Georgina Harvey’s RCAF photo album reveals a fascinating slice of life in the wartime air force, compiled by a young woman from a well-known family in Kelowna, British Columbia who joined up in 1943 and trained as a photographer. Georgina Harvey was born in Kelowna to the distinguished Harvey family, still a well-known name in that community. […]
This week marks the seventieth anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp, and the Holocaust survivors who made it out alive. Please read my previous post about the Scheffer family, who hid a Jewish couple for two years in their home in their small town in Holland: Heroic Family Hid Jews From Holocaust. […]
Wartime mail was critically important. Imagine saying goodbye to your husband or son, knowing that you will not see his face or hear his voice for years — maybe forever. Mail was the lifeline, both for the boys over there and the folks back home.
I had two personal reasons for visiting the museum at Peenemünde in Germany, where the Nazis invented their deadly V-weapons: because it plays a role in my wartime novel about aerial photo interpretation, and because my father-in-law Kurt Drews worked here during the war.
Back then they were called V-weapons, but today we call them cruise missiles. In the German language, the V stood for Revenge. Hitler promised that his revenge weapons would punish the Allies for their bombing of German cities. These jet-propelled missiles almost won the war. Even before the war, the Nazis realized that the land, […]
The aerial photo interpreter who made the biggest impact in the Second World War was the brilliant, beautiful Constance Babington Smith. (My wartime novel Bird’s Eye View is fact-based fiction about an aerial photo interpreter.) Constance Babington Smith is well-known in some circles, although most people have never heard of her. But she is credited with […]
Danesfield House is now a luxury hotel, but during the war it was requisitioned by the Royal Air Force, renamed RAF Medmenham, and served as the headquarters for aerial photographic interpretation. It has personal meaning for me, too. I visited this lovely place in 2022, when I was invited to be the guest speaker at a […]
My friend Russ Jeffs was a Royal Air Force veteran who rose to the rank of RAF Wingco, or Wing Commander, before leaving England in the 1950s and moving to Canada. He was an inveterate story-teller with an endless stream of anecdotes about his days in the air force. After Russ moved to Canada, he spent the next […]
My mother-in-law Gerda Drews was a teenager living in Berlin during World War Two. She witnessed the ferocious battle of Berlin, and her family’s tragic experiences after her city fell to the Soviet Army.
Gerda Drews was a child living in Berlin with her family when the Second World War began, and over the next five years she survived the bombing of her city 363 times, witnessing some horrific sights. By Elinor Florence My family members, on both my mother’s and my father’s sides, served in the Canadian forces […]
