CKNW Editorial
for November 11, 1999

I was saddened yesterday to read an article in the Toronto Globe and Mail, by a veteran, Anthony Westell, who made out as if going to war was a lark and that few were inspired by patriotism or any lofty purposes. He declared that he would not be wearing a poppy today.

I was saddened, not because of the iconoclastic nature of the silly column, but because it does ill to the memory of so many. The writer was 13 when the war started, I was five years younger. He was afraid that the war would end before he could get into it – so was I. He did get into it and according to him he was in more danger at home from air raids than any time he spent at sea. To him it was a lark.

In my case the war ended when I was 14. But it didn’t take me long to realize just how lucky I was to have missed it. My Uncle Howard didn’t make it back from Italy. My boyhood hero, Bud O’Hara, was killed over Germany. One of my teachers came back with a leg missing. Every day as I grew up I saw the casualty lists and saw my parents and their friends, especially those directly involved, weep. What had seemed as so exciting and glorious to my tender years suddenly became awful as I got older.

Undoubtedly some people had a very good war in the sense that they had fun with little danger. But many didn’t.

I’ve had the privilege of visiting three military graveyards – the Canadian Cemetery in Normandy, the Canadian Cemetery at Dieppe and the British, which is to say mostly Anzac Cemetery at El Alamein. What shocks you is the age on the crosses. All kids. Look around a high school graduating class or first and second year at college and there are the people who died. And this is what we forget as we age along with our veterans. These were young men and women … very young men and women who as our poet John Macrae said, "loved and were loved." This was young flesh and bones that went into those graves and the old men and women we see at the cenotaphs around the country were that age when they served and survived, so many of them maimed – often in ways not obvious to the naked eye.

Does anyone seriously suggest that these young people wanted to die? As their fathers and uncles had died just 20 years before?

Of course there was glamour – governments depend upon glamour, hearty songs and images of the opposite sex to recruit the young to die – they always have and always will. But that’s not the point. Everyone of these kids knew that they might die or be hurt for life. And most of them volunteered.

But let it also be said that this wasn’t just some little imperial adventure they got involved in. There were, of course, sins of omission and commission on both sides but this was a war that had to be fought.

Winston Churchill was the first to recognize what distinguished World War II from all other wars – here there was real, identifiable and horrible evil. Churchill quickly identified Hitler as a one off – he was a madman who had attained power and that he would go on killing and pillaging until he was stopped. He was the sort of person who would try to exterminate and nearly succeed at exterminating an entire people.

One can argue with conviction and truth about the mistakes Britain, France and the United States made between the war. The Treaty of Versailles ending the First War was unnecessarily harsh leaving injustices to Germany in its wake. England slept and even more so did France. Neither country was prepared to make the only commitment that would have ensured collective security – a deal with Russia. Munich was a disgrace … and on the arguments will rage. But there was one salient fact that, in June of 1940, no one could deny or ignore. Hitler was about to take Britain, Japan would have her way in the Far East and no one, not even those in the Americas was safe. And how true that last statement proved to be when Hitler, in the dying days of the war, got supersonic rockets and was not far from having an atom bomb to arm them with.

No … let’s pay no attention to those who would like to shock us for a $500 newspaper article. The scene in 1940 was such that the very existence of democracy anywhere on earth was in mortal peril.

The men and women you see at the cenotaphs today may or may not have had a quiet war. But they were there when the freedom of the entire world was at stake and they volunteered to risk their lives so that the rest of us could have the kind of free speech exercised by Anthony Westell, a former Dean of Journalism at Carleton University on the Comment Page of the Globe And Mail yesterday entitled "Why I Won’t Wear A Poppy Tomorrow." He can write his bilge and have it published because of those who wear their poppies and medals today and because of the comrades they left behind them all over the world.