1. This is the extraordinary story of Toppy Topham — a medic with the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion — and how he died...

2. March 1945. WWII was nearly over. Nine months since D-Day.

The 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion had been there: students, shopkeepers & dentists from places like Calgary, Saskatoon & Toronto leapt into the air above France, dropped behind enemy lines to secure bridges & roads

3. Hundreds of them had died doing it. And the following winter, the battalion had patrolled the freezing snows of the Ardennes Forest, resisting the brutal German counter-attack at the Battle of the Bulge.

4. Since then, the Allies had pushed all the way across Western Europe into Germany itself — but there was one more mammoth task ahead of them: they needed to cross the Rhine River.

What was left of Hitler’s army was waiting for them on the other side.

5. And so, the Allies launched one of the biggest airborne operations in the history of the world: Operation Varsity.

Thousands of planes & gliders took off in England and soared across Europe. They stretched out for more than 300km, took 2.5 hours to pass by.

6. When they reached the Rhine, tens of thousands of men leapt out of the planes, white parachutes bursting open in the morning light—easy targets for the bullets & shells that rose to meet them.

Many died before they hit the ground. Hundreds of planes fell burning from the sky.

7. But that’s not how Toppy Topham died.

8. Frederick George Topham had been born in Toronto during the First World War, had gone to school at Runnymede Collegiate on Jane Street, and spent some time working as a miner at Kirkland Lake.

9. He’d come to Europe as a medic with the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion, stitching up wounded men on the front lines.

Now, he was among those floating down out of the sky — but unlike so many others, he was lucky enough to survive the drop.

10. That was good news for the men below. They needed him that bloody morning. Many had been shot on their way down.

So Topham got to work, rushing from one injured paratrooper to the next: performing first aid, tending to wounds, saving lives.

11. An hour after his jump, Topham heard yet another cry for help. An injured solider was lying in the open, bullets whizzing around him. A medic ran over, knelt down at the man’s side & was shot dead. A second died the same way.

Topham saw it all happen—then rushed out to help.

12. The air was laced with machine gun & sniper fire, but he made it all the way through to the wounded soldier, tending to his patient among the dead.

That’s how Toppy Topham got shot.

In the face.

13. But that’s not how Toppy Topham died.

14. Fighting the pain, blood pouring from his mangled nose & cheek, he stood his ground, gave the solider first aid, and carried him through the hail of bullets into the woods to safety.

Then he turned around and headed right back out again to help more of the wounded men.

15. For the next two hours, he refused to stop working, refused to let anyone take care of his bloodied face until the entire area had been cleared of casualties.

16. And his day wasn’t over yet. On his way back to join his company, Topham came across an armoured machine gun carrier. It was on fire, hit by a shell. Men were trapped inside. Mortars were still landing all around it. An officer warned everyone to stand back.

Topham rushed in

17. Flames leapt from the carrier and explosions burst all around him...

But that’s not how Toppy Topham died either.

18. He found three men inside the vehicle and carried each of them to safety. One died of his wounds, but the other two survived.

They wouldn’t be the last lives he saved that day. The Canadian medic kept working for hours on end.

19. It would take the Allies a day and a half to win that battle. More than 60 Canadians died; nearly 200 were wounded.

Then, they pressed on deeper into Germany until they finally ran into the Soviet army coming the other way. The war in Europe was over.

20. The 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion was the very first unit sent home to Canada. They arrived in Halifax having completed every mission they’d ever been given, and having never given up an objective they’d won.

21. Back home in Toronto, the city celebrated their new hero. They threw him a parade down Bay Street. He laid the cornerstone for the new Sunnybrook Memorial Hospital, built for veterans of the war. Soon an entire neighbourhood bore his name: Topham Park on St. Clair East.

22. He was awarded the Victoria Cross — the highest military honour in the Commonwealth.

(Nearly 60 years later, when it went up for auction, his old battalion raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep it in Canada. They gave it to the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa.)

23. Topham remained modest even while he was being hailed as a hero. “I don’t believe that one boy in the outfit wouldn’t have done the same,” the told the Star.

With the war over, he settled down to a quiet life in Etobicoke.

24. He briefly worked for the Toronto police until he realized they wanted to use him for public relations rather than to patrol a beat. Then he went to work for Toronto Hydro instead.

25. It was on spring day in 1968 that Topham climbed high up a hydro pole to check a power line in the Junction. It was an ordinary part of his job, nowhere near as risky as his death-defying feats on the banks of the Rhine.

But on this day, something went terribly wrong.

26. Four thousand volts of electricity were suddenly sent coursing through his body. He lost his grip and fell twenty-five feet onto the ground below.

27. But *that’s* not how Toppy Topham died either.

He was rushed to Toronto General Hospital and, amazingly, survived the shock and the fall.

28. No, it was years later that Toppy Topham died.

He’d survived the horrors of the Second World War, a bullet to the face, a burning machine gun carrier, a terrible electrical accident, and a dangerous fall, but his life finally ended in a most mundane way.

29. Toppy Topham died of a simple heart attack in 1974.

Thanks so much for reading — this is one of several war stories you'll find in The Toronto Book of the Dead, which you can check out here: https://www.dundurn.com/books/Toronto-Book-Dead