Rare Courage: Veterans of the Second World War Remember

J.L. Granatstein, Distinguished Research Professor of History Emeritus,
York University, served as Director of the Canadian War Museum from 1998
to 2000. His latest works are Who Killed Canadian History?, Who Killed
the Canadian Military, and Hell’s Cor

Full disclosure: I am the author of the foreword to this book. I wrote
my brief history of Canada in the Second World War without seeing the
rest of the text, prepared by Rod Mickleburgh and Rudyard Griffiths from
interviews the former conducted with 20 veterans.

Memories are fallible and, unfortunately, simply because someone
remembers an event does not mean that it happened or that it occurred in
precisely this or that sequence. I can’t remember what I did last
week, let alone 50 years ago, and my stories (and everyone else’s) too
often become burnished with retelling. Too many of the accounts in this
book suffer from these problems.

What does survive, in my view, are attitudes. Consider the account by
Stanley Grizzle, a Canadian of Jamaican ancestry, who as a youth
suffered from the discrimination then generally visited on non-white
Canadians. As he says, “When war was declared, I didn’t join up
because I was black and therefore the principles of democracy didn’t
apply to me. None of us black boys felt any desire to join up.” That
attitudinal recollection rings completely true, as does Grizzle’s note
on being conscripted that “I ain’t frigging well going.” But he
did, serving well in the Medical Corps in Northwest Europe.

Other accounts by veterans in this well-illustrated volume are by
men—and two women—who served their country in the Army, Navy, and
Air Force. Their memories of Canada’s war are poignant and personal,
and it is not their fault that errors have been allowed to pass
uncorrected. They served Canada well.