Ken Gallagher is among the youngest surviving veterans of the Second World War. He was just getting his career in public transit underway, working as a parts clerk at the Ottawa Electric Railway, when he decided to serve his country in wartime as soon as he was old enough to enlist. AMy greatest frustration was that I couldn=t join earlier,@ says Ken. ASo many lads I knew were already overseas doing what they could.@

He joined the Royal Canadian Navy Reserve when he was 18 and left Ottawa to train in Québec City, Cornwallis and Ste-Hyacinthe, completing his training in signals operation in early 1944. He laughs as he recalls that every sailor in training was also assigned duties necessary to the operation of their base or ship, so he also graduated as a Arefuse disposal technician@ C he worked on a garbage truck for four weeks.

Ken volunteered to serve as a signalman on defensively equipped Allied merchant ships in large convoys crossing the Atlantic. His job was to communicate silently with other ships in semaphore using flags and in Morse code with powerful lights.

He made his first crossing on a British tanker out of Halifax. His ship=s tanks were filled with molasses destined for the troops. After his convoy of 110 ships had zigzagged across the Atlantic for 14 days to try to avoid enemy submarines, from his signaling post Ken could see the coasts of Scotland and Ireland in the distance. He assumed they would reach port without incident. However, in the night, the claxons rang out and everyone rushed out onto the deck. A submarine lurking along the coast of neutral Ireland had torpedoed the ship to starboard, and Ken realized if his ship had wandered only slightly out of its lane, he might have been one of those going for a cold swim that night.

On other Atlantic crossings, Ken heard the Canadian Corvettes that escorted the convoys dropping depth charges but he didn=t see or experience any other sinkings.

On a trip from Liverpool to New York City aboard a New Zealand troop ship, Ken remembers they were bringing home a few hundred American service people, most of whom had been injured serving in France or Germany. He was deeply moved when, no matter how severe their pain, disability or illness, they all tried their best to catch a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty B a sight they thought they would never see again.

When the war ended, Ken returned to work at the OER and stayed with the transit company through its transitions from a private firm to the municipally operated Ottawa Transportation Commission and, with the creation of the Regional Municipality of Ottawa Carleton in 1972, OC Transpo. He retired in 1985 as head of the Safety and Claims Department, and lives near Mooney=s Bay.

Ken plans to stand with his fellow veterans at the Cenotaph on November 11. He notes sadly, AWe=re getting awfully thin in the ranks these days.@