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!”
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 […]
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.
