Blackouts to Bright Lights: Canadian War Bride Stories

J.L. Granatstein is a professor of history at York University, the
co-author of the Dictionary of Canadian Military History and Empire to
Umpire: Canada and the World to the 1990s, and the author of The Good
Fight.

During World War II, nearly 50,000 Canadian servicemen married overseas,
and by the time their spouses—British, French, Belgian, and Dutch in
the main—came to Canada, there were more than 20,000 children too.
Most of the war brides adjusted, with more or less difficulty, to
Canada—who can forget the “Herbie” cartoon showing a British war
bride telling her child that they were going to Daddy’s ranch in
Toronto?—and soon enough they largely disappeared as a recognizable
group in society.

This book, prepared on Vancouver Island from the oral histories or
written accounts of 36 war brides, is an attempt to re-create that
group—and it works well. The oral histories have a sameness: girl
meets boy; they fall in love; they come to Canada; they live happily
ever after. Still, the girl-meets-boy part seems almost invariably to
have been a pickup on a train or in the street, sex scarcely gets a
mention, and the sea voyage to Canada and the train trip across the
country still live in the minds of most of the now 75-year-old brides as
a wretched sea-sick experience—but with lots of good food, if only
they had been able to keep it down. In Canada, the experience generally
seems to have been happy. There were predictable difficulties with
in-laws for some; there were divorces; there were tragedies with
children. But again and again, the women, many now widowed, see Canada
as home and a wonderful one.

The great migrations of people after the war were far from happy in
most cases. But this aspect of the postwar experience was a success in
human terms: of that there can be no doubt.