A Dead Man's Penny Returned after 90 Year Journey

Medal heading back to soldier's family in U. K.

A memorial for a fallen Hamilton soldier is going back to his family after 90 years
January 03, 2009
Jackson Hayes
The Hamilton Spectator

More than 92 years after he was killed in action, the memorial plaque commemorating the service and sacrifice of Hamilton's Walter Thomas Baker is finally on its way home.

And it has been a long journey for this dead man's penny, which went from his widow's hands on King Street in 1916 to a $5 raffle bag in the 1970s before winding up in a desk drawer in a suburban Ottawa home.

Now it will return to the shores of England, where it was forged nearly a century earlier, to his surprised and grateful great-great-grandniece Vanessa Rider, who was unaware of this stranger in her family tree and his remarkable story.

"I was absolutely stunned," she said from her home in Lowestoft along Britain's eastern coast. "It's tangible. It's something you can hold onto that belonged to someone."

The story started in November after The Spectator ran an article about an Ottawa woman named Della Hill who was looking to return another family's heirloom.

Hill's mother, Ella Boyd, had found the First World War medal in a $5 grab bag at a bazaar at her Hamilton seniors' home in the 1970s.

She inquired about the medal but because no one knew what it was, it was stored away and neglected.

It surfaced again in the late '80s after Boyd moved to Hill's Ottawa home, but the mystery continued.

The thick disk roughly the size of a teacup saucer sat in a cluttered desk until this year, when a newspaper article featuring a dead man's penny answered her questions.

"I thought, 'Wouldn't it be wonderful if there were relatives of this person who could have this medal back?'" she said at the time.

The memorial plaque was a product of the British government, which felt a gesture of appreciation was needed to recognize the sacrifice of men and women who perished in the First World War.

Commonly called a dead man's penny, the medal is cast in bronze gunmetal.

Each included the deceased's name and came with a scroll.

Because the medal came from Hamilton, Hill thought the relatives might still be around here. But after weeks of searching and help from amateur genealogists, the trail ran cold.

Until, that is, representatives from the genealogical website Ancestry.ca read the story and delved into their archives to help fill history's gaps.

According to Ancestry.ca representative Karen Peterson, a research team searched the roughly eight million family trees and 780 million names in its database for any trace of Baker.

"Once you have a number of records, you can start to confirm things," she said.

The global network pulled Baker's military service file, marriage certificate and attestation papers and his story was slowly revealed.

It started with a summer wedding in 1915.

Baker, an immigrant from Middlesex, wed Jane Finlayson on June 23 in Canada. But the honeymoon was short-lived, as Baker enlisted just over a month later.

He sailed to Liverpool in April 1916 and was sent to fight at one of the bloodiest battles in modern warfare, the Battle of the Somme.

Somme, a five-month siege of a 19-kilometre-long German line near the Somme River in northern France, was nearing its end when Baker and his unit arrived.

Two Canadian divisions and nine from the British 4th Army were the attacking forces on one of the last allied assaults, the battle of Flers-Courcelette.

It was Baker's first major action. And it would be his last.

It was dawn on Sept. 15 when Baker and his fellow troops went over the top into hell on earth.

Summer rains and months of artillery barrages had turned no-man's land into a quagmire of death.

The troops, creeping behind one of a few dozen tanks -- used by the Allies for the first time -- inched through knee-deep mud toward the fury of the German line.

Baker was killed in action five days later -- one of 24,029 Canadians and more than 1.4 million soldiers to die at Somme.

At 114 1/2 King St. W. in Hamilton a few weeks later, Jane Baker opened a package and saw her husband's name etched in the dense bronze.

Where it went from there is a mystery, until it turned up in Boyd's $5 grab bag around 60 years later.

Now, thanks to Ancestry.ca, Baker's penny will return to his family's bloodline in Suffolk, closing the chapter on his memory.

"It's amazing how it finds its way through all this time all the way back," his niece Rider said.

The 53-year-old works for a local charity in Britain's easternmost town and is an avid amateur genealogist who had come across Baker's name while delving into her family roots.

Rider expects to have the penny in a few weeks.

Though neither she nor Hill has seen the scroll that accompanied every memorial plaque, Baker could be proud that both women will honour its final creed:

"Let those who come after see to it that his name be not forgotten."

jahayes@thespec.com

905-526-3283

Col. Gail Halversen "The Candy Bomber" of Berlin Airlift on KNX 1070 in LA on Friday

Col. Gail Halversen Day declared in LA

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Business Hour 1-02-09
Stocks kick off 2009 with a New Year rally. A look at 2008's "techtonic" events that forever changed Wall Street. Guests include retired U.S. Air Force Colonel Gale Halverson, and John Challenger, of Challenger, Gray and Christmas.

Councilmember Tom LaBonge and Consul General of Germany Christian Stocks honored WWII Berlin Airlift flier Col. Gail Halvorsen in Los Angeles City Council Chambers on Friday, November 21st. Col. Halvorsen was in Los Angeles to participate in a roundtable discussion on the 60th Anniversary of the Berlin Airlift that was sponsored by the German Consulate General and the Goethe-Institut Los Angeles.

Halvorsen was recognized for his heroic efforts during the Berlin Airlift of 1948/1949 when he flew in food and much needed supplies after the Soivets blocked the western portion of Berlin controlled by America and its allies.

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Col. Gail S. Halvorsen

(© Consulate General Los Angeles)

Among the most eagerly anticipated provisions brought in were the bundles of candy for the city’s children. "Operation Little Vittles" started after Halvorsen encountered a group of children near the Berlin airport. Touched by their gratitude for his gift of a couple of sticks of gum, he promised more candy on his next trip, telling them to watch for the plane that would "wiggle" its wings once. He kept his promise by dropping candy wrapped in handkerchiefs and scraps of cloth as miniature parachutes the next day. His kindness earned him the nickname "Uncle Wiggly Wings2, the “Chocolate Flyer” and the “Berlin Candy Bomber”.

On his tour of City Hall, Halvorsen was congratulated by Los Angeles City Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

Councilmember Tom LaBonge and Col. Gail S. Halvorsen in LaBonge's memorabilia-filled office

(© Consulate General Los Angeles)

Before taking off to visit the Berlin Forest in Griffith Park, Halvorsen stopped in at Councilmember LaBonge's memorabilia-filled office.

http://www.knx1070.com/topic/play_window.php?audioType=Episode&audioId=3269138

Official EPK Clips for their upcoming film VALKYRIE, which opens in theaters on December 25th, 2008.


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For one veteran, every day is Memorial Day

Joseph Salvia (left) surprised Rochester resident and World War II veteran Robert Martin with a medal during a chance encounter at Kruse Muer restaurant last month.



It was totally by chance that Joseph Salvia and Robert Martin crossed paths on a December day in a popular Rochester restaurant. They'd probably never laid eyes on each other before, they now agree, though the younger man, who lives in Milford and works in Rochester Hills, looked familiar to Martin, who lives in Rochester.


Salvia sized Martin up right away: World War II generation. Did he serve in the war? Salvia would make it his business to find out.

It's an exercise Salvia, 65, has repeated countless times in the last seven or eight years. A Vietnam-era veteran of the Michigan National Guard, he started his own personal movement to honor veterans after getting involved with first the Milford and then the Detroit Memorial Day parades.

"Too many people have taken Memorial Day and turned it into some kind of celebration instead of focusing on service to country, sacrifice to country," he said. "I just decided to create a veterans medal. A lot of times folks didn't get any medals when they were in the service, or they would lose them."

So on that day at Kruse & Muer on Rochester's Main Street, Salvia struck up a conversation with Martin, who is 85 and suffering from Parkinson's disease.

"Every day I try to engage a conversation which will cause me to find out if someone is a veteran," Salvia said. "I always ask, 'Were you in the military?'" Martin, he said, answered, "Oh yes; I was airborne."

"Usually their face lights up," Salvia said. "They're excited to talk about what they did, where they were."

Martin, a retired General Motors executive, has quite a story to tell.

"If you were to ask me what was the great experience in my life, I would tell you World War II," he said. He remembers it vividly and still gets choked up talking about it.

SURPRISE MEDAL

Martin enlisted in the Army paratroopers at 18 and spent more than three years in Europe, returning home at 21 just as the war in Europe was ending. In between, he jumped into France and Holland, lived in the trenches in snow and cold during the siege of Bastogne, part of the Battle of the Bulge. He was wounded at a town called Foy after his commander refused to surrender to the German army. He earned the Purple Heart and Gold Star and survived not one, but two, perilous ocean voyages to get back home.

He's still married to Helen, who lived on his block and married him when he came home on leave. After 62 years together, they have four children, 13 grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren. Over the years, they've made a practice of visiting World War II battlefields in Europe, and even lived in the Netherlands for a time, "overlooking where the war was. It was just about 30 yards in front of our condominium."

Martin and Salvia were seated near each other Kruse & Muer. At a third table, Rochester Hills neighbors Joanie Allan and Betty Anderson were having lunch. Martin was with his wife. Salvia was having lunch with a business contact.

After initially chatting with Martin about his service, "I went back to my table and told the people, 'In a few minutes I'm going to do something you've never seen before.'" He also invited Anderson and Allan to be prepared to participate in what he was about to do.

Salvia went to his car and came back with a gold-colored medal on a ribbon. On the front it depicts an eagle, the branches of the service, a torch and some mountains. On the back the words "honored American veteran" are inscribed. He went to Martin's table.

"I asked him to stand up, give me his best attention position," Salvia said. Then he presented the medal to Martin, saying, "It's just from one veteran to another. ...

"It's not monetarily worth anything. ... I do this whenever the opportunity presents itself."

GENUINE GESTURE

"I was surprised," is all Martin would say when asked his reaction. "He's an advocate for veterans. ... A very nice guy."

The two women were surprised, too. Anderson had a camera and snapped a few photos.

"We were so proud to be seated near such a hero and his wife," Allan said. "Because of the unselfish heroism of servicemen such as Mr. Martin, Americans such as myself are able to enjoy the freedoms we have today."

The thing is, no one in the restaurant would have known about Martin's service without Salvia's gesture. And that's the whole point.

"So many veterans are forgotten," he said. "People do their time and when they're done, they fade into civilian life.

"Lots of times they would probably relish the opportunity to be recognized, but they're shy. I kind of coax them out of it ... by finding them and giving them an opportunity to speak a little bit. Then I invite them to come to Milford and march in the parade."

Salvia said he's had nothing but positive reaction. One of his favorite times was when he presented a medal in a hardware store, grabbing an in-store microphone and announcing that everyone in the shop should come to the register. The veteran "just started weeping. ... He was just overwhelmed with tears. He just said, 'Nobody's ever done that for me before.' Within a week he joined the Legion."

Salvia's American Legion post now pays for the medals, which are in great demand. He's been awarded Rotary's Paul Harris Award for his efforts and been named Huron Valley Citizen of the Year twice.

He said he loves hearing the veterans' stories and getting them some recognition, however delayed it might be.

"It's always exciting. It's never routine," he said. "It's a good thing to spread happiness, to see people excited. So I enjoy that. I enjoy when you can make somebody proud, make a new friend."

Heaven help us! What Prime Minister Jim Callaghan said when he discovered Britain only had two days of ammunition to fight the Russians

By Tom Kelly and Arthur Martin

James Callaghan described Britain's inability to defend itself as a scandal

British defences were so perilously low during the Cold War that the RAF's ammunition would have lasted for only two days if the Soviets had decided to launch an attack, official files reveal today.

The RAF's Phantom jets had enough firepower to defend the country for just two waves of attacks from Leonid Brezhnev's bombers.

And if enemy planes had slipped through, air defence missile batteries protecting key strategic targets could have been fired only twice before they, too, ran out of ammunition.

At sea, the Navy would have been no match for the threat posed by enemy submarines and on land the Army was so stretched that even when fully mobilised it would have been unable to cope with a wide-scale campaign of sabotage and subversion from the might of the Soviet special forces.

When he learned about Britain's inability to defend itself, the then Prime Minister James Callaghan described it as a 'scandal' and called for heads to roll.

'Heaven help us if there is a war!', he scrawled on the side of a classified document released today by the National Archives under the rule which requires government files to be made available for public inspection after 30 years.

The latest batch of papers covers the Labour administration between 1974 and 1978. Another furious note from the Prime Minister said: 'I take it someone has worked out whether we can defend ourselves.'

The threat from the Kremlin: Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev

The scale of the problem became apparent after the Joint Intelligence Committee warned in late 1977 that, in the event of a conventional war, the Soviet Union could unleash up to 200 bombers and 18 submarines against the UK.

To make matters worse, intelligence officials widely expected the Soviets to plant hundreds of mines in waters off the British coast.

However, with money tight, ministers simply shrugged their shoulders and had to accept that there was little they could do until new equipment such as the Tornado jet fighter became available in the mid-1980s.

In a document from January 1978 marked Top Secret UK Eyes Alpha, the Chiefs of Staff wrote: 'Air defences would be outweighed because aircraft would be outnumbered and stocks of air defence munitions would sustain operations for only two or three days.

Enlarge

Missiles on parade in Red Square during the 1970s

'Maritime forces need better anti-submarine weapons, and face a massive threat from submarine and air-launched missiles and also from mines. The most serious deficiency is in numbers.

'The Army in the UK would, until mobilisation is complete, have insufficient forces to meet its commitments.

'After mobilisation of the reserves, a process taking between 15-20 days, the Army would be able to counter the currently-assessed Soviet land threat during the initial stages of the war but, lacking supporting arms and logistic support, it would be inadequate to deal with any more significant threat, including sabotage or subversion on a wide scale.

Royal Navy minesweepers, meanwhile, were busy keeping open the sea lanes to the nuclear submarine base at Faslane, near Glasgow, and would be unable to clear the routes across the English Channel.

British forces were also highly vulnerable to an attack from the Soviet arsenal of chemical weapons because, while most troops had respirators, only a few had the necessary protective clothing as well.

After he read the damning report, Mr Callaghan summoned Defence Secretary Fred Mulley to Downing Street to demand an explanation.

Mr Mulley said that, in practice, Britain would rely on collective Nato defence in the event of a Soviet attack, but nevertheless agreed that the position was unacceptable.

He complained that he was no more than a messenger for the forces chiefs and blamed 'crazy' decisions on defence spending taken a decade earlier.

U.S. sent Cold War escapees back across Iron Curtain

Program brought refugees to safety of America, only to ask them to become spies in Europe


Arthur Max and Randy Herschaft The Associated Press

12/29/2008 -

BAD AROLSEN, Germany — In the locked attic of a German archive is a dusty file that harks back to a long forgotten chapter of the Cold War — a humanitarian endeavor that, it now emerges, also had a covert side.

Marked "Escapee Program," it contains a list of thousands of names of people who, through cunning, bravery and luck, slipped through the Iron Curtain that divided Europe after World War II and found freedom in the West.

President Harry Truman's administration launched the program in 1952 to rehabilitate and resettle refugees from Eastern Europe, feting them as heroes who defied communist tyranny.

Recently declassified U.S. documents disclose that, from the start, the program went beyond giving them new lives and sought to use them for intelligence and propaganda. Some were offered money to be smuggled back to their home countries to gather information on Soviet military defenses and public attitudes toward the communist regimes that had replaced Hitler's Nazi occupiers.

The file in the attic of the International Tracing Service adds yet another previously unknown element to this Cold War episode: For years, a humanitarian group dedicated to family reunification ran background checks on the escapees at the United States' request.

Associated Press reporters, who have been allowed repeated access to the archive in the past two years, recently gained entry to the attic, where even employees rarely venture. Cardboard boxes storing old letters were stacked on the floor, and binders of inactive and uncatalogued files lined floor-to-ceiling metal shelves. The Escapee Program carton sat among those files, apparently undisturbed for many years.

Each name on the list gave a reference to a case file and is among the 17.5 million people in the archive's publicly accessible index of people killed or otherwise persecuted by the Nazis. The Escapee Program files reviewed by the AP gave personal details, names of relatives, movements and jobs before and after they fled to the West. Their number is not known, but the ITS says it handled more than 7,400 cases in the program's first year.

There is no suggestion the U.S. program was coercive or any escapee was denied refuge if he refused a request to go back across the Iron Curtain.

Miloslav K., for instance, says he refused an offer of money to return to Czechoslovakia, but nonetheless was able to immigrate to the U.S. and is now living a quiet retirement in New York City.

After threading his way on foot across the Czechoslovakian border in December 1953, he said, he wound up in a refugee camp where he was repeatedly debriefed about life under the communists and about a military airstrip near his hometown.

He said he was offered 1,000 marks — less than $2,000 at a time when money and jobs were scarce — to gather intelligence in Czechoslovakia. He knew of one man who accepted the assignment but was captured on his second trip to Prague when he visited his wife. Miloslav said he never heard of him again.

"I risked my life at least three times" to escape, he recalled telling the U.S. recruiting agent. "Do you think for 1,000 marks I will risk my life again?"

One program devised by the CIA for covert actions was Operation REDSOX, which the agency launched in the early 1950s to infiltrate escapees back into the communist bloc to encourage resistance and defections.

Most of the teams were captured, however. According to a CIA history, 75 percent of the 85 REDSOX agents "disappeared from sight and failed in their missions."

As an intelligence operation, the Escapee Program failed to produce the quality intelligence the spymasters were after and reflected the general disarray at that time in the intelligence community, says Sarah-Jane Corke, author of the 2008 book U.S. Covert Operations and Cold War Strategy: Truman, the CIA and Secret Warfare.

Information from the escapees often was unreliable, cooked up to impress interrogators and secure resettlement, she said.

"As the Escapee Program was building up, American covert operations in Eastern Europe were unraveling," Corke said by telephone from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. By 1952, the Soviets had penetrated or exposed all the U.S. clandestine missions in the East. The CIA's credibility was shot, and the administration was floundering for an anti-communist policy.

One escapee was Jiri Wertheimer who, with a friend named Zdenek Volf, stole a single-engine Piper sports plane from the Prague Communist Youth Flying Club and skittered across the frontier, evading pursuing Czech Air Force Messerschmitts and gunfire from Soviet watch towers.

Communist Czechoslovakia "was a dictatorship. You had to keep your mouth shut. Otherwise you could be arrested for not following the party line," Wertheimer, now 80, told AP 55 years later. "We didn't want to spend our lives in this kind of system."

After landing in a German potato field, Wertheimer said, he went through several interrogations over a period of weeks, first by the CIA, then by the intelligence agencies of Britain, France and West Germany.

Wertheimer said he did not resent the questioning, which was to be expected. "There was nothing brutal about it," he said. "It's never a pleasant thing, even though it may be conducted in a very polite and respectful way. Nevertheless, it was an interrogation."

Wertheimer, an engineer, worked for Boeing for 33 years and lives in Newcastle, Wash.

Miloslav K. said he left Czechoslovakia because of the humiliations he suffered at Soviet hands. "Nobody liked the Russians. Stalin was a dictator, a former bank robber. Nobody liked the soldiers," said Miloslav.

A retired printer, now 86, he spoke on condition of anonymity, saying he didn't want to be disturbed by publicity. But he relished retelling the story of his 120-mile journey to the U.S.-occupied zone of Germany.

He said he spent seven days moving through forests and villages, begging food, shelter and directions from East German peasants.

He remembers each farmer, shopkeeper, train conductor and Russian soldier he encountered.

The border was a 30-foot-wide strip of rough road constantly patrolled by armed soldiers. Miloslav hid behind a boulder in the woods for hours. Two armed Russian soldiers with a dog came, stayed, and finally left.

Then he saw his chance. Speaking in English that faltered as he relived the excitement, he gave this account:

"Now is the time. Now is the time. Now is the running. I was running directly to the spot." He saw the ditch, jumped across, then sprinted along the road.

"All of a sudden, I turned. Behind me was running the German shepherd. Directly at me. I said, 'That's finished.' It was a trained dog. It was going at the face. Lucky I had this little briefcase. I put it in front of my face. He jumped and hit the briefcase. It was a lucky move, believe me. He hit it with full speed."

The dog fled, pursued by soldiers who didn't see Miloslav racing the other way. "I believe it was a miracle," he said.

Miloslav said he was interviewed on the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, which had its origins in, and was partly financed by, the CIA. "I was good," he said. But having himself turned down an offer to go back, he never encouraged people to flee.

"I knew how dangerous it is," he said. "If they caught somebody, he was sent to the uranium mine or they killed him."

In Washington, around the time Wertheimer and Miloslav made their escapes, the migration office of the U.S. State Department wrote a secret assessment of the Escapee Program. It was declassified last year.

In the late 1940s, it said, the Soviet Union was capitalizing on the plight of people who had fled the Eastern bloc and were "forced into debilitating inactivity in government camps or marginal existence as free-living persons." Some were locked up with criminals. Others gave up on the West and returned home.

As early as January 1950, Truman's national security advisers saw the refugees as having "positive value for U.S. intelligence, operational or propaganda purposes."

And 15 months later, a directive from the National Security Council said a program to encourage East bloc defections would further U.S. aims "by placing maximum strain on the Soviet structure of power through threatening the regime's control of its population."

In December 1951, the Psychological Strategy Board, responsible for psychological warfare and answerable to the National Security Council, drew up a program to employ, resettle and care for escapees from the Soviet orbit.

These people "should be capable of providing certain necessary services to assist U.S. operating programs," the review said, underscoring their covert potential.

A State Department history released in 2007 drew an explicit link, saying the Escapee Program's goals were to "provide care and resettlement for current escapees and facilitate their use by CIA and the Armed Forces."

The board met in January 1952 to work on details. According to minutes obtained from the U.S. National Archives in College Park, Md., Gen. Walter Bedell Smith, the CIA director, told the senior State and Defense Department officials the refugees could be recruited into a volunteer army.

Under legislation known as the Kersten Amendment, $100 million was available "to support resistance behind the Iron Curtain."

Truman authorized the Escapee Program in March 1952 and approved $4.3 million in funding.

However, plans to form an active military unit, called the Volunteer Freedom Corps, collapsed under objections from other allies.

By the end of the first year, 14,000 people — Czechoslovaks, Hungarians, Poles, Bulgarians, Romanians, Soviets, Albanians and Balts — had benefited from the program. Camps were improved. Clothing was provided, along with medical and dental services. Some 4,000 people were approved for resettlement.

Nothing was said publicly about the program's clandestine side. Some material about the CIA's involvement in the program is still secret.

In the Cold War atmosphere of the time, said author Corke, it would not be surprising for humanitarian organizations to help the intelligence services.

"There was an idea in the 1950s that you were all in it together. You had an obligation to help the government in time of the Cold War," she said.