Ninety-four-year-old Second World War veteran Frank Krepps never misses a Remembrance Day service.
“I attend faithfully, even though it’s tough,” said Krepps, a Red Deer resident who doesn’t need the annual holiday to remind him of fellow soldiers who didn’t make it home. “I think about it all the time. Every day.”
His worst wartime experience – the one that pushed him briefly into alcoholism after he returned to Canada – goes back to an overcast day late in the conflict.
His company was moving across Germany when he and a fellow soldier were sent ahead on their motorcycles to see if the road was safe.
The two dispatch riders drove along until they saw an abandoned hotel by the Rhine River. “My curiosity got the better of me,” Krepps admitted, and he and his buddy went in to investigate.
The hotel was full of dead German soldiers. “Rats had eaten some of their faces. It was grim,” he recalled.
The two shaken Canadians returned to their motorbikes outside the hotel when the first German machine gun shots were fired at them from across the river. When bullets fell short, the Germans began to lob mortar shells over the Rhine.
Krepps said his comrade’s motorcycle was shot right out from under him. Both men dove into a ditch and thought the end had come.
“We were lying there for more than two hours as they were shelling over us, steady.”
It wasn’t until nightfall that the guns across the river finally fell silent, and it seemed they were given up for dead.
“We finally heard someone say ‘Canada! Are you OK?’” he recalled, and realized Allied soldiers were coming – and they were saved.
“I was very fortunate. I was lucky, lucky, lucky …”
Krepps grew up on a Saskatchewan farm. He enlisted in the army in 1941, as an antidote to the Great Depression. His two brothers and a sister had also decided to serve overseas.
At the time, he was an adventure-seeking 17-year-old who was game for anything. But not long after, when he became a dispatch motorcyclist entrusted to carry important messages for the Royal Canadian Engineers, B Company, he realized war wasn’t exactly a carefree exploit.
“When you’re on a motorbike, you’re on your own. If you survive, it’s by the grace of God …”
The veteran, who worked as a farmer and mine foreman after returning to Canada with his first wife, an English war bride, never received counselling for war-time trauma.
Nobody did back then.
He never talked about his experiences, either. But they took a toll on him and his first marriage.
He credits his second wife Eleanor, who passed away last year, for being supportive and encouraging him to quit drinking. The father of four tried to put the war behind him.
But of course, you never do, he admitted, with a bitter chuckle.
More than seven decades after the peace deal was signed, Krepps is disturbed to see more hate-mongering happening south of the border, as well as in Europe. He wonders, do we ever learn?
When the next war could happen with the push of a button, Krepps believes there’s never been a better time to find more civilized ways to solve our problems.
lmichelin@reddeeradvocate.com
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