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The moving finger of fate moved early for 17 members of the 2nd Royal Canadian Horse Artillery.

The Canoe River disaster on November 21, 1950 would also touch the hierarchy of the Canadian National Railway (CNR), as well as a hapless 22-year-old telegrapher by the name of John Atherton, who needed our Prime Minister – John Diefenbaker – to defeat his manslaughter charge in the courts.

The accident involved two steam locomotives – one carrying ordinary freight, and the other the troops heading for Korea. The accident was at the west end of a high trestle bridge near Canoe River, B.C. in the Canadian Rockies. The cause was, according to the CNR, because a telegram message to the eastbound train managed to skip the important words, something like “HOLD UP AT CEDARSIDE.”

The eastbound train continued full bore until it met the westbound train.

The eastbound train crew said that the part about sidetracking never arrived.

More now about Diefenbaker. Firstly, he was not licensed to practice law in British Columbia. According to hearsay, he had to take a test which consisted of one question. The trial hinged in part on one statement where Diefenbaker said that the snow on the wires was responsible for the elimination of the important words. The media covered the trial for weeks.

An official from the CNR apparently irritated our thirteenth Prime Minister, who engaged in a heated exchange with a Colonel Pepler, representing the railway. A highlight of the trial was when Diefenbaker, in a critical blast aimed at the railway official and the lawyer, Colonel Pepler, said, “I suppose the reason you put these soldiers in wooden cars with steel cars on either side was so that, no matter what they might subsequently find in Korea, they’d always be able to say, ‘Well, we had worse than that in Canada.’”

Apparently the answer from Pepler was, “I want to make it clear that, in this case, we are not concerned about the deaths of a few privates going to Korea.”

Diefenbaker countered: “You’re not concerned about the killing of a few privates?” Then he added, drawing himself up to his full height and beaming with sarcasm, “Oh, Colonel!”