An unforgettable contribution
IAN ELLIOT, THE WHIG-STANDARD
Monday, November 8, 2010 6:10:00 EST AM
Sydney Valpy Radley-Walters won't be at the Cenotaph for Remembrance Day.
He's in a wheelchair on the fifth floor of Providence Manor and the 90-year-old former tank commander says he doesn't want to go if he can no longer parade.
The man revered by a generation of tankers as "Rad" is not only surrounded by mementos and awards that testify to his place as one of the most important Canadian armour officers in history, but his room overlooks Artillery Park and the Montreal Street armoury where his career began 70 years ago as a young second lieutenant in the Sherbrooke Fusiliers.
It is actually difficult to overstate Radley-Walters' achievements. He was the first to figure out the fatal weakness in German Panzers -- the ring at the base of their turrets was not armoured and soon Allied gunners were aiming at that spot to destroy them. He recorded 18 confirmed tank kills, becoming not just the top Canadian tank ace, but the Commonwealth Ace of Aces.
He was awarded the Distinguished Service Order and the Military Cross and his leadership style is still held up and studied as a model for the modern battlefield commander. He shared battle plans with subordinates and altered plans based on their input in a way few commanders did, and was not afraid to question his own superiors. He was one of the first to up-armour his tanks' weak spots and sandbag the floors to protect his crewmen, tactics that continue to be used by crews in Afghanistan and Iraq.
He and his tanks fought from Normandy, through Holland and into northern Germany, where they were when the war ended.
His biggest kill was one of the biggest of the war. Although dis-p uted after the fact, his tank squadron was the one who killed Michael Wittman of the Panzercorps, a German tank ace known as "The Black Baron."
Wittman is credited with more than 150 tank kills and in his most legendary engagement in June 1944 -- you could characterize it as a rampage -- single-handedly killed 14 British tanks, 15 personnel carriers and two anti-tank guns within the space of 15 minutes.
Radley-Walters is indifferent to the historical record, remembering the feared leader of the 101 Schwere SSPanzerabteilung as a worthy and determined foe.
"He was a superb tanker," recalled Walter-Radley as the late afternoon sun washed over his room and its artifacts, including pieces of the very first tank the retired brigadier general was blown up in.
"I had tangled with him two or three times and let me tell you, when you fought against his group, you were challenged by a wonderful group of commanders.
"I never had any use for the German administration that started the war but they had some of the best generals, and I hope the next time we go to war, they're going to be fighting on our side."
Radley-Walters, who was born and raised on the rugged Gaspe coast before attending Bishop's University in Lennoxville, Que., learned his tank trade in Petawawa and Borden after first drilling at the Barriefield Army Camp.
He still remembers the camp's legendary mud -- one of the reasons so many Kingstonians looked across the Cataraqui River and decided to join the air force or the navy instead of the army when the war began.
Radley-Walters was never formally schooled in command but said he picked it up along with the craft of maneuver warfare about which he can still speak effortlessly decades on.
At Borden, the members of his Sherbrooke Fusiliers practised beach landings for D-Day but it did little to prepare him for the real thing in 1944.
"That beach was 17 miles long," he recalled.
"You looked to your right and your left and it was so long you couldn't see a god-damn thing."
Radley-Walters lost his first tank shortly after landing. His lightly-armoured Caribou was hit by a shell and exploded, but his family recovered fragments of that very tank after the war and presented them to him mounted on a plaque.
"I have four sons and we were visiting Normandy 16 years later," he said.
"We went to this spot and I told them this was where my tank was hit, and the boys started digging in the sand and started pulling up pieces of my old tank.
"It was a good little tank. I was sorry to see it go at the time."
Radley-Walters moved up to Shermans and his squadron became one of the most proficient as the Allies fought their way across France and the Netherlands.
He was noted for getting the most out of his soldiers and keeping up their morale despite the heavy casualties they were suffering. While all ow i n g his men to mourn their dead, he did not allow them to handle casualties, reasoning that they were soldiers and had a job to do.
"It's not the easiest of jobs," he reflected.
He learned from the German Blitzkrieg about how to use airplanes and artillery to support lightning-fast tank maneuvers and while, like any commander, he issued commands that men died following, the first tank in was always his.
His contempt for officers barking commands over the radio while safely ensconced in the rear is still palpable.
"By being at the front you have to get cute so you don't get hit, but you were forced to do a lot of the killing yourself," he said, "but you don't show off. You're always covered and when you move, someone moved with you while two others were taking aim.
"You took care, but I guess that I was sort of cute."
While he respected the Germans, he saved his most effusive praise for his own men.
"There's nothing wrong with the Canadian as a soldier," he said.
"He can get booted around and he will never, ever quit. I respected them and they respected me.
"Around this time of year I still get calls from my men. The phone will ring and it will be someone calling from Vancouver or Montreal or anywhere else in the world just wanting to see how I'm doing."
He takes a keen interest in the war in Afghanistan and a large photo of a Leopard tank on patrol outside Kandahar City is prominently displayed in his tidy room. He gestures at it as he explains why war changes armies in ways that peacetime never does.
"There's a difference between a garrison soldier and a soldier at war," he says.
"A soldier in garrison does everything he's supposed to do exactly the way he's supposed to do it the same way every time.
"A soldier at war, every-thing is new to him and he he has to learn everything all over again, at least if he's a smart soldier. He's always looking for things and noticing things, he never takes the same route twice, he isn't rigid in his approach to things. You can't be if you want to stay alive when people are shooting at you. Canadians are very, very good at that."
After the war, he rose through the ranks, becoming Commandant of the Royal Canadian Armoured School in Borden and ending his career as the director-general of training and recruiting at Canadian Forces Headquarters in Ottawa in 1974.
He was interviewed for the controversial series The Valour And The Horror and in that documentary, gave voice to what many veterans feel come Remembrance Day -- and what he had tried to give back to the Canadian a rmoured corps.
"It really comes back on our own shoulders, that before they put us six feet into the ground, somebody should sit down and each one of us pass on to the gene rat i o n ... some of the lessons which we learnt," he told the filmmakers.
He has returned to Germany at least 20 times and is so revered by his former enemies that he has gone hunting for game with the tank officers he once hunted.
"They don't bear any grudges," he said. "Their attitude is, 'You beat us, now we can be friends.'"
Radley-Walters' thoughts are still on Remembrance Day and of his trips to Europe, where he has revisited cou1ntless graves of men he both commanded and befriended and who did not come home as he did.
"It was always difficult," he said in a soft voice.
"I visited some graves and all I could do when I got there was weep over these men.
"I wept for them, because they were just so friggin' good."
