On the third floor of Regina’s Wascana Rehabilitation Centre sits a quiet but observant Second World War vet, lost in thought and clutching his morning coffee in a faded mug with “craft room 3-5” written on the side. At 90 years old, he maintains a full head of white hair, matching the white sneakers on his feet resting comfortably on the foot pedals of his wheelchair. Every man in this ward is a veteran, most of the Second World War with a smattering of them seeing action in Korea. For many of them, everything they accomplished is in their service file-the man in the wheel chair with white sneakers being the exception.
John Makie’s file says he was a petty officer in the Canadian navy, and occasionally he was. However, for most of the Second World War, the self-described “bush kid” from Northern Ontario was Agent 034 of the British Secret Service’s Underwater Demolition Squad-the “Frogmen.”
“I don’t even know who came up with the word ‘frogman,’” Makie says. “It was interesting enough that they picked up on it. It suited the situation pretty good.”
In the prime of his life, you’d never suspect Makie was a secret agent. In his younger days he had an athletic build, but at 5’7 he was a far cry from the tall, mysterious strangers who fill the role in the public’s imagination. He didn’t attend any elite schools or prestigious academies either, aside from his training in the rolling hills of Tobermorey, Scotland. Instead, the youngest son of a sawmill worker honed his hunting and survival skills in the bushes of Sioux Lookout, a town of about 5,000 situated halfway between the Great Lakes and the Manitoba border. Ironically, that’s what made him a good candidate.
“I fit their bill,” he says. “I had bush experience. I was brought up in the wilds... I knew how to conduct myself in the bush and survive.”
Rustic survival skills may seem like an odd talent to look for in a diver, but as with most espionage work, the term “Underwater Demolition Squad” is slightly misleading. The UDS primarily infiltrated ports and shipyards, blowing up German warships, submarines, transports and cargo vessels. However, agents had to be versatile too. Many of Makie’s missions took place on land, although the agents almost always arrived off the coast paddling inflatable life rafts and left on fishing vessels.
Demolition was usually the objective. Between 1942 and 1946, Makie and 72 other Australian, British and Canadian agents fanned out across Nazi and Japanese occupied territories, tasked with sabotaging everything from fuel reserves to rail lines to communications towers. Agents also gathered intelligence and sometimes fought off enemy soldiers, all before slipping back into the water.
“One time I was just looking up over (from) behind a little bush,” Makie remembers. “A bullet went right by me. I thought, ‘where the hell did that come from?’ You were very careful. They had their men and they were well trained too. They were a little better trained, I think, than we were because they were right from the area where we were trying to walk into.”
It’s the kind of life that’s been immortalized in movies like the James Bond classic “Thunderball,” which features an underwater fight scene based largely on Frogman tactics. Makie has never seen a James Bond movie in his life. He’s skeptical of Hollywood’s romanticized version.
“It’s dramatized,” is all he says when asked about how Hollywood portrays spies and secret agents. “(Viewers) assume this is what’s being done.”
There are some similarities. Like many Hollywood blockbusters, Makie’s missions took him to exotic locals like Burma, Hong Kong, France and Sweden. The Frogmen had access to the latest technological advancements, in his case first class diving gear and the Limpet Mine, an innovative underwater explosive device they attached to the hulls of enemy ships. They also met and spoke with the likes of Louis Mountbatten and Winston Churchill. However, unlike their silver screen counterparts, real allied agents faced a staggering death toll. Of the 72 men Makie trained with in Scotland, only three survived the war.
“I saw too many men get killed right beside me,” he remembers. “In Hong Kong we went up once... up in the hills. The British, they’d send four or five naval people up there. They were commandos. They only thing you’d see of them were their heads coming back. They were up there and they were looking for the enemy, well they found them. But the enemy cut off their heads. Like, ‘don’t bother coming up here’ eh. So when you’re young, it scares the living hell out of you.”
Training methods were harsh. Makie tells stories about claustrophobia drills designed to weed out agents who couldn’t handle cramped spaces, and exercises to help them escape a submerged submarine. At times, the training regime seemed like it was designed for Spartan soldiers, not the Allied navy.
“We wondered why they were doing this to us,” he recalls. “It didn’t take long (in the field) to find out.”
Over five years Makie and a rotating cast of agents would conduct 11 clandestine missions around the world, most of which were successful. He helped repair convoy transports stuck at sea while sailing for Russia, helped capture German Enigma Machines for the code breakers at Bletchley Park, and was part of the squad tasked with quickly and quietly killing a group of Japanese soldiers who had refused an official order to lay down their arms. Instead they had slaughtered the British officers sent to accept their surrender. Almost all of them began and ended with a quick swim underwater, either to or from shore, occasionally with enemies in pursuit. Most of the time, however, it was a solitary journey, even when part of a squad.
“When you go into the ocean and you go down about 10-15 ft... you don’t realize that you’re all alone,” he explains. “No matter which way you kick or turn or twist. Every time you look out you’re all alone, except for the odd screwball fish that would go by. Really it’s a very lonely world.”
He suffered three injuries for his trouble, all of them, ironically, in Norway. In 1943 he was hit in the leg by a sniper after his squad blew up a communications site. Later that same year he was hit in the back by shrapnel while trying to destroy a heavily guarded railway bridge. Finally, in 1945 he was stabbed in the foot by German divers after completing a mission off the Norwegian Coast.
“I don’t think (the enemy) had any conscience. As long as they got their thing done, that was the important thing.”
However, for all his visible scars, it’s the invisible ones that caused him the most pain. Like all agents, Makie took an oath under the Canadian Secrets Act of 1939 promising not to talk about the events for 50 years. He returned from the war suffering heavily from PTSD, which led to heavy drinking. Compelled by his oath to keep quiet, Makie silently suffered through the trauma. When the restrictions were finally lifted in the mid-‘90s, Makie began to slowly tell his family about his experiences.
“I thought they might have something negative to tell me,” he says.
Fortunately, it went better than expected. One of his sons (also named John) even wrote a book about his father’s activities called “The Spy Worker,” although the process was far from easy. Makie’s son wrote that his father suffered severe nightmares, flashbacks and reoccurring trauma during the interviews. Infact, the entire project was put on hold so Makie could re-enter counselling. The interviews between father and son revealed just how much the elder Makie had changed. The man who had once enjoyed outdoor activities like hunting and fishing, now found himself physically unable to skin a deer.
However, Makie is a man of few regrets.
“What good are regrets,” he says. “If I had regrets I wouldn’t be here talking to you.”
Throughout the interview there were plenty of pauses and a few tears. This is a serious thing, he says, talking about his experience. He wants there to be an official record of what happened, although there will always be a bit of mystery to Agent 034. As his son notes in “The Spy Worker,” almost all the documents relating to the UDS were destroyed. Simply verifying his accounts is difficult to do, since there are so few people left to corroborate what happened. In some ways, that’s why he agrees to talk about it, because there are so few people left who can.
“(The book) would become a fulfillment, not so much to myself, but to the general public because... every time the American’s have a good burst of gas or something they put it in the paper and inflate it. So I said, well, we’re just as good as they are and comparable in size and what have you. They only think they’re the best.”
John Makie’s tenure with the UDS ended in 1946. When he got back home he enrolled at the University of Toronto. Oddly enough he became an accountant, because he’d heard there were plenty of jobs in the field. He wrote a few books, none of which were related to his war experiences, and later moved to Regina to become an investment advisor. Today he lives out his days the way he always has... in anonymity. After all, he never went looking for a career in the secret service. He simply enlisted in the Canadian Navy. The rest is history.
“I wanted to serve,” he says. “That was all.”
