Western Lakes & Mountains
16
Bethel Native C.D. Howe The farm boy who engineered Hitler’s defeat by Charles Francis
O
n December 14, 1940 a torpedoed British merchant ship, the Western Prince, gave one last gigantic sigh as her stern lifted heavenward and then disappeared into the icy waters some two hundred miles off the coast of Iceland. Some hundred yards from the bubbling gray-green waters where the ship disappeared, the vessel’s few lifeboats clustered as the periscope of a German submarine broke the surface of the sea. In one of the lifeboats, a passenger, who just happened to be a reporter for Britain’s Manchester Guardian, watched the man with the bushy eyebrows and piercing blue-gray eyes beside him. As the deck of the Nazi sub-
marine broke the surface of the stormtossed North Atlantic, the man’s jaw muscles knotted and his fist-clenched arm reached out “as if he would grasp the black hull with his bare hands.” By the time the fishing boat that rescued the passengers of the Western Prince reached Glasgow, Scotland, the story of the attack had already appeared in papers across Great Britain and every British subject knew the name of Clarence Decatur Howe, the Bethel farm boy who had risen to the position of Canadian Minister of Supply and Munitions, and who Winston Churchill’s office would later credit with doing more to save Britain from Hitler
and the Nazis than any other single individual. Clarence Decatur Howe — he was universally known as C.D. — was one of those rock-ribbed New Englanders who migrated to Canada just after the turn of the century and made contributions to that country that are almost mythic in proportions. Among other things, he was responsible for modernizing the grain storage facilities of Canada’s prairie provinces, organizing the Canadian National Railroad, creating Trans-Canada Airway, which later became Air Canada, and directing Canada’s war effort during World War II. In the latter instance, he saw to the devel-
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