My admiration is boundless when it comes to the Canadian wartime nurses who bravely carried out their grim duties — so it was an honour to interview Jessie Middleton of Abbotsford, British Columbia. I was especially keen to meet Jessie because my column has not paid enough attention to wartime nurses — our Canadian women […]
Jack Dye, a brave young bomb aimer from Regina, Saskatchewan, saved everyone on his Halifax bomber but lost his own life.
Parachute packers — who prepared those complicated contraptions of silk and leather —meant the difference between life and death for a man plunging from the sky.
Author and journalist Tony Cashman is famous for his lifelong contribution to the history of Edmonton, Alberta — but less known for the significant role he played in World War Two, completing a full tour of thirty operations as the navigator in a Halifax bomber. Tony Cashman passed away on June 3, 2024 at the […]
Hank Herzberg of Chicago learned what had happened to his boyhood friend from Hanover, Germany, by reading my post called The German Jew Who Bombed Berlin. And his own story as a Ritchie Boy is also extraordinary!
Thanks to a body part donation from another Lancaster called Lady Orchid, one Canadian Lancaster bomber is still flying. And the man indirectly responsible was Lady Orchid’s pilot, Ron Jenkins. His daughter Deb explains the fascinating chain of events.
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.
