Last Island Warrior Falls: Canada’s WWII Legacy Faces Final Chapter

Paul Riverbank, 12/21/2025PEI mourns WWII veteran Lloyd Gates—last Island link to wartime sacrifice and quiet heroism.

He wasn’t a man who boasted, not by habit anyway; but people noticed. A plain blue navy blazer and medals on Remembrance Day, his step a little slower each year. It wasn’t grandstanding. He wore his history, not to impress, but because it shaped him in ways that farmwork and Island wind never did.

Gates grew up among potato fields near Charlottetown. Back then, a young man could watch the planes fly overhead from the Upton strip and feel the pull—less about king and country, more about curiosity and camaraderie. He signed up with the Royal Canadian Air Force because most of his friends were going; maybe it seemed, for a time, like signing up to see what the world looked like beyond red soil.

But adventure can turn on a dime. His brother Bob went too—never came back. A crash, somewhere over Italy. “That changed him,” his stepson remembers, though Lloyd didn’t like to dwell on grief. Still, the shadow of it shaped the stories he later told—never making war into some grand hero’s parade, never glossing over the cost.

He trained as a radio telegraph operator, posted to Eindhoven in the Netherlands, far from home. Some work—painting stripes on aircraft before D-Day, so no one mistook friend for foe—wasn’t glorious, just essential. Long hours, hard on the knees, but a different sort of importance. Other times, simple things stand out: the taste of unfamiliar bread, chatter in a language he’d never quite catch.

The war ended but didn’t blow away. Gates spent nearly a year helping with occupation, gathering up arms, helping take apart a machine built for destruction. He returned, eventually, to PEI. Veterans Affairs put him in a sign-painting course, but as it happened, he was allergic to the paint, and that plan vanished. He learned engraving instead—delicate work, his hands shaping names and stories onto metal and, later, jewelry. Eventually, he ran the counter at the Charlottetown Kmart; people on the Island still come across a piece with his careful touch.

Maybe it was only with age that he started to share more of what those years meant. “Talking about it, I think that helped him,” said his stepson Paul Robinson—not for show, but as a way to find normal again. There were things people now call PTSD; nightmares he’d never put a name to, memories that stuck long past peacetime.

He leaves Mary, his wife, along with a wide, interwoven family—children, stepchildren, grandchildren. To them, he was never just a piece of history. The town knew him not for medals but for quiet reliability, a memory of a deeper sacrifice most will never witness. And now, the Island has lost another connection to that bridge—between lives built and lost, years of violence, and the steady, daily business of carrying on.

Gates never stepped into the spotlight, but it’s not hard to imagine him pausing, straightening his blazer on a cold November morning, taking one more careful breath before the ceremony begins. That, too, is a kind of heroism.

It’s hard to imagine now, with the steady drift of years, but once Prince Edward Island felt closer to the second World War than to this one. That closeness dimmed again this week. Lloyd Gates—one of the last of the Island’s Second World War veterans—died at 101 in Charlottetown, quietly closing another page.He wasn’t a man who boasted, not by habit anyway; but people noticed. A plain blue navy blazer and medals on Remembrance Day, his step a little slower each year. It wasn’t grandstanding. He wore his history, not to impress, but because it shaped him in ways that farmwork and Island wind never did.Gates grew up among potato fields near Charlottetown. Back then, a young man could watch the planes fly overhead from the Upton strip and feel the pull—less about king and country, more about curiosity and camaraderie. He signed up with the Royal Canadian Air Force because most of his friends were going; maybe it seemed, for a time, like signing up to see what the world looked like beyond red soil.But adventure can turn on a dime. His brother Bob went too—never came back. A crash, somewhere over Italy. “That changed him,” his stepson remembers, though Lloyd didn’t like to dwell on grief. Still, the shadow of it shaped the stories he later told—never making war into some grand hero’s parade, never glossing over the cost.He trained as a radio telegraph operator, posted to Eindhoven in the Netherlands, far from home. Some work—painting stripes on aircraft before D-Day, so no one mistook friend for foe—wasn’t glorious, just essential. Long hours, hard on the knees, but a different sort of importance. Other times, simple things stand out: the taste of unfamiliar bread, chatter in a language he’d never quite catch.The war ended but didn’t blow away. Gates spent nearly a year helping with occupation, gathering up arms, helping take apart a machine built for destruction. He returned, eventually, to PEI. Veterans Affairs put him in a sign-painting course, but as it happened, he was allergic to the paint, and that plan vanished. He learned engraving instead—delicate work, his hands shaping names and stories onto metal and, later, jewelry. Eventually, he ran the counter at the Charlottetown Kmart; people on the Island still come across a piece with his careful touch.Maybe it was only with age that he started to share more of what those years meant. “Talking about it, I think that helped him,” said his stepson Paul Robinson—not for show, but as a way to find normal again. There were things people now call PTSD; nightmares he’d never put a name to, memories that stuck long past peacetime.He leaves Mary, his wife, along with a wide, interwoven family—children, stepchildren, grandchildren. To them, he was never just a piece of history. The town knew him not for medals but for quiet reliability, a memory of a deeper sacrifice most will never witness. And now, the Island has lost another connection to that bridge—between lives built and lost, years of violence, and the steady, daily business of carrying on.Gates never stepped into the spotlight, but it’s not hard to imagine him pausing, straightening his blazer on a cold November morning, taking one more careful breath before the ceremony begins. That, too, is a kind of heroism.