Arthur “Durwin” Dingle

Canadian Officers’ Training Corps – 6th Canadian Infantry Division

Arthur “Durwin” Dingle was born on 6 August 1926 in Northern Saskatchewan. As a child, he and his family moved to Wawota, Saskatchewan, a small town of just 250 people. He joined the boy scouts in his childhood, one of the only extracurricular activities available in his area. The organization helped him learn basic skills beyond what he was learning in school. In his teenage years, Durwin worked in his uncle’s garage helping with various chores and labour. Growing up during the depression, he was of the attitude that if his family needed help with anything, there were no questions asked. He would simply do whatever needed to be done to help his family. 

Durwin was the second youngest of six children in his family. During the Second World War, his eldest and second-eldest brothers joined the 101^st Light Anti-Aircraft Battery, while his third brother joined the Royal Canadian Air Force. His Father, who was a schoolteacher, was recruited as an educational officer in 1942. He worked under the British Air Commonwealth Training Program, a massive initiative that hosted and trained aircrew for the Allied war effort. 

During the winter of 1942-1943, the family moved to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, where their father had been teaching airmen math and physics at the University of Saskatchewan. In June 1943, the family moved to Winnipeg, Manitoba. The family lived with Durwin’s grandparents while his father was serving locally. When Durwin’s father was posted back to RCAF Station Dafoe in Saskatchewan, the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan’s No. 5 Bombing and Gunnery School, the family purchased a house in Winnipeg where he lived with his mother and younger brother. 

When Durwin turned 18, he joined the Canadian Officers’ Training Corps. Joining wasn’t a tough decision for Durwin; it just seemed to him like the right thing to do. He enlisted at the Fort Osborne Barracks in Winnipeg.

He completed basic training at Fort Garry in Winnipeg and then took advanced training at Wetaskiwin, Alberta. Being in the infantry, he learned how to shoot, assemble, and disassemble guns, “the hardest one to do was the Bren gun,” he said. As the war with Germany was ending, Durwin was posted to Vernon, British Columbia, to train for the war in the Pacific. He claimed the hardest part of his training was the gruelling overnight guard shifts. Durwin served under the 6^th Canadian Infantry Division attached to Pacific Command. There, he was also trained in combined operations, which gave infantrymen specialized training for amphibious landings. He was then posted to Sarcee Barracks in Calgary. There, he volunteered to help build caissons over the Bow River for about five weeks. In Calgary, he chopped down trees for the construction with nothing but hand tools.

The atomic bomb was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, coincidentally on Durwin’s birthday. The division he had been serving with was to have been part of the Commonwealth Corps, formed for a planned invasion of Japan. Fortunately for him, the surrender of Japan in August 1945 meant that there was no need for an invasion force, and he applied for an educational discharge. His application was accepted, and he was released from service in early 1946.

Durwin then attended the University of Manitoba, receiving a bachelor’s degree in math and physics. He received a reestablishment credit for his time in service, which paid for his first couple of years of schooling. 

After graduating, he worked for a company on the Winnipeg street railway before answering an ad for technical officers to work with the Defense Research Board at Fort Churchill in Manitoba. He worked there from 1950-1952. His first task was installing and setting up all the physical measuring instrumentation for the biochemical lab, where many experiments were later conducted. Later, he received statistical analysis training, which he used in the lab to interpret results. His work with the military was done as a civilian contractor.

While attending graduate school, Durwin went to Toronto, Ontario, to visit a brother and interviewed for a position at Dunlop Tire. The company had decided to set up a research division in Canada, and Durwin was offered a position once he had finished graduate school. He accepted the position and helped establish the physical research department, working mostly with elastomers and plastics. He trained and recruited students from Brooklyn Polytechnic University in New York before setting up their own lab at the Dunlop Factory on Queen Street East in Toronto. 

While Durwin’s eldest brother became the president of the Emerson Legion in Manitoba, Durwin never joined. He never felt very much like a veteran since he never was sent to a theatre of combat. When he reflects on the war, he thinks of both those who came home with scars and those who never came home at all. When discussing remembrance, he thinks about his cousin who was shot down in his plane and spent three years as a prisoner of war, his uncle who was killed while serving in the air force, and his sister’s brother-in-law, Howard Heasman, who was wounded while serving with the South Saskatchewan Regiment during the Dieppe Raid in 1942. Just before he was going to get into the boat, a piece of shrapnel came down and took off his nose. Whenever Durwin saw the scars on his face he was reminded of the horrors of war. As of 2025, Durwin resides at Sunnybrook Veterans Centre in Toronto.