Wartime fiction makes great reading. Since I’m less concerned with military strategy, and more interested in how war affects people’s hearts and minds, my best wartime fiction is laden with drama and romance. This is by no means a complete list. I’ve included some oldies but goodies along with the best of the new novels. […]
For almost one hundred years, a story has circulated in our family about these two World War One soldiers. My grandfather Charlie Light, right, was saved from certain death on a French battlefield by his younger brother Jack Light, left. But several family members have expressed skepticism about whether it really happened.
A few years before he died, I asked my father what was the best Christmas he could remember. I expected him to recall his childhood, or a time when his own children were young. But without hesitation, he said: “Christmas 1945!”
Hundreds of churches, both large and small, installed stained glass windows to thank their defenders after the war ended. This was especially appropriate because so many homesick servicemen found comfort and community in church, especially at Christmas time. This lovely example, in the Welsh town of Pembroke Dock, features the badges of units from the […]
A heartfelt question was posed in one of his wartime letters, written the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, by a young Canadian airman who didn’t want to fight but was determined to do his duty. “Damn this war anyhow, why can’t people just get along?” Raymond James Barnes of Battleford, Saskatchewan joined the […]
Very few Royal Canadian Air Force airwomen received the coveted posting overseas but Nancy Lee, from a remote ranch in the Rocky Mountains, was one of the fortunate few. A few years before she died, I was lucky enough to interview Nancy, still as smart and strong-minded and sassy as ever, about her wartime experiences. […]
As a child, I loved to pore through the colourful, patriotic and often amusing images pasted into my mother’s wartime scrapbook. Most of them were covers of the Star Weekly magazine, published by the Toronto Star. (Note: To see ALL my covers, scroll to the bottom of the page). The scrapbook created by my mother, […]
This sweet-faced woman later known as Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, boosted morale so vigorously during the Second World War that Adolf Hitler himself called her “the most dangerous woman in Europe.” The young Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother Queen Elizabeth, mother of the current queen, died in 2002 at the age of one hundred […]
As a child, I used to lie in bed at night and imagine the air force ghosts all around me. That’s because the farm in Saskatchewan where I grew up is a former airfield, one of hundreds created during the Second World War through the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan.
