John Arthur Shreve Alexander was born on the Six Nations Indian Reservation near Brantford, Ontario on April 3, 1918. His father, Arthur Harding Alexander, was teaching school there at the time. His grandfather, John Henry Alexander, had taught school at the King Street School in Amherstburg, Ontario during the late 1800's and early 1900's. His great grandfather, Thomas Alexander, was a fugitive slave who escaped from a plantation in Kentucky and settled in Anderdon Township near Amherstburg, Ontario in the 1840's.
John Arthur Shreve Alexander was in A Company of The Queen's Own Rifles, on the first Canadian ship to hit the beach of Normandy on D-Day. It is possible he was the first Canadian soldier on the beach for his first task was to blow up the barbed wire entanglement along the beach. He fought through France, Holland, England, Italy, and Germany. He was wounded several times and returned a highly decorated war veteran. His acts of bravery are documented historical fact housed in the War Memorial Archives in Toronto, Ontario. The following is his war story which appeared in McLeans magazine June 6, 1994:
Nervously Waiting at Home
The hedgerows and hills of Normandy are far removed from the gently rolling
southwestern Ontario countryside where John and Jean Alexander
lived
in their cozy ranch house just outside North Buxton. But the memories of
the events 50 years earlier, when John Alexander was a young rifleman fighting
on French soil, are still vivid. The couple were married in Jean's
hometown of Chatham, Ont. on Dec. 30, 1942, just eight months before Cpl. John
Alexander left for England. Once there, the 24-year-old former railway porter was assigned to
The Queen's Own Rifles of Canada, then
stationed in Aldershot, southwest of London. But that posting would have
been news to his 18-year-old bride. "I wrote letters to him all the time,
but he rarely wrote to me," Jean Alexander, 70, says now with a chuckle.
And it would be a long time after June 6, 1944, before she knew what part he
played in the invasion of Normandy. "It wasn't like today, where you hear
about things almost as soon as they happen," she says.
"News about D-Day trickled in. We heard bits
on the radio, saw some newsreel footage at the cinema."
John, now 76, continues to work four days a week as a barber, the occupation he took up after the war. Their four grown children and seven grandchildren, meanwhile, are regular visitors. But during the war, Jean lived with her parents while her husband was overseas. During the day, she worked at an airplane parts facility with 29 other women and two men. "We waxed the parts so they wouldn't get rusty when they were being shipped overseas," she says. "It was boring." In the summer, she also worked three evenings a week at a tomato-canning factory. "I never knew when-or-if I would see my husband again," she says.
When D-Day arrived, life was anything but routine for John Alexander. Once on the beach at Courseulles-sur-mer, his job was to blow up some barbed wire entanglements. But shelling from the ships had already done the job. "It didn't take any time at all to get over the beach and into a railroad ditch," Alexander says. Even so, only one-third of his 33-member platoon made it to the relative safety of that ditch; enemy fire mowed down the other 22 young men. The survivors then moved about 11 km. inland, where they rested briefly. "My buddy Jack Bailey from Galt (now Cambridge), Ont., was hit and killed," Alexander remembers. "I was lying right beside him."
Alexander's luck continued. After dark, he and two other men were sent to stand guard, about 100 metres in front of the rest of the platoon. Spending a sleepless night, they fired into the darkness whenever they heard a noise. "We were firing from the hip because we couldn't see to aim," Alexander explains. When their sergeant major checked on them at daybreak, he found two dead German soldiers just two metres away.
That September, Jean Alexander received distressing news: her husband had been injured. "The telegram said that he had been "seriously" injured," she says. "There were no other details." But as she learned after the war when John returned home, that information was wrong. Her husband had suffered a broken bone in the wrist after being struck by shrapnel and was able to return soon afterward to his regiment. Improbably, a second telegram informed Jean Alexander the following February that John had been "slightly wounded," when in fact he was out of action for three months after being shot in the back and thigh.
The
extent of those injuries did not become clear until 1952, when John was playing
with their oldest daughter, Pam, then 2 1/2 years old. "She
whacked her Daddy on the bum," says Jean Alexander. "That drove a
piece of lead that had been lodged there right up into his hip joint." The
memory of the pain still makes John Alexander wince. "They hadn't X-rayed
me during the war, so nobody knew the lead was there," he says. "When they
X-rayed me in 1952, they also found a piece of lead in my right lung."
Because of the way each fragment was positioned, doctors decided not to remove
them. They remain to this day, silent reminders of the ravages of war.
Reference:
(1) Barbara Wickens in North Buxton
(2) McLeans magazine June 6, 1994
(3) Alvin McCurdy Collection, Ontario Historical Archive
(4) Oral History - John Arthur Shreve Alexander - Spencer Alexander (son)