An Outline of the WW II Exploits of Peter Alfred Neuman,
a Fifteen Year Old Canadian Boy
In the Royal Canadian Navy’s Combined Operations ‘Commandos’
Written and Submitted by Peter's son, Michael Neuman
Peter A. Neuman - Boy Soldier
In Montreal you could volunteer at an English or French speaking office, HMCS Montreal or HMCS Cartier, respectively. My father parlayed his ‘Able Seaman’ status and experience, supported by birth certificate showing him to be nineteen, and enlisted in the “Royal Canadian Navy Volunteer Reserve”. His Certificate of Service clearly shows his birthdate as February 2 1923 (whereas his actual Baptismal Certificate says February 2, 1927) and his sign-up date as 16 June 1942.
The first two pages of Dad’s detailed service record are seen below:
While my Dad did not provide us with a blow-by-blow account of his wartime activities, I did manage to have him tell me various accounts which, with the benefit of the precise naval service record documentation, I can now put into perspective.
A few stories that floated around in my head for years but I could not pin down to specific events include a time he spent training commandos in British Columbia; a time he spent being trained in Egypt and the invasion of Sicily. I also knew that when he came home, he had with him a Thompson sub-machine gun all disassembled in parts throughout his baggage – he had that, re-assembled and ready to fire, under his bed until my older sister was two years old. My Mother confirmed that he could disassemble and reassemble it blind-folded in a few minutes.
My Dad told me that my Mom’s brothers were dying to see the gun fired and try it, so he took them to the country somewhere near Cobourg one day in the late 40’s and let them all try blasting away at targets. Apparently they enjoyed the experience but it was not to be repeated. My Dad said the ammo was very expensive and the gun could get rid of large amounts of it in short order. The Thompson lay under my parent’s bed until my older sister was two. At that point my Dad found a gun collector in Buffalo who gave him an unspecified amount of money for it and a Browning semi-automatic handgun with a leather holster and loaded clip.
The Browning remained in our house, loaded and ready to go for most of the rest of my Dad’s life. Dad owned that gun until 1999 when he asked the Burlington, Ontario Police to come and pick it up for destruction. He did not want to be responsible for it being passed to his heirs. I still have the police receipt for the gun.
As my Dad had been in the Navy, I had assumed he had worked on ships throughout the war and on first glance, his records seemed to confirm that. All of his “ships” are noted in sequence on his Certificate of Service after he enlisted, showing the day, month and year he served on each. It was only when I researched each ship that I learned that none of them were actually boats and my Dad wasn’t actually a sailor in the classic sense.
He had told me he was in the “Combined Operations” and that they were like ‘marines’ whose job it was to land on and “clean out” the beaches at the outset of an invasion. They were part sailor and part soldier. The Combined Operations group of the U.K.’s design, included Canadians and Combined Operations from several countries that trained together at many of the same bases in the U.K.. In the U.K. they were known variously as Commandos; Beach Commandos and so forth.
My Dad’s Combined Operations ‘patch’
I found that almost no one had ever heard of this Combined Operations group and that their exploits went largely unheralded during and shortly after the war. The Combined Ops also had a strange piecemeal-looking uniform and even during the war, they were confronted by lack of understanding of exactly who and what they were when they met regular army or navy personnel. Nevertheless, there is now quite a lot of information about them available online and their wartime activities have been the subject of many books and movies. They are the pre-cursor to the Navy Seals and the U.K.’s SBS (Special Boat Service), SAS and other special forces.
The Combined Operations group had many roles, but they often or primarily centered around activities both on water and land and they often facilitated the arrival of the next wave of combat forces by means of landing barges. In particular, they specialised in operating landing craft or barges used to deliver men and equipment ashore and in forcefully securing beachfront property and managing the chaos of a secured beach as a major invasion unfolded. They also undertook specialised raids in small groups in many places around the world, in an effort to inflict severe damage to the enemy without the need for a major invasion and the significant support which that would entail.
Shortly after my Dad’s enlistment, he was assigned to HMS Quebec, which was not a ship named after the Canadian province but a naval base located at Inveraray, Scotland, in operation only from 1940 through 1946.
The following is a photo of Dad’s Naval Pay and Identity Book and on the inside front, the stamp showing that it was issued by Inveraray on 7 Dec. 1942.
HMS Quebec was a Combined Operations training center on Scotland’s west coast along an ocean inlet that was the best place they could find to teach men to handle landing barges in all sorts of weather and sea conditions. My Dad was stationed there from October 1942 until August 1943 to be trained in aspects of beach landings and the other work of Combined Operations warfare. Other pages of this ‘book’ show rates of pay, pay and deductions and cash payouts as well as dates of leave. There is a leave noted from 11/10 to 21/10 1943. Where he went and what he did will remain unknown. There is also a Department of National Defence ID card stapled into the back of the book. On the back of that card he is shown to then be 5’ 11” and 175 pounds. His next of kin shown is his mother and her address is: 3790 Cote St. Catherine Rd., Montreal, Que.
There is an ‘overlapping entry’ in my father’s service record that shows him assigned throughout the latter part of his time with HMS Quebec, at a place called ‘COPRA’. In fact he was drafted out to ‘COPRA’ from January 15 1943 until 26 November 1943, almost a year. My research has confirmed that COPRA was not a ship or a land base but simply a Navy designation for an admin and pay office for Combined Operations personnel who were otherwise on maneuvers somewhere in Africa or the Mediterranean. In fact, there are instances of Combined Operations men killed in action and buried in Europe or Africa with the words “HMS COPRA” noted on their headstones, because the service record shows COPRA as their assignment and the Navy did not have a record of exactly where the individual was fighting at the moment of his death. Were it not for my father’s own keepsakes among his files, his time listed as ‘COPRA’ might similarly have been a blank spot in his service history.
My father kept two small booklet-style cards called Leave and Duty Cards, one from HMS Saunders and another from HMS Canopus, neither of which is listed among his wartime ‘ships’, but both stays occurred during the period allocated to COPRA. Fortunately, there is now much written about both Saunders and CANOPUS online as others describe their time in each. HMS Saunders was the Combined Operations Training Centre, Middle East at Kabret by the Little Bitter Lake north of the Suez Canal. It was not much more than a big tent city. My father’s duty card shows that he was assigned to “tent 179” and “mess tent 3”.
I found a story online written by another fellow who spent time at Saunders, complete with photos. It is a very good summary of the purpose, history and use during WW II of HMS Saunders to be found at Training - CombinedOps.
At some point during his time at Saunders, my Dad moved to another camp called CANOPUS, also in Egypt, where he was then ‘drafted’ on June 30, 1943, to a ‘working party’ which was to be the invasion of Sicily. In particular, according to his CANOPUS duty card pictured below, he was assigned to the 81st flotilla where his duty was listed as “ L.C.M.”, which stands for, Landing Craft Mechanised.
There is a very good and detailed outline of the plan and execution of the landing in Sicily (Operation Husky) to be found in “Canadian Local Histories Online” on pages 196 – 198, which details the time, place and role of the 81st Flotilla.
The invasion of Sicily took place on July 9, 1943 (9 days after his working party assignment card above was stamped). Dad was then five months past his sixteenth birthday. According to information provided by the Loyal Edmonton Regiment, the 80th and 81st flotillas stayed in Sicily for several weeks continuously ferrying heavy equipment ashore amid regular bombing and strafing by the enemy:
Following the invasion of Sicily, Dad was sent to HMS Niobe for one day to transition to Stadacona for about 6 weeks over Christmas. Once again, neither of these was a ship. HMS Niobe was a hospital that became the HQ of the Royal Canadian Navy in Britain and was often used as a ‘transit camp’ for RCN crewmen between postings. HMS Stadacona was a navy base in Halifax where Dad was sent and from which he travelled to British Columbia where he took up a post at HMS Givenchy III. He was to be at Givenchy III from January 16 1944 to November 20 1944.
Givenchy III was a Combined Operations training base at Comox on Vancouver Island where Dad helped train other recruits but, as I recall it, had the best time of his war period life and possibly his life altogether to that point. No one was shooting at them, the food was good and they swam and fished all the time. And according to the wartime recollections of another Givenchy III inhabitant of the period, everyone was having a similar experience.
After almost a year at Givenchy III, Dad was moved several times and we do not have any information as to why or what he did at each place.
Following that stint at Givenchy III he went to Peregrine, about which we know almost nothing. After that, he was shipped back to the Halifax area (HMS Stadacona and Cornwallis) and then all the way back to the west coast to HMS Naden in Esquimalt, British Columbia. These moves were great distances apart and because of the extensive cost and time involved to make the voyages I have to assume he was moved for good reasons. I suspect there was another “working party” associated with at least one of these trips.
He went back and forth between Naden and Givenchy on Vancouver Island before being once again sent back to Halifax and then Montreal to be discharged after the war ended. The war ended in September 1945 and Dad was discharged on November 2 1945. His Certificate of Discharge is seen below.
The extensive travel involved for Dad during particularly the latter part of his service, which we know very little about probably involved long ship and train voyages. From my reading, some of which I have referenced throughout this document, you will find many references by others who wrote about their similar exploits. From these documents it would appear that all of the travel within Canada was by train.
All of the travel to and from Europe would have been by ship. There is also quite a bit of anecdotal evidence to suggest that the travel to Egypt might have been via ship around Africa and through the Suez Canal as this route, while much longer, was vastly safer than taking the chance of entering the Mediterranean through the Straight of Gibraltar where German U-Boats sat in wait to sink anything that went in or out. I vaguely recall Dad mentioning going through the Suez but can’t recall anything else about the travel.
The Navy delivered my Dad to HMCS Donnacona in Montreal, on September 10, 1945, just a week after the war officially ended. They then discharged him from the Navy on November 2, with an extra $100 ‘gratuity’ for plain clothes according to page 2 of his service record. And upon discharge, Dad was eighteen years old…finally, just old enough to join the military.
Apparently, the armed services would not take anyone under eighteen but the Navy had been given dispensation to recruit seventeen year olds. Years later accounts surfaced of several very young war veterans in both the Canadian and U.S. military. Dad was by no means the youngest but was certainly among a very few who managed to serve in combat several years under age.
To some extent I can imagine how my Dad would have been swept up in what was happening at that time in history. In some ways, his introduction into the life of a merchant seaman was a more bizarre story. Once he had managed to become a merchant sailor, it was not as giant a leap to join the Canadian Navy and in fact, there was a tremendous momentum at the time which would have all but swept any able bodied young man in that direction.
Dad certainly could have avoided service after he recovered from Pellagra in Montreal in 1942. He could have simply reverted back to his bona fide identification and be shown to be clearly under age. In fact, he was under age to leave school at the time. The problem was, he was just a kid and he had nowhere to go.
As inconceivable as his story is, it is just as hard to imagine what he must have felt immediately upon discharge. There he was, in Montreal with a duffle bag and a fresh suit of clothes, eighteen years old and no education. He had been on his own for many years at that point but it must have been daunting. Montreal was awash in vets at that time, so jobs were scarce and there was lots of time for blowing off steam. Civilian life was in stark contrast with that from which he’d returned. I recall my Dad saying that he had several menial jobs and that a lot of time got wasted carousing in Montreal.
Right after the war, between jobs, I know that my Dad took at least one more seafaring job aboard a ship that was to be delivered to Norfolk, Virginia, from October 25, 1945, landing in Norfolk on November 15. Once again, his age is shown on the manifest as 22, whereas by then he was actually only 18. The following pages are his ship’s immigration crew log detailing the port to port information, crew names and ages. I cannot make out the ship’s actual name.
I know that my Dad re-connected with his Mother upon his return. He told me that he simply knocked on her door while still in uniform after returning to Montreal. Apparently they were quite shocked as they had assumed he had not survived. As to his own father, he never saw him again for the rest of his life.
It is entirely incomplete to leave my Dad’s story at this point, as if it all happened in the years between ten and eighteen years of age. Far from it. My Dad turned adversity into prosperity by taking advantage of every opportunity throughout his life. His war years were by no means his most interesting.
He met and married my Mom and raised a family of four kids. He enjoyed a successful business career, eventually becoming CEO of a billion dollar company in the U.K with 170 subsidiaries around the world in mining and manufacturing (Amalgamated Metal Corporation). A year after my Mom passed away, knowing how he was abandoned early in life, I could not leave him to the care of others as lung cancer chipped away at his vitality. He had been our provider and protector for years and now the tables were turned.
I moved from England for a few months at the end of his life, took him out of hospital and back to his home and became his caregiver until he died. At the end, as his life came full circle, I saw that scared kid and was glad I was there to reassure and comfort him.
For the first half of Peter Neuman's memoirs, please link to Memoirs re Combined Ops, "Peter Neuman - Boy Soldier" Part 1
Memoirs and Photos used by permission from Michael Neuman
At some point during his time at Saunders, my Dad moved to another camp called CANOPUS, also in Egypt, where he was then ‘drafted’ on June 30, 1943, to a ‘working party’ which was to be the invasion of Sicily. In particular, according to his CANOPUS duty card pictured below, he was assigned to the 81st flotilla where his duty was listed as “ L.C.M.”, which stands for, Landing Craft Mechanised.
The invasion of Sicily took place on July 9, 1943 (9 days after his working party assignment card above was stamped). Dad was then five months past his sixteenth birthday. According to information provided by the Loyal Edmonton Regiment, the 80th and 81st flotillas stayed in Sicily for several weeks continuously ferrying heavy equipment ashore amid regular bombing and strafing by the enemy:
Following the invasion of Sicily, Dad was sent to HMS Niobe for one day to transition to Stadacona for about 6 weeks over Christmas. Once again, neither of these was a ship. HMS Niobe was a hospital that became the HQ of the Royal Canadian Navy in Britain and was often used as a ‘transit camp’ for RCN crewmen between postings. HMS Stadacona was a navy base in Halifax where Dad was sent and from which he travelled to British Columbia where he took up a post at HMS Givenchy III. He was to be at Givenchy III from January 16 1944 to November 20 1944.
Givenchy III was a Combined Operations training base at Comox on Vancouver Island where Dad helped train other recruits but, as I recall it, had the best time of his war period life and possibly his life altogether to that point. No one was shooting at them, the food was good and they swam and fished all the time. And according to the wartime recollections of another Givenchy III inhabitant of the period, everyone was having a similar experience.
After almost a year at Givenchy III, Dad was moved several times and we do not have any information as to why or what he did at each place.
Following that stint at Givenchy III he went to Peregrine, about which we know almost nothing. After that, he was shipped back to the Halifax area (HMS Stadacona and Cornwallis) and then all the way back to the west coast to HMS Naden in Esquimalt, British Columbia. These moves were great distances apart and because of the extensive cost and time involved to make the voyages I have to assume he was moved for good reasons. I suspect there was another “working party” associated with at least one of these trips.
He went back and forth between Naden and Givenchy on Vancouver Island before being once again sent back to Halifax and then Montreal to be discharged after the war ended. The war ended in September 1945 and Dad was discharged on November 2 1945. His Certificate of Discharge is seen below.
All of the travel to and from Europe would have been by ship. There is also quite a bit of anecdotal evidence to suggest that the travel to Egypt might have been via ship around Africa and through the Suez Canal as this route, while much longer, was vastly safer than taking the chance of entering the Mediterranean through the Straight of Gibraltar where German U-Boats sat in wait to sink anything that went in or out. I vaguely recall Dad mentioning going through the Suez but can’t recall anything else about the travel.
The Navy delivered my Dad to HMCS Donnacona in Montreal, on September 10, 1945, just a week after the war officially ended. They then discharged him from the Navy on November 2, with an extra $100 ‘gratuity’ for plain clothes according to page 2 of his service record. And upon discharge, Dad was eighteen years old…finally, just old enough to join the military.
Dad’s Canadian Volunteer Service Medal with Clasp, as noted on his service record
Apparently, the armed services would not take anyone under eighteen but the Navy had been given dispensation to recruit seventeen year olds. Years later accounts surfaced of several very young war veterans in both the Canadian and U.S. military. Dad was by no means the youngest but was certainly among a very few who managed to serve in combat several years under age.
To some extent I can imagine how my Dad would have been swept up in what was happening at that time in history. In some ways, his introduction into the life of a merchant seaman was a more bizarre story. Once he had managed to become a merchant sailor, it was not as giant a leap to join the Canadian Navy and in fact, there was a tremendous momentum at the time which would have all but swept any able bodied young man in that direction.
Dad certainly could have avoided service after he recovered from Pellagra in Montreal in 1942. He could have simply reverted back to his bona fide identification and be shown to be clearly under age. In fact, he was under age to leave school at the time. The problem was, he was just a kid and he had nowhere to go.
As inconceivable as his story is, it is just as hard to imagine what he must have felt immediately upon discharge. There he was, in Montreal with a duffle bag and a fresh suit of clothes, eighteen years old and no education. He had been on his own for many years at that point but it must have been daunting. Montreal was awash in vets at that time, so jobs were scarce and there was lots of time for blowing off steam. Civilian life was in stark contrast with that from which he’d returned. I recall my Dad saying that he had several menial jobs and that a lot of time got wasted carousing in Montreal.
Right after the war, between jobs, I know that my Dad took at least one more seafaring job aboard a ship that was to be delivered to Norfolk, Virginia, from October 25, 1945, landing in Norfolk on November 15. Once again, his age is shown on the manifest as 22, whereas by then he was actually only 18. The following pages are his ship’s immigration crew log detailing the port to port information, crew names and ages. I cannot make out the ship’s actual name.
It is entirely incomplete to leave my Dad’s story at this point, as if it all happened in the years between ten and eighteen years of age. Far from it. My Dad turned adversity into prosperity by taking advantage of every opportunity throughout his life. His war years were by no means his most interesting.
He met and married my Mom and raised a family of four kids. He enjoyed a successful business career, eventually becoming CEO of a billion dollar company in the U.K with 170 subsidiaries around the world in mining and manufacturing (Amalgamated Metal Corporation). A year after my Mom passed away, knowing how he was abandoned early in life, I could not leave him to the care of others as lung cancer chipped away at his vitality. He had been our provider and protector for years and now the tables were turned.
I moved from England for a few months at the end of his life, took him out of hospital and back to his home and became his caregiver until he died. At the end, as his life came full circle, I saw that scared kid and was glad I was there to reassure and comfort him.
For the first half of Peter Neuman's memoirs, please link to Memoirs re Combined Ops, "Peter Neuman - Boy Soldier" Part 1
Memoirs and Photos used by permission from Michael Neuman
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