| Mark Tennant thus entered the
world into a family with a long military tradition. Born in Winnipeg on June 13th,
1913, he enrolled in Army Cadets in Lethbridge, and later joined the Militia as a
private in the South Alberta Regiment, eventually reaching the rank of sergeant.
When war came in September 1939, Tennant enlisted in the Canadian Active Service
Force. Each unit received its own block of service numbers; the unit he joined, an
artillery battery in Lethbridge, assigned him the service number M9 - the lowest number in
the province of Alberta. He transferred himself to the Calgary Highlanders, and when
it was found he had been an NCO in the Militia, the RSM appointed him Orderly Sergeant at
Mewata Camp that very night. By
the time the battalion was ready to leave for Shilo in 1940, Tennant had been promoted to
Warrant Officer Class III and appointed Platoon Sergeant Major.
Many of the PSMs were commissioned as
officers after the battalion arrived in England in 1940; such was the case with Tennant,
who did not go to England until December 1940. He was promoted to Captain in June
1942.
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PSM Mark Tennant on the train platform in Calgary, prior
to embarking for Shilo with his platoon.
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| Tennant served in many roles
during the long period of training in England, and went ashore in Normandy with the
battalion in July 1944, having reached the rank of Captain. He had also earned his
nickname of "The Green Hornet" in England. His namesake had been a
character in a 1930s radio serial; the Green Hornet was the main character of this crime
show who always knew what the "bad guys" were up to. As Orderly
Officer, Tennant displayed great efficiency; part of his job was attending to minor
breaches of discipline - or in other words, knowing what the "bad guys" of the
Calgary Highlanders were doing. The
first fatal casualties in Normandy were members of Support Company, whom Tennant
commanded. In a 1992 interview, he said "I got hit myself. I checked one
of the fellows and I knew he was dead but I picked him up in my arms and carried him over
to the field dressing station....I never had any illusions that we were all going back
alive. It was either today or tomorrow. I had no trouble coping with that, I
just knew it was going to happen." |
Lieutenant Mark Tennant, Bognor Regis, England, December 1942.
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In action, Tennant scouted sites for the
weapons of his company (especially the 6 pounder anti-tank guns), and ensured that his men
were providing support for the rifle companies. He was also responsible for getting
necessities to the troops. During the attack on Tilly at the end of July, he
organized a relay of Universal Carriers, to provide PIAT and Bren ammunition to the
forward rifle companies. The regimental history tells us that it ....was a
day-in day-out struggle to get rations, water and ammunition up to the rifle
companies. Tennant ensured that every vehicle that went to the front had a water
tank tied to it but "the big thing was to get ammunition up to them," he later
remembered. "We used to tell them, 'don't be machine gun happy,' but they would
hear a bit of noise at night and fire off all their ammunition. So we had to get
ammunition up to them all the time." Tennant always had several cases of land
mines, grenades, and machine gun ammunition in his carrier and visited the rifle companies
as often as he could to keep them supplied.
On 22 August, he was called on to do a
reconnaissance for the entire battalion; it was not the first time, according to
Regimental historian David Bercuson. Tennant himself boasted that he was the only
Calgary Highlander who "really knew how to read a map." That same month,
Tennant was promoted to Major.
Life in Support Company was no less dangerous
than life with the rifle companies. Tennant later recounted an incident from the
night of 25 August in an interview:
Someone
had fired a flare right over our area and then the Stukas came in, their sirens screaming.
You could have struck a match on their noses they came so close to the ground.
As they pulled up, down came their bombs, not the ordinary kind but containers with
five to six hundred bomblets a little smaller than a grenade - grass-cutters. One
container landed near me and didn't explode, Thank God.
There's always been an argument about how many Stukas there were. I think maybe
three, others say half a dozen, others more. But they only made the one pass.
No one had dug in except for Bob Morgan-Deane who was killed the next day. He made
his platoon dig in and one of those clusters landed right beside them. Not one of
them got a scratch. But counting a liitle skirmish we had next day, (the battalion)
lost five officers and 115 men to those damn Stukas.
Normally, digging in was the first thing a
battalion did when it arrived anywhere; here the Highlanders had been ordered to make a
night move and were waiting for the order to get going.
Other duties in Support Company included
evacuating the wounded. On the 22nd of September, he found himself ferrying wounded
soldiers across the Albert Canal on makeshift rafts. Tennnant also found himself
acting as a forward observer for the 5th Field Regiment, RCA. On one occasion,
Tennant was directing artillery and mortar fire from the bow-gunner's position of a tank.
In an interview with Jeffrey Williams, he remembered:
Ahead of
us, a German was running away and I decided to let him go. I didn't want to shoot
the poor devil but then he turned back and picked something up. I thought that it
must be pretty valuable and that if he was that serious about it, we probably needed it
more than he did. I gave him the works and told the tank commander to stop. In
the German's hand was a tin can with a swastika on it, used to collect coins for the war
effort. And that had cost him his life!
Tennant continued to scout for billeting
locations, finding a first class "hotel-like" lodge for battalion headquarters
at the end of September. Other scouting missions were recce patrols into enemy
territory; one such mission found Tennant involved in a firefight on the night of 7
October; it hadn't been the first time he ran into enemy soldiers while patrolling.
The next day, when communications were cut
between battalion HQ and the forward companies, Tennant drove his carrier to a church,
hoping to survey the ground ahead from the steeple. He was hit by 20 mm gunfire on
the steps of the church, and evacuated. It was his second wound; he had also been
hit on July 27th.
The Army wanted to send Tennant home; his
wounds required months of hospitilization. Tennant wanted none of that.
"I talked to the colonel and got him to agree to let me stay as a training
officer. Later, I talked myself back into the war. I volunteered to fight a
war, not a portion of a war. They were my men and I figured I could probably look
after my men better than anybody else. I loved my men."
At the start of April, Tennant was back, now
in command of D Company. He led his company into vicious street fighting in the
Dutch town of Doetinchem, and later led his company in the capture of Groningen.
When his company went to ground under fire during the Groningen battle,
...Tennant was
determined to get them moving. "The men went to ground...they would have been
massacred if they had stayed there...I went to one platoon and said, 'Get going, you sons
of bitches, or I will gun gut you myself.' The padre looked around and he said to
me, 'Very crude, but very effective, Mark.' The men went in."
| On VE Day, Mark Tennant could think of only
one thing. "I wanted...to get a hold of my mother and tell her that I had
survived the war. That meant everything to me....None of us knew what we were going
back to, we didn't know what we were going to do. But we did know that we had
survived the damn thing." Tennant had been wounded three times in total, and
had also been Mentioned in Despatches three times. Tennant went on to serve in the Militia after World War Two,
commanding the Calgary Highlanders from 1953 to 1956. Afterwards, he was elected as
an Alderman of the City of Calgary and served from 1958 to 1969. He was made an
Honourary Lieutenant Colonel for life in 1977, and served as the Calgary Highlanders'
Honourary Lieutenant Colonel until 1981. He was awarded the Order of Canada in 1981
as well.
In 1995, a park in Doetinchem, The
Netherlands, was named in his honour, becoming "Mark Tennant
Plantsoen - A Canadian Liberator". Tennant spent the last years
of his life at the Colonel Belcher Hospital in Calgary, but even in his last years he
could be seen on recce missions downtown, in his motorized wheelchair. He passed
away on the 29th of December 1997, and was buried with full military honours by his
Regiment. His casket, by request, was draped with the Union Jack flag that his
father and grandfather had fought for. |
Major Mark Tennant, at left, with Lieutenant Colonel
Gregg, on the steps of City Hall in 1951.
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