Lieutenant-Colonel Jim Swayze
Lincoln and Welland Regiment

All ranks are held together by the fear of having their peers realize that they too are afraid, particularly among those of the social system to which we belong … It’s very, very difficult to have them men come to the situation where you realize that you’re going to say “charge” and they’re going to get up and run across a field and fire their weapons at someone else and; at the same time, there’s a fair chance that they’re going to get hit.

(Swayze quoted in Hayes, “The Friction of War,” 218)

Born on 1 January 1916 in Niagara Falls, Ontario, James Fletcher Swayze was an athlete and graduate of McMaster University. He was commissioned with the Lincoln and Welland Regiment and served as company commander for much of the Northwest Europe campaign. In the final days of the war as the battalion pushed into Germany, Lieutenant-Colonel R.C. Coleman said to him “You put in the first attack of the Lincoln and Welland. Now I want you to put in the last.” As Swayze recalled, “And I took A company and moved forward a thousand yards and stopped and that was the last we made.”

Swayze served as acting commanding officer on several occasions during the last months of the war and succeeded Coleman at the end of October 1945. He received the Distinguished Service Order and led the battalion home to Niagara in January 1946. A few years after the war, he told how he had managed to secure a war surplus tank for the region:

One night some of us got to talking about war souvenirs—the brass was pretty sticky about that stuff—and somebody suggested we try to get a tank home. We put in our bid, and first thing we knew, the tank arrived at St. Catharines.

In 1949, Swayze passed the Ontario bar and practiced law for many years in Welland, where he later worked as city solicitor.

He died on 25 May 1988.