By Elinor Florence My family members, on both my mother’s and my father’s sides, served in the Canadian forces in both world wars. But I also have another connection with wartime: my husband’s family. He was born in Berlin after the war and emigrated to Canada as a young man. His father Kurt Drews flew with the […]
Read More
The Russians were the only women in the world who engaged in aerial combat during World War Two. These daring young women, some of them just teenagers, flew lightweight aircraft that dodged and darted and dropped bombs on the enemy under cover of darkness. So feared were they that the Germans called them The Night Witches. Regular readers will […]
Read More
Rosie the Riveter, the bomb girl with the bulging biceps, is an iconic image. But Canada led the way with our own glamourpuss: Ronnie, the Bren Gun Girl. She was one in one million Canadian women who worked in factories during the war. When World War Two began, British women trooped into factories in full force. They were desperately […]
Read More
How were children on the home front protected from the horrors of a world at war? The short answer: they weren’t. Kids were fully involved in the war effort, doing whatever their little hearts and hands could manage. Many children who grew up during the war were too young to fight, but they still wanted to do […]
Read More
Canada’s greatest living fighter pilot, Stocky Edwards, is a legend in aviation circles. But when I visited him and his wife Toni at their home in Comox, British Columbia, this humble gentleman still attributed much of his success to simple luck, and prayer. Stocky Edwards passed away on May 14, 2022 at the age of 100. […]
Read More
This band of EIGHT Ballendine brothers served in the Canadian Army during World War Two, following the path laid down by their father John Ballendine and his brother James, both crack snipers in the Great War. Pictured here are James on the left and his younger brother John on the right. They are wearing pre-war […]
Read More
Seventy-two years after my uncle RCAF pilot trainee Alan Light died in a training accident, I discovered a dramatic oil painting that shows the last moments of his life. It was a lovely summer evening on June 5th, 1942. At seven o’clock, the sun was still high in the sky. RCAF Leading Aircraftsman Alan Scott Light was taking his bright […]
Read More
Arthur Bradford’s Spitfire was shot down over Normandy on D-Day, and he parachuted into the sea where he was promptly “rescued” by a landing craft, steaming towards the beach. He was unarmed, unprepared, and very, very unhappy. I interviewed Arthur Bradford at his comfortable lakeview home in Invermere, British Columbia before he passed away in […]
Read More
Twenty thousand Dutch civilians starved to death as World War Two drew to an end, while others ate tulip bulbs to stay alive. The Allies stripped their bombers of weapons, and dropped tons of food instead. One woman describes how Operation Manna delivered her family from starvation. Even the most famous war stories bear repeating […]
Read More
A Jewish couple spent two terrifying years hiding inside the Scheffer household, in a small town in Holland. Casey Scheffer, who moved to Canada after the war, told me how his courageous family hid Jews from the Nazis without being caught and executed. Note: This was posted on May 7, 2014 — and on June […]
Read More