just told to be at the airport—form up at the airport. We flew straight over and then we were gone.” To this day, Ernie does not know where he landed. They had military training, but who would have imagined what they were really about to experience?
“I flew over to on a B-29, a big bomber. It was my first time jumping out of an airplane. All of your practice was on static lines on towers, none of it was real. You were scared to living hell! When we were up there, they guy pulled the door open, and there were 32 of us all lined up, with the jump master at the door. You just went out 1, 2, 3… You didn’t have time to be scared, but we all were. You could not hold it all up, because they wanted everyone to land as close together as possible. The jump master would take his fist and knock you out, then out you went. After ten seconds you look up and make sure that your parachute had deployed.”
“The Germans could see that we were coming and we had to land and form up as fast as we could. The pilots would tell us where the Germans were, and they would be on their way to get us. We had to set up our guns so we could be prepared when they came. That was the scary part. Because we were dropped behind enemy lines, you did not know what direction they were coming.”
“When you parachute out, you are dropped with a bag full of ammunition and a mess kit. We carried a small machine gun and an Enfield rifle—everyone had one of them naturally. You would carry all your ammunition, and they dropped a lot of it for us. Some soldiers would get the ammunition and bring it back to us. We got our ammunition, and made sure all of our guns were loaded. Our officers made plans to get us off the field where we landed and into the forests. That’s where the first action happened.”
“We had to move out of the first location because there was a hell of a lot of Germans. We had to keep formed up, and just try to keep killing as many of them as you could. All you were interested in was not getting killed and the Germans were everywhere, killing everything that moved. Of course, they realized how many of us had come down from the airplanes. We were trying to hold a bridge until the army could catch up.”
“We slept on the ground, but we didn’t sleep very long because you were always on the move. We would catch the Germans when they were sleeping in their billets, we just took them over and then anything that they had we could take. Our food was parachuted in, and we had our own cooks. There was a building that we took over that would be our kitchen, and they would cook our food for us. We would go to dinner in units, about 20 at a time. Everything that we ate came out of a can. You would take your helmet off, put your food in your helmet and ate it. There were times where we would stay in the same spot for about a week because the Germans were putting up such a fight. We needed to group as many men together as we could before moving ahead.”
One day, a grenade exploded right beside Ernie. “I didn’t realize that I had been hit. I was looking down and all you could see was puff. The bomb went off right beside me, you don’t stop, you don’t even realize it, but then the guy beside me said ‘Your foot is half gone.’ If you still have one leg left, you still run like hell for cover. It’s like a nightmare thinking what you did to save yourself.” Even after eight decades, it is evident that he does not enjoy talking about this experience of what combat was really like. Many of the people who are close to him do not realize that this happened.
“There was a medical team that went with us, following us as we went. They pulled me out of there and bandaged it up. It was not that long before the British Army caught up with us. It was a great moment when the army arrived. When you saw them come—maybe 500 or 1000 soldiers would be arriving—it was quite a feeling. Everybody was giving a hurrah. We couldn’t be happier than to see more troops pouring in all the time. You felt that you might not die after all. They had jeeps and guns that we didn’t have, and it was pretty nice to have them there. But even after the army arrived, our unit never stopped. We would be getting news all the time from airplanes who had spotted where the Germans were, or small groups of scouts who would locate where they were.”
“Once the army caught up to us, they had doctors and nurses. It was a big job to collect all the people that were killed. A lot of soldiers were wounded. I was wounded, so they scooped me up, as quick as they could. They would use anything they could get for an ambulance. Often, they would pick up injured guys with a jeep and take them back behind the lines. Then they could see the doctors and nurses. The ones that were badly hurt, like me, would be moved out to the nearest ports, and then they went back to England.”
When Ernie arrived back in Great Britain, he was transferred to a hospital. “It was pretty depressing being in the hospital. The guys in there had legs off or arms off, and they were moaning and groaning. But the nurses looked after you like you were their mother. I had a prosthetic ankle put in when I came home. It needs to be done again now.”
Once Ernie’s paratroopers were reinforced by the army, they would rotate in and out of active duty at the front. “You would stay up there for 2 or 3 days, then you would come back, and another troop would take your place and give you time to get things back together. Then you would go back after a few days, as long as you were healthy. I only jumped out of an airplane once into action. After that there was no reason to parachute in, and my unit was just part of the army.”
As Ernie took part in the liberation of Western Europe, the conditions that he saw left an indelible mark. “You would think that everyone was in a prison camp. There was little food, and people were killing their animals so they would have something to eat. When we saw that, we knew why it was important to free all the people in those countries. We wanted to catch the Germans for the terrible things that they did to the French, Belgians and Dutch. They took their animals, food and jewellery. They imposed a curfew so people could not go out at night.”
The 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion served in Europe until after the German surrender on May 8, 1945. However, Ernie’s service at the front ended when he was wounded. Once he had recovered enough to assist, he helped to load ammunition and supplies to be shipped to Europe.
Ernie remembered his trip home on the SS Ile de France—which prior to the war had been a luxury passenger liner. It was a very beautiful ship, decorated in the Art Deco style, that in peace time was a very fashionable ship to travel on. Ernie’s unit arrived in Halifax on June 21, being the first unit in the Canadian Army to come home after the war, and it was disbanded on September 30. “The first thing I did was get out of uniform. When they put us back on ‘civvy street,’ you got your ticket, and put on your suit to go out. But there were quite a few guys who would spend their lives as a soldier.”
“I went back to Holland a few years ago, when the Dutch government invited us to come over for a week.” In 2019, Frits van Eerd, co-owner of the Jumbo supermarket chain, sponsored twenty veterans to return. “They flew the old planes over us once again, and took us to an airport and a jump school. They took us up to see what it the view was like today, and took us to where the Canadians went in. They had statutes where Canadians had served. Most of the paratroopers who went were in their 90s.”
The veterans who went on the tour were treated like celebrities. “We were heroes, and the Dutch people were lining the streets. We were treated something special. We were put up in a beautiful hotel. You couldn’t get into your hotel room because there were so many people there shaking your hand. Little children would run up saying ‘Canada, Canada, Canada.’ If only veterans were treated like that here! I’d like to go back one more time. I’d like to have a little longer over there.”
“Everything looked totally different than when I had been in the army. There were all new homes, cities and buildings. When I was going back over for the tour, I thought I would find out where I had landed. I knew it was an open spot, but when we got there, so many years had passed that nothing was the same then. I still don’t know where I landed.” As a paratrooper, Ernie didn’t need to know where he was going, he just had to focus on the difficult job that he had to do.
A visit to a concentration camp was part of the tour. “It was just a nightmare to see a concentration camp. They had movies of what it was like to be in a concentration camp. They showed us the furnaces in action, how the trains came in, and how they would tell them that they were going to have a shower, only to be taken into the section where they were going to be gassed. They had the inmates’ clothes piled as high as the ceiling. They show pictures of the guards taking a little girl to throw her into the furnace. They built a big theatre, and you could pay to go into it—it had become a big tourist attraction.” In April 1945, Ernie’s unit had liberated the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp, but at that point, he was not on active duty at the front.
When Ernie looks back on the time that he served, he says: “It really was quite an adventure. The friends you made and the guys that you met—the camaraderie. It was always a wonderful thing to be a paratrooper—you were top of the heap. But having served, we all wanted to get out of the army and get back to work in a civilian job.” Ernie was just 19 when this adventure of a lifetime ended. “There were three of us—myself, Buck Mullholland and Bob Milne—who trained and served together. I appreciated getting to see them again, years after we had served together.” Fifty years after serving, a woman recognized Wiles as he was standing at the Fenelon cenotaph and helped him to track down his old friends.
“If I had to make the choice again, I would do it in a heartbeat. If we hadn’t done what we did, God knows where the Germans would have been. They were so well armed and they had been planning for years. Hitler had millions of kids in uniform.” To this day there are millions of people who are grateful that soldiers like Ernie answered the call and helped to liberate Western Europe.
Today Ernie is 98 years old and is among Canada’s last surviving Second World War veterans. Of more than one million Canadians who served in the military, less than 1% are still able to share their memories of their experiences, that thankfully the generations that followed have not had to endure. He is the Fenelon Falls Legion’s last surviving Second World War veteran.
When Ernie is asked what message he would like to share, he replies: “When you see wars starting around the world today, there are people who want to jump in and start something. But people today have no idea of how bad war is.” Like so many veterans, it is hard for Ernie to talk about the worst parts of the nightmare that he endured. What it was truly like to be under fire, in combat, defies description.
Though he was wounded and would live with the aftereffects from age 19 on, Ernie does not regret volunteering to serve. “We wanted to defend our country. We were given proper training. Get in there and do what you have to do.” We should all be thankful that Ernie was willing to serve when the call came, and that he is still able to share his story of what it was like to serve his country during that last global conflict.
Lest We Forget.
This story is a memory and nobody’s memory is perfect. Sometimes details get a little mixed up, things get forgotten or overlooked, and the perspective is inevitably subjective. If you notice something that not right, have something you would like to tell us, or a memory to share the museum would be happy to hear from you: [email protected]
Fenelon Falls’ Royal Canadian Legion will be hosting a candlelight vigil service at the cenotaph, at 7 pm on Sunday November 10. The Remembrance Day service is the next morning at 11 am. That evening the Legion will be hosting a dinner, with cocktails at 5 pm and meal at 6 pm, with a brief presentation by Belinda Wilson. In 2013, Belinda was selected to represent Ontario Command in the biennial Legion Pilgrimage of Remembrance – a 15-day trip through Northern France and Belgium, exploring Canadian battlefields, memorials and cemeteries from both World Wars. Since returning home, Belinda has put together a unique presentation combining her photos, stories and songs to take the audience on a journey through time and tears…In the Footsteps of Heroes.
This story is part of our partnership with Maryboro Lodge, The Fenelon Falls Museum.
If you want to make a donation to the museum, you can e-transfer to: [email protected] or mail a cheque to :
Maryboro Lodge Museum
Box 179
50 Oak Street
Fenelon Falls, ON
K0M 1N0
