Lieutenant-Colonel George Bullock
West Nova Scotia Regiment

Would [I] be able to meet the spiritual needs of the men whom then Lieutenant Colonel Bullock had personally recruited and led into this maelstrom? … It was only later, after I had been attached to the West Novas, that I realized the importance of some of the questions Captain Bullock raised during that brief visit. So much was left unsaid.

(L.F. Wilmot, Through the Hitler Line, 11)

Born in Gibraltar on 4 June 1884, Gerald Wetherall Bullock was an Anglican clergyman in Bridgewater, Nova Scotia and an army chaplain who had been twice wounded during the First World War. He went on to join the militia and was active in the Canadian Legion. When critics complained that military camps taught young men bad habits, Bullock defended militia service, arguing that swearing and drinking were more likely to be picked up in civilian society anyway. He became commanding officer of the West Nova Scotia Regiment in 1936 and led the battalion overseas after mobilization four years later.

At fifty-five years old, the veteran reverend was deemed too old for active service soon after arriving in the United Kingdom. In February 1940, Bullock relinquished command to Lieutenant-Colonel Milton Gregg, who had earned the Victoria Cross at the Hindenburg Line in September 1918. During the first war, Gregg had been a lieutenant in the Royal Canadian Regiment while Bullock had been the battalion chaplain.

Some soldiers welcomed the change in command. “The colonel we had leaving Nova Scotia is transferred to the church unit. He was a church of England minister in N.S,” one corporal wrote to his parents. “This one we have with us now won the VC and the MC in the last war so we have an experienced leader anyway.” While Gregg would eventually return to Canada for officer training duties, Bullock remained overseas.

Despite his age and seniority, Bullock reverted in the rank to captain. In April 1943, he went to North Africa as part of the War Graves Registration Unit. Following the invasions of Sicily and Italy, he worked to locate every Canadian soldier’s grave and designate temporary military cemeteries. In January 1944, he had to bury his own 20-year-old son, Captain Reginald Warren Bullock, who had been severely wounded at Ortona. Called to the field hospital, Bullock had been with his son when he died. The Toronto Star reporter Gregor Clark summarized:

So there is the story of a father and son, or a son and his father. It is probably unparalleled in the Canadian army and by reason of so many things, such as the father’s reversion from commanding officer to captain, perhaps not paralleled anywhere. It is a story to think upon if at anytime we feel a little comfortable regarding our share.

(Toronto Star, 27 Jan 1944, 2)

With this personal loss, Bullock returned to Canada. “Now that Reg is gone,” his wife stated, there is nothing for him to stay for now. Though he was the kind of a man who loved a good fight.”

Bullock became an archdeacon in the Anglican Church and died in Middleton, Nova Scotia in 1973.