Against All Odds

by P. J. Naworynski

  Coming out of the war, St. Moritz was an obvious choice as host for the Games. Switzerland had remained neutral during the war, and it had the physical means to mount the Games. The city had hosted the Winter Olympics in 1928, and most of the athletic venues were already in existence and in good condition, untouched by the ravages of battle. All the venues were outdoors, which meant the Games would be heavily dependent on favourable weather conditions.

  For the RCAF Flyers, this meant all their matches would be played on outdoor ice, on rinks that were subject to blazing sun, frigid temperatures, and swirling snowstorms. Boards for the Olympic ice surfaces were also much shorter than those the boys were accustomed to at home. But different ice surfaces and varied outdoor conditions had never stopped Canadians from excelling on Olympic ice before. Canadian hockey teams had claimed gold at the Winter Olympics in 1920, 1924, 1928, and 1932.

  But in 1936 at Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Canada’s unbeaten streak in ice hockey came to a striking halt when Britain snatched the gold, beating the Canadians 2–1. Funny thing, though: the team from England secured its gold medal using almost exclusively Canadian players. Only one member of the British squad was 100 percent British. Nine of the other players on the team were born in the United Kingdom but had grown up in Canada and perfected their skills while playing hockey on Canadian ponds, rivers, rinks, and teams from childhood right on up. One of the British players was actually born in Canada and had served in the Canadian army. When it was time to don jerseys for the Olympics in 1936, those boys had either been called by the British Ice Hockey Association or felt the pull to “come home” and lace up for the Brits. Although using Canadian-raised men to bolster the English hockey squad may have been acceptable before the war and before Canada gained its independence from Mother England in 1947, this time things would be different.

  Despite the Flyers’ short timeline, critical press, and naysayers, Buck Boucher, Frank Boucher, and Sandy Watson knew they had something very special on their side—a group of airmen who had been forged in the fires of war.

  There was no shortage of Canadian hockey players with wings. The challenge was time and creating that golden recipe of men who could read each other’s minds and play together as a cohesive unit with just weeks of practice. Mere days after starting, Buck told reporters: “We’re going to try and get the strongest possible team. It’s going to give me a lot of extra work but it’s also going to be some extra pleasure. This is an honour and I’m going to do the best I possibly can.”

  Milt Schmidt, Bobby Bauer, and Woody Dumart, also known as the “Kraut Line.”

  Bruce Bennett / gettyimages

  The Bouchers and Watson knew there were a lot of great air force boys who were fantastic players. Milt Schmidt, Bobby Bauer, and Woody Dumart, also known as “the Kraut Line,” had all played for the RCAF but were also unfortunately NHL veterans with the Boston Bruins. There were legions of outstanding RCAF players with experience in the American Hockey League, the senior hockey leagues, and the NHL farm teams. But like Frank Boucher, they were paid players, making them ineligible to join the team under the IOC rules.

  With painstaking precision, the two Bouchers and Watson scoured the land for the best players the RCAF had to offer. They set off watching games on bases as well as local league matches in search for diamonds to pluck for their team. Calls were sent out to the sports officers at all air force stations across the country to send over their best players. Anyone with a Junior A or higher hockey history was invited to jump on an RCAF plane and get to Ottawa to try out for the team. Hopefuls like forward Andy Gilpin and goalie Ross King came flying in from as far away as the Yukon.

  As the clock ticked down to departure day for St. Moritz, Buck, Frank, and Sandy continued to sift through hundreds of airmen. The proving grounds for the tryouts would be Tommy Gorman’s Ottawa Auditorium. Conveniently located right next door to the RCAF Beaver Barracks, where the boys would be housed, it was a stand-out facility for testing the mettle of the future Olympic squad.

  A former Olympic athlete and avid hockey lover, Gorman was a prominent local businessman who happened to own the auditorium as well as the rink’s home team, the Ottawa Senators of the Quebec Senior Hockey League. As a man who had been to the Olympics before, with Canada’s lacrosse team in 1908, Gorman had a passion for all sport as well as the means to help the Flyers. Like Buck, he also knew a thing or two about hockey, having coached or managed seven Stanley Cup champion teams. Gorman offered his rink to the Flyers free of charge to use all day, every day, in their race to get ready for Switzerland. He also offered to help out with a bit of perspective or a friendly ear if they so desired.

  Day after day, through late October into November, RCAF pilots, gunners, navigators, radio operators, office clerks, and men working in all other reaches of the service were flown into Ottawa and put through a grinding session of twice-daily workouts. Nine men flew in one day, ten the next, and five or six the following day as new crops of potential players swarmed into the Ottawa Auditorium vying for a coveted spot on the team.

  Buck’s mantra was to work the boys hard, giving them an opportunity to get into sound hockey shape and show their wares before facing elimination from the team. Practice sessions designed to cull the talent pool and whip the chosen few into shape began at 5:00 a.m. each day, with some marathon sessions continuing late into the evening. Those who continued to shine on the ice during the test matches and practices would receive three square meals a day, a private room to sleep in at the barracks, and military pay according to their rank for a day’s work.

  Buck ran four full lines in the morning and four full lines in the afternoon. When Buck and Frank felt it necessary, a few of the boys were forced to sweat it up in back-to-back sessions. Black eyes, bruised noses, and battered limbs were part and parcel of the gruelling sessions. For a few of the unlucky guys, dislocated shoulders cut short their attempts to gain a place on the roster. Some men lasted a day, others a few days; a select core stayed on, rising to the top of the list as “possibles.”

  ONE OF THE MEN BEING PUT through the paces from day one of the tryouts was Flying Officer Hubert Brooks. “Brooksie” or “Hub,” as he was referred to by his war buddies, struck a commanding presence with his shock of black hair, steely blue eyes, chiselled jaw, and movie star good looks. During the war Brooks was a navigator/bomb aimer in a Wellington bomber, part of 419 (Moose) Squadron. The 419 Squadron’s motto was “Beware of the Moose.”

  Brooks was the real deal, a full-on war hero. He was one of only five RCAF officers to be awarded the Military Cross for his deeds of heroism during the war. He also received a Mention in Dispatches citation and the 1939–1945 Star, the Air Crew Europe Star, the Defence Medal, the Polish Cross of Valour, and the Polish Silver Cross of Merit with Swords. His Military Cross citation was the longest of anyone in the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War II.

  Brooks was the embodiment of true grit. He not only survived bailing out from his bomber when its engines caught fire on a nighttime bombing run for Hamburg, but after hitting the dirt and being captured by the Germans, Brooks plotted and then engineered his own escape from German POW camps on three separate occasions.

  When the war was over, Brooks didn’t come home. Instead he volunteered for the Missing Research and Enquiry Service, or MRES. The MRES was set up by the Royal, Dominion, and Allied air forces at the end of World War II. Its mandate was to locate Commonwealth air force personnel who had gone down or had died in missions over enemy-held territory.

  Around the globe, 41,881 airmen and -women had simply disappeared on operations or routine flights and were listed as missing, presumed dead. The bulk of them, some 37,000, were believed killed in Europe. Tens of thousands of Commonwealth air force personnel still lay in their aircraft, or were buried in poorly marked graves, or were simply lost in the blackness of war. As an MRES search officer, Brooks undertook the greatest detective job in the world. From war’s end until the summer of 1947, he w
as part of an extraordinary group of men who scoured millions of square miles of battlefields, oceans, landscapes, and mass graves in an attempt to identify, account individually for, and bury their thousands of missing men and women. It was a monumental task involving the use of intelligence reports, official and unofficial sources, investigative sleuthing, various scraps of information, and forensic and semi-forensic work throughout Europe, the Middle East, and the Far East. Identifying the lost souls was of paramount importance. Every case solved laid a ghost to rest for a family back home.

  Brooks’s MRES work searching for downed airmen and aircraft took him through Denmark and Norway and into the American occupation zone of Europe. It was a gruelling and gruesome task that required a steel will, a high degree of knowledge and experience, and exceptional tact in potentially unorthodox situations with hostile or unfriendly locals. In July and August 1946, Brooks made MRES history as part of a two-man mission dubbed Operation Polesearch. With fellow search officer Eric “Chick” Rideal, Brooks scaled mountains, scoured fjords, and sailed a fishing smack around the most northerly part of mainland Europe, Cape Nordkinn in the Arctic Circle, in the search for downed airmen.

  For Brooks and his colleagues in the MRES, it was simply unacceptable that any airmen heroes should remain in an unmarked grave in some nameless corner of a foreign field, or left exposed at a crash site on some windblown mountaintop. Every little clue needed to be examined and recorded carefully in the search for identification. The first and last thing Brooks and his colleagues would do on approaching or leaving a gravesite was to salute it. One can only imagine the mental fortitude and internal strength required to crawl into a mass grave to study remains in situ and conduct an examination. But it had to be done, and Brooks possessed the inner fire to do this for his fellow warriors. For Brooks the work was fraught with challenges and difficulties, but it was also deeply rewarding and satisfying.

  In the quest for sanity and a little normalcy, the MRES encouraged its men overseas to engage in sports whenever possible. While in Copenhagen, Brooks leapt at the opportunity to play a little hockey with the local Kobenhavns Hold hockey team. Danish newspapers championed his impressive skills. “Canadians are the world’s finest ice hockey players and Pilot Officer Brooks is no exception. Brooks will star with the Kobenhavns Hold against Oslo and Stockholm the 3rd and 10th February when the weather becomes cold again.”

  In February 1947, while he was stationed in the American occupation zone of Germany and in need of another break, Brooks got the chance to lace up and play with the U.S. Army All-Stars at Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Hockey was just the thing he needed to help his spirits soar. A few months later, Canada started calling its search officers home, and Brooks reluctantly closed down his activities and was repatriated to Ottawa in July.

  The Hubert Brooks who returned to Ottawa in the summer of 1947 was a different man from the boy who had sailed to England on the Mauritania back in September 1941, sleeping in hammocks crammed in four-deep with eight inches between each man. Since then, Brooks had not only escaped death dozens of times but he had been through hell and back in captivity. He had seen unspeakable horrors in the aftermath of war, and he now spoke seven languages, most of them fluently: English, French, Polish, Russian, German, Czechoslovakian, and Ukrainian.

  When his superiors at RCAF HQ in Ottawa tapped him on the shoulder to try out for the Flyers, Brooks was honoured to give it a shot. At twenty-six, his legs weren’t quite as limber as they were in his late teens, but he had a great head for the game and he was still sharp on his skates.

  His journey to the ice at the Ottawa Auditorium began decades earlier in the wide-open expanses of northern Alberta. Born on a crisp winter morning on December 29, 1921, Brooks was a product of the prairies. His father, Alfred, and mother, Laura, lived a pioneering life, homesteading on a plot of land some twelve miles south of the hamlet of Bluesky, Alberta. There was no plumbing or electricity in the eighteen-by-twenty-foot log cabin Alfred had built with his bare hands. The only source of heat to tame the biting winter temperatures, which could dip to sixty below zero, came from the woodstove fire.

  Hubert’s father was a resourceful, hard-working man. In those early years outside Bluesky, Alfred provided for his young family by farming, hunting, and trading furs at the local trading post in the Peace River district of northwestern Alberta. In the summer months the sun would shine until 10:00 p.m. The skies were predominantly clear and crystal blue, which allowed for long, back-breaking days of work.

  Winter work was long and hard in a different way. Typically in this stretch near the Peace River, snow fell early in October and stayed until late March. With his brother Aimé, Alfred would set out and spend a week at a time on their trap line in the brush. At eighteen miles long and three miles wide, the line provided the brothers with upwards of five hundred pelts over a winter, including fox, coyote, lynx, weasel, muskrat, wolf, and squirrel. They would sell the pelts in the spring.

  Using teams of horses, brute strength, and sheer determination, the homesteaders cleared the land to make room for crops and gardens to help provide the sustenance of life. Trees had to be extracted, rocks removed from the soil, stumps blasted with dynamite, ground broken by horses pulling a single bottom-breaking plow. To make the earth ready for a garden or crops, the final clearing was done using elbow grease with an axe, a grub hoe, and a plow.

  Alfred kept a cow and some chickens on his homestead. To provide meat for his family, he would hunt moose, fox, and muskrat, as well as take advantage of the abundance of wild game, such as partridges and rabbits. In the winter, he built an ice house to preserve the perishables, using giant, sawdust-covered blocks of ice from the river. In the summer, after the ice had melted in the ice house, meat, cheese, and milk would be sent down the well to keep from spoiling in the baking summer months.

  Roads in the area had been built by local farmers, and in the spring and early summer they were nearly impassable because of the ruts of soft, wet mud. High-wheeled wagons pulled by a team of horses were the only mode of transport.

  For Hubert’s mother, Laura, the loneliness and homesickness, especially in the winter months, could seem soul-crushing. Her family was thousands of miles away in Ottawa. And unlike Alfred, she had come from the city and was more accustomed to living somewhere less isolated that provided for the niceties of life.

  With very little money, everyone in the community, for miles around, was in the same situation. Clothes were patched; flour and sugar sacks were used to make curtains. It was a hard life but not without its pleasures and beauty. There was a bond between neighbours, people were friendly, and homesteaders depended on one another as they squeaked out a humble existence. In the winter, there were house parties, dance parties, card parties. And in summer, there were picnics, ball games between communities, and plenty of things for kids to occupy themselves with down by the river. Young Hubert’s world expanded on August 24, 1923, when his parents welcomed his baby sister, Doris, into the world. Hubert now had a new playmate.

  For Alfred, finding a way to make a living off the land was a way of life. He tried his hand at prospecting and taking his boat out to pan for gold. But the shiny metal bonanza eluded him. Alfred, Laura, Hubert, and Doris soldiered on at the homestead outside Bluesky until 1925. Then the dream and idyllic country life collapsed. Subject to the whims of nature, the prairies were hit hard by drought—wheat wasn’t growing, cattle were dying. Alfred had tried almost everything to provide for his growing family. Times had simply become too tough. Disillusioned with the homesteading dream and faced with a potentially grim future, Alfred and Laura sold the family farm and moved to Ottawa with hopes for a brighter future.

  In Ottawa Laura could find solace and support from her family. The Brookses could also make a new beginning. Laura had been a seamstress of some note before leaving to marry Alfred in Alberta. Now that they were back in Ottawa, she resumed this work while Alfred chased the golden lure of prospecting opportunities in the w
ilds of northern Ontario and Quebec.

  The Brooks family stayed in Ottawa for five years. Unfortunately Alfred’s quest to strike it rich in the eastern gold fields never bore fruit. So in 1930, the family upped stakes once again, this time searching for greener pastures in Montreal.

  Hubert was eight when the family put down new roots in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, which was one of the poorer areas of the city. Once more they were hopeful that times would be better for them in their new home. But making ends meet did not come easy. Laura managed to get work as a seamstress, and Alfred initially continued his quest for mineral wealth. Young Hubert would take up caddying at a local golf course to help supplement the family coffers while his father was away prospecting up north.

  Ultimately Alfred abandoned his dreams of mineral riches and landed steady work with a fire equipment company. Although times were tough and money was tight, Hubert and Doris were well loved by their hard-working parents, and the kids were able to maintain an active youth. Hubert had a natural passion for all athletics; he played golf and softball, rode bicycles, and started playing lots and lots of ice and street hockey.

  Fortunately for Hubert, the streets in his poor section of Montreal were a veritable proving ground for future hockey greatness. Shinny games were a near daily occurrence around Notre-Dame-de-Grâce and nearby Bordeaux, and several future National Hockey League legends were growing up in the neighbourhood. One of Brooks’s regular street hockey buddies was none other than Maurice “the Rocket” Richard. Young Hubert could not have asked for a better partner with whom to hone his stickhandling skills. Brooks and Richard were the same age, and they would while away the hours playing street hockey, setting up rocks to stand in for goalposts on the pavement. They also made up games like “hog,” where one player would try to see if he could hog the puck or tennis ball as long as possible from the other guy. It was a great way for them to perfect their technique and have a blast.