Willa Walker rose rapidly through the ranks in 1941 to become head of the newly-formed Royal Canadian Air Force Women’s Division. Only 28 years old, grieving the recent death of her baby son, her husband locked away in a German prison camp, Willa rose to the challenge with courage and dignity, breaking down barriers for future generations of women […]
After a bullet from a Japanese machine gun tore through her body, Australian nurse Vivian Bullwinkel floated face down in the sea and feigned death. She was the sole survivor of the 1942 Bangka Island Massacre, in which 22 nurses were forced to wade into the ocean at gunpoint and then shot in the back. It’s […]
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. […]
Jack Dye, a brave young bomb aimer from Regina, Saskatchewan, saved everyone on his Halifax bomber but lost his own life.
My mother-in-law Gerda Drews was a teenager living in Berlin during World War Two. She witnessed the ferocious battle of Berlin, and her family’s tragic experiences after her city fell to the Soviet Army.
August 19, 2014 marked the 72nd anniversary of the Dieppe disaster, a bloody fiasco in which thousands of Canadians were killed, wounded or captured. Journalist and historian Rob Alexander of Calgary, Alberta has provided this gripping description of his grandfather’s experience on that terrible occasion, based on journals and letters. Pictured here is Rob’s grandfather […]
My godfather Colin Greener served in the Canadian Cavalry in the First World War. He stood five foot three in his boots, but he had the heart of a lion. He fought in the trenches, was wounded twice, and decorated for bravery. He always joked that if he had been taller he wouldn’t have survived. […]
Operation Manna saved thousands of Dutch civilians from starvation when the Allies stripped their bombers of weapons, and dropped tons of food instead. It was too late to save twenty thousand others who starved to death as the Second World War drew to an end. One woman describes how Operation Manna delivered her family from […]
A Jewish couple escaped the Holocaust by hiding inside the Scheffer household for two years, in a small town in Holland. Casey Scheffer, who moved to Canada after the war, told me how his courageous family accomplished this remarkable feat.
