Testaments of Honour: Personal Histories from Canada's War Veterans

Book by Heathcote Blake

Foreword

A half-century after the war was over they came to be called the Greatest Generation, an expression coined by television anchor Tom Brokaw. They were, as a generation, radically different from those who came later -- one more innocent, more stoic, less worldly, whose members had gone out, most of them almost without thinking about it, certainly with little agonizing and with no posturing, to do their duty for their society, even if it meant the sacrifice of their lives.

It was this sense of duty and of obligation that was their principal hallmark. In Canada, this meant that out of a population of little more than eleven million, more than one million -- nearly an incredible one in ten -- served in uniform. More than 100,000 Canadians either were killed or suffered serious injuries or were captured. None of these wounds made the slightest difference to their resolve, or to the nation’s. Together, those at the front and those serving at home transformed a small, largely agricultural society, one that was parochial and colonial in most of its attitudes into a major economic power, one capable of equipping, training and manning what became, by 1945, the world’s third-largest navy, its fifth-largest air force, and an army large enough to fight simultaneously on two major fronts, in France and later Holland and Germany, and in Italy. By their effort, and by their blood, and no less by their experience overseas, they created a new Canada, one far more sophisticated and complex than the pre-war version and so able to strike off in entirely new directions, building a welfare state, taking in millions of immigrants and refugees and so decisively changing the kind of people that we were, expanding our cities until several of them grew into major metropolises, building new universities and creating cultural centres. Perhaps the most profound change effected by the war was that before we were quasi-isolationist and afterwards we became one of the most international-minded of nations.

Over that half-century, though, this connection between what we had become and those who made it possible was lost. It was never explicitly rejected, rather it was forgotten amid the onrush of new events, or just pushed to the edges of peoples’ memories. Polls among high school and university students showed that few knew which countries had fought on which side in the Second World War and that many thought Canada had always been neutral in the quarrels of others in the same way that we now take part in so many United Nations peacekeeping missions.

The veterans themselves were in part to blame. They were the Silent Generation. They didn’t often talk about their experiences both because it was almost impossible to describe what had happened Over There to those who had stayed home, and because people of that era simply didn’t talk about themselves. The word “I” was seldom used; the preferred pronoun was “One.” Confessionalism, most certainly in public, but often even within the family, was almost unknown.

So the old soldiers began to fade away, not just physically as they grew older, but psychically, slipping to the margins of their society, occasionally trotted out for the ever-smaller Remembrance Day parades.

It was their grandchildren who re-discovered them. In a magical reaching out across the generations, young people began encouraging their grandparents to share their stories of chasing U-boats across the Atlantic, or more often of trying frantically to dodge away from them, of the lethal madness of trying to land on the stony beaches of Dieppe, of the long hell of German prisoner-of-war camps and the special hell of Japanese camps, of slogging it northwards from Italy’s “boot” and of sloshing through water-logged Holland, or of rationing and V-bonds. They wanted to touch their own roots before these had slipped away from them.

At last they turned toward their grandparents, not just with love, but now with admiration, respect, even awe, and thanks.

Blake Heathcote’s Testaments of Honour is both a personal and a collective thank you to those who once went out to save this society and then to rebuild it. After his grandfather, an artist who served in the First and Second World Wars, died, Heathcote set out to digitally archive all his grandfather’s scrapbooks and sketches. Scanning the material and reading the notes made him realize how close to extinction the priceless storehouse had come. So Heathcote set out in his car, with a digital camera and scanner to capture the recollections of as many veterans as he could find before they went the same way as had so many of their colleagues before them.

At long last, some members of the Silent Generation have found a voice. Often shyly at first, they have described what it really was like during the last time that this entire nation committed itself collectively to a single overarching cause. Despite the often unspeakable pain and loss, it was for many of them the best years of their lives. For Canada, it was our best years as a nation, when we grew up and learned we could do almost anything we wanted. This book is a thank you to those who did it from those who are now able to do so much because of what they did.

Richard Gwyn