Drive south of the 401 in Ajax and read the street signs. Harwood. Exeter. Achilles. Admiral. Burcher. Woodhouse. Parry. Some of them carry a small silhouette of a warship.
They are not decoration. The majority of streets in that part of Ajax are named after the men who served aboard HMS Ajax, HMS Exeter and HMNZS Achilles at the Battle of the River Plate on 13 December 1939 — the Royal Navy's first major surface victory of the Second World War. Harwood Avenue is named for Commodore Henry Harwood, who commanded the British force from Ajax's bridge. The Town of Ajax began the practice in 1958 and extended it in 2014.
Most people who live on those streets have no idea. That is true of almost all of this: Durham Region has one of the densest concentrations of Second World War history in Canada, and nearly all of it is invisible from the road.
Here is what happened here — and, at the end, how to spend an afternoon seeing what survives.
1. Ajax was a bomb factory before it was a town
In 1940 this was farmland in Pickering Township. The federal government expropriated roughly 2,900 acres of it — about twelve square kilometres — from eighteen farm families, at around $125 an acre. Several of those families had worked that land for generations and did not consider the price fair. Army surveyors were walking the fields by February 1941.
What went up on it was Defence Industries Limited, the largest shell-filling plant in the British Empire. The boundaries are worth knowing because you can still drive them: Duffins Creek on the west, Pickering Beach Road on the east, the 401 on the north, Lake Ontario on the south. Inside that rectangle went about thirty miles of railway, thirty miles of road, fifteen men's dormitories, twenty-one women's residences, a hospital, a post office, a school, a recreation centre with a fourteen-lane bowling alley, and roughly 600 prefabricated houses.
At its peak about 9,000 people worked there, and this is the part that tends to stop people: women vastly outnumbered men on the lines. By January 1942 the ratio was better than two to one, and some accounts put it at three-quarters of the workforce. Around 2,350 women were recruited from outside the region — from the Prairies, the Maritimes, across Ontario — and housed in the on-site residences.
They handled TNT, amatol and RDX. They wore special uniforms and leather-soled shoes, removed every bobby pin before a shift, and faced fines or jail for carrying a cigarette or a match onto the site. They worked forty-eight-hour, six-day weeks across three shifts. Men earned 71 to 80 cents an hour. Women doing comparable work earned about fifty cents.
Between 1941 and the summer of 1945 the plant filled more than 40 million shells. Legion Magazine puts it higher still — over 51 million units of heavy ammunition plus nearly 234 million caps, detonators and pellets.
In 2024 Parks Canada designated munitions production at the Defence Industries Limited factories a national historic event. By July 1944, roughly 40 per cent of Canada's 107,000 munitions workers were women, and Canada had become the fourth-largest munitions-producing nation among the Allies. Parks Canada, National Program of Historical Commemoration
Where the name came from — and why it matters to your deed
The plant needed a name for its postal address. Management ran an internal contest. Frank Holroyd, the assistant safety director, won it with "Ajax," after the cruiser. The other names on the ballot were Dilco and Powder City. It is worth a moment's thought that Ajax came within one vote of being called Powder City.
When the plant closed in 1945 the town did not. The University of Toronto took the site over from January 1946 to April 1949, because enrolment had exploded from 7,265 registrations in autumn 1944 to 17,060 by 1946 — 9,700 of them veterans — and the St. George campus could not hold them. The Ajax Division used 428 acres and 111 buildings and taught about 6,000 students, peaking at 3,312 in 1946–47. From 1949 to 1953 the former women's residences housed displaced persons from Europe.
And then the thing that actually made Ajax a town: Wartime Housing Limited offered its renters the chance to buy, at 10 per cent down with 25-year mortgages of $2,500 to $3,300. War-worker rentals became owner-occupied homes. Ajax became an improvement district on 1 November 1950 with a population of 5,124, and a town in 1954.
If you own a house in south Ajax, that is the lineage. A farm, expropriated. A munitions plant. A campus full of veterans. Then a mortgage.
2. Camp X: the spy school on the lakeshore
Ten kilometres east, on the shoreline where Whitby meets Oshawa, Britain built something it did not tell the Canadian Prime Minister about.
Special Training School No. 103 opened on 6 December 1941 — the day before Pearl Harbor. It was the first purpose-built facility of its kind in North America, serving Britain's Special Operations Executive, and it was run by Sir William Stephenson, the Winnipeg-born head of British Security Co-ordination in New York, whose codename was Intrepid.
More than 500 agents trained there before going behind enemy lines. Courses ran three to four weeks with roughly thirty-two people at a time, covering sabotage, subversion, intelligence gathering, lock picking, explosives, radio work and silent killing.
The other half of the site mattered more. From May 1942, Hydra — a 10-kilowatt high-frequency relay station built by the engineer Benjamin deForest "Pat" Bayly — carried secret traffic between Ottawa, New York, Washington and Bletchley Park. By mid-1944 it was transmitting around 30,000 and receiving around 9,000 message groups a day. Members of the Canadian Women's Army Corps sent, received, transcribed and decoded that traffic.
And in September 1945, after the Soviet cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko defected with proof of a Soviet spy ring operating in Canada, the RCMP hid and questioned him here. His family lived on the site until 1947. Historians generally mark that defection as the moment the Cold War began in the West — and it was managed from a field in Whitby.
About the James Bond story
You will read, often, that Ian Fleming trained at Camp X and that James Bond was born on this shoreline. Be careful with it.
The Canadian Encyclopedia states plainly that the claim is unsubstantiated. The confusion may come from Fleming staying near Toronto's St. James-Bond Church. The official Ontario plaque on the site is carefully worded and says only that the camp's activities "have inspired spy-fiction writers."
What is fair to say is more interesting anyway: Fleming moved in the same intelligence world as Stephenson, and many scholars think Stephenson himself was a model for Bond. And one writer really did train here — Roald Dahl, who went on to write Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. So did Paul Dehn, an instructor who later wrote screenplays for the Bond films.
What is there now
The training school closed in April 1944. The Royal Canadian Corps of Signals ran the site as a communications station until 1969. The buildings came down after that — sources differ on whether the last of them went in 1969 or as late as 1977. The land was renamed Intrepid Park in 1976, and the Camp X Memorial was dedicated in 1984.
Today there is grass, the lake, and two plaques. One describes STS 103 and Hydra; the other honours Stephenson. That is all. It is also, somehow, enough — the lake is the reason the camp was put there, and standing on that shore is the closest you will get to understanding why.
One building survives. Part of an original dormitory was moved to Thickson Road in Whitby and used for storage; Durham College students did restoration work on it in 2016, and there are proposals to bring it back to the park. Camp X artifacts are on display at the Region of Durham headquarters, 605 Rossland Road East, Whitby.
3. Camp 30: where the U-boat commanders were kept
Bowmanville, 2020 Lambs Road. Before the war this was the Bowmanville Boys Training School, established in the mid-1920s and, in Parks Canada's own words, "widely considered the most progressive institution of its kind in Canada." Officials had barely seven months to convert it.
From November 1941 to April 1945 it held German officers — over 800 of them — including Otto Kretschmer, commander of U-99 and the highest-scoring U-boat ace of the war.
In October 1942 it produced the strangest three days in Durham's history. After the Dieppe Raid, German forces chained Canadian prisoners; Canada was ordered to shackle German prisoners in reprisal. 126 men at Camp 30 were selected. They refused.
What followed, from 10 to 12 October 1942, is known as the Battle of Bowmanville. There was hand-to-hand fighting. Around 400 prisoners barricaded themselves in the mess hall for more than a day. Canadian reinforcements — the Veterans Guard, plus army cadet commandos brought in from Kingston — arrived on Thanksgiving and broke the barricade with fire hoses and tear gas. Contemporary accounts describe guards improvising with hockey sticks.
Dozens were hurt on both sides. One Canadian guard suffered a fractured skull; a German prisoner, Volkmar Koenig, was shot twice by a tower guard. Remarkably, nobody was killed. It remains the only site in North America where prisoners of war revolted against their guards.
Operation Kiebitz, and the man who got over the wall
A year later the German navy tried to get four of its U-boat commanders out. The plan — Operation Kiebitz — was to break Kretschmer, Horst Elfe, Hans Ey and Hans Joachim Knebel-Döberitz out of Camp 30, move them 1,400 kilometres to Pointe de Maisonnette in northern New Brunswick, and take them off by submarine.
The prisoners dug. One tunnel ran 250 feet, 150 of them past the perimeter, and had a crude railway to haul out soil; another, from Victoria Hall, had wired lighting and tin-can ventilation. The long tunnel was discovered in August 1943.
But Wolfgang Heyda, commander of U-434, did not use a tunnel. He went over the wall on a home-made zip-wire rigged to the camp's electrical cables, then travelled by Canadian National Railways across the country to the rendezvous — where the RCMP and the navy were already waiting for him. The submarine sent to collect them, U-536, arrived on 26 September 1943, sensed the trap, and stayed submerged. It was sunk northeast of the Azores the following month.
Not one prisoner made it home.
The part that is happening right now
Camp 30 is a National Historic Site of Canada, designated 19 April 2013. Parks Canada calls it "the only relatively intact Second World War prisoner-of-war camp remaining in Canada." Six masonry buildings are protected, notable for a rare Prairie-Style architecture arranged around a campus oval.
It has also been falling down. Full restoration was costed at roughly $22 million, which nearly ended the effort, and the cafeteria building came close to demolition in late 2025.
Then, on 21 January 2026, Clarington council voted unanimously to let the Jury Lands Foundation take on preservation and fundraising for that building. Stabilising the cafeteria shell alone is about $4.5 million; by late 2025 roughly two-thirds had been raised, with up to $500,000 committed federally through the Building Communities through Arts and Heritage Legacy Fund. Clarington has owned the cafeteria since 2022; Kaitlin Corporation owns the five other heritage structures and the surrounding land, and has offered to transfer them in exchange for designated parkland.
That is the position as of early 2026, and it is still moving.
If you go: walk the grounds — Clarington has opened trail access — but the buildings are fenced, derelict and genuinely dangerous, and going inside is trespassing. The municipality has built berms and placed boulders specifically to keep people out. The long-term plan is guided tours once the cafeteria is stabilised. Support the preservation effort rather than climbing a fence.
4. Oshawa: where the pilots and the trucks came from
Oshawa's war was industrial, and it is the one with the most left to look at.
Under the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, the airfield north of the city became No. 20 Elementary Flying Training School. Construction ran from autumn 1940 to March 1941; the first aircraft arrived in June 1941, and the Duke of Kent officiated at the formal opening in June 1942. Between 78 and 84 aircraft — de Havilland Tiger Moths, the Air Training Plan's standard elementary trainer — operated from three hard-surfaced runways, with a relief landing field in Whitby at what is now Hopkins Street and Gerdau Court.
Roughly 2,400 to 2,500 student pilots were trained here — two classes of sixty graduating every six weeks — by about 400 civilian staff including seventy instructors. The last class graduated in November 1944.
Of the 176 airfields the BCATP built across Canada, 62 are still operating. Oshawa is one of them, and four wartime structures survive on the field: the No. 10 and No. 11 buildings, the canteen, and Nos. 1 and 2 hangars. The No. 10 Building was recommended for heritage designation in 2003.
Meanwhile General Motors of Canada stopped building passenger cars in 1942 and did not build another until October 1945. The Oshawa operation turned out military vehicles, gun mounts, machine guns and — at a rate of roughly one a day — fuselages for the de Havilland Mosquito. In 1943 GM Canada marked Canada's 500,000th fighting vehicle. Nationally, GM built about 201,000 of Canada's roughly 410,000 Canadian Military Pattern trucks, with Oshawa at the centre of that effort.
And The Ontario Regiment mobilised on 1 September 1939, the day Germany invaded Poland. It converted to armour in 1940, sailed from Halifax in June 1941, and was the first Canadian unit issued the Churchill tank. It landed in Sicily on 13 July 1943, fought up Italy through Ortona, Monte Cassino and the Liri Valley, and finished in the Netherlands. More than ninety names are inscribed on the regiment's memorial tank at 53 Simcoe Street North.
5. The best hour of local history in Durham
The Ontario Regiment RCAC Museum sits at 1000 Stevenson Road North, Oshawa — on the former flying-school lands, which is a satisfying piece of circularity. Founded in 1980, it is an accredited Canadian Forces Museum and holds more than seventy operational or in-restoration military vehicles, including a Sherman and an M24 Chaffee. They run. It is entirely volunteer-funded, partly by lending vehicles to film and television productions.
If you stop at one place on this list, make it this one. Open seven days a week, 10am to 4pm in summer; Friday to Sunday, noon to 4pm in winter, closed on major holidays — but check before you drive out, because they change.
6. The home front, in the archives
The Oshawa Museum at Lakeview Park holds the other half of the story: rationing, victory gardens, blood drives, scrap metal, and the collection of waste cooking fat for explosives manufacture. Its online collections run past 50,000 objects and photographs and are searchable by anyone.
The Ajax Public Library holds the DIL photographic record — the women on the lines, the dormitories, the town taking shape. If you had family who worked at the plant, or at GM during the war, both archives want to hear from you. Those collections are still being assembled, and a great deal of what is missing is sitting in people's basements.
Why a real estate team is writing this
Because it explains the shape of the place. South Ajax has the street pattern it has because a munitions plant needed dormitories and a rail spur. Its homeownership began with a 10-per-cent-down offer to war workers. Oshawa's airport is still an airport because the Air Training Plan built it properly. Whitby's waterfront trail runs past a field that Britain kept off the record.
People choose neighbourhoods for schools, commutes and price. Fair enough. But the reason a street curves the way it does, or why your subdivision sits where a farm used to, is usually not an accident — and in this region it is very often the war.
One good afternoon
West to east along the lake. About an hour of driving, or a full afternoon if you stop properly.
- South Ajax — the street grid. Start near Harwood Avenue South and drive the side streets. Look for the ship silhouettes on the signs. Ajax Town Hall at 65 Harwood Ave. S. stands on the site of the DIL administration building; an anchor from HMS Ajax, presented in 1987, is at Royal Canadian Legion Branch 322.
- Intrepid Park, 2008 Boundary Road, Whitby. Free, open, passive parkland on the lake. It is in an industrial area and awkward to reach on foot — drive. Parking is very limited. Read both plaques.
- Ontario Regiment RCAC Museum, 1000 Stevenson Rd. N., Oshawa. Check opening hours first. Budget more time than you think.
- Oshawa Executive Airport, same site. Look at the low wartime hangars on the way in. That is No. 20 EFTS.
- Oshawa Museum, Lakeview Park. The home front, and the photographs.
- Camp 30, Lambs Road, Bowmanville. Last stop, and view from public ground only. The buildings are unsafe and closed.
Sources and further reading
Every figure above is drawn from the following. Where sources disagree — and on the Ajax output totals and the Camp X agent count they do — we have used the most conservative well-supported number and said so.
Compiled by The Renavu Team, Royal LePage Ignite Realty. Historical details are drawn from the sources listed above and were accurate as of September 2026; the Camp 30 preservation situation in particular is still developing. Opening hours change — check before you drive out. Treat every derelict site as closed unless a sign says otherwise: the Camp 30 buildings are structurally unsafe and entering them is trespassing. This post is local-interest writing, not real estate advice.