Too Young to Fight: Memories from our Youth during World War II

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

The inspiration for this book came to Priscilla Galloway while she was
speaking to a group of young students about her career as an author and
editor. When Galloway mentioned that World War II was raging when she
was a young girl, one of the students asked: “Did the war make any
difference in your life?” The question intrigued Galloway. Although
she had been too young to serve in the military and Canada had been
spared the horror of seeing war on its own soil, Galloway knew that war
had left impressions that had lasted all her life.

For this book, Galloway enlisted the help of 11 Canadians who were
children during World War II. Although not all the contributors are
writers by profession, the quality of the prose is uniformly high. Not
surprisingly, their impressions were shaped by their race, gender,
social class, and geographic location. Roch Carrier describes the
bizarre experience of happily playing war with other French-Canadian
children while their parents determinedly resisted conscription into
what they saw as an English colonial war. Joy Kogawa and Timothy
Nakayama recount their experience of being arrested like criminals and
herded with their families into concentration camps in Canada’s
interior. As a fascinating counterpoint, Dorothy Joan Harris describes
her experience of being raised as a privileged foreigner in prewar
Japan, only to be forced to flee to Canada when her father’s
anti-imperialist views became known to the Japanese authorities.

Galloway herself remembers cramped housing, rationing, separation from
loved ones, and jingoism, but it was during the war years that she also
felt the first stirrings of adult responsibility, independence, and
sexual awakening.

Other contributors include Christopher Chapman, Brian Doyle, Janet
Lunn, Budge Wilson, Monica Hughes, and Claire Mackay. The book, which
includes family photos, cartoons, and civilian war memorabilia ranging
from cigarette cards to newspaper clippings, is highly recommended for
readers of all generations.