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T he final campaign for the liberation of Europe was underway 75 years ago this autumn – do you know how Toronto was involved? These three books, now in the Canteen, vividly describe three very different contributions. Charles Cromwell Martin, Battle Diary: From D-Day and Normandy to the Zuider Zee and V.E. (Dundurn 1994). Charlie Martin was a company sergeant major in The Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada, the Toronto regiment that hit the beaches in the first waves of D-Day. This is the best mud-level Canadian account of the fighting in Europe that we’re ever likely to see. Ellin Bessner, Double Threat: Canadian Jews, the Military, and World War II (New Jewish Press, 2018). Toronto’s diverse Jewish community figures prominently in this comprehensive new account of how Canadian Jewry responded to the mortal threat of Nazi Germany abroad – and to the persistent blight of anti-Semitism at home.
Barbara Dickson, Bomb Girls:Trading Aprons for Ammo (Dundurn 2015). From July 1941 to the end of the war, in a complex of buildings in the rolling farmland of what they called Scarboro, 20,000 workers – most of them women – did the dangerous work of filling millions of explosive fuses for the bombs and shells that British and Canadian forces needed overseas. This model Hurricane, finely cast and enamelled, has just been added to the inventory of the Canteen – joining a selection of Georgian cookbooks, candlesticks, Blue Willow china and caligraphy instruments that is second to none.
Original printed pages
