A Soldier's View: The Personal Photographs of Canadians at War 1939-1945 - Couverture rigide

Introduction

I remember lying on the floor of my grandfather’s study poring over a scrapbook of his ­photos from the war. I was perhaps ten or eleven years old, and this was something new to me. My grandfather was, in equal parts, a soldier and an artist. On the walls of his house hung many of his watercolours from the war years and, in a place of pride, his formal officer’s portrait ­painted in London during the war. There were also studio photographs of him in uniform taken in London, where he’d been second in command to C.P. Stacey of the Historical Unit of the Canadian Army.

But this scrapbook was something different; as it turned out, it was also something I wasn’t supposed to be looking at. Some time later, I asked my father about the scrapbook and he suggested that I not mention it to Grandpa, as it was something quite personal of his. So I kept it to myself, but I kept it.

It turns out that Eric, my grandfather, was writing his memoirs of his three years in the trenches in the Great War, with the Toronto Scottish during the 1930s, and of his time in London during World War II. Being a “picture man,” he had begun laying out his story using sketches he’d done and photos he’d accumulated over the years. What I’d seen was an artist’s sketchbook of his life, his way of marking moments he didn’t want to forget. He never managed to write more than a few pages, beautifully hand-lettered on massive folio sheets. I didn’t see his scrapbook again for another thirty years, ten years after he’d died and twenty years after he’d stopped working on it, lost in Alzheimer’s.

The scrapbook was, in many ways, the tip of the iceberg. Dad discovered a cache of ­contact sheets and negatives in my grandfather’s army trunk, a transportable wardrobe complete with drawers and hangers and countless compartments that held everything an officer might choose to carry with him.

The photos that Dad found were tucked in beside Eric’s five-year wartime diary and a handful of crowns, shillings and thrupenny bits. These images were less about his life and more about the people whose lives were so deeply scarred by the war. I don’t think he knew what to do with them – they were difficult to look at – but he kept them nonetheless.

I have since discovered from many veterans that the heart of their wartime lives was often reflected in the photos they took. Not everyone had a camera, but those who did weren’t reluctant to share them. Sometimes the photos I was shown were stored in shoeboxes, and other times kept in places of pride. Even when the photos spoke of times and places that veterans did not care to remember in too much detail, the pictures were kept as an irrefutable, irreplaceable link to their past. The secret to discovering this past is that you have to ask.

Looking at veterans’ photos in the company of those who took them is a deeply meaningful experience. When the photos are spread out before them, memories spring to life, ­returning veterans to what many refer to as “the best years of my life.” On page 107 of A Soldier’s View there is a photo of a gang of Typhoon pilots horsing around between ops. These guys flew tough low-level missions against German ground troops; they were a major factor in the Allies’ success at Falaise in 1944. The mood of this picture seems wildly at odds with the danger of their work. There is a sad irony here too: a few weeks after it was taken most of the pilots in the picture had been killed. It was taken by Alex Gray, whose photographic duties with the RCAF included recording operational squadrons, the aircraft they flew, and the wreckages of planes that crashed. His photos span the lives and deaths of these men, and in recounting his experiences with both, a hardness comes into his voice, common to those vets who were witness to the extremes of life on the front lines.

When it came to choosing what photographs to include in this book, I resorted to the simple method of taking ones that elicited the most powerful memories from their owners, thereby generating insight into how war is experienced first-hand.

I’ve come to appreciate that what matters most about a photograph is the emotion it inspires. Great pictures don’t answer our questions; they show us why questions should be asked. However wrenching an image may be, its deepest power lies in opening the viewer up to something that extends past the boundaries of time and history to reveal events on an individual and human scale.

Percy Loosemoore, a few months too young to enlist in World War I, joined up at the beginning of the next war as a mature man in his forties. He served for six years overseas with the Royal Canadian Army Pay Corps. This branch of service, like all supply units, was never far behind the front line. As the Canadian Army moved from an offensive role to one of occupation, the RCAPC provided service to our soldiers throughout Europe. In this capacity, Percy had the unique opportunity to travel extensively, on the heels of battle and through the wake of the war’s destruction in villages and towns across the Continent. Being a noncombatant afforded him the chance to use his camera, and he diligently photographed most everything he saw. When he returned to Canada in 1946, he spent the next seven years feverishly recording what he’d seen and experienced during those years and meticulously cataloguing his photographs.

He was sad to have missed much of his children’s formative years while he was away, but he had no regrets. In 1946, he wrote, “I feel conscious of fulfilling a duty, [and] of a pride in the knowledge that I have contributed part of my life to what I believed to be a great cause. It is somewhat consoling to know you have not lived completely in vain, and that you have been part . . . of a great human struggle to better the world for future generations.”

He died in 1953, a few months after completing his work of wartime remembrance. His album of photographs, which is one of the finest I’ve ever seen, seems to have been an encompassing purpose in life in those few years after the war. I believe that he hoped his children and grandchildren might see it as a means of understanding something of his experience that he himself was unable to come fully to terms with.

Looking at his pictures, particularly those taken in the spring and summer of 1945, and reading his notes about them, I think that Percy was looking to find some solace amidst the unfathomable destruction. He seems to have found hope for the future and delight in the resilience of youth in the smiles and colourful dresses of the young German schoolgirls he noticed while passing through a small village, their hesitant and shy faces full of curiosity and innocence.

All veterans want what Percy wanted: for their contribution in the war to be acknowledged as part of something greater than themselves.

The photographs in A Soldier’s View are of a generation at war, and they preserve a chain of experience that words can’t always convey. I’m sure that’s why they were taken and why they have survived from generation to generation.

From their photographs, I have come to know my father’s and grandfather’s worlds as seen through their eyes. The meaning of these pictures and stories deepens with the passage of time and keeps these memories very much alive today.

Thousands of Canadians were moved by Testaments of Honour. Now, with A Soldier’s View, Blake Heathcote opens his extensive archive of photos, rarely before published or seen, to share with us the face of the Second World War as it was witnessed by those who fought it.

Blake Heathcote has spent years crisscrossing the country, interviewing Canadian war veterans on video so that their stories will be preserved for generations to come. In the course of these interviews he has compiled an archive of more than 8,700 photographs digitally scanned from the personal collections of the men and women he has met, veterans who were involved in all branches of the service and on all fronts of the war.

A Soldier’s View: The Personal Photographs of Canadians at War 1939–1945 includes five hundred images from this stunning collection. Cameras were strictly forbidden by the military (for fear of espionage), and individuals used them at significant personal risk. Later generations should be grateful that these contraband cameras were put to good use: documenting a story that would otherwise have been lost.

We see the images captured by Alex Gray, an RCAF photographer who often saw war at its most devastating. In addition to the pictures used for official purposes, Gray captured many images that he kept for his personal collection, a rich sample of which is included in A Soldier’s View: pilots still in flight gear celebrating their return from enemy airspace, and a gravely prohibited shot of the acres of vehicles and armour assembled for the Canadian assault on Normandy.

We meet Tom Ingham, a stoker on HMCS Iroquois, and the crew’s forbidden Kodak Brownie, which captured life aboard a combat destroyer: a boxing match used to settle disputes between sailors, an informal group of seamen singing around an accordion, the spectacular explosion of a merchant ship.
We see the devastation of Europe through the lens of Percy Loosemore, a paymaster who traveled the front lines hot on the heels of the advancing Canadians. His images of makeshift Canadian graves, Dutch street urchins, and shattered towns are unforgettable.

A Soldier’s View captures the diversity of human experience and emotion inspired by war — life and death, destruction and hate, adventure, bravery and sacrifice, friendship, hope and the wisdom of experience — and offers a unique and powerful way of entering a time in Canada’s past so fundamental in shaping the country and the world as we have come to know it.