By Tom Slater & Tom St. Amand
After Pat Williams died in action during World War II, his family in Sarnia had a difficult time accepting it.
His niece, Linda, who had never met her Uncle Pat, recalls that “for decades after he died, my grandmother never mentioned him by name, such was her grief.”
Linda knows that her uncle's death also distressed her father, Ed, Pat's younger brother.
Pat was born in Sarnia on March 17, 1920. In an unusual development, William Logie, the physician who delivered him, claimed that since this child was the first boy he had brought into the world on St. Patrick's Day, he had the right to name him. The child was thereby christened William Patrick Logie Williams, but everyone called him Pat.
Two years later, Ed, the sixth and last child of Charles and Zillah Williams, was born.
Growing up, Pat and Ed were very close and, undoubtedly influenced by their father's service in both the Spanish American War and the Great War, both brothers fought in World War II.
After attending SCITS, Pat worked as a rigger for the Sarnia Elevator Company. At age 20, he enlisted in October 1940 and planned to enter the field of tool and die making after the war. Four months after enlisting and before leaving for overseas, Pat married Maxine McGill in Sarnia.
In November 1941, he began training in England, mostly with the Royal Regiment of Canada (RRC), and after subsequent officer training in Canada for a year, Pat was re-assigned to England in May 1943.
A month later, he was devastated to learn that his father had passed away. This might account for his actions three months later: first, he completed his will on September 10th, 1943, bequeathing his entire estate to Maxine in Sarnia; the next day, he reverted to the rank of private by request and within two days disembarked in Italy as a member of the Royal Canadian Regiment (RCR).
The Allies had just begun the invasion of mainland Italy when Pat arrived. They had spent a difficult month taking Sicily and liberating Italy was as challenging. It took 20 months and proved to be a painstaking northward crawl over a range of landscapes, through challenging weather, and against a series of well-protected positions defended by some of the German army’s best troops.
Shortly before Christmas, Pat was wounded.
The Canadians had been ordered to seize German-occupied Ortona, a fishing town and port on the Adriatic Sea. After incurring heavy casualties while crossing the Moro River, they arrived at a deep, narrow trench known as “The Gully”, a kilometre south of Ortona.
As the Canadians traversed “the Gully,” the Germans used their strategic vantage points to fire on them. Enemy shrapnel tore into Pat's left leg and he was hospitalized for three weeks.
While he convalesced, he sent a Christmas card to Ed, who was stationed in England. Part of the card read, “Together you and I we will see this thing through to the end."
This was the last correspondence Ed received from his older brother.
After a brief furlough, Pat was promoted in mid-April to Acting Corporal with A Company, a rank he held until May 17th. By early May, the Canadians had joined the British in the advance towards Rome. The Germans had constructed two formidable lines—the Gustav Line and the Hitler Line. After breaking the Gustav Line, the Canadians had to cross the Liri Valley to reach their next objective. The German artillery, however, unleashed a devastating mortar attack and as the Canadians withdrew from their position, Corporal Pat Williams, 24, was killed.
Fellow soldiers buried his remains the next day in a temporary isolated grave on a roadside near where he had been killed. Authorities later exhumed and reverently reburied Pat's remains in Cassino War Cemetery, where over 850 fallen Canadians lie.
"he was the greatest guy in the world”
Ed Williams had enlisted fourteen months before Pat died.
As a member of the Railway Corps Engineers (RCE), he helped to construct and to repair railways as the Allies moved through France, Belgium, and Germany. After the war, he returned to Sarnia, worked with C. N. R. as a railman until retirement, and never spoke about the war.
At least when he was awake.
As a child, Linda recalls hearing her father's nightmares as he thrashed, groaned and yelled unintelligibly about the war in his sleep. Often when his wife, Ilean, shook him awake, he had no recollection of what had transpired; if he did, he never divulged anything.
This went on for years.
“He placed Pat on a pedestal and felt guilt, I think, that he had survived the war and Pat didn't,” Linda speculates. “Whenever he spoke about Pat, he always mentioned that he was the greatest guy in the world.”
Perhaps this explains why Ed never joined his daughter and son-in-law at Veterans Park for Remembrance Day. Instead, he'd park on Queen Street and listen to the service from the privacy of his own car.
Until he passed away in 2001, he preferred to feel the pain of his brother's death alone.