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David Suzuki – a Bomb Fell on Hiroshima by Patrick Bruskiewich

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David Suzuki – a Bomb Fell on Hiroshima by Patrick Bruskiewich David Suzuki – a Bomb Fell on Hiroshima By Patrick Bruskiewich December 2013 Why do the Suzuki, Nakamura and Yamamoto clans have such a hatred towards Dr. Gordon Shrum and the wartime President of UBC? It might have something to do with the fact that Dr. Gordon Shrum and the wartime President of UBC, as well as some of the colleagues and friends of these gentleman, played an important role in defeating the Emperor of Japan and the Suzuki, Nakamura and Yamamoto Clans during the Second World War. Dr. Shrum and a number of other UBC professors did some exemplary Special Intelligence service for Allies during the Second World War, and keep true to their oath of secrecy. I have written about the remarkable story of Station Point Grey and Special Intelligence under a separate cover. It might also be because the Nakamura clan, David Suzuki’s maternal grandparents, hail from Hiroshima. We all know what happened there in August, 1945 … Dr. George Griffiths and an interesting Story In the early 1980’s Dr. George Griffith, an accomplished nuclear physicist, was teaching me an electronics course and when he found out that I was a naval reserve officer we struck up a friendship, which included lively discussion about things like the Battle of the Atlantic, the great submarine battle during the Second World War. (refer to Dr. George Griffiths, circa 1981). Dr. Griffiths had done wartime service with the Royal Navy's "Y-Service" in Newfoundland and had been directly involved with the allied efforts to plot, intercept and decipher naval messages to and from German U-Boats in the North Atlantic. Our weekly conversation and lunch of beef dip sandwiches had benefited greatly by the 1976 declassification of the ULTRA Secret, as well as a 1978 book describing how the Enigma machine code was broken at Bletchley Park. Solving puzzles has always been a fancy to me. This was one of the reasons I chose a career in mathematics and physics and a reason why codes and ciphers intrigued me in. Dr. George Griffiths, circa 1982 (Courtesy of the UBC Archives) The Quiet Canadian Dr. Griffiths had suggested I read the 1931 book by the American Herbert Yardley titled "The American Black Chamber'" a few weeks before I met Dr. Shrum for our one and only meeting. Dr. Griffiths also suggested I read H. Montgomery Hyde’s 1964 book “The Quiet Canadian”, which told the story of Sir William Stephenson – the famous Intrepid, and the work of British Security Coordination, and the British Secret Service during World War Two. The life of Sir William Stephenson had become popular folklore with the publication of the book The Man Called Intrepid, by a down and out journalist unfortunately was a book filled half with fact and half with fiction. H. Montgomery Hyde, on the other hand, worked for and with Intrepid during the Second World War, in particular with the infamous Vollard Case, and on other secret missions. Sir William Stephenson – Looking out on New York Harbor from the Rockefeller Centre The Vollard Caper was when the Nazis seized and then sent to America the superb Vollard collection of art pieces in an attempt to cash in on the plunder. H. Montgomery Hyde, in turn, pinched the Vollard collection away from the Nazis and arranged for its safe keeping for the duration of the war in Canada’s National Gallery in Ottawa. In Montgomery Hydes’s own words: “In October, 1940, the famous Vollard collection of impressionist paintings worth hundreds of thousands of dollars was consigned by the Vichy authorities to a French art expert in New York named Martin Fabiani. There was reason to believe that Fabiani was acting on German instructions and intended to sell the collection to secure dollar exchange for Hitler. The consignment, which consisted of 270 paintings and drawings by Renoir, thirty paintings by Cezanne, twelve by Gauguin, seven by Degas and also some by Manet, Monet and Picasso, had been in various Paris museums, whence the British Ministry of Economic Warfare feared that they had been abstracted (The collection was formed by Ambrose Vollard. See his Recollections of a Picture Dealer, 1936). The pictures were shipped from Lisbon for New York in the American Export Lines' Excalibur, which was brought into Bermuda by the British Contraband Control. Meanwhile instructions had been received from London to remove the contraband cargo. It fell to the writer of these pages to carry out this operation in defiance of the vessel's master who refused to open the strong-room where the precious packing cases reposed. This was eventually accomplished by blasting away in with oxy-acetylene flame burners, and the pictures were removed. So as to avoid the effects of the Bermuda climate, they were sent to Ottawa, where they were kept for the duration of the war in the Canadian National Gallery, having in the meantime been condemned as prize.” Given my interest in exciting things, for some reason it was this little vignette – the Vollard Caper – that drove home the unique things that Intrepid and his agents did for the cause of freedom during the Second World War. You couldn’t make this stuff up even in Hollywood. Gordon Shrum and the Man called Intrepid Over our beef dip sandwich the previous week Dr. Griffiths told me ‘on the QT’ that Dr. Gordon Shrum did work with and for Sir William Stephenson and B.S.C. during the Second World War, and that he knew the likes of Ian Fleming. Gordon Shrum was also a friend to Lester Bowles Pearson who set up the Examination Unit which decrypted Axis coded messages. But Dr. Griffiths added “even today the nature of Gordon’s work is still classified.” I, in turn, explained to Dr. Griffiths that the Flemings and the Bruces go back a long way, to as least as far back as Michael of Bruce and the Battle of Waterloo. I explained to him that my surname Bruskiewich means son of Bruce. Michael of Bruce was a British Secret Agent who smuggled a rather important French gentleman out of prison the night before his scheduled appointment with Monsieur Guillotine. When the guards arrived the following morning they find Michael of Bruce instead of their prisoner. It would have been bad form for the French to guillotine an Englishmen who was a colleague and friend of Wellington and the British Cabinet in London. After some haggling and the exchange of some gold pieces Michael of Bruce was set free. Michael of Bruce was asked by Wellington to remain in central Europe to help guarantee the Peace after the Treaty of Vienna. The work he did included special intelligence and many intrigues exploits, many of which even today remain locked away in the archives at Westminster. Michael of Bruce is the role model behind the near to real life character the Scarlet Pimpernel. George Griffiths was very amused by this, which helped to cement our friendship. He had read about the Scarlet Pimpernel when he was a child. On the more serious side, I also explained to Dr. Griffiths that two of my ancestors attended to Queen Victoria when she created the Dominion of Canada in 1867, and that I am related to both Lord Durham who married a Bruce and to James of Bruce one of Canada’s 19th century Governor Generals. The following week Dr. Gordon Shrum would invite me for lunch and a special conversation at the advice and suggestion of Dr. George Griffiths (see Station Point Grey and Special Intelligence: Part 1). Dr. Gordon Shrum and Some of his Colleagues After the Second World War Dr. Shrum would invite a number of unique physicist to make the University of British Columbia their home. Take, for instance, Dr. George Lawson Pickard (1913 - 2007) who was a professor of oceanography at UBC from 1949 to his retirement in 1974, had during the second world war did weapons development work for the RAF and RN. As his family wrote of Dr. George l. Pickard, in his 2007 obituary: “With the onset of WW II George worked with Sir R.V. Jones, at the Clarendon Laboratory Oxford, on the first successful use of infrared radiation to detect aircraft at night. In 1938 he was posted to the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnbourgh becoming Senior Scientific Officer and later Squadron Leader. George designed a simple two- spotlight beam altimeter to assist aircraft to fly at low altitudes for night attacks on submarines. He later applied this technique to Lancaster aircraft used for attacks on the Ruhr dams – a mission made famous in the book and movie “The Dam Busters”. Testing navigational aids required many flights over water and occupied Europe. In 1942 George qualified for membership in “The Goldfish Club” by surviving after his plane went down in the English Channel. In recognition of George’s contributions to the War effort, in 1946, he was decorated as a Member of the British Empire.” The Dam Buster raid on the three Ruhr dams, Mohne, Edersee and the Sorpe – Operation Chastise – on the 16-17th May, 1943 was made possible because of the precise altitude that could be flown due to Dr. Pickard’s two-spotlight altimeter that had been already developed for use aboard long range ASW patrol planes. The Dam Buster raid was made by Lancaster bombers of RAF No. 617 Squadron, led by the famous Wing Commander Guy Gibson. What was remarkable about this raid was the bouncing bomb designed by Barnes Wallis, a bomb that had to be launched a precise distance from the target, at a precise speed and at a precise altitude.
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