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Testaments of Honour: Personal Histories of Canada’s War Veterans

by Blake Heathcote

Canadians know very little about their history and even less about their military past. Part of the blame for the latter deficiency is that Canada’s veterans have, to an extraordinary degree, remained mute about their experiences. Blake Heathcote helped to rectify this problem when he undertook a massive project to interview veterans of the Second World War. After 150 interviews, an invaluable record that will eventually be housed in the Canadian War Museum, he has chosen for publication the best 24 “personal histories,” a representive sampling of English Canada’s soldiers, sailors, and airmen.

As he notes, “Testaments of Honour is a product of memory, flaws and all.” And so it is – some of the accounts regrettably invent units and shift events to another time and place. This is unimportant, except that a book like this will be cited and used for future research.

What is important is what Heathcote’s interviewees say. There is a recurring theme that Canadians have little idea why their grandparents fought in the Second World War and fail to realize that they live in prosperity because of an earlier generation’s sacrifices. And those sacrifices were terrible. Virtually every interviewee recalls the friends who didn’t make it home, the aircrew shot down, the prisoners of war who died of ill-treatment, the comrades killed by German shells. The wartime photographs of each of those interviewed – everyone looking as if he had yet to get his first shave – reinforce the point that the war was fought by the young.

Still, there were good times, the comradeship, the oddly humorous moments that occurred in terrible circumstances. When the Americans dropped food into Japanese POW camps where Canadians were held after V-J Day, for example, the payloads included large cans of ketchup that exploded when they hit the ground. “I found myself covered in blood,” prisoner John Stroud recalled, then “took a good whiff and a taste and realized I was covered in ketchup.”

None of those interviewed glory in war, but what emerges from their words is a sense of satisfaction at serving Canada and freedom when everything was at risk. As infantry officer Barney Danson said, when “the chips were down, we were there. No one can take that away from us.”

 

Reviewer: J.l. Granatstein

Publisher: Doubleday Canada

DETAILS

Price: $45

Page Count: 304 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 0-385-65846-X

Released: Oct.

Issue Date: 2002-11

Categories: History

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