My father was 34 when he enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force, a week before Christmas in 1940. It’s hard to remember now that, halfway through the second year of World War Two, winning didn’t look like a sure thing for the Allies — at this point just Britain and the Commonwealth countries. It would be six months before Germany invaded Russia, and another year before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, and no one expected Britain to hold out until then.
From where we sit, history always looks inevitable; a single outcome never less than ordained, all the drama and anxiety long since evaporated. World War Two was supposed to be over in a few months but dragged on for over four years, but by the time my father enlisted there were credible scenarios imagining the war with Germany and Italy lasting a decade, perhaps longer.
John Babcock is the only surviving Canadian veteran of World War One, and in two or three decades the men who served alongside my father will be down to a few dozen, perhaps less.
The cenotaphs and war memorials around which our Remembrance Day services are held will have been in place for at least a century, and almost no one will be left alive who will remember how crucial they once were — the closest thing to a headstone here for the friends and family of the men and women who were buried all over Europe and Asia.
“They are sending some men over to England from here in the next couple of weeks but I don’t expect I’ll be going,” my father wrote to my mother from his air base outside Ottawa in 1944, just two months after D-Day.
”It’s only for six months but they have to pass a medical so that lets me out.”
A mechanic, he lost an eye in Dartmouth, N.S., working on a plane less than a year after enlisting, but refused a medical discharge; he would remain in uniform until two months after Japan surrendered, and he would never leave Canada.
Probably because he never thought he’d really risked his life, my father never joined the Legion or marched in a Remembrance Day parade. My brother remembers his medals showing up in the mail on a Saturday, almost a decade after the war had ended.
For every veteran in their beret in front of the cenotaphs next Tuesday there will be a few men like my father. As the years pass there will be fewer of both, and ever smaller contingents of men and women who served in Korea, on peacekeeping and UN missions in the Sinai, Somalia, Bosnia or Rwanda, or in Afghanistan.
Remembering will be hard work, but it has to be done, if only as a tribute to the men and women for whom history was anxious and unwritten, motivated by duty, and expecting little more than soldier’s pay and the hope that, at least one day a year, the rest of us will commit to the difficult but necessary task of remembering when history was alive.
