Famous photo, Wait for Me Daddy, has dual meaning
It is the most famous Canadian photograph of the Second World War, a little boy running from his mother for the outstretched hand of his soldier father.
But for Warren “Whitey” Bernard, his image as a five-year-old is more powerful for what it doesn’t show.
That little white-haired boy — who is now a 79-year-old retiree in Tofino — will unveil a monument today in New Westminster based on the photo that symbolized the emotional turmoil of Canada’s men heading off to war.
The photo, called Wait for Me Daddy, moved from the Vancouver Daily Province newspaper to Life magazine, then to every B.C. school during the war and is now proudly displayed in the Canadian War Museum. For Bernard, it is the memories behind the image that are distinctive.
“That’s probably the last time we were together as a nuclear family, as they put it today,” said Bernard in a recent phone interview from his home. “We were never together again as a family after that moment.”
His parents’ marriage didn’t survive the war. They split up just a few years later, and there was no joyful reunion between his father, Jack, and his mother, Bernice, when his father returned to Vancouver in October 1945. When Canada declared war against Germany in September 1939, the Bernards were living in Summerland.
His father was in the militia and was a sergeant and an acting troop sergeant major for the B.C. Dragoons, a senior rank for non-commissioned members.
But the unit was not activated, and Bernard said his father decided to drop his rank and enlist instead as a private with the British Columbia Regiment, Duke of Connaught’s Own Rifles, which is based on the coast, and is also known as the “Dukes.”
“He was 33 years old, he had a dependent child and she was madder than a hornet, and she wanted him to wait until the BCDs, the B.C. Dragoons, were called up as a regiment and then he would have gone into the army as a sergeant, and of course a sergeant’s pay was twice what a buck private’s pay was.”
Bernard said his mother never forgave his father, although their marriage was “never made in heaven.”
So the Bernards uprooted themselves from their little brown house in Summerland, their neighbours, their family and friends and headed to Vancouver, where his mother — who had been orphaned as a child — had no relatives and needed to find a job and a place to live.
John Maker, Second World War historian at the Canadian War Museum, said the photo, taken by Claude Dettloff, touched a public nerve at the time and sums up the war experience.
It depicts pride, sadness and the anxiety of what’s to come.
Bernard will speak when the memorial sculpture commemorating the photo is unveiled today in New Westminster’s Hyack Square. Canada Post and the Royal Canadian Mint are also releasing a commemorative stamp and $2 coin, respectively.