Sixty-eight years ago this month, a German submarine torpedoed the SS Caribou, a ferry travelling from Canada to Newfoundland. Within five minutes, the ferry sank to the bottom of the Atlantic. Margaret Brooke valiantly tried to save her friend Agnes Wilkie, who became the only Canadian nursing sister to die from enemy action in World War Two. […]
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Ruth Owen Whitelegg of Brantford, Ontario, trained as a photographer for the Royal Canadian Air Force and served at RCAF Centralia, Ontario, during World War Two. Her photo album gives us a fascinating glimpse into wartime history, crammed with snapshots of life on a Canadian air training base. Ruth was born on March 12, 1925 to parents […]
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History buffs with a passion for the Second World War take it to the limit – dressing in vintage uniforms, sleeping in tents, eating rations, and even re-enacting entire battles! Their primary purpose is to teach the public about a war that is rapidly fading from living memory. “Re-enactment” is the term for a craze that has […]
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Because my focus is on women’s lives during World War Two, I’m always delighted to unearth little-known stories about their adventures. Here are four of the best. MARGARET HERMESTON This petite photographer achieved monumental significance by becoming the first female photographer in the Canadian Army. Her name was Sgt. Karen Margaret Hermeston of the Canadian Women’s Army […]
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For hundreds of thousands of families around the world, 1945 marked the first happy Christmas celebrated together after the sad and lonely years of war. After the war ended in May 1945, it took months to transport all those men and women home again, and some didn’t arrive until just before Christmas. My own father, who […]
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A wartime scrapbook kept by Alice Spackman of Okotoks, Alberta, stuffed with letters, photographs and clippings, is the foundation for a new book titled She Made Them Family. It’s a fascinating glimpse of life in a small prairie town during World War Two. I became acquainted with Anne Gafiuk of Calgary through our mutual love of […]
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Wartime television series, with time for extra action, more suspense, and greater character development than a two-hour movie, can be absolutely gripping. Regular readers may remember that I created a list of top ten wartime aviation movies, which you can read by clicking here: Ten Flyer Flicks Worth Watching. But there are many great made-for-TV shows – dozens […]
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Of all the work performed by women in uniform, packing parachutes — those complicated contraptions of silk and leather — meant the difference between life and death for a man plunging from the sky. Here’s a photo of some very smart-looking Canadian women carefully laying out a parachute on a long table, checking that every fold is in place. […]
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Georgina Harvey was a young woman from a well-known family in Kelowna, British Columbia, when she joined the air force in 1943 and trained as a photographer. Her photo album reveals a fascinating slice of life in uniform. Georgina Harvey was born in Kelowna to the distinguished Harvey family, still a well-known name in that community. The stately brick house where […]
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This week marks the seventieth anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp, so I’m updating a post that I wrote last year. The Scheffer family hid a Jewish couple for two years in their home in a small town in Holland, saving them from certain death. The Scheffers had six children of their own. If […]
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