What is war good for, pleads for support of veterans

Billionaire philanthropist asks what is war good for, pleads for support of veterans

GORDON MCINTYRE
Published on: January 17, 2018

Bullets whizzing overhead, buddies killed before your eyes, all the terrible things that war entails, Joe Segal has rarely talked about publicly.

Until now.

With a documentary crew in town to talk to him ahead of next year’s 75th anniversary of Juno Beach, the 93-year-old Calgary Highlander veteran was willing to open up to Postmedia News before filming began.

“It was an experience that I don’t think anybody wants to live through again,” the billionaire businessman and humanitarian said, sitting behind his desk at Kingswood Venture Capital Corp., where he comes to work every day. “But if you retain the lessons you learn and you convey those lessons to the younger generations, maybe we’ll establish an environment of peace and harmony in the world.”

How Segal came to be crawling through the muck of Dutch and German fields in 1944-45 is a story in itself.

He grew up in Vegreville, 100 kilometres east of Edmonton, and after his dad died when he was 14 he went door-to-door selling frozen whitefish.

By 17 he’d made his way north to work on the building of the Alaska Highway, which eventually put $3,000 in his pocket.

Flush by 18, he headed to Calgary. And promptly lost the whole caboodle in an all-night poker game.

Broke, he signed up with the Calgary Highlanders.

It was too late to take part in Juno, but after four months of basic training, he was sent to the Netherlands in 1944 and, once the Dutch had been liberated, on to fight in Germany until V-E Day on May 8, 1945.

“I learned whatever I learned under fire,” Segal said. “There was a place called Doetinchem, the Jerrys pulled out, taking their (tank) with them. We set up headquarters and Jerry started shelling us.

“I went through basic training with a buddy named Bob Brown from Lloydminster, Alberta, and when they started shelling we all headed for the basement. but Bob was 6-foot-6, he couldn’t get into the basement so he crouched on the stairs.

“He got shrapnel through the head and he was gone.”

Then there was the time his Bren light machine-gun quit on him.

He was caught in crossfire while crawling through the mud and under barbed wire to take a farmhouse near the Siegfried Line, a 630-kilometre stretch of bunkers, tunnels and ditches where the Allies’ support tanks couldn’t get past the tank traps.

“My Bren got so hot, it seized up,” Segal said. “You ever see a gun seize up from that type of thing? So here we are at this farmhouse, lying outside is a wheelbarrow with a dead German in it … we got down the hill, we took occupation of the farmhouse and in the middle of the field between the farmhouse and the forest were some clumps of trees.”

His company included one soldier who had recently shot someone through the back of the head during non-combat.

“Now we’re in this environment, you wonder whether God understands,” Segal said.

The soldier in question stuck his head up and got it riddled by a Schmeisser submachine-gun from Germans camouflaged in the trees.

That’s the way it was, Segal said.

“So, what is war? It’s a stupid thing,” he said. “Why do we continue with it? Why do we punish ourselves, why do we punish the world? Why do we punish humanity?

“We haven’t learned much.”

Besides his business acumen, Segal, his wife Rosalie and their four children have donated millions to charities, a partial list of which includes Simon Fraser University, the United Way and Variety Club, Children’s Hospital and Coast Mental Health.

He’s still passionate about being compassionate.

“The military to me is the most valuable entity in the Canadian government,” he said. “They’ve been (to war), they’ve encountered (hostile fire) and what we do with our veterans … ”

The federal government doesn’t seem to understand, he said.

“If (Justin Trudeau) just picked up the (financial) crumbs off the floor and re-employed that to look after the veterans. Why would anybody go to fight for Canada if you’re not going to look after them? They put their life on the line.

“They get wounded and they haven’t got an arm or a leg, they have a post-traumatic problem and we toss ’em to the winds. Why?

“We are so engrossed in things that are not important that we haven’t got the time for the things that are important.”

http://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/billionaire-altruist-asks-what-is-war-good-for-pleads-for-support-for-veterans