‘I thought there’s a classic’
Soldiers’ photos capture personal side of war New compilation elicits powerful memories
Jim Jones knew he had to snap the picture. He was on a training mission in England, camped in the woods without a tent in the spring of 1944. One day, he passed five officers eating lunch at a makeshift table and wondered what might happen to them.
“ I thought there’s a classic,” he said. “ I figured this was a picture I could look at in the future.”
In Jones’s photo, which appears in A Soldier’s View: The Personal Photographs of Canadians at War 1939- 1945, second from the left is Clare Thompson, whom Jones knew as a boy on Parkside Dr. in Toronto. Thompson was shot in the face the day after D-Day in Normandy, carried on, and was killed two days after that.
Third from the right is Doug Bradley, then a lieutenant in C Squadron of the Sherbrooke Fusiliers ( armoured corps). By the end of World War II, he was serving as Jones’s commanding officer and survived the fighting. On the far right is a Capt. Humphries, an older man who never saw direct action.
All three Jones remembers well, at the age of 90, but it is the two other men who stand out most vividly.
S. V. “ Rad” Radley- Walters, on the far left, from Sherbrooke, Que., began D-Day as a captain and two days later was made a tank commander and major.
“ A born tank hunter and the best shot in the Canadian army,” Jones says of him. “ He knocked out 16 enemy tanks.”
Nairn Boyd, second from the right, was from a farming family in Tillsonburg, Ont.
“ He was killed at Buron ( France) and he was married,” Jones says. “ His wife had come over ( from Canada to England) for the Red Cross and, when he was killed, it was Rad’s duty as commanding officer to visit her and deliver the news.
“She and Rad later married and had three sons.”
ASoldier’s View,
published this week by Doubleday Canada, is a by- product of an archival project begun six years ago by Blake Heathcote, a former playwright and theatre director from the Niagara region now working full time at recording veterans’ stories for posterity. “When it came to choosing what photographs to include in this book,” he says in his introduction, “ I resorted to the simple method of taking ones that elicited the most powerful memories from their owners.”
Like U. S. soldiers in Iraq emailing digital pictures home, Canadian soldiers during World War II sometimes carried cameras and took personal pictures.
For Ed Haddon, the most important war photo he took is one of his wife, Terry. She is shown in the book fresh- faced with an open laugh, an image he carried in his wallet through the fighting and afterward during the Allied occupation of Germany.
“ She kept my spirits up,” said Haddon, a dashing man of 83 with a full head of swept- back silver hair. Haddon grew up in Quebec’s Eastern Townships and got to England when he was still 17 in 1940. Soon he was a sergeant in the army service corps stationed near London, running a truckdriving school for soldiers.
“ I met her at a dance one night in the camp,” he says of Terry. She was working at the time in the London office of a company making artificial arms and legs. As a sergeant, Haddon had access to a motorcycle and often rode in on weekends to see her. Soon they were married. Haddon served in Holland as a tank commander, took shrapnel in the leg, recovered in Belgium and, when the war ended, joined an occupation force on the German side of the Dutch border.
“ Not a happy time for me,” he says of the occupation. “ Villagers were trying to exist on probably 800 calories a day. They were starving.”
Dick Field, a gunner with the Royal Canadian Artillery, contributed several photos to the book, but one makes him laugh. He took it with a collapsible Kodak camera a few days after Feb. 8, 1945, the start of an Allied push into northeast Germany.
“ In Holland and Belgium, we never stole anything, but Germany was different,” he says. “ We didn’t have much sympathy for the country that forced us over there in the first place and we would liberate whatever we could find.” One day, he and his friends were digging in a barn. From experience, they knew that farmers sometimes buried valuables in such places and one of the soldiers hit something hard.
“ It was a big chest, like a treasure chest,” Field recalls. “ It had leather straps and a big brass lock. We imagined the German army payroll, or a load of diamonds, so we shot the lock off it — just like in the movies — and opened it up.
“ It was full of smoked ham.” The soldiers built a fire. They put a ham in a pot to boil the salt out and, as eight of them waited to eat, Field shot the picture.