Soldier, doctor, hero

By Allison Lawlor
For The Globe and Mail, Toronto, Canada

January 08, 2008 09:50 am

— The following story appeared in The Globe and Mail, Toronto, Canada. Dec. 7, 2007. It is being reprinted with permission from the author.

HALIFAX, Nova Scotia — Jack Fairweather of Lewisburg was rather taken aback when he learned last year that the French government had decided to award him the Legion of Honour for his exploits in Normandy in 1944.
After all, it had been six decades since the war ended. “I was surprised,” he told The Globe and Mail in February 2006. “My army career was 3½ years of my life, 60-some years ago. I’ve gone on to do other things.”
A gynecologist and obstetrician, he spent most of those years caring for women and babies in small-town Pennsylvania, likely trying his best to forget about the Second World War.
In faraway France, however, he was still remembered — and little wonder. With Jack Veness, his inseparable army pal, Dr. Fairweather had survived a D-Day firestorm, been captured, escaped from a prison camp and then sought refuge with a French underground unit led by a ruthless criminal whose taste for murder the two men managed to subvert. In the process, they saved the life of a policemen and other townspeople.
Their wartime heroism and adventures were chronicled by Maritime writer Will R. Bird in his 1954 book “The Two Jacks: The Amazing Adventures of Major Jack M. Veness and Major Jack L. Fairweather.”
When the Canadian Army went ashore on the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944, the two men — both from New Brunswick — landed with the North Nova Scotia Highlanders. By the next day, the North Novas (as they were known) had battled their way about 15 kilometres inland and occupied the villages of Buron and Authie when they came under attack by the 12th SS Panzer Division.
The ensuing battle devastated the North Novas. Dozens were killed or injured and about 100 were captured. The two Jacks were among those taken prisoner.
“We thought it was bad luck that we were captured, but on the other hand, there were a lot of people who didn’t survive,” Dr. Fairweather told The Globe in 2003.
After being forced to walk for close to a week with little food or rest, the prisoners reached the gates of “Front Stalag,” a prison camp fashioned out of a collection of worn-out army huts and a ring of three barbed-wire fences.
The two Jacks spent the next six weeks in the camp before being crowded into a railway boxcar and sent on their way to a permanent camp. About five days later, with bombs dropping all around them, the two men decided that if they were going to escape, now was the time.
“It was made pretty clear in training ... an officer’s first duty when captured is to escape,” Dr. Fairweather said. “We had that in the back of our minds.”
One night, just outside Tours in central France, the two men jumped from the moving train through a hole in the boxcar.
“Jack said, ‘This is our chance, we have to take it,’ ” Dr. Fairweather recalled. “He said, ‘Come on, we can do this.’ ”
Under the cover of darkness, the two officers made it safely away from the tracks and sought help. They were hidden in the belfry of a church by a French priest, then connected with a French resistance leader named Georges Le Coz. He turned out to be an unsavoury individual bent on evil.
Dr. Fairweather said that he and Mr. Veness initially stuck with Le Coz because he appeared to be a smart “survivor.” But his brutal nature soon became apparent. Over the next two months, the Canadians witnessed Le Coz take mistresses, raid private chateaus for wine, money and food, and routinely shoot French citizens on the pretext that they were collaborators. They also saw him order the shooting of a handful of his own men after he accused them of attempting to desert with their rifles and ammunition.
One day, after Le Coz’s men had killed 11 Germans and taken several others prisoner, Dr. Fairweather watched in horror as the dead were arranged in a semi-circle, then propped in the sitting position with a bottle of wine placed in one hand, a loaf of bread in the other and a cigarette in each mouth. Le Coz’s men then danced gleefully around the arrangement of corpses.
On another occasion, after seizing a castle in Loches, Le Coz lined up some of the town’s citizens, including a police officer named Alfred Hangouet, and asked the Canadians to shoot him. The two Jacks refused.
“We said: ‘Our enemy is the Germans. We’re not getting into French politics,’ ” Dr. Fairweather said in 2007. “And he was quite irate about it, and stormed around. It was in the center of town. These people were all lined up. Some were just shot out of hand.”
After the Loches killings, Dr. Fairweather and Mr. Veness decided they should try to leave Le Coz’s group at any cost. They managed to contact a genuine underground unit, which helped them escape to England. After declining an offer to be sent home, they rejoined their North Nova units.
“I’m sure we wouldn’t have survived without the underground,” Dr. Fairweather said. “They protected us.”
Dr. Fairweather had nearly forgotten the 1944 afternoon when he saved a French police officer from death. Then, three years ago, he received a letter of thanks from the man’s daughter, Jeanine Wallace. She told him her father never forgot the heroic action of the two Canadians.
In the 1970s, a friend told Ms. Wallace of the book “The Two Jacks.” She recognized the protagonists as the two men who had saved her father, but did not know how to reach them.
In 2003, Mr. Veness died and his obituary appeared in The Globe and Mail. Browsing the Internet, Ms. Wallace came across the article, which quoted Dr. Fairweather and noted that he lived in Lewisburg, Pa. She wrote to him.
It was then that Dr. Fairweather learned the truth about Le Coz. He was a career criminal named Georges Dubosq. In the final years of the war, she said, it was common for people such as Mr. Dubosq to take advantage of the chaos and lack of civil authority to pose as resistance fighters. Her father had been investigating Mr. Dubosq when the criminal turned on him. When peace returned, Mr. Hangouet arrested him and he was executed in the fall of 1945 on charges of murder and treason.
Dr. Fairweather felt touched to receive Ms. Wallace’s letter and wrote back, joking that his role in saving her father made him her honorary uncle. The next time Ms. Wallace wrote, she called him “Uncle Jack.”
While honoured to receive France’s highest award, Dr. Fairweather spent little time thinking about the war and did not consider his actions heroic, said his wife, April Fairweather. “I just got lucky,” he told her. “I was at the right place at the right time. Anyone else in my shoes would have done the same thing.”
From New Brunswick to Lewisburg
Jack Fairweather was born in Rothesay, New Brunswick, in 1924. His father, Jack Fairweather, was a New Brunswick lawyer who later became a judge. His brother, Gordon, followed in their father’s footsteps and studied law, eventually becoming the province’s attorney-general and the first chief commissioner of the Canadian Human Rights Commission.
“Jack was the adventuresome one,” recalled Gordon Fairweather. At 11, he jumped out of a second-storey window in the family home. When his father asked him why he did such a foolish thing, he replied: “I just wanted to see what it was like.”
His sense of adventure led him to set out for Halifax to enlist in the army on the morning after completing his final high-school exam. It was July 4, 1942, and he was 18. After basic training, he was sent across the Atlantic on the Queen Mary, which had been converted to a troopship. In England, he was assigned to the North Nova Scotia Highlanders.
After the war, Dr. Fairweather studied medicine at Dalhousie University in Halifax. He practised in Dartmouth, across the harbor from Halifax, for a short time before moving to the United States to specialize in obstetrics and gynecology.
He settled in Lewisburg, set up a private practice and conducted surgery at the Evangelical Community Hospital.
An advocate for women’s health, Dr. Fairweather also opened the first family planning clinic in the area. By his retirement in 1998, he had delivered thousands of babies in Lewisburg and in some instances, two generations of the same family.
“He was really special with children,” said Gordon Fairweather. “He loved his own and anyone else’s.”
Throughout his life, Dr. Fairweather kept in touch with Mr. Veness, who returned home to New Brunswick after the war to become a civil engineer. While they weren’t the closest of friends, they saw each other whenever Dr. Fairweather made a trip back to New Brunswick.
The last time they met was during Dr. Fairweather’s last visit, about four years ago. At that time, Dr. Fairweather gave a speech at a reunion of the North Nova Scotia Highlanders in which he emphasized the importance of living in the present.
“The war was an event that he and other veterans would never forget,” said his brother. “But he felt it was important to go on with life.”

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