THUNDER BAY — Not a day goes by that one of Northwestern Ontario's oldest surviving veterans fails to recall the ultimate sacrifice made by Canadians on the sea during the Second World War.
"I think of all those guys who lost their lives. I think about it all the time," said Elmer Auld.
Now 100 years old, the memories of the tragedies he witnessed on the Atlantic Ocean while serving in the Royal Canadian Navy are even more painful on Remembrance Day.
This year, Auld had to watch the tributes to Canada's war dead on television in his home, as for the first time in nearly 80 years it wasn't practical for him to make it the local service.
"I wish I could go over there today...I've done that ever since the Second World War. Old age is hell," he said with a chuckle.
One of his most poignant memories is of the sinking of the frigate HMCS Valleyfield.
Auld had enlisted in the navy in 1941 when he was only 17.
He served in various capacities, but in May 1944 was a sonar operator on the corvette Giffard while it escorted convoys of merchant ships between St. John's, NL and Londonderry in Northern Ireland.
On the trip back to North America, a German U-boat fired two torpedoes at the trailing naval vessel, Valleyfield, just missing Auld's own ship.
The frigate went down in less than four minutes.
"We didn't know what happened until someone asked 'Where's the Valleyfield?' " he recalled in an interview Monday with Dougall Media. "And there she was. Here's all the guys in the water, and there were 155 guys on that ship. We managed to pick up 33 of them."
Auld said he and fellow sonar operator Ross Newitt had just come off watch, so they joined a group of sailors trying to pull survivors out of the water.
"We had the captain of the Valleyfield. He didn't have his lifejacket tied up very well, and he slipped out of our hands into the water."
In an interview with the Canadian military history magazine Legion in 2022, Auld said he and his crewmate had jumped in after the captain when he fell while trying to scramble up a climbing net.
"We're right down in the water about five feet from the edge of the ship. We were pulling him up and all of a sudden, he slipped out. He was all covered in oil and blood and water, and down he went...We just about had him."
Auld calls his period of service on the Atlantic "the hell years," and feels he was very fortunate to make it out of the war alive.
"I never thought I'd make 100," he said. "Such a lucky old guy."
In a 2017 interview with Newswatch, he described the "rotten, miserable" conditions aboard cramped corvettes, saying the crews had to confront two enemies – German submarines and the ocean itself.
Despite his age, Auld still manages some brief outings, including a trip two days ago to a fast-food restaurant where he was disturbed to see no one acknowledging the approach of Remembrance Day.
"There wasn't one poppy. Young people don't know anything about the war, really...It was really disappointing...I was on the bus the other day over to Walmart, but not one person had a poppy on. I guess half these kids don't know about the war anyway."
With files from TBT News
