An astonishing collection of compelling and vivid wartime memories.
As Canada's tens of thousands of veterans of the Second World War increasingly fall victim to the ravages of time, their personal stories become more and more vital to our understanding of what happened in those pivotal years. In Rare Courage, twenty Canadian veterans candidly describe their experiences in their own words, combined with more than eighty photographs and artifacts from the Dominion Institute and the veterans' personal collections.
Rare Courage takes readers to the sinking of the Bismarck and to the bloody beaches of Normandy. It describes the poignant search of a Jewish nurse for survivors of the Holocaust and chilling tales of shot-down airmen on the run in occupied Europe. Many of the stories shed light on little-known aspects of the war: Did you know that almost all the pioneering radar officers on British warships were Canadians? Or that a Canadian major-league baseball star ended up a prisoner in Stalag Luft 13? This is not dry, academic history, but a book that breathes with vivid details. Rare Courage celebrates the heroism and remembers the horror of the Second World War. Rod Mickleburgh is a veteran journalist who has worked in television and radio and for numerous newspapers, including The Globe and Mail, where he has been for fifteen years. He is a co-winner of the prestigious Michener Award for his coverage of Canada's tainted blood scandal. He lives in Vancouver. Rudyard Griffiths is the Executive Director of the Dominion Institute. It took thirty-eight days to capture Sicily. There was some very heavy fighting. The Germans just didn't want to give up. We lost quite a few boys. Then we had to meet up with our Canadians, take them across the Strait of Messina to Italy. But along the way, I had an attack of malaria and dysentery. I was sick as a poisoned pup. I spent a couple of weeks in a hospital in Tunisia. When I was released, I had nothing on but my battledress. No flotilla. No nothing. But what the hell, I was young and I recuperated quickly. I went to the colonel, and he said, "I've got something for you, young man. Here's a jeep. It's only got two cylinders, but it's working." So I took the jeep, drove to Algiers, and I was able to hitchhike on a ship back to England. I was told to join hmcs Prince Henry in Glasgow. She was an lsi troop ship, Landing Ship Infantry.
The Canadian Scottish Regiment from Vancouver joined us and a few days later came a New Brunswick regiment. We knew we were going to land somewhere soon, but we didn't know where. Finally we were told the landing was going to be Normandy. On the night of June 5, we gave all the boys a hot dinner. I didn't get any sleep that night. I was excited. As I walked up and down, officers were in our cabins, writing letters to their loved ones. In the morning, we had breakfast at four o'clock.
Finally, the boys were up on deck, opposite their landing craft. We issued them all vomit bags, because we knew some of them would be seasick. We boarded the craft, loaded them in the water, and, was it ever rough. It was awful. We were about four miles from the beach. All of a sudden, every battleship, destroyer, every ship that had a gun, started to bombard the beaches. The smoke and the flames and the roar were overwhelming. And the boys on the craft said this was going to be a picnic if they were going to bombard the beach like that. But we knew damn well from experience that whenever we got to a beach, there was enemy fire to greet us.
The landing craft were only about three feet above the water. They could toss about a lot. They had a half-inch steel plate around them. The boys were loaded on the deep side of the landing craft under the deck, so they wouldn't get wet. But it was very, very choppy. Fear and seasickness from the rich dinner the night before and everything else all accumulated to make them sick as could be.
