Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

Jack Knox: Soldier fled remote outpost — and headed toward the action

It’s not uncommon for soldiers to desert in wartime. Oak Bay’s Noel (Bach) Parker-Jervis might have been the only one to run toward the action.
Remembrance Day poppy

Jack Knox mugshot genericIt’s not uncommon for soldiers to desert in wartime.

Oak Bay’s Noel (Bach) Parker-Jervis might have been the only one to run toward the action.

So keen was he to get overseas during the Second World War, he bolted from his post on a remote islet off Vancouver Island and headed for England.

Parker-Jervis is 96 now, long retired from his job as an English professor at the University of Alberta. He still lives in his own house, but his knees are shot. So is his hearing. “I’ve got gunner’s deafness,” he says.

As for his eyes, they never were any good, which is how be came to be stuck guarding seals and cedars on Yorke Island at the south end of Johnstone Strait.

The tale goes like this: An 18-year-old Vancouver boy, he signed up as soon as the war broke out in 1939. “I hoped to go overseas,” he said this week.

Alas, his eyesight was deemed too poor for that. Instead, he was consigned first to a two-gun artillery unit at Point Grey, staving off the less-than-likely Nazi invasion of the University of B.C., then to Yorke Island, staving off an attack by lord knows whom. Canada wasn’t even at war with Japan at that point.

No matter how hard he tried — “Every time they asked for volunteers, I volunteered” — Parker-Jervis couldn’t persuade the army to send him to Europe.

So he took matters into his own hands. While home in Vancouver on leave, he left a note for his mother that read “Don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine” and boarded a train to Halifax. There, he signed on as a coal trimmer on a cargo ship as it crossed the U-boat-infested Atlantic to England.

“I thought that was the only way,” he says.

“I had no fear that I would be punished severely. I was trying to go toward the war, not away from it.”

He did, however, expect more punishment than he got.

In London, he found his friend John Acland, whose uncle was a high-placed British general. The general was persuaded to send the Canadian military authorities a letter saying something like “I’m interested in the case of Gunner Parker-Jervis. I would be grateful if you would inform me as to his disposition.”

Maybe it was that note. Maybe it was the circumstances of Parker-Jervis’s flight. Maybe it was the interest of the newspaper reporters who heard the strange case of the Canadian soldier who had surrendered to the Military Police. Whatever the reason, instead of being thrown in the stockade, Parker-Jervis was shipped to a holding unit for artillery personnel. “I was astounded.”

In the end, he got what he wanted. In 1943 he was sent into action in Italy, bad eyes or not. (“By that time, they didn’t care if you had glasses as thick as a bottle.”) He was at Ortona, the Liri Valley, Ravenna and river crossing after heavily defended river crossing as the Canadian Army chewed its way up the Italian boot.

He made the trip in an anti-tank tank — that is, an open-turreted armoured vehicle whose weaponry included a rear-mounted .50-calibre machine gun whose muzzle flash would come right down on his head when hammering away at targets to the front.

“That’s the one that gave me my deafness,” he says now.

When they could, the Canadians would shelter in farmhouses whose sturdy masonry offered protection from shellfire, though that didn’t help on the night when, as Parker-Jervis was crawling into his blankets, a thumb-sized piece of shrapnel came screaming in and smacked him on the butt so hard that it knocked him over. The blow left a massive, multi-coloured bruise reminiscent of the sunset-hued behinds of North African baboons, which earned him the nickname him Baboon.

Parker-Jervis liked the Italians he met and, like many soldiers, tried to slip the hungry population Canadian rations when he could. Ditto for when the 1st Canadian Corps was sent from Italy to northwest Europe after D-Day. “Canadian mess lines were always full of Dutch children.”

He still eats the bully beef that was a staple of the Canadian Army. He wasn’t the only one with a taste for it: Parker-Jervis has a funny tales about trading several cases of the stuff for a U.S. Army jeep that the Americans subsequently declared lost in action.

What isn’t funny, though, is the rest of it, the stories he skirts around — the terrible times, the loss of friends, the loss of youth. We shouldn’t forget that on Remembrance Day, shouldn’t forget the teen who deserted toward the war, shouldn’t forget the million other Canadians who chose to march there.