Rick 'Jake' Jacobs' war

By Greg J. Edwards

A brief Nov. 11 item about Rick Jacobs’ honorable WWII service struck the chord of shame in my Canadian soul.

Jacobs didn’t storm Juno Beach on D-Day in order to liberate France, nor did he do so in order to defend Canada’s other mother country: England.

Nor was he one who’d survived the Hungry ’30s only to find relief by enlisting in the army for three square meals and a warm bunk: Jacobs’ father, Peter, had kept himself working through that decade as a deckhand, fisherman, logger, farmer and hunter, providing nicely for Rick, and Rick’s two sisters, and their mother, Sophia.

Nor did Jacobs join up in order to liberate Europe’s disabled, Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Poles, Catholic clergy, dissidents, gypsies, homosexuals, Russian prisoners and all the others who’d incurred the Nazis’ wrath: the war would be nearly over when Jacobs saw the “ovens where people were burned alive” and the camps where prisoners were worked to death.

Jacobs’ volunteering for combat was the start of his fight to be accepted back home in Ladner, BC. Rick was born and reared on the Tsawwassen (Chewassen) Indian Reserve. It has been his home to this day. He’s 87.

In 1943, Peter Jacobs knew his son was going to be called up soon. He and Sophia had discouraged their son from enlisting earlier on in the war, but now Canada was in grim need of men who’d volunteer for battle. Peter called Rick aside for a chat.

Peter told his son he’d be called up but he wouldn’t have to go into battle: Canadians could serve in Canada on home defence as so-called Zombies. However, Peter warned Rick that, if he served as a Zombie, he “wouldn’t have any friends among the white people in Ladner.” So, against his will, Peter advised his son to “go active service.” So, Rick volunteered for combat.

“But,” says Rick, “that was all right, because I wanted to go anyway. I was young and crazy, I wanted to travel, I wanted to see the world. I didn’t give a thought to the fact that I could get killed over there.”

He avoids discussing the racism of those days, saying only that ‘Indians were treated bad back then. We’re more like brothers now.”

More to the point, he still has bad dreams and nightmares about the war: it still staggers him that he survived: “There was always something,” he says, “that saved me.” That “something” was blind, random luck.

The recruitment depot in Vancouver assigned him to the Regina Rifles. He trained near Saskatoon and Calgary.

His buddies nicknamed him ‘Jake’.

A troop train took them to Halifax where they boarded The New Amsterdam, a ship which took them to Glasgow, Scotland, where a train awaited their arrival. It was late May 1944.

That train took them south to Aldershot, England. They’d get no further training. Some Canadians had already left Aldershot for a staging area near England’s south coast in preparation for D-Day. Jacobs’ unit joined them.

The English Channel was rough that fateful morning. Jacobs’ buddies got sick, but he stayed healthy, which reminded him of something his father had told him when he was a boy “vomiting to beat hell” during a similar storm out on Georgia Strait: “Son, that’s good that you get seasick now because you’ll never get seasick again for the rest of your life.”

“[At the time], I thought he was giving me a line. But, you know what? I’ve never been seasick to this day. And I never got seasick heading over to Normandy.”

Jake landed with the third assault wave. The first wave had taken a pounding and the second had managed to take Juno, but there were still pockets of resistance: “At one point,” Jacobs remembers, “guys were falling all around me, but I didn’t get hit.” Luck.

The order of the day was to keep their assault going no matter what: no stopping, not even for the wounded. The medics would tend to them. But they did stop for the wounded, pulling them out of the line of fire for the medics. Their advance went well.

On June 8, Jake celebrated his 23rd birthday in a slit trench dug into French soil. He recalls thinking, It’s my birthday and I’ve been in combat for two days.

Holding onto Normandy was “tough work.” The Germans would retreat and fight, retreat and fight.

Schmeisser machine gun fire, tracers, tanks, snipers and Moaning Minnies left indelible impressions. Moaning Minnies, rocket mortars fired in clusters from multi-barreled launchers, shrieked. The first hint of their shrieking sent soldiers diving for cover. One cluster landed all around Jake, killing and maiming everybody but him. Blind luck.

On his first division rest, Jake met up with Walter Williams, a friend from the Tsawwassen Reserve, and Roland Benoit, a chum from Ladner. That would be the last Jake would hear of them till his return home.

Jake’s entire division, the Canadian 3rd, fought at Falaise, a plan to entrap 100,000 Germans be-tween the British, Canadian and American armies.

“We had them on the run. They were retreating faster than we could go. We had a hard time catching up to them. They’d leave guys behind to cover their retreat, to slow us down. We’d chased them all night.

The next day was sunny. The Canadians had their bayonets fixed. They were carrying 85-pound packs, plus their weapons, so they walked because running so heavily laden would have exhausted them for the hand-to-hand fighting that lay in store. It was bitter going. They advanced through farm fields separated by hedgerows. They’d go 20 to 30 feet, and the Germans would open up their machine guns on them, and they’d hit the dirt. And they’d get up and advance another 20 or 30 feet, and the Germans would fire on them, and they’d hit the dirt again.

As Jake stepped into the last field, a Canadian officer being blown out of an abandoned German trench caught his eye. Jake froze, standing on one foot. The field was mined. He got out by using the footprints he’d made going in.

Jacobs’ section took cover in a bomb crater; they’d started out two men short and they’d lost three more, including their corporals, as they came down the hill: “We needed a leader. I don’t know why I was the one who spoke up, but I did: ‘We have no corporal and no lance corporal. Without a leader, we’re going to be like a chicken with its head chopped off.’”

Much to Jake’s surprise, they elected him, “a Native Indian,” their acting corporal: “I never dreamed they’d elect me. This was when Native Indians were treated pretty bad. I knew they knew I was a Native Indian, but they elected me anyway.”

They had to await further orders.

German machine gun fire followed an officer’s runner into their crater; he had an order to deliver: The field is mined. We’re going to try another route tonight. Retreat back over the hump when you think it’s best to do so. And he climbed back out of that crater to carry the order to the next section. “We could hear the Germans open up on him again,” Jake says. “We never learned if he made it. He probably didn’t. He had a hell of a job.”

They retreated in the same way they’d advanced: hitting the dirt each time the Germans opened up. They’d got to within two and half fields of their base when Jake got hit. They’d just hit the dirt.

“My [right] foot,” Jake says, “went up in the air. I didn’t know why it did… I dragged my foot up. Sure enough, there was blood. I hadn’t felt a thing, just my foot flying up in the air and dropping back… And then I heard a grinding noise – a Tiger tank. It was to our right. I could keep an eye on my foot and it, too.” The Tiger was the German’s largest tank.

“My men were eyeing the hedgerow. ‘Stay put.’ I ordered. ‘Don’t run for the bushes or the tank’s machine gunner will get us.’ My face started to sweat. We were in trouble. I knew the tank was going to kill us. Tank commanders, German and Canadian,” he explains, “were under orders to take no prisoners: tanks had no place to put prisoners.”

Instantly, Jake realized he’d made a mistake back at the crater: in order to make the smallest possible targets of his men, he’d sent them out well spaced apart, separating his Bren gunner and his PIAT launcher from their No. 2 men.

The Bren gun was a cumbersome .303 caliber machine gun, so it wasn’t what Jake needed; however, the PIAT (projector, infantry, anti-tank), could do the trick if its 2.5-pound bomb could be landed in the tank’s most vulnerable point: its machine gun port.

But, hell, the tank’s machine gunner would have got the drop on Jake’s PIAT team even if he hadn’t spread them apart: it takes time to load, aim, and launch an anti-tank grenade.

So, Jake figured he’d have to be the one to take the tank on by leaping up and firing his rifle – not much of a defence, especially considering he’d just been shot in the foot and didn’t know yet whether he could step on it, let alone leap up and spin on it while firing blindly from the hip.

“So,” Jake says, “I gave up. I just gave up. I didn’t know what to do, so I said, ‘Just pretend you’re dead. Close your eyes half way as if you’re dead. Play possum.’ It sounded stupid but what else could I have said? I don’t know how they reacted to this order. Some of the guys probably squeezed their eyes tight, not wanting to see the bullets come out at them. All I know is, I left mine half open, pretending to be dead.”

The tank commander was standing up with his head and shoulders exposed above his turret. He was “jabbering away in German” at Jake and his men; none knew German.

“Anyway,” Jake recalls, “sweat was pouring down my face, and I was thinking of my mom and my dad and my sisters, figuring, This is it. This is the end of my life. This is it. In a few seconds, we’ll be dead.”

But they weren’t dead: the German backed his tank up and left. “I couldn’t believe it,” Jake says. “He was supposed to take no prisoners, to kill us… He was not supposed to let us go. And I thought, jeeze, we’re still alive!”

But did that German let them live? Perhaps he believed they were dead? Perhaps he was short of ammunition?

Jacobs insists that that commander did let them live: “He was one of those kind fellows who didn’t like killing. Anyway, he could see that I was wounded and bleeding and he probably assumed some of my buddies were hurt and suffering; but he knew all of us weren’t hurt. I could see him. I was lying with my head turned toward him. I could see him from the waist up. He let us live.

“But all this time, and I didn’t know it, there was a Canadian anti-tank gun hidden in the hedgerow, waiting. It hit that tank. The tank broke up in flames. It went up. Exploded. And I thought, Oh, that guy was supposed to shoot us and he let us go and now he gets shot. I felt sorry. I felt like saving some of those guys but I couldn’t save any of them.”

The sun was setting. The horizon was pink. Jake told his men to stay put: they’d finish their retreat under the cover of darkness.

His wound “tingling,” Jake rode a jeep’s right fender through the night to the French coast where he received first aid and passage to England aboard a ship. He ended up at No. 9 Hospital in the Midlands. His foot had taken two bullets. He’d be out of the fight for five months.

Before being re-conditioned for battle, Jake spent time back at Aldershot on light duties – kitchen chores and taking deserters to meals.

Jake was to accompany deserters one at a time. No cuffs. No shackles. Just Jake with his rifle. If one should try to escape, he was to call him back once, twice if necessary, but he was to give him no third chance. If a prisoner didn’t return after two warnings, Jake was to shoot him.

“In the back?” Jake asked.

“Yes,” the officer replied, “if necessary, otherwise they’ll get away and we’ll have to go after him.” Jake wondered how he could prevent having to shoot a fellow Canadian – in the back, no less! He decided he must warn them there’d be no third warning if they ran. He did, and not one ran.

But Jake was no saint: deserters evoked disgust in him: “Deserters were dirty bastards. We were trained to take care of each other, not to run out on our buddies.”

The Regina Rifles were near the German border when he returned to the front. There was a foot of snow on the ground, snow that he figures was more luck: “We weren’t going to attack with so much snow on the ground and that was good because we lost a lot of guys when we attacked.”

The Canadian army may have had no plans to attack but it was making the Germans fear it was about to; it did so by sending patrols in behind their lines. “We’d go in after dark,” Rick says, “to locate their big guns, and that sort of stuff. It was scary. But somehow we came through.”

The Germans sent out their own patrols. Jake and a partner spotted one; they’d been ordered to observe and report enemy movements from atop a hill. Jake was on point. His partner was farther back, awaiting Jake’s hand signals. Jake spotted one and signaled: “Patrol spotted; I’ll return when I can.” But instead of carrying Jake’s message back to base, his partner came forward. He was a Bren gunner and wanted to open up on them, but Jake stopped him, reminding him of their objective: to observe and report only.

And there was K-House, a farmhouse in no man’s land that Canadians used as an observation post. During his unit’s first 24-hour tour out there, Jacobs found that all the trenches were manned so he looked around for a place to hide himself. A spoke-wheeled wagon caught his eye. He climbed up and jumped in. He had company: A German! Helmet! Rifle! And all! “He stunk pretty bad,” Jacobs recalls. “He’d been dead a long time.” Jake jumped out.

Though he’d be out in the open, exposed to the enemy, Jake took up a post just outside the officer’s shelter, a wine cellar. An officer, finding the farm well guarded, invited Jake in.

The night after Jacobs’ last tour at K-House, the Germans attacked and took it. “If we’d stayed one more night, I would have been taken prisoner or killed.”

Another close call: Jacobs’ unit was advancing against tracer fire: “Just as I was about to hit the dirt, I caught a glimpse of a tracer as it was coming down at me. It passed between my legs,” he says, pointing just below his crotch. He shudders at how close he came to being hit where soldiers most fear being shot.

Had he dodged that bullet? Probably not; he doesn’t know; probably just lucky; but he does know that when a guy’s young and fit and in danger he reacts fast – very fast.

By April 1945, Jake and his buddies knew they’d won but they were wary, wary of being killed or maimed just before the end. They hoped to get leave. Jake’s unit did. He was sitting in the sun in Ghent, Belgium, when two soldiers in a jeep with a loud hailer announced the end of the war. Jake and his buddies couldn’t believe it. They thought somebody was playing a cruel joke. But it was true: the war was over.

All had a good, happy, drunken time.But the dying was still going on.

While Jake had taken his leave in Ghent, two of his buddies, Alec and Mutt Belanger, had taken theirs elsewhere. At the moment in question, Mutt was sleeping. A rifle went off, its bullet piercing Mutt’s torso, killing him: a fellow corporal had been cleaning his rifle; a round in the chamber, “he squeezed the trigger or shook it,” Jake surmises, and Mutt was dead.

After the war, Alec left Saskatchewan for Vancouver Island where he died in a logging accident.

Jake changed regiments – from the Regina Rifles to the Westminster to the Canadian Scottish – in order to stay on in Europe near Connie, a little Dutch girl he’d met while guarding canned food being flown in for Dutch civilians. Connie’s uncle promised Jake one of his three nightclubs, an obvious inducement to keep the couple in Holland.

However, Jake’s buddies doubted that he knew what he’d be getting himself into. His buddies threw him a going home party instead of a stag:

“They gave me a big party, a big dinner, a great big dinner just for me, a Native Indian. Beer, free beer; they got me half shot. In the end, I didn’t know whether I wanted to stay or not. You see, I wanted to go home; but she was so darned pretty I hated to leave her.”

An older veteran told Jake that he’d stayed on in Holland after WWI and had grown to dislike it because the people changed once order had been restored. Jake, too, would regret it if he were to stay on. Besides, his buddies added, your parents will need you. You’re their only son.

“So anyway they won. I decided to go home. But I knew I couldn’t go back to see her: she was so darned pretty I wouldn’t go home if I saw her again.”

Jake declined to go to the Pacific to fight the Japanese but he did fight on after a fashion: he joined the 3rd Division’s boxing team: boxers were exempt from guard duty. He was one fight away from the Division’s championship when his regiment was shipped home.

Jake hadn’t wired home: he’d wanted to surprise his family, but his Vancouver cousins Ralph & Alfred Nayu, returned veterans, looked up his arrival date. They stood with Peter at the CNR station in Vancouver. Peter recognized a face among the uniforms: “There’s my son!”

And Jake was home where he’s known as Rick, short for Frederick Lewis Jacobs.

Home, indeed! His mother ordered him to quit swearing: “You sound terrible.”

“I did sound terrible,” Rick concedes. “But that’s all we did over there: smoke, drink and swear. It took me two months to stop swearing.”

His folks told him about Walter Williams: killed at Falaise. “Young Williams,” The Optimist reported, “was the first B.C. Indian to die a battle casualty of this war.” And his folks brought him to date on Roland Benoit: seriously wounded during the same battle.

Rick’s Uncle Bert, who’d tried to enlist but had failed the army’s medical, was eager to see him.

Uncle Bert, Peter and Rick found a log on the beach. They had beer, which worried Bert: they weren’t allowed to have beer on the reserve. Bert fretted. Rick tried to calm him down.

“I said, ‘Uncle Bert, I am still in uniform. Don’t worry about it. If they come through, I’ll do the talking. You just sit there. I’ll do the talking.’ And Dad never said a thing. Dad knew I didn’t give a shit about anything anymore.”

A squad car passed, stopped and turned around. Two Mounties got out, asking, “What are you doing?”

“‘I’m having an effing beer!’ Rick said. ‘You want one? I’ll give you a beer. You want one?’ They’re looking at me. I knew what they were going to say and I didn’t want to give them a chance to say it, so I looked down at their shoes and I looked at their uniforms and I looked at their shoes again and I said, ‘You know what? Your shoes look like they’ve been through the mud. Look at mine: they’re just like mirrors; you could shave by them. Shave! Look at yours. Look at my uniform. Sharp. Look at my pants. There’s a crease in them that’s sharp as a knife. Look at yours. They look like stove pipes. Your officer let’s you look like tramps. And look at this [wound stripe]. It means I’ve been wounded.’ They turned around and walked away… I was a different guy when I came home.”

Rick bought a fish boat named Wavy with his army pay. He speaks of that boat as though she were as pretty as Connie, his “pretty little Dutch girl”.

One day, after a day aboard Wavy on the fishing grounds, Rick and two buddies tied up. They were thirsty. The Indian Act forbade Rick as a reserve resident from being served in bars, so he suggested they go to the Ladner Legion: “We’ll get a drink there. I’m not a member but I’m a veteran.”

Everybody in the Legion, including Slim Cameron, the bar tender, knew Rick. In fact, Slim, in his other job as game warden, had fined Rick for poaching, and, as a friend, he’d sent Rick a Christmas cake, which he received while in a slit trench one snowy night on the frontline. But Slim felt he had to respect the Indian Act: “Rick, do you still live on the reserve?”

“I was a different guy,” Rick recalls, “When I came home, I was no longer the timid guy I was before I went overseas. I was bold and I’d say anything: ‘Yeah, Slim, you’re effin’ right I’m still on the reserve!’

“‘Well,’ Slim replied, ‘I can’t serve you then.’

“All the people in there knew me. The Wilsons were there. They’re half-breeds. Everybody in there’s looking and listening. They’re looking at me. And they’re looking at Slim Cameron. They all knew him. And he knew them. Pretty soon Cameron comes back to the table: ‘Rick, I have to serve you, but I don’t know what’s going to happen to my job.’ They all knew me; that’s why he had to come back. Anyway, we drank till closing time.”

Some weeks later, Rick and his buddies tried out the Ladner bar. Slim Cameron tended bar there, too. He served Rick, no questions asked.

So had his father been correct? Had his volunteering for battle won him acceptance among the local whites?

“Yes,” Rick says, “I have friends all over the place and I have a good name and I’ve led a beautiful life. I was band Chief when the Tsawwassen causeway and ferry slip were put in. And I’m the oldest Elder in the Tsawwassen First Nation [and a successful businessman] – but do you know what I’m most glad of?

Not being one to guess, I answered “No.”

“There aren’t many who can say this: I never shot a German. Every time we got close to them, something got in the way – that mine field; and my wound; and that order not shoot German patrols, to observe and report them only… It’s true: I never shot a German.”

back to top