Canadians in Radar
A Collaborative Oral History of World War II Veterans
proudly presented by
The Secrets of Radar Museum
Remembering Sacrifice: Veterans Recall War Losses
The suffering brought on by the events of the Second World War can seem very removed and abstract to someone who did not live them. Oral histories are a rare glance into the past that bring this tragedy into a new perspective. The scale of lives lost in the war is overwhelming and can reduce tragedy to mere numbers, but each life lost held its own grief that was acutely felt by friends, family, and colleagues.
Janet Bates
Interviewer: Were there … I mean, was it difficult for some radar operators, especially the ones on systems like GCI maybe, where you’re talking to the pilot, was it difficult knowing that, you know, the pilots are out there getting shot at?
Janet Bates: Well, I don’t know. I was never on GCI, but, well, yes because even when, say we were plotting in on defensive, you did your quick calculations, say it was a hundred bombers plus coming in and have to alert the fighters - they fell to ruin - and the fighter stations that they better get up there and do some intercepting, you worried about our men, you know, getting shot down and what have you. Because … thank goodness for the RAF spitfire and hurricane pilots because I don’t think … if we had not won the Battle of Britain that we would have … we would have been swamped by Germany.
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Janet Bates: I don’t think people would want to go through it again. I’ll tell you where the worst memory was, when, you know, when Dunkirk happened. You just couldn’t believe the thousands of men that were just coming across in little rowboats. Anything went out there that floated to take them off the coast because they were just getting cut down to pieces. Well, I mean a lot of them were on D-Day too, but Dunkirk seems to stick in my memory because it was such a … startled you, you know. If there doing that to us now, what will they do when they come over en masse, you know?
Interviewer: What were you doing on D-Day?
JB: Oh, I was on duty at Swingate. Yeah.
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Joseph Lesley Brown
Joseph Lesley Brown: Well, yes, I’d gone off on this course and I had to spend a night somewhere on the way, and I was awakened with this strange noise I’d never heard before and of course the windows were all blacked out and I could just see creeks through this blue flashes. Next thing I knew I was blown out of bed. I wasn’t hurt, just a blast wave. I thought, “Aha, this must be…” and it was the buzz bomb. And there were a lot of buzz bombs. Toward the end of the war people’s nerves were getting a bit frayed, a bit tired, and the buzz bomb in lots of ways was the last straw. It was a terrifying experience.
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Donald Harrett
Donald Harrett: We lost a lot of Canadians on the Dieppe Raid, but we'd have lost ten times as many on the Normandy invasion if it hadn’t been they listened to us and put radar on the landing craft.
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Charlie Jackson
Charlie Jackson: We woke up one morning and the submarine, which was supposed to be part of our convoy, had disappeared. It was an English submarine and I think it was a cruiser, an Indian cruiser, that was also out with us for a couple of … was with us for a week and a half, and it had disappeared so we wondered what was happening. Well the next morning after that we woke up, we found out that about eight or ten of our ships had been torpedoed and we were in the middle there with a panoramic view of all these oil ships burning around us and so on. Just like watching a horrible moving. And two or three ships carrying aircrafts on board were sunk and these were freighters. They only travel around eight or ten miles an hour. And then orders came from the headquarters in England to disperse and get out of there as fast as we could.
Edna Simpson
Edna Simpson: When you’re young, you think you’re immortal. You do. I mean, I think back to the days in Liverpool when we were bombed and I mean…. Bombs dropped very close to me. And I never thought that they would hit me. Imean, you know, you think, “Oh dear, that’s really close,” but…
Interviewer: Either it doesn’t hit you and you think, “Gee, it’ close,” or it does hit you and …
ES: Yes, and you get up the next morning and the house two down is gone except for the stairway, because very often the stairway was left because that’s the strongest part of the house.