Letters Home: The Wartime Correspondence and Diary of John Edwin Gardiner RCAF (1919–1942)

Sidney Allinson is Canadian news correspondent for Britain’s The Army
Quarterly and Defence. He is the author of The Bantams: The Untold Story
of World War I, Jeremy Kane, and Kruger’s Gold: A Novel of the
Anglo-Boer War.

This touching memoir delivers far more than one would initially expect.
Books based on relatives’ letters usually tend to be of little
interest to anyone but the recipients. Letters Home, however, is an
exception. Editor David Smith has formed an interesting narrative based
on the wartime writings of John Edwin Gardiner, a 22-year-old Canadian
fighter pilot who was shot down and killed during the Dieppe Raid of
1942. Smith came across Gardiner’s letters and diary coincidentally
while researching a biography of the pilot officer’s politician
father. Struck by the quality of the material, Smith recognized its
potential as a book.

Letters Home is an excellent melding of Gardiner’s writings with
descriptive explanations. Clearly, the airman was part of a very close
family. He regularly wrote letters home, and these included a running
description of his wartime experiences. His last letter, written on the
evening before his fatal flight, has a hint of foreboding under his
cheerful final words. Gardiner’s father’s carefully documented
details of his son’s death provide additional background information.
And there is an especially poignant aftermath: the airman’s
grief-stricken mother drowned herself two years after his death.

Gardiner’s words, to the reader who knows his fate, are achingly sad,
yet at the same time they convey the optimism and bravery of a patriotic
young man fighting against Nazi tyranny. Smith is to be commended for
producing this fine volume.