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“He used to carry a pair of moccasins in his bag with him. He would never tell anyone where he was going, but would just slip away in the night. The Germans thought he was a ghost or a devil. They could never figure out how he passed the lines and the sentries. He was deathly quiet. Instead of sneaking in and killing them, he would steal something, like a pair of shoes right off their feet. Or he would leave articles behind, like a calling card, just to let them know he had been there. Once in a while, he would kill one of them, slit their throat so as not to awaken anybody. When those Germans woke up and found one of their own lying dead in the midst of them, that’s when they got scared. They didn’t believe that Prince could be real, so they figured he must be an evil spirit or better yet the devil. We were known as the Devil’s Brigade to the Germans.”
— One of Tommy Prince’s comrades, describing his stealth behind enemy lines during the Second World War.
His is one of the great tragedies of Canadian military — and social — history. Tommy Prince, an Indigenous Canadian war hero and among the country’s most decorated non-commissioned officers, gave everything he had for his country in two conflicts — the Second World War and Korea — yet due to systemic racism was largely forgotten by that same country when he, himself, fell: an alcoholic who spent his last days in a small, sparsely furnished room in the Salvation Army’s Social Service Centre in Winnipeg, his medals either pawned or lost, his spirit damaged beyond repair.
“Remembrance,” P. Whitney Lackenbauer poignantly wrote in A Hell of a Warrior: Remembering Sergeant Thomas George Prince, “particularly in the official policy domain, always involves a calculated amount of forgetting.”
Born in a canvas tent in 1915 and raised on the Brokenhead Reserve, about 70 kilometres northwest of Winnipeg, Thomas George Prince was the great-great grandson of Saulteaux Chief Peguis, and his forebears served on the Crown’s side in the Red River Rebellion, as Nile River Voyageurs in Sudan, and in Europe during the First World War.
One of 11 children in his family, he attended residential school from the age of five, and joined the army cadets, where he became an excellent marksman.
“As soon as I put on my uniform,” he once remarked, “I felt like a better man. I even tried to wear it to class.”
He reluctantly dropped out of school after Grade 8 to earn money for his family, working as a lumberjack, among other jobs, during the Depression. In 1940, at 24, he joined the Royal Canadian Engineers and, six weeks later, was sent to England, where he grew bored operating a lathe on home guard duty. “I joined the army to fight,” a fellow RCE member recalled him saying, “not to sit around drinking tea.”
So, in 1942, he answered a call for parachutists for the Canadian Parachute Battalion, which was then attached to the United States Special Force, or Green Berets, in an elite U.S.-Canadian commando unit known as the First Special Service Force, or Devil’s Brigade.
“Tom was ideal for this type of a unit,” said FSSF platoon sergeant Al Lennox. “He was brave, he was intelligent. In his early days as a young man, he was out living off the land, getting (his) own game, learning how to track, and how to walk right, without making a noise. So all those attributes came in very handy in this type of a unit.”
Prince claimed his abilities were innate, pointing to his Indigenous roots. “Once a man was in an army uniform no one cared about his origin,” wrote D. Bruce Sealey and Peter Van De Vyvere in Manitobans in Profile: Thomas George Prince. “Prince, however, felt it necessary to represent Indians as a people and never let the men forget his racial origin.”
On March 21, 1951, a Princess Patricia’s company commander points out the unit’s next objective and briefs his officers and NCOs. The soldier, second from the left, is the legendary sniper, Sgt. Tommy Prince.
His feats of derring-do frequently stood him head and shoulders above other soldiers. At Anzio, Italy, during the winter of 1944, for example, he volunteered for a nighttime reconnaissance mission, running a telephone line about a kilometre and a half into enemy territory and setting up an observation post in an abandoned farmhouse less than 200 metres from the German line. From there, he could send back information on enemy positions. But when shell fire cut the line the following day, he came up with an ingenious solution. Donning civilian clothes that he found in the house, he went outside and, posing as an Italian farmer, inspected the chicken coop and pretended to weed his crops as the Germans looked on, a ruse that allowed him to repair the broken line.
“He maintained his charade,” recounted Lackenbauer, “shaking his fists at the Germans and the Allies, then returned to the house and resumed communications with his unit.”
As a result of Prince’s efforts that day, four German tanks were destroyed and Prince was awarded his first medal, the Military Medal, with Lt.-Col. Thomas Gilday noting that Prince’s “courage and utter disregard for personal safety were an inspiration to his fellows and a marked credit to his unit.”
Prince also received the Silver Star, one of only 59 Canadians awarded the U.S. honour, and among only three who also received the Military Medal. It total, he was awarded 11 medals that today are kept at the Manitoba Museum in Winnipeg.
But not all Prince’s colleagues were so obviously moved by his disregard for safety. One FSSF soldier recalled another remark “There goes Prince trying to win another medal to prove he is brave,” while Prince, as he set sail for his second tour in Korea, in 1952, reportedly announced “I’m not coming back until I win the Victoria Cross.”
Out of uniform and back in Canada following the end of the Second World War, Prince faced the prejudice and racism that was the lot of most First Nations members. He divorced his first wife, his father died, and finding work was difficult even after he moved from Brokenhead to Winnipeg, where he worked as a janitor before starting his own cleaning business.
At the end of 1946, he was asked by the Manitoba Indian Association to serve as vice-president and chief spokesman, hoping his reputation as a war hero might prove helpful when dealing with federal officials on the Special Parliamentary Joint Committee formed in 1947 to examine the Indian Act. Prince, however, didn’t enjoy the machinations of politics, and left Ottawa for Winnipeg, where he worked as a lumberjack and in both a cement plant and pulp-and-paper mill.
He re-enlisted in 1950 when the government announced it was looking for forces to serve in Korea. “I owed something to my friends who died” in the Second World War, he explained of his decision to return to combat duty.
Tommy Prince, right, and his brother Morris at Buckingham Palace in 1945, where the former was presented his Military Medal and Silver Star.
“Prince,” wrote historian Robert Hepenstall, “belonged to the 10 per cent of the battalion who were really competent in battle. Prince was an excellent man in the field, but the demons that lurked within his personality rendered him useless in garrison. Eventually, the demons would tear him apart and kill him; but not in war. Some people are indestructible in war. Prince was one of them.”
On Christmas Eve in 1952, during his second tour in Korea, the accumulated stress finally got to Prince, who suffered a breakdown while on a recon patrol during which he and the men in his command were shelled by Chinese mortar bombs. Prince was moved to administrative duty and spent several weeks in early 1953 in hospital.
He returned to Canada and continued to serve at a personnel depot in Winnipeg, until he was honourably discharged in September 1954. Although he was never assessed or diagnosed, Prince most certainly suffered from PTSD.
His search for odd jobs in Winnipeg continued to reveal systemic racism. He and his common-law wife, Verna Sinclair, had five children and moved back and forth between Winnipeg and Brokenhead. They separated in 1964, their children placed in foster homes. The arthritis in Prince’s knee worsened and he had difficulty sleeping as he increasingly turned to alcohol for relief.
By the mid 1970s, he was living at the Salvation Army in Winnipeg, in a six-by-eight-foot room. His only possessions were newspaper clippings of honours he had received. According to a 1976 newspaper article in the Winnipeg Free Press, Prince had kicked his alcohol habit, but “his final years were spent reliving the terror of the two wars, and every night his bed was wet from tears and sweat.”
Tommy Prince died at Winnipeg’s Deer Lodge Centre on Nov. 25, 1977, at the age of 62. He has since been commemorated on a coin, a plaque and various murals. A statue of him sits in a park on the Brokenhead Reserve, near one of his great-great grandfather and streets in Winnipeg and Calgary, and a school in Manitoba, were named after him. The Canadian Forces have immortalized Prince at various sites, including the Tommy Prince barracks at Garrison Petawawa and the Tommy Prince Drill Hall in Wainwright, Alta. In 2000, the Sergeant Tommy Prince Army Training Initiative was established to encourage Indigenous recruitment.
That same year, his medals turned up at auction in London, Ont., and through donations from various groups and individuals, were purchased for $75,000 and given to his family. In 2001, they were placed on permanent display in the Manitoba Museum.
bdeachman@postmedia.com
查看原文...
— One of Tommy Prince’s comrades, describing his stealth behind enemy lines during the Second World War.
His is one of the great tragedies of Canadian military — and social — history. Tommy Prince, an Indigenous Canadian war hero and among the country’s most decorated non-commissioned officers, gave everything he had for his country in two conflicts — the Second World War and Korea — yet due to systemic racism was largely forgotten by that same country when he, himself, fell: an alcoholic who spent his last days in a small, sparsely furnished room in the Salvation Army’s Social Service Centre in Winnipeg, his medals either pawned or lost, his spirit damaged beyond repair.
“Remembrance,” P. Whitney Lackenbauer poignantly wrote in A Hell of a Warrior: Remembering Sergeant Thomas George Prince, “particularly in the official policy domain, always involves a calculated amount of forgetting.”
Born in a canvas tent in 1915 and raised on the Brokenhead Reserve, about 70 kilometres northwest of Winnipeg, Thomas George Prince was the great-great grandson of Saulteaux Chief Peguis, and his forebears served on the Crown’s side in the Red River Rebellion, as Nile River Voyageurs in Sudan, and in Europe during the First World War.
One of 11 children in his family, he attended residential school from the age of five, and joined the army cadets, where he became an excellent marksman.
“As soon as I put on my uniform,” he once remarked, “I felt like a better man. I even tried to wear it to class.”
He reluctantly dropped out of school after Grade 8 to earn money for his family, working as a lumberjack, among other jobs, during the Depression. In 1940, at 24, he joined the Royal Canadian Engineers and, six weeks later, was sent to England, where he grew bored operating a lathe on home guard duty. “I joined the army to fight,” a fellow RCE member recalled him saying, “not to sit around drinking tea.”
So, in 1942, he answered a call for parachutists for the Canadian Parachute Battalion, which was then attached to the United States Special Force, or Green Berets, in an elite U.S.-Canadian commando unit known as the First Special Service Force, or Devil’s Brigade.
“Tom was ideal for this type of a unit,” said FSSF platoon sergeant Al Lennox. “He was brave, he was intelligent. In his early days as a young man, he was out living off the land, getting (his) own game, learning how to track, and how to walk right, without making a noise. So all those attributes came in very handy in this type of a unit.”
Prince claimed his abilities were innate, pointing to his Indigenous roots. “Once a man was in an army uniform no one cared about his origin,” wrote D. Bruce Sealey and Peter Van De Vyvere in Manitobans in Profile: Thomas George Prince. “Prince, however, felt it necessary to represent Indians as a people and never let the men forget his racial origin.”
On March 21, 1951, a Princess Patricia’s company commander points out the unit’s next objective and briefs his officers and NCOs. The soldier, second from the left, is the legendary sniper, Sgt. Tommy Prince.
His feats of derring-do frequently stood him head and shoulders above other soldiers. At Anzio, Italy, during the winter of 1944, for example, he volunteered for a nighttime reconnaissance mission, running a telephone line about a kilometre and a half into enemy territory and setting up an observation post in an abandoned farmhouse less than 200 metres from the German line. From there, he could send back information on enemy positions. But when shell fire cut the line the following day, he came up with an ingenious solution. Donning civilian clothes that he found in the house, he went outside and, posing as an Italian farmer, inspected the chicken coop and pretended to weed his crops as the Germans looked on, a ruse that allowed him to repair the broken line.
“He maintained his charade,” recounted Lackenbauer, “shaking his fists at the Germans and the Allies, then returned to the house and resumed communications with his unit.”
As a result of Prince’s efforts that day, four German tanks were destroyed and Prince was awarded his first medal, the Military Medal, with Lt.-Col. Thomas Gilday noting that Prince’s “courage and utter disregard for personal safety were an inspiration to his fellows and a marked credit to his unit.”
Prince also received the Silver Star, one of only 59 Canadians awarded the U.S. honour, and among only three who also received the Military Medal. It total, he was awarded 11 medals that today are kept at the Manitoba Museum in Winnipeg.
But not all Prince’s colleagues were so obviously moved by his disregard for safety. One FSSF soldier recalled another remark “There goes Prince trying to win another medal to prove he is brave,” while Prince, as he set sail for his second tour in Korea, in 1952, reportedly announced “I’m not coming back until I win the Victoria Cross.”
Out of uniform and back in Canada following the end of the Second World War, Prince faced the prejudice and racism that was the lot of most First Nations members. He divorced his first wife, his father died, and finding work was difficult even after he moved from Brokenhead to Winnipeg, where he worked as a janitor before starting his own cleaning business.
At the end of 1946, he was asked by the Manitoba Indian Association to serve as vice-president and chief spokesman, hoping his reputation as a war hero might prove helpful when dealing with federal officials on the Special Parliamentary Joint Committee formed in 1947 to examine the Indian Act. Prince, however, didn’t enjoy the machinations of politics, and left Ottawa for Winnipeg, where he worked as a lumberjack and in both a cement plant and pulp-and-paper mill.
He re-enlisted in 1950 when the government announced it was looking for forces to serve in Korea. “I owed something to my friends who died” in the Second World War, he explained of his decision to return to combat duty.
Tommy Prince, right, and his brother Morris at Buckingham Palace in 1945, where the former was presented his Military Medal and Silver Star.
“Prince,” wrote historian Robert Hepenstall, “belonged to the 10 per cent of the battalion who were really competent in battle. Prince was an excellent man in the field, but the demons that lurked within his personality rendered him useless in garrison. Eventually, the demons would tear him apart and kill him; but not in war. Some people are indestructible in war. Prince was one of them.”
On Christmas Eve in 1952, during his second tour in Korea, the accumulated stress finally got to Prince, who suffered a breakdown while on a recon patrol during which he and the men in his command were shelled by Chinese mortar bombs. Prince was moved to administrative duty and spent several weeks in early 1953 in hospital.
He returned to Canada and continued to serve at a personnel depot in Winnipeg, until he was honourably discharged in September 1954. Although he was never assessed or diagnosed, Prince most certainly suffered from PTSD.
His search for odd jobs in Winnipeg continued to reveal systemic racism. He and his common-law wife, Verna Sinclair, had five children and moved back and forth between Winnipeg and Brokenhead. They separated in 1964, their children placed in foster homes. The arthritis in Prince’s knee worsened and he had difficulty sleeping as he increasingly turned to alcohol for relief.
By the mid 1970s, he was living at the Salvation Army in Winnipeg, in a six-by-eight-foot room. His only possessions were newspaper clippings of honours he had received. According to a 1976 newspaper article in the Winnipeg Free Press, Prince had kicked his alcohol habit, but “his final years were spent reliving the terror of the two wars, and every night his bed was wet from tears and sweat.”
Tommy Prince died at Winnipeg’s Deer Lodge Centre on Nov. 25, 1977, at the age of 62. He has since been commemorated on a coin, a plaque and various murals. A statue of him sits in a park on the Brokenhead Reserve, near one of his great-great grandfather and streets in Winnipeg and Calgary, and a school in Manitoba, were named after him. The Canadian Forces have immortalized Prince at various sites, including the Tommy Prince barracks at Garrison Petawawa and the Tommy Prince Drill Hall in Wainwright, Alta. In 2000, the Sergeant Tommy Prince Army Training Initiative was established to encourage Indigenous recruitment.
That same year, his medals turned up at auction in London, Ont., and through donations from various groups and individuals, were purchased for $75,000 and given to his family. In 2001, they were placed on permanent display in the Manitoba Museum.
bdeachman@postmedia.com
查看原文...
