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Bethel Native C.D. Howe The farm boy who engineered Hitler’s defeat
Bethel Native C.D. Howe
The farm boy who engineered Hitler’s defeat
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by Charles Francis
On 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 submarine 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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opment of the Eldorado Uranium Mine which provided the uranium for the Manhattan Project which developed the first Atomic bombs. He organized the Royal Canadian Air Force, without which England would never have survived the Battle of Britain, and, in addition, saw to it that the Allies in Europe were supplied with countless tons of Canadian grain, without which hundreds of thousands of people would have starved to death. All told it is an incredible series of accomplishments for someone who had roots sunk deep into the soil of the little western Maine town of Bethel.
Clarence Decatur Howe was the only son of William Howe and Mary Hastings Howe. William Howe and Mary Hastings grew up on neighboring farms in Bethel. The Howe family was one of the oldest Puritan families in New England and one of the most noted. The first Howes had settled in the Boston area in the 1630s, where several had operated Sudbury’s Red Horse Tavern, better known as The Wayside Inn made famous by Longfellow. The family included such individuals as Elias Howe, inventor of the sewing machine and truss bridge, Samuel Gridley Howe, founder of the Perkins School for the Blind where Annie Sullivan, Helen Keller’s teacher studied, Joseph Howe, first premier of Nova Scotia and one of Canada’s Fathers of Confederation, and, by marriage, Julia Ward Howe, author of The Battle Hymn of the Republic. The Howes were relative latecomers to Bethel, in relation to the Hastings, however. The first Howe, C.D. Howe’s great-grandfather, had come to Bethel in 1820, the year Maine became a state.
The first Hastings had come to the Massachusetts Bay Colony about the same time as the Howes. One of them, a Revolutionary War captain, had moved north in 1796 and had founded Bethel. One of Mary Hastings relatives
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│ 764 West Bethel Road had been the naval hero Stephen Decatur, and C.D. Howe had received his middle name in Decatur’s honor. Mary Hastings grandfather, the Bethel town blacksmith, had built Bethel Academy. In fact, when William Howe married her, she was teaching there.
C.D. Howe’s parents wanted the very best education for their only son so they moved to Waltham, Massachusetts, which in the late 1800s was one of Boston’s elite suburbs. In school, C.D. evidenced a natural proclivity for mathematics and the hard sciences, especially physics. At home, his one indulgence was an exceptionally elaborate train set, for which he was continually restructuring grades and inclines. His favorite books were those of Horatio Alger. The Howe family was well off but not wealthy. William Howe was a finish carpenter who later expanded his business by purchasing a small roofing company. During most (cont. on page 18)
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(cont. from page 17) summers the Howes spent some time in Bethel. C.D. and his younger sister, Agnes, however, always spent the entire summer there with their grandfather Hastings, who had replaced the original family homestead with a Federal-style mansion overlooking the Androscoggin. The Howe family farm was now in the hands of William’s brother Fred so the two youngsters had a second home replete with various aunts, uncles, and cousins. C.D.’s summers were spent working on his uncle’s farm and enjoying the warm Bethel summers.
After graduating from Waltham High School, C.D. enrolled in Boston Tech. (Soon after he graduated the name was changed to Massachusetts Institute of Technology.) Here he concentrated on engineering. His favorite professor was George F. Swain, considered the best engineering teacher in the country. At his graduation he and his best friend James Baker, had no idea what they would do next. Then Swain told them that Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia wanted him to recommend an engineering professor for its faculty. Both wanted the position, so they tossed a coin. Howe won and spent the next seven years teaching at Dalhousie. (Years later, Baker became Chairman of the Board of Sears Roebuck & Company.)
In the early 1920s, C.D. Howe left Dalhousie for the Canadian west, settling in Port Arthur, Ontario on Thunder Bay. Here he established the C.D. Howe Company and went into the business of constructing grain elevators. Canada at this time was fast becoming the major grain producer in the world. By 1925 the C.D. Howe company was employing a hundred and seventy-five men and had branched out into Saskatchewan and Alberta. By the time the Depression hit, drying up construction orders, C.D. was worth over a half million dollars and was looking for a new line of endeavor. The opportunity presented itself when Canada’s Liberal Party asked him to stand for election to Parliament from Port Arthur. Because of his already established reputation, he handily won the election and was named Minister of Transportation in Prime Minister William Lyon MacKenzie King’s new cabinet. One of his accomplishments in this position was the amalgamation of a number of failing rail lines into the Canadian National Railroad. It was also during this time that he created the Canadian Broadcasting Company.
When Canada entered World War II, there was only one man that Prime Minister King trusted to gear Canada up for the conflict — C.D. Howe. Howe was named Minister of Supply
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and Munitions in 1940. In that capacity, Howe was to see that Canada built up its military, especially its air power, and see that Britain received those Canadian products it needed to fight the Germans. It was the latter that led to Howe being on the Western Prince when it was torpedoed off Iceland. The British actually had no idea what it needed in order to maintain its war effort, and Howe was on his way to confer with British military officials when the Western Prince was sunk.
After establishing what Britain needed in terms of what Canada could supply, Howe found himself working with the American researchers from the Manhattan Project, who were desperately seeking high-grade uranium. Of course, Howe the engineer knew where to look in Canada. The result was the fabulously rich Eldorado Uranium Mine. Howe was one of only about a
half dozen people outside of the Manhattan Project who were privy to the date and time of the first detonation of an atomic bomb. Later, Howe was responsible for the development of Port Radium.
In the early 1950s the economy of Canada was booming, thanks in part to the efforts of C.D. Howe. In fact, in 1952 Fortune reported Canada “had riches, it had resources, it had a future — and it had C.D. Howe.” The onetime farm boy who had worked on his Uncle Fred’s Bethel farm had certainly made his mark in his adoptive country. It was not to last, however. The times were changing and C.D. Howe was not changing with them.
C.D. Howe lost one election in his life. It was his last in 1957. In 1957 C.D.’s opponent in the run for Parliament used the new medium of television to campaign. Howe realized too
(cont. on page 20)
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(cont. from page 19) late that while he was speaking to a few hundred an evening, his opponent was reaching to thousands of homes at the same time on television. Odd for the man who created the Canadian Broadcasting Company.
C.D. Howe died of a heart attack in 1961. His career had not ended in 1957, however. Dalhousie University, where he had begun his career in Canada, had asked him to become chancellor and he had accepted. His last great contribution had been to science and engineering when he had secured an endowment for building a new science facility at the university.
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