Major John C. Cave
27th Armoured (Sherbrooke Fusilier) Regiment

It’s a strange thing I can remember in detail what happened between 1925 and 1939, and yet the war years I guess I don’t want to remember them. Because it wasn’t a very pleasant thing to see men killed. I never got any real opportunity to distinguish myself if I could have, I never thought about it.

(Cave interview, 24 Aug 1978)

Born on 24 December 1907 in Birkenhead, Cheshire, England, and raised in Winnipeg, John Clifford Cave was a Permanent Force non-commissioned officer and armoured corps instructor. He had joined the PPCLI in 1925, trained as a machine gunner and was posted to the army tank school in 1938. He was commissioned in 1940 and served as tank instructor at Fort Knox, Kentucky before being assigned to the 4th Division under General F.F. Worthington.

In May 1942, he took over the 27th Armoured (Sherbrooke Fusilier) Regiment, replacing Major Aimé Biron. Cave worked to reorganize the unit which had been converted to armour months earlier. Although many men were reluctant to welcome an outsider, the war diary noted after a month “he has become well liked by everyone. He is a man of inexhaustible energy and spends very little time in his office, preferring to be out among the men and thus being in a position to make any changes or adjustments necessary to improve and speed up training.”

Cave took the regiment overseas on November 1942 and handed command over to the original CO Lieutenant-Colonel M.W. McA’Nulty in England. Cave took a senior officers’ course before rejoining the Sherbrookes as second-in-command in early 1943. He survived his tank being knocked out shortly after D-Day but would be evacuated by the end of June 1944. He volunteered for the Pacific War and served in the postwar army as a lieutenant-colonel and general staff officer.

Cave died in Sidney, British Columbia on 19 February 1991.