For your summertime reading enjoyment, here’s a collection of five wartime tales that are stranger than fiction – starting with this delightful picture of Samantha Kot, who re-enacted an old photo she discovered right here on Wartime Wednesdays! Aviation Fan Recreates Wartime Photo Samantha Kot of Orangeville, Ontario comes from an aviation-mad family that restores […]
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Former naval pilot Ted Davis of Toronto, now 95 years old, will never forget the night of March 17, 1945 when his minesweeper HMCS Guysborough was torpedoed twice by a German submarine. Tony Davis is a former classmate of mine from the Journalism Program at Carleton University in Ottawa. When I learned that his father Ted Davis was still living, I […]
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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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Bud Abbott was just twenty-three years old when he strapped himself into his cockpit, took off from the deck of an aircraft carrier, and headed into aerial combat for the very first time. His target: the Tirpitz, one of the deadliest German battleships ever built. (Bud Abbott passed away in Cranbrook, British Columbia on January 30, […]
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Operation Fortitude was an elaborate, mind-boggling hoax – using decoys such as rubber tanks, canvas ships, plywood aircraft, and even dummy soldiers to fool the Germans about where we secretly planned to land on D-Day. Everyone knew the Allies would eventually try to take back the continent. But when, and where? To refresh your knowledge of geography, Pas-de-Calais […]
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It’s still puzzling why so many prairie boys went to sea in World War Two – including George Crewe of landlocked Lethbridge, Alberta, who had never even seen the ocean until he joined the Royal Canadian Navy at age seventeen to train as a Boy Telegraphist. Written by Anne Gafiuk (My guest and fellow writer […]
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