My biography of Joseph Alfred (Joey) Jacobson has been published online in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography.
Author: Peter Usher
Remembering VE Day, 8 May 1945
This is my uncle Joey Jacobson’s grave in Lichtenvoorde General Cemetery in the Netherlands. The photo was sent to me by a man I know only because he read my book, Joey Jacobson’s War, a few years ago, and who went out of his way last week to visit Joey’s grave. I was deeply moved that he would honour my uncle that way. Joey lies next to his fellow crew members, all of whom perished in a bombing raid on Germany on 28 January 1942.
Photo credit: Steve Clayman
Our family visited Joey’s grave and took part in Netherland’s Remembrance and Liberation Day observances on May 4thand 5th, 2008. These are important days in the Netherlands, not simply remembered but observed with gratitude and reverence. Yesterday, as on that day that we were present, the ceremony of observance in Lichtenvoorde would have been followed by a walk to the cemetery where Joey and 22 other Commonwealth airmen are buried. Children would have laid flowers by their headstones.
This week is the 80th anniversary of VE Day, when Nazi Germany was finally defeated. I see too little sign that we in Canada plan to observe the day with the same depth and intensity as the Dutch people, but we should. They do not forget, and neither should we. Yes, the fighting was very far away from us, and we were neither occupied nor liberated, but Canadians were front and centre in the struggle, at the cost of many thousands of lives. And we should remember what they fought and died for, and against.
This is what Joey’s father recorded in his diary that day in Montreal when victory was declared.
My own feelings were mixed. I was glad … that is putting it mildly for the millions of people who could again feel with relief that their own were safe. I knew that I had in my thoughts rather feared the day when the realization of our personal loss would be … well I will leave it at that … I just felt lost for a while. I sat in Murrays drinking coffee for an hour, then walked along St. Catherine Street watching the crowds celebrate. … We closed our offices at noon. I went home to lunch in the usual way. Arranged to send some V Day flowers, red and white, to May whom I knew was feeling very much the same as I felt. We spent the afternoon quietly together. … Sounds a very trite description of one of the greatest days in history but my spirits were flat and I am not going to embellish this account with stuff that I did not feel.
80 years later, it is still appropriate to observe VE Day as the occasion for celebration, reflection, loss, and remembrance.
Battle of Britain Spitfire Ace – Author Talk at Waterstones Books, Canterbury, England, 27 February 2025
I was pleased to have the opportunity to talk about my new book at our local Waterstones bookshop in Canterbury recently. I was even more pleased that Willie Nelson’s son Bill McAlister and his grandson Dan McAlister came down from London to be part of it.
The Crisis We Must Face
Canadians are now confronted with an existential crisis. We are faced not only with economic hardship but with fundamental threats to our sovereignty and as importantly, with profound moral challenges. How we will bear and endure harsh measures against us if they come to pass, and what are we willing to do to resist? And who or what do we look to for support?
Four of my uncles enlisted in the RCAF in 1940. By 1941 they were bombing Germany. By the end of 1942, when I was only a year old, three were dead and buried in Europe and one was a prisoner in Stalag Luft 3 who would survive the forced march of January 1945.
Now that we are threatened again after what was for me a lifetime of peace and security, I think about them more than ever. I asked my mum once why they went, she replied only “that’s just what people did.”
Is that what people would do now? I don’t mean getting into a stripped-down airframe to get shot out of the sky, that’s not the way things get done any more. I mean, more broadly, would we do what is necessary and what may be demanded of us not only to live in peace but also to prevent tyranny.
My uncles enlisted and trained in Canada, but once they got to England they flew under the authority of the Royal Air Force, because we were still a semi-colony of Britain. We are on our own now. No mother country across the Atlantic, and apparently no reliable ally to the south.
My uncles’ enduring legacy was their letters and diaries. From these I gained a pretty good idea of why they went, what they experienced, and what they thought at the time. They were very clear about the rightness of the cause for which they had volunteered, and why they themselves could not stay home and watch from the sidelines. Their purpose was not just a military victory on a far off continent, but the defence of civilization as they understood it. They were not teenagers when they signed up, nor were they desperate for a job. They were old enough to know the risks and what they were sacrificing in their immediate future.
In 1941 our Minister of Defence for Air characterized the thousands of Canadian airmen serving in England as “mainly third, fourth and fifth generation Canadians, bred in Canada, schooled in Canadian schools and with an intensely Canadian viewpoint.” My uncles, however, were first and second generation Canadians, but with no doubt about who they were: Canadians who happened to be Jewish. They knew that they would have to work hard for what they might get in life, and that they would have to endure slings and arrows along the way. Most importantly they knew that they lived in a country that had offered their parents and grandparents security of life and property and the opportunity for a decent life.
Perhaps as Jews they were more sensitive to the country’s inequalities and injustices, but they weren’t saints, and they weren’t entirely free of every casual prejudice of those days. Yet they had a vision of a better and more equitable post-war future and wanted to help build it.
They and a million other Canadian servicemen and women contributed mightily to the good life that I have enjoyed for eighty years, and that so many millions of others sought and found in coming to Canada since then. I was fortunate in never having to answer the call as my uncles did. I hated war in my youth, but I hated tyranny more, as they did, and as I still do. Tyranny might not look exactly as it did in their time, but the way it comes about has not changed much and we need to recognize that.
What will be the moral compass as well as the practical content of our resistance as individuals, as communities, and as a country? What bad things must be fought against right now, with all our might and dedication, and what good things might have to wait but nonetheless be planned for because their value does not diminish in tough times. I am forever grateful that so many of my parents’ generation knew all that and acted on it.
Let us do that in our time.
— Peter J. Usher
Northwest Territories Archives — Peter J. Usher Fonds
The Canadian North was the focus of my working life for fifty years. In 1962 I was hired by the Department of Northern Affairs as a field assistant on a resource survey on the Western Arctic coast, and for several summers afterwards continued as assistant and then director. I also conducted my field research in the region for my doctoral degree in geography. This led to a job in the Department’s Northern Science Research Group in Ottawa. I left government in 1973 and moved back to the Western Arctic to work for Indigenous organizations on their land claims, and to coordinate their intervention in the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry (1974-77). There could have been no better beginning to my working life, and no better learning experience.
I then established a consulting practice on Indigenous land claims, environmental and social impact assessments, and renewable resource management. I advised on these issues for clients (mainly community and regional Indigenous organizations) across the North from Labrador to Alaska, especially in Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Quebec, and Labrador. For several years I was research director for Inuit Tapiriit Kanatamii (the national Inuit organization). Between 1997 and 2010 I was a member of two federal environmental assessment panels, one on a mining project in Labrador and the other on a pipeline project in the Northwest Territories. I also chaired the Wildlife Management Advisory Committee, a co-management body established under the Inuvialuit Final Agreement.
My decades in the North shaped me personally as well as professionally. I came to know and appreciate life in a very different part of Canada, and the social and environmental challenges confronting its people. I am indebted to those, especially in the Western Arctic, who became my teachers and my friends. My years in the North made me who I am and how I see the world.
I recently donated all of my research, writing, and correspondence from those years to the Northwest Territories Archives at the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre in Yellowknife. These records, which include field diaries, correspondence, research reports, memos, interviews, photos, and supporting documentation, are now accessible to the public. The catalogue can be viewed online (Fonds 434 – Peter J. Usher fonds). The only exception is with respect to my work on the adverse impacts of mercury contamination and hydro-electric development on First Nations communities in northwestern Ontario, which I donated to the Archives of Ontario in Toronto.
My donation to the NWT Archives included 991 photographs which they digitized with captions. These can now be viewed on-line. Most were taken in the Western Arctic and the Mackenzie Valley in the 1960s and ‘70s.
I am so pleased that these records have a permanent home in the Northwest Territories, where I considered they rightly belong. It is especially gratifying to me to hear from people in the Western Arctic that I knew as children, who are finding photos of their elders and of the places they knew a long time ago, and to read their comments and memories. I am also very grateful to the staff at the Northwest Territories Archives for their professionalism and care in organizing, cataloguing, and digitizing these records.
Springtime in Huron County
Huron County is the land of corn, soy, and wheat. If city folk wonder where their food staples come from, this is the place. The land here is bountiful, productive, and readily cultivated. It’s as good as it gets in Canada. Drop a nine-furrow plow in the dark soil and you could go for miles without turning up a stone. In this fourth week of May, the fields are awakening. Corn has just been planted and in some fields is already at the two-leaf stage. The fields with last year’s corn stubble are being disced, harrowed and rolled, likely to be planted with soybeans within days. A few have already been planted. Seed heads are emerging in the wheat fields planted last fall, and will be ready for harvest in a couple of months.
I took these photos while cycling along the Orchard Line, which runs a mile in from where our cottage overlooks Lake Huron. The orchards are gone now, including the one my wife’s uncle had at the south end. But the crop fields are still interspersed with woodlots dense with hardwoods, spruce, and cedar. The trees are tall here, too. Those woodlots haven’t been high-graded, at least not lately, nor have they been clear cut, although sadly, they are visibly marked by the skeletal remains of ash trees that fell victim to the emerald ash borer. Pine plantations, elsewhere intended to regenerate forests from abandoned fields, were not needed here and so are rarely seen.
Hundred-year-old maples mark the edge of the Orchard Line. Farmers seem to treasure them: they are quick to replace those that die, and they don’t begrudge the moisture and sunlight that those huge maples take from the first two or three rows of corn adjacent. Yes, there is industrial-scale farming here, but there is also stewardship.
Should the food that comes from these fields be cheap? Not if those who produce it can’t get a reasonable return for their work and risk. Should the grocery chain magnates get less of a share and pay more taxes? Maybe, but that share divided up among all the farmers of the land wouldn’t amount to much. Would “axing” the carbon tax make a difference? Some, no doubt, to the individual farmer, but certainly less than by “axing” all the other costs for equipment and fertilizer and every other input (which nobody proposes to do), along with lower interest rates. But none of that would make food in the grocery store cheaper. Better to ensure that everyone gets a living wage so that we can all afford to buy the food we need.
Springtime in Huron County. All photos by Peter Usher.
On This Day — 30 March 1942
Eighty-two years ago today, on 30 March 1942, Britain launched a desperate attempt. to destroy Nazi Germany’s largest battleship, the Tirpitz. The Allies’ fortunes were at a low ebb at that point in the war, and the Tirpitz, anchored near Trondheim, Norway, posed an immediate threat to Murmansk-bound convoys carrying aid to Soviet Russia. The Royal Air Force despatched 34 Halifax bombers from three squadrons for that difficult and dangerous task. Positioned at forward bases in northern Scotland, they took off in fading daylight for a target at the very limit of their range.
Had the raid been successful, it would be remembered today as among Bomber Command’s most spectacular achievements of the entire war. Instead, it was an utter failure. It was ill-conceived and unpracticed, undertaken by brave men who were insufficiently trained for the purpose, and defeated by adverse weather and the German air defences in Trondheim Fjord. Six of the 34 aircraft were lost, and the raid itself remained shrouded in secrecy until after the war ended. It would be years before the families of the men who perished learned the nature of the raid and the details of their fate. The Tirpitz raid of March 30/31 became a forgotten episode in a long war.
One of those aircraft that failed to return was Halifax R9438, on which my Dad’s cousin Moe Usher was wireless operator and air gunner. Perhaps crippled by anti-aircraft fire, perhaps weighted with ice, R9438 was also very likely running out of fuel. After eight gruelling hours, long after midnight and still 200 km short of the Scottish mainland, the pilot sought to make an emergency landing at the only possible airfield, RAF Sumburgh, at the southern tip of Shetland. On approach from seaward in low cloud, fog, and darkness, he failed to clear the high cliff at Fitful Head.
No one learned what became of R9438 until evidence of it was discovered a week later by crofters calling in their sheep along the top of Fitful Head, nearly 300 metres above the pounding sea below. The difficult and drawn-out identification, recovery, and burial of the crew became an exceptional and long-remembered event in the wartime history of Shetland. Moe and two others are buried in the Commonwealth War Graves plot in Lerwick General Cemetery, the rest are commemorated at the Air Forces Memorial near London for those with no known grave.
This monument near Trondheim, erected in 1985 and topped by one of the unexploded mines, is the only memorial to the March 30/31 raid, and to the two equally unsuccessful ones four weeks later.
This monument at the top of Fitful Head in Shetland, placed by the Dunrossness Community Council in 1995, is the memorial to the crew of Halifax R9438 who lost their lives on 31 March 1942.
Two and a half more years would pass before the RAF finally destroyed the Tirpitz. By that time, the war was nearly over, and the task less urgent.
On This Day — 21 March 1974
FIFTY YEARS AGO ON THIS DAY – 21 March 2024
Fifty years ago today the Government of Canada established the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry. Its purpose was to hold hearings and report on the social, environmental and economic impact of the proposed Mackenzie Valley Gas Pipeline, and to recommend terms and conditions that should govern its construction, operation, and abandonment.
The Liberal government of the day didn’t do this just because it seemed like a nice idea. The proposed pipeline was meeting with determined opposition by Indigenous people in the Northwest Territories, and substantial public concern across Canada about its environmental effects. The New Democratic Party, which held the balance of power in Parliament, made the Inquiry happen, and that it would be chaired by Justice Thomas Berger, as the price of its continued support.
I was living in Inuvik, Northwest Territories, at that time, working for the Inuvialuit on a mapping project for their land claim. They asked me to stay on and assist them in their participation in the Inquiry, which I did. The next three years, during which I acted as advisor to and expert witness for the Committee for Original Peoples’ Entitlement, changed Canada very much for the better, and also set the course for the rest of my working life.
I already knew who Tom Berger was. As a socialist I admired his politics, and we in the Western Arctic were well aware of his role in the seminal Calder case on Indigenous land rights. Yet in the circumstances of Canada’s headlong rush at that time to develop the energy and mineral resources of the North, from Churchill Falls in Labrador to the oil and gas resources of the Mackenzie Delta, I was not optimistic that much would come of Berger’s Inquiry.
As it turned out, my limited expectations were much surpassed. Not only did Justice Berger recommend against construction of the pipeline unless several key conditions were met, not least the resolution of Indigenous land claims. The very title of his historic report, Northern Frontier Northern Homeland, changed Canadians’ perceptions of the North profoundly and for the better. Canada’s ruling elite, and indeed many ordinary Canadians, thought that the concept of Indigenous title was laughable, that the North was a vast treasure house of riches ripe for exploitation, that its unrestrained development would be unambiguously beneficial, and that there was no need for public consultation and participation on matters of such fundamental national interest. In short, much of what we now believe to be normal and right with respect to Indigenous rights, careful consideration of the environmental consequences of resource development, and public consultation, simply did not exist fifty years ago.
We owe that change in very large measure to Tom Berger’s wisdom and action, and to his courage, his empathy, his capabilities, and his quiet determination. And he didn’t stop there, he continued to act and to advocate for the rest of his life. Individuals do matter in history, and Tom Berger was one of them. To the extent that we live in a better country now than we did then, we owe him a debt of gratitude and honour. He stands in the select company of truly great Canadians.
Tom Berger did not do this alone. His Inquiry succeeded mainly because so many Indigenous residents of the affected communities in the North turned out to express their views and concerns at the community hearings, aided by the key intervenors at the Inquiry, with the Dene and Inuvialuit organizations at the forefront.
Yet nothing is forever. If we do not defend and advance the achievements initiated fifty years ago that made Canada better, they will wither away and we will go backwards.
Cover Reveal: Battle of Britain Spitfire Ace
My publisher, Pen & Sword Books, have recently released the cover design for my new book, now titled Battle of Britain Spitfire Ace. Read all about it here.
On Snowshoeing
One of the consequences of Covid has been rediscovering the joys of snowshoeing. While isolated on a hundred acres of bush in eastern Ontario, with three kilometers of trails, there was never a boring day in winter, whatever the weather. And so it continues.
While snowshoeing I read the news: what animals are moving about the place, and what they are up to. Deer trails and feeding craters, coyote tracks and their occasional kills, signs of porcupines and racoons, rabbit tracks, squirrel burrows in the snow, mouse tunnels, and on rare occasions the telltale pattern of wing tips on either side of a suddenly terminated mouse trail – prey surprised by an owl.
I monitor the snow condition of my trails, whether hard-packed and firm, crusty after freezing rain, or mushy from a recent thaw. I watch for the freezing and thawing of spring-fed outflows and wet spots, and when it is safe to venture across the beaver pond as revealed by deer tracks in the snow. I marvel at the variety and beauty of the light and the snow whether it’s mild or cold, windy or calm. Sunny days bring the diamond sparkle of fresh light snow, cold winds create hard sastrugi ridges on the open fields. A prolonged thaw brings snow-fleas to the surface.
A heavy snowfall brings the drudgery of trudging through deep snow to break trail anew. I call this slow hard work “trudgery”, but it is rewarding nonetheless. Hard-packed trails in the cold make for fast going, not only for me but also for deer that use them to avoid deep snow. Sometimes I see fresh deer tracks on my own track, on a second circuit around less than an hour later.
A moderate snowfall accompanied by strong wind brings the challenge of finding the old trail across open fields. This is especially so when the flat grey light of a cloudy day obscures all highlights, including the tell-tale contours of an existing trail. Even then, knowing how far ahead to look – perhaps ten or twenty metres rather than one or two – may reveal a hint. When all visible signs are absent, the existing trail can be found by feeling for compacted snow underfoot as one goes along.
Falling snow muffles all sound. Then there is only silence. Otherwise I listen for woodpeckers and owls, for suddenly flushed grouse or bolting deer. I am far enough away from highways that there is no background hum of traffic. Headphones are the last thing I would take with me outdoors, so I am entirely away from the ceaseless din of commerce and even the distraction of background radio or music.
As the season progresses I watch for the signs of trees melting snow. A depressed ring appears around every tree trunk, deciduous or coniferous, alive or dead, because the trunk conducts heat upwards from the unfrozen ground at root level.
I can do all this just by going out the back door whenever the conditions look right, and strap on my snowshoes. I miss the days of speedskating on the Rideau Canal, and of cross-country skiing in the Gatineaus, but I don’t have to get in the car to snowshoe at home.
I miss the aesthetics of my old wood-framed gut snowshoes and my simple moosehide mukluks, now both worn out. And I miss the aesthetics of the track those old snowshoes made in fresh snow. Yet my newer tubular framed snowshoes and my hardy Canadian-made Sorels – rubber-bottomed, canvas-topped snow boots with heavy felt inners (now no longer available, unfortunately) – are perfectly serviceable.
In the silence and in solitude I can contemplate and think. Perhaps about the work that needs to be done in the bush once the snow goes, perhaps about the book I am currently writing. Come mid to late March, the season draws to an end and it’s time to move on. Walking and cycling will replace snowshoeing, and it will be time for bush work and later for gardening. And come the fall, time again for trail maintenance and preparation for the coming winter. I am blessed with sufficient health and fitness to carry on, and all is good.
Photos
My old snowshoes. Woodframe and gut, made in Loretteville, Que., bought at auction near home, ca 1978, with lamp wick binders added.
My old mukluks. Moosehide and canvas with Western Arctic trim, felt inners, made at Sachs Harbour NWT, ca 1967.