[ footprints ] Tommy Prince - Tommy Prince born and bred for War

Diary entry, February 2, 1944
Anzio, Italy

"Well past dusk I awoke as I always did, clear-headed and ready to move. Everything was quiet, even the shelling stopped. I reached into my kit bag and felt the familiar bumps of the beads my mother had sewn onto the uppers of my moccasins ­ such beautiful footwear to do such ugly work.
"I tied the moosehide laces tightly, blackened my face with mud and slipped outside.Ý Almost trotting on the soft earth, I silently crossed the enemy line. Taking a deep breath, I chose the first tent on my right, and side-stepped inside.
"There they lay - three German soldiers - arms and legs sprawled as though they had dropped dead on the spot. But the rising and falling of their chests told me they would live another day to kill more of our guys if I didn't do something about them.
"I slit each of their throats before any of them knew what was happening. Tonight I decided to leave a bleached cow vertebrae I'd found in the field near the head of the youngest ­ my calling card. I slipped back outside, smiling to myself as I imagined the look on the faces of the enemy as they tried to puzzle this one out."

If the decorated war hero Thomas George Prince, pride of the Saulteaux Brokenhead Band of Scanterbury, Man., had kept a diary, it might have read like the above. He was so silent and stealthy, the opposition began to think of him as an evil spirit employed by the allied forces.
When he wasn't slipping out on his own and spreading fear among the enemy, demoralizing their ranks, commanders sent Tommy on reconnaissance missions. They recognized his fieldcraft was unequalled as a natural hunter who had grown up soundlessly tracking moose and deer with his father. They charged him with sneaking behind enemy lines to listen to the Germans and estimate their numbers.
As one of his peers, known as "Anonymous Alf", said of Tommy, "it's as if he was born and bred for one great task (to fight in the war). He was a quiet, ordinary man who had greatness thrust upon him by the force of one of the greatest conflicts in the history of Western civilization. He was a true son of his people and a great warrior."
From the start, Tommy had good genes. He was the great-great-grandson of the famous Chief Peguis, the Saulteaux chief who led his people to the southwestern shore of Lake Winnipeg in the late 1790s. The traveled from Ontario and Peguis looked after them like a father. Tommy was born in a canvas tent on a cold October day in 1915 and when he was only five his family moved to the Brokenhead Reservation.
ÝAlong with his necessary hunting marksmanship, his skills were honed as a teenaged army cadet, where he perfected his ability to blast five bullets through a playing card-sized target at 100 metres.
At 24, Prince volunteered with the Royal Canadian Engineers when war broke out in Europe in 1939. By the next year he was training to be a paratrooper, and was one of nine out of a hundred men to pass the rigorous parachute school.
Another of his anonymous peers commented "it wasn't his ability to 'jump' that made him a good paratrooper. Prince had a natural instinct for the 'ground.' He would land, creep forward on his belly with the speed and agility of a snake and take advantage of small depressions in an otherwise flat field to conceal himself from view. He was a crack shot with a rifle and crafty as a wolf in the field."
Tommy's wolf-in-sheep's clothing sense was at its best when he cool-headedly posed as an Italian farmer to repair a broken communications line. After he single-handedly ran a radio wire 1,500 metres into enemy territory to an abandoned farmhouse where he was relaying exact locations of the Germans, he realized the line had been cut when communication halted. Without pausing to think, he stripped off his uniform, dressed in farmer's clothes abandoned in the house, and emerged as an angry civilian, shaking his fists and brandishing his hoe. In plain view of the enemy line, he feigned working in his field and followed the radio line to where the break had occurred. Pretending to tie his shoe, he secretly spliced the line and continued to "work" in the field until finally returning to the house to relay further enemy positions ­ information that allowed allied forces to advance and force the enemy to withdraw.
More stories of Tommy's prowess and skill abound, including the time he and a fellow private opened fire on a group of Germans, killing many, and causing an observing French squadron leader to believe "at least 50 of you" must have pulled off the ambush.
Though Tommy earned 10 war medals, he told relatives he was never prouder than when King George VI pinned the Military Medal and the Silver Star on him, on behalf of President Roosevelt, and chatted with him about his wartime experiences. He was one of only three Canadians awarded the King George Military Medal.
After the war ended and Tommy took off his uniform, he returned to Brokenhead reserve to find his people struggling with another kind of war. Poor and dispirited, they were beaten down in the wake of government oppression, and Tommy knew if he didn't leave he would also succumb to despair.
In Winnipeg, he developed a successful cleaning service with a half-ton panel truck, only to leave the city when his people wanted him to lobby the government and even speak to King George, his old friend, about their plight. He left his business in the care of friends and took on a new role as Manitoba Indian Association chairman.
Sadly, he found the government slow to hear his complaints, even if he was a war hero, and he became frustrated at the lack of help offered his people. To make matters worse, he discovered his friends had ruined his truck when he returned to head up his cleaning business, and he was reduced to working in lumber camps and a concrete factory.
Drinking assuaged his broken dreams and soothed the pain in his knees; his lower joints were ruined by warfield crawling, and later, the climbing of impossibly steep terrain during return-duty to Korea.
Estranged from his wife and family due to alcohol, Tommy finally ended his days alcohol-free in the Salvation Army Social Service Centre in Winnipeg.
Over 500 people listened to the "Death of a Warrior" lament that five Brokenhead Reservation men chanted for their hero. They watched as an officer hand the folded Canadian Flag from Tommy's coffin to Beverly, one of five of his children who were fostered out but managed to find their famous father after many years of searching.