Korean War Veteran Internet Journal for the World s Veterans of the Korean War August 21, 2014 Is the Pension List a Roll of Honour? This is a message from the publisher of the Korean War Veteran. Quite recently my sister sent me a clipping of an article from the old Border Cities Star, the forerunner of the current Windsor (Ontario) Star, by my father, Thomas G. Courtenay, a four times wounded former lieutenant and platoon leader who had served throughout most of World War One with the Victoria Rifles of Canada. My father left his home at an early age and first served with the U.S. Army on the Mexican border. However, in 1914, with the outbreak of war in Europe involving the British Empire, he took passage on a cattle ship out of Galveston and traveled to England. There, still a teenager, he enlisted in the Irish Guards. Some months later, when elements of the Canadian Expeditionary Force began arriving in theatre, he successfully transferred to the Victoria Rifles, it says on his documents, so that he could serve with his brother. Both of them subsequently became lieutenants.
My father s first assignment with the Victoria Rifles was to show the entire battalion correct British military drill. To his embarrassment, the C.O. made him demonstrate in front of the entire assembled unit. He quickly was promoted to corporal and soon was in action in France, or Flanders. Promoted to platoon sergeant at 19, he led his platoon in hand to hand defence of their trenches when attacked by enemy storm troopers. He was shot through the right bicep, the bullet passing through his sergeant s chevrons, which for many years were a prized memento kept by one of my brothers. Though wounded, he stayed in the trenches for four hours after the enemy was defeated, consolidating the position and supervising the rescue of wounded soldiers. Before the war ended in armistice he was wounded thrice more, the third time in action during the assault on Vimy Ridge. He went into action with his platoon once again after that and was badly wounded by machine gun bullets during an attack. He lay in a water filled shellhole with a private soldier in no-man s-land for several days, until stretcher bearers could safely reach him. He had surgeries on his bullet wounded leg on and off for the next three years until finally discharged from service in 1920. The wounded leg atrophied to become two inches shorter than the left and was kept stable by a steel implant in the shin bone. An athletic young man who excelled at baseball, he had to wear a custom made elevated shoe on the wounded leg for the rest of his life, and ankle spats in autumn and winter to stave off the cold that bothered him acutely. While working in a railway yard, recording freight movements for one of the major railways, his wounded leg collapsed and he fell between the wheels of a slow moving freight. He pushed himself free from the wheels, but his right hand was on the rail and crushed and severed. He had other ailments, stemming from the war that had taken his youth. Throughout his last winter at the front his lungs were badly infected and he wrote a letter home to our mother that he thought he would cough out his lung in pieces. That letter swung the Veterans Affairs decision in his favor when he was reviewed for a disability allowance for service contracted lung disease which became classified as tuberculosis. While confined to a sanatorium in London, Ontario, at around age 35, which would be in 1929 or 1930, a specialist from Ireland performed an experimental surgery on him, collapsing the worn lung so that it could rest from the ravaging inflammation and stop deteriorating. He eventually left the sanatorium with his condition cured.
While there, however, he felt compelled to write the public letter that I have read for the first time just a few days ago. I marveled at it. It not only is grammatically perfect, but every word used is perfectly applied. He would have pecked away with his left hand on an upright typewriter to record it. He had trained himself to use the left hand for all things, including freehand writing and the signing of his signature. The paramount thing that makes one marvel is that the language could be applied this very day in Canada, although the veterans disability claim process was a little different 84 years ago. Despite that slight procedural difference, most of what he wrote could apply this very day and frankly, I found it to be inspirational and a letter that once again should be made public. Herewith below, that article, which my father had headed, Is the Pension List a Roll of Honour? Vincent Courtenay
A not very good reproduction of a photograph of Lieutenant Thomas G. Courtenay of the Victoria Rifles of Canada 24th Battalion. The red smudge mark in the upper right corner was made by a poppy. He went over the top in Flanders and plucked a poppy, which he kept in his folded service book. Ironically, on the day that Canada entered World War Two, the poppy slipped from place and fell within the glass to the bottom of the picture frame. In his later years, despite physical travails, he sold poppies for the Royal Canadian Legion in all kinds of adverse weather to commemorate Veterans on November 11 Remembrance Day. He did live for 26 more years beyond his treatment at the sanatorium in London, Ontario, and died in December, 1951 at age 56. His war wounds and damaged lungs plagued him for all of those years. When I visited him a few weeks before his death in 1951 he told me that he wished he was a soldier again, but that his only drawback was that he would soldier too hard. He was a soldier in bearing and thought and in his heart until the day that he died. Fellow veterans wept openly at his funeral. The disability claim for his damaged lungs eventually was resolved in his favor. After his death, our mother continued to receive his disability pension for services rendered, for another 40 years until she died at age 96 and was buried in the same grave at his side.