Gerald Bowen

by RunningLight Thu 04 Jun 2020, 4:12 pm

Gerald Bowen holds of picture of himself in his youth when he was a member of the Royal Canadian Navy while at Perley-Rideau Veteran's Health Centre Monday October 05, 2015. DARREN BROWN / Ottawa Citizen

Second World War, Korean War veteran was longtime volunteer at the Canadian War Museum

June 04. 2020

Ottawa’s Gerald Bowen felt so at home in the Canadian military that after serving in the navy during the Second World War, he enlisted in the army and fought in the Korean War.

“I think maybe, you know, I liked that disciplined life,” Bowen once said, “and I always felt that, in the military, you knew what you had to do.”

He spent 33 years in the military and served in Cypress, Israel, Lebanon and Germany before retiring as a major. In retirement, he became a dedicated volunteer at the Canadian War Museum and a fixture at National Remembrance Day ceremonies.

Bowen died last month at the Perley and Rideau Veterans’ Centre. He was 94.

One of his three sons, Greg Bowen, said his father was always a good listener: intelligent, wise and ready with advice. “When he had heard enough grumbling from his boys, he would be quick to tell us, candidly, to stop complaining and do something about it,” Greg Bowen said. “He was one of the good guys.”

Gerald Bowen grew up in Centretown where he delivered newspapers for the Ottawa Citizen. On the morning of Sept. 4, 1939, he carried news of the outbreak of the Second World War. People ran out of their homes to meet their papers.

Bowen and six of his young friends, all 13 or 14 at the time, worried that the war would end before they had the chance to fight. “Before the war was over,” Bowen later recalled, “four of those boys were dead.”

While still a student at Lisgar Collegiate Institute, Bowen forged his baptismal certificate and enlisted in September 1942. His war began on HMCS Royalmount, a frigate responsible for guarding supply ships as they travelled across the Atlantic.

German U-boats hunted the convoys in “wolf packs” to overwhelm their defences. By mid-1942, their attacks were threatening to drive Britain from the war: One Allied supply ship was going to the bottom of the ocean every four hours.

As a telegraphist, Bowen’s action station was deep within the ship, just above the propeller, in the emergency wireless room. His job was to message for help if the main wireless cabin was damaged. “The only consolation,” he told an interviewer, “was that if the Germans launched an acoustic torpedo which homed in on the ship’s screws, I wouldn’t know anything about it.”

U-boats usually attacked at night and Bowen remembers the horror of seeing an oil tanker explode in the darkness. Four crew members survived the blast, but they were so slick with oil that they had to be fished out of the water by their hair.

Bowen’s closest brush with death came during shore leave in January 1945. He was staying at a London boarding house and had just settled into the first-floor bathroom when a German V2 rocket — the world’s first long-range ballistic missile — slammed into the neighbourhood. The blast wave threw Bowen off the toilet, out the door, and onto the floor in front of his screaming landlady.

“I never knew if she was screaming because of the fact half her house was gone,” he later recalled, “or because I was lying there half-naked.”

After the war, Bowen left the navy and joined the public service, but he didn’t like the drudgery of office work. So in 1948, after getting married, he enlisted in the army, trained as a paratrooper, and was commissioned as an officer.

He served with the Royal 22nd Regiment — the Van Doos —in the Korean War, where he was involved in night patrols, mine clearance, enemy raids and defensive battles.

In retirement, Bowen became a voracious reader — he was a student of history — and volunteered at the Canadian War Museum, where he served as an interpreter for two decades. He loved to share his experiences with visitors, and was among last Second World War veterans to work at the museum.

Ashlee Beattie, training co-ordinator at the museum, said Bowen was a kind and humorous man who connected quickly with people.

“Never have I met someone who so appreciated the people and friends in his life,” she said. “He always seemed capable of accepting the hardships of life with a can-do attitude — and an encouraging smile for others.”

Bowen often told her, she said, that that he had lived a good life and held no regrets.

https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/second-world-war-korean-war-veteran-was-longtime-volunteer-at-the-canadian-war-museum