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2 Intelligence Company

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CEREMONY AT UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO HONORED INTELLIGENCE OFFICERS KILLED IN SECOND WORLD WAR

TORONTO -- Sixty years ago, in September of 1944, Canadians Frank Pickersgill and J.K. Macalister were executed by the Nazis in Germany. Shortly after graduating from the University of Toronto, they had volunteered for one of the most dangerous duties imaginable in the Second World War-- to parachute into Occupied France to aid the Resistance.

Both men had declined opportunities to avoid military service: Pickersgill with Canada's external affairs department, Macalister as a law lecturer at U of T. Instead, deeply concerned for the people of the Nazi-occupied countries they had previously known from their student travels in Europe, they enlisted as army intelligence officers. They then signed up together for special operations duty, to join local resistance fighters in their secret war of sabotage and ambush.

Captured in 1943, the pair were relentlessly and brutally interrogated by the German Gestapo, which wanted to use them to lure other Allied agents to their deaths. They always refused. They never gave up hope: at one point Pickersgill assaulted a guard and jumped out a high window, but he was shot and recaptured. In late 1944, while the Allies were completing the liberation of France, they were sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp, and executed as spies.

Their ending was cruel, but the strong example of selflessness, courage, and concern for the oppressed that Pickersgill and Macalister set through the course of their lives has inspired Canadians for six decades. On Sept. 15, 2004, members of 2 Intelligence Company of the Canadian Forces, along with members of the University of Toronto Soldiers' Tower Committee, honored their memory with a wreath-laying at the site of the garden originally dedicated to them, at the foot of U of T's Soldiers' Tower. The Hon. Roy MacLaren, author of "Canadians Behind Enemy Lines, 1939-1945" spoke at the ceremony. There was also a reading from "Macalister," a poem by the late Prof. Douglas LePan, a former principal of U of T's University College and veteran, who originally established the garden in their memory.

For more information, contact:

2 Intelligence Company
416-633-6200 x2949
info@2intcoy.org

Photos