Banff’s Vern Morrow was no stranger to adversity, illness or hope.
And even though Morrow, who died May 24, will no longer be able to share his stories in person, his story lives on in his three memoirs, including the recently completed My Landlocked Year in the Navy.
Morrow, who changed his name from Werner Mrowietz when he immigrated to Canada following the Second World War, grew up in Leipzig, Germany. The Luftwaffe pressed him into service in 1944. He was 16 and forced – at risk of internment in a concentration camp or execution by firing squad – to serve in the Anti-Aircraft Auxiliary.
At 17, he enlisted in the navy, the Kriegsmarine.
Morrow recorded his experience as a youth in Germany in Compulsory Labour Service: An Attempt at Political Indoctrination and Reminiscences of a Child Soldier. My Landlocked Year in the Navy takes readers from his transfer to the Kreigsmarine to the end of the war.
Once with the Kriegsmarine, at a naval academy on the Baltic Sea, Morrow was given a uniform, helmet, gas mask, rifle and a pair of stiff, coal-black boots two sizes too big that quickly caused a heel to blister.
The blister turned into an open wound amid all the marching basic training required of recruits, and soon, Morrow limped along unable to be one of 25 men accepted for sick parade each morning as it was strictly on a first-come-first-served basis. A small lymph gland in his groin became swollen, as well.
Morrow’s company commander finally sent him to a naval hospital where he became an inmate. While in hospital, it was discovered that his tonsils had also become infected and had abscessed, damaging his heart. His tonsils were removed on Christmas Eve, 1944; the anesthetic did not work and doctors operated on a very awake and lucid Morrow who screamed in what he described as “mind-boggling acute pain,” turning a minor surgical procedure into something none of its participants would ever forget.
Morrow soon learned, post surgery and with a rare treat of ice cream to help soothe the pain, that food was scarce and over the next year he would come to understand what persistent starvation and malnutrition felt like.
A string of illnesses followed and, by the time Morrow turned 18, he wrote that he had survived “in rapid succession, rheumatic fever, a tonsillectomy, myocarditis, jaundice, influenza and hepatitis C and B, and was just diagnosed as suffering from a stubborn case of endocarditis, disintegration of the heart’s interior.”
He had also suffered malnutrition and weeks of starvation.
“I was, indeed, merely a wreck of my former youthful, confident and optimistic self. I was lying bedridden in an overcrowded naval base hospital lacking operating facilities and possessing only a dwindling supply of a few standard medicines.”
He became, with the surrender of Germany, a prisoner of war – still struggling with life-threatening illness – and hanging over him the threat of hard, manual labour or dangerous jobs such as off-loading ammunition and explosives, or be sent to former-German occupied countries as reconstruction workers.
Morrow escaped those fates through good fortune, bribery and intervention on behalf of people with some influence that took pity on the young, gentle and ill sailor. Morrow was instead assigned to the British-German Mine Sweeping Administration, where he was put on guard duty first at the naval hospital turned POW camp and later, dockside on the Baltic Sea, protecting small British minesweeping ships.
Through My Landlocked Year in the Navy, Morrow provides a view into Germany at the end of the year. In doing so, Morrow reminds us that many Germans did not support Hitler, the Third Reich or the Nazi Party, but as average citizens they were powerless, swept along in the chaos and forced to survive as best they could.
Morrow chose the navy to avoid being drafted into the fanatical SS.
We’re reminded as well that many regular German people, those who had no allegiance to Hitler or ideology, suffered as a result of the war as well and hospitals appear to have been full of desperate young men who found ways to make their illnesses or wounds worse as a way to safely avoid the rest of the war.
Men such as a submariner who faked appendicitis, resulting in an unnecessary appendectomy, and then infected himself with the tonsillitis bacterium in the hope of contracting tonsillitis. All of that to gain a week’s reprieve from the suicide missions submarine crews were being sent out upon at the tail end of the war.
We’re also reminded that kindness is universal and that the most unlikely people – including a vice-admiral, the commander-in-chief of the naval hospital or British soldiers – could show kindness to a young man.
We’re reminded, as well, that cruelty is universal. From ill-tempered and vindictive nurses who saw Morrow as a shirker and malingerer to the over-zealous and dangerous officers who did not care if Morrow and other sailors lived or died, to British soldiers who purposefully dumped their leftovers into the Baltic Sea when they knew the starving Morrow was watching.
Even though Morrow’s story is not the typical wartime account, as he did not see combat in his year in the navy, it is still a story of survival and of hope in dangerous times. It is, as a result, a human story and an important one.
We’re fortunate that Morrow – and others like him – see value in sharing these stories. They teach, inform and remind us that even in the worst possible times, people can maintain their dignity, their ethics, their sense of what is right and what is wrong and that above all there is always hope for a better future.
Morrow’s books are available at Indigo Books in Banff and at the Banff and Exshaw libraries.
