BOCA INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHING COMPANY

It's 4:23 a.m. Tuesday morning and here I am again. The website is coming together slowly and will continue to grow as the days go by. I have been thinking about my godfather and his role in WWII. He was a highly respected man in the Essential Oil business throughout his life and certainly had a rough one. Few people knew that he was in a camp for suspected spies throughout WWII while my father was in England and Scotland or flying over Germany with the RAF. They met after the war and became fast friends. My father always felt bad about what the general public of Germany had to go through because of Hitler, the SS and the Gestapo. At the same time he was a fair man and only judged an individual on his individual worth and not the roots he was born into. You see, my godfather came to Canada in 1928 from Germany at the insistance of his own father. His father was one of the industrialists with I G Farben, the largest accumulation of Chemical Companies in the world. His role with the corporation created in 1925 grew as the Nazi government took hold in the 1930s and the war began. Had he survived the war he would have been one of the many war criminals of the Nuremberg Trials of war supporters. From what I have read though,  they were all released and no further charges were made against them. Fortunately for him, he died in 1943. It is interesting how the world unfolds around you over time. My uncle was a Squadron Leader in Intelligence for the RCAF and set up the Ottawa war rooms, one of many difficult tasks assigned to him. He also had to take a team into the Bergen Belsen camp tokwards the end of the war. My other uncle, who just died in Bermuda where he lived since the late 1940s also went to war as a Lieutenant in the tank corps. He returned to Canada in 1943. My own father was among the first to go and had the Canadian Army gone to Europe, he would have likely been among the casualties. However, he had originally applied to the RCAF and was rejected because he did not have a university degree and there were only 240 aircraft in the Canadian air force in 1939 while they had tens of thousands of applicants. Joining the Non Permanent Active Militia (NPAM) hoping that would make his transfer to the RCAF easier, he next found himself in the mobalized Canadian Army Signal Corps. The NPAM or as they referred to themselves the "Not Particularly Anxious Men" became the first contingent of the Canadian Armed Service Force (CASF) and Dad found himself heading for the UK in January 1940. I will tell you more about his most unusual military history during the war in a later Blog. In the meantime, go wrap some presents, Christmas is only five days away.