One of Calgary’s most decorated Second World War veterans and a leader in the city’s naval and military community has died at the age of 101.
Born in Winnipeg on Nov. 5, 1924, navy Capt. William (Bill) Wilson enlisted in the Royal Canadian Navy in 1942, serving aboard HMCS Ottawa as a seaman gunner during the latter stages of the Battle of the Atlantic and taking part in the D-Day landings at Normandy.
“He started off in sea cadets in Winnipeg, and he was very, very keen to be able to join the war,” Scott Hausberg, who knew Wilson well, told CBC Radio’s The Homestretch Tuesday.
Hausberg said as soon as Wilson turned 18 he was at the recruiting office, but after undergoing the necessary tests he was told he had failed his medical exam because he was underweight.
“So, the clerk said, ‘There’s a store across the street. Go over there, buy a bunch of bananas, eat them all, come back, and we’ll weigh you again,'” said Hausberg, who is also the president of the Naval Museum of Alberta Society.
“So he did that and he came back and he gained enough ounces, I guess, to pass the medical and that’s how he got in the navy.”
In a 2015 video for Valour Canada, a non-profit for Canadian military history, Wilson said he and his unit “had no idea” about the magnitude of D-Day, code-named Operation Overlord.
“We really weren’t quite sure what we were going to see,” he said.
There on Normandy’s shores, the largest land, sea and air invasion in history — made up of almost 160,000 Allied troops and some 14,000 Canadians — took German defences by surprise.
The invasion is now remembered as the beginning of the end of the Second World War.
Amid the dark, choking smoke and “bloody noisy” gunfire, Wilson said sailor after sailor shot out from landing craft with their eyes on the beaches.
Many were quickly cut down by bullets.
“You can’t visualize guys coming out of a barge and meeting machine-gun fire and mortars and shells from artillery,” he said. “We couldn’t visualize that.”
In all, 4,414 Allied troops, including 381 Canadians, were killed that day. And at the end of the 77-day Battle of Normandy, 73,000 Allied forces were killed and 153,000 wounded.
“I think [D-Day] was the best day of the war for the world,” Wilson told Valour Canada. “We did free all of Europe, and Canada was there. For a little nation like ours, it still amazes me.”
According to a 2013 Alberta government profile, published when Wilson was inducted into the Alberta Order of Excellence, upon his return to Canada, he worked for Canadian Pacific in Winnipeg, before eventually moving to Calgary in the 1970s.
Following the war, he joined the naval reserve and retired from active service in 1979.
Wilson was also a founding member of the Naval Museum of Alberta in 1984 — along with Commodore Laraine Orthlieb — where he was a “driving force” in fundraising for the museum’s original building and acquiring many of its artifacts, said Hausberg.
“He was one of those people where you couldn’t say no to him.”
“When he found out that there was a three-inch/70[-caliber] gun sitting along the shore in Esquimalt, British Columbia, and the museum needed it, he’d go and call the admiral and said, ‘I want that gun,'” Hausberg said.
“He got a lot of art artifacts into our museum. That’s why it is the largest naval museum in the country.”
Hausberg said Wilson’s ability to acquire any artifact from anywhere earned him the nickname “Captain Rabbit,” a naval term for acquiring something by any means.
In 2001, he served as the general manager of a campaign that successfully raised $26 million needed to open The Military Museums — the largest complex of its kind in Canada — combining the pre-existing Museum of the Regiments with the naval museum and a new air force museum.
In light of his many accomplishments, Hausberg said Wilson’s greatest legacy is the steady example he set through his commitment to serving the community and country.
“Everything that he did was in service to Canada, and he deserves to be remembered for that.”
A celebration of life will be held Aug. 10 at 2 p.m. at Calgary’s HMCS Tecumseh, the Naval Reserve unit where he most recently served.
