Back home in Canada radio was delivering the war news in communities large and small from the tiny fishing villages in Newfoundland (not then part of Canada), across the Prairies to the Interior towns and cities in the mountains of British Columbia on to Vancouver and Victoria. In my hometown of Moose Jaw, local station CHAB had lost most of its announcers to the military. Women who worked at the station as copywriters and secretaries were pressed into service as newscasters. To this day, some seventy years later, I can still recall a couple by name—Eileen Bradley and Bette Parke. By coincidence I met Bette’s husband in the 1970s. He was a pharmacist by the name of Bob Bedard, who owned a drugstore in New Westminster, BC. I remember him particularly for his kindness and compassion. A prison guard had both his hands blown off when he opened a parcel that held a bomb, probably sent by a disgruntled prisoner with a twisted mind. Bedard provided drugs to the injured guard free of charge.
The war news was read not only by Bette Parke and Eileen Bradley but also by Barbara Wells, sister of the well-known football broadcaster “Cactus Jack” Wells. My long-time friend and radio colleague, Lyndon Grove, worked at CHAB as a very young host of a program called Melody ’n’ Stuff. He started as a high school student and went on to become a well-known and well-respected broadcaster and writer, ending his career in Vancouver writing for a successful public relations firm headed by the late Ray Torresan. Grove said recently that he vividly recalled the women who did the news on CHAB during WWII. Bette’s regular job was traffic manager, the person who scheduled commercials and prepared the daily program log. Grove said Eileen Bradley, called “Brad” by the boys, was the continuity editor, the person in charge of those who wrote commercials for clients like Evans Florists, “the little flower shop around the corner” and an iconic department store called Joyner’s, where customers paid for purchases at store counters. The money and bill were then placed in a little metal “car” that travelled by an overhead cable to an unseen cashier in the back of the store. Change was returned to the customer by the little car a few minutes later.
Radio stations now refer to continuity editors as copy chiefs. Although salesmen who sell radio time persuade advertisers to go on the air to sell their product or service, often it’s the good copywriter who works closely with clients and keeps them on the air. They are invaluable. One of the other female newsreaders during wartime, Barbara Wells, was a senior secretary at the station. All three women were very competent in their regular jobs and filled in admirably on newscasts when male staff members went off to war. In that era, hearing women read the news was an anomaly, fascinating to some listeners, but when the war was over, women who had filled in for men in doing newscasts went back to their other duties when the men returned. However, it was then that the role of women in broadcasting began to change and evolve, even though it took many decades. Lyndon Grove noted that it is “interesting” that in this day and age fully half of all newsreaders and reporters are women—which, of course, is as it should be in the twenty-first century.
Wartime newscasts, particularly the 12:30 news on CHAB Moose Jaw, inevitably included the names and military units of those who were killed or wounded or those missing in action. It was an agonizing time for families, especially the parents of boys overseas. In the course of World War II, an estimated sixty million people were killed, millions more were wounded and many spent much of the war in prisoner-of-war camps. Canada, which had a population of eleven million people when war broke out in 1939, lost 43,600 people.
I was five years old at the onset of World War II. As a child, I was much too young to understand the devastation experienced by so many families. To a youngster like me, the idea of war meant only excitement and adventure. In high school, I joined the Air Cadets and went to summer camp in Gimli, Manitoba. We marched on the tarmac at Gimli, the same airstrip that an Air Canada pilot used in 1997 to make a safe landing when, believe it or not, his plane ran out of fuel. It was a huge Boeing 767 with 61 passengers and crew on board. Unknown to pilot Bob Pearson and co-pilot Maurice Quintal, their fuel gauges were not working properly because of some improperly done mechanical repairs shortly before their flight. They had to find a place to land immediately. Pilot Pearson remembered an old Air Force landing strip at Gimli. With great skill he and Quintal landed the plane safely with no loss of life. Forever after, the big jet was known as the Gimli Glider. Many years later the crew was feted at an anniversary celebration in the small Manitoba town. Pilot Pearson was treated as a hero. It was not unlike the 2009 “Miracle on the Hudson” when Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger also showed great skill and ability in safely landing an Airbus A320-214 passenger plane on the Hudson River in New York. The engines stalled because a flock of Canada geese had been sucked into them. One hundred and fifty-five people had been aboard and none were seriously injured. Sully helped passengers onto the wings as the plane was sinking into the river, and people were rescued by boats. The story was recently the subject of the movie Sully.
The first major newspaper headline I saw during the war was on June 6, 1944. The headline, in very large bold black letters, read: “D-Day Invasion.” It was the Allies’ long-planned invasion of France to rout the German occupiers. It was the largest military invasion in history, involving 156,000 men, an armada of ships and many aircraft. It was the beginning of the end of the war. We were told of places like Juno, Omaha, Sword and Gold Beaches. They were military names for beaches along the Normandy coast of France where the Allies knew the German defences were formidable. The invasion was successful but at great cost. There were an estimated ten thousand casualties, including twenty-five hundred dead. There were an estimated 946 Canadian casualties.
As a child, I had no appreciation of the sacrifice made by those men and women and their families back home. By the time I reached the age of eighty, in 2015, I felt an obligation to visit Normandy to honour those who had fought in both world wars. In April and May, 2015, I went on an escorted bus tour of the Normandy coast to see the cemeteries, museums and former battlefields. It was a moving experience to see the beaches of Dieppe where hundreds of Canadian soldiers and others were killed and wounded on August 19, 1942, in a futile attempt to breach the solid German defences. Soldiers were literally picked off by German snipers as they attempted to ascend the steep embankments. Of the more than six thousand troops who took part in the raid, more than thirty-three hundred were killed, wounded or captured. The water ran red with Canadian blood. It was the bloodiest day in Canadian history.
A local guide with vast knowledge of First World War battles took us to the very spot where Dr. John McCrae, a lieutenant colonel, operated a field hospital just behind the battle lines. It was at this very place where Dr. McCrae wrote the famous poem “In Flanders Fields.” We were there on May 3, 2015, one hundred years to the day that the poem had been written on May 3, 1915. It was during the second year of the so-called Great War, which lasted from 1914 to 1918. It was supposed to be the war that ended wars for all time.
On our tour of France and Belgium we saw evidence of a wartime atrocity. In the courtyard of an abbey in the French countryside we saw the pictures of twenty-seven Canadian soldiers mounted on a wall. They had been captured when they tried to breach German lines in 1944. On the orders of SS Colonel Kurt Meyer, they were lined up and shot by a firing squad composed of Hitler Youth (Hitlerjugend). We stood beside the sacred ground where the men had fallen.
Many times in my career as a reporter, destiny has played a hand in my getting a story. Much of it was luck, sometimes augmented by intuition that something was about to happen. All of us on the tour of the Normandy coast were completely unprepared for what happened next. After the execution of the Canadian soldiers, a veteran named Bud Weeks had journeyed from his home in Orillia, Ontario, to this very site to pay homage to his fallen comrades. He had been captured along with the executed men. He would have been executed too, probably the next day, but a soldier in the regular German Army had allowed him to escape, telling him to run or he would be next. It was sheer serendipity that we were standing there when the old veteran appeared, resplendent in his beret and blue blazer with a row of medals. It was to be the last of many trips he had taken there from his home in Ontario. At age ninety-three, he was getting too old to make another trip. Of even greater coincidence