A Soldier's View: The Personal Photographs of Canadians at War 1939-1945 [Hardcover]

Considering that the youngest veterans of Second World War military service are now nearly 80 years old, it's hardly surprising that the ranks of the marchers have thinned. And age may also explain the steady shrinking of crowds of supporters. The old warriors' contemporaries are themselves aged and infirm, or gone. For many younger Canadians, the events of 1939-1945 lack immediacy and relevance to their own lives. It all happened so long ago, in a different world and to people who are now grandparents and great-grandparents. How can the young connect with all that?

One answer may lie in a new book by Toronto writer Blake Heathcote. A Soldier's View: The Personal Photographs of Canadians At War 1939-1945 uses the photos of service men and women to personalize the events of the war years, both dramatic and mundane.

The book is a companion volume to, and direct descendant of, Heathcote's 2002 best-seller, Testaments of Honour: Personal Histories of Canada's War Veterans. In the first book, Heathcote presented the personal stories of 24 Canadian men and women who served in almost every branch of military service and theatre of operations in the Second World War.

For his research, the writer visited veterans across the country, interviewing them on videotape so their stories would be preserved. In the course of those interviews, his subjects shared their personal photos, allowing Heathcote to build an archive of more than 10,000 pictures. It is from that archive that the 500 images in A Soldier's View are drawn.

Some of the pictures are posed; many more are candids. But most reveal something rather remarkable: the subjects look just like people anywhere. Certainly, the haircuts and fashions are from a different time, but the faces are familiar.

A Soldier's View is much more than a photo album. It is also a living history. The book is divided into chapters devoted to the different branches of the military and major operations. Heathcote's subjects took part in the disastrous Dieppe Raid. They were in Bomber Command, on convoy duty in the North Atlantic and wading ashore on D-Day. Some risked their lives in Burma, others languished in German and Japanese prisoner-of-war camps. These stories are told in text and cutlines but never more eloquently than in their photographs.

The people who were young in these photographs are old now, and soon most will be gone. But thanks to people such as Blake Heathcote, their stories will live on. Thanks to their photographs, younger generations will be able to see who they were and know what they did.