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Illustration by Marley Allen-Ash
If your parents or grandparents lived through the Second World War, this is the perfect time to explore their memorabilia. Faded photos, old paper, hard-bound high-school yearbooks with glossy pages, handwritten letters, creased post cards and posters have a heft, texture and even aroma that delivers a sensory wallop that transports you like a time machine.
That’s how it felt when I read the letters my father wrote to his parents and siblings while he was in the military between 1942 and 1945. Sixty-five years after they were written and 30 years after he died in 1978, those fragile blue airmail forms with his pencil handwriting brought him back to life. His turns of phrase, idiosyncratic expressions, point of view and tone of voice sounded exactly like him, but more intense and bouncy.
My future dad turned out to be a remarkable young man I simply never got to know. His vivid record of daily life in the army, as he moved from Peterborough to Toronto, to Brampton, to Petawawa to Quebec and then overseas to England, France, Holland and Germany, brims with acute observations, wry humour, gripping anecdotes and vivacious personality.
There were strong echoes of my settled suburban Dad in the fun-loving and jocular letters written by B133750 Gunner Rogow RM, as he officially signed every note. (Dad changed his last name to Roger before I was born.) Aligning the athletic young man with the paternal model was an intriguing challenge in reconciling my memories with his reports. In his letters, my father describes playing table tennis, basketball and swimming. He coached boxing matches and went canoeing and hunting. When I knew him, he only played golf and reminisced about winning high-school swim competitions. I thought he was content to be sedentary, but the letters revealed military conditions that permanently injured his back.
My future Dad describes writing high-pressure exams in geometry, physics, calculus and electricity in the officer training program, the No.1 Canadian Army Course. I wasn’t aware he studied these subjects, let alone used them in his military career. He mentions competitive table tennis matches with the other soldiers, but I never saw him pick up a paddle. Yet reading about these games triggered a dim, half-century old memory of him stepping up to a ping pong table to play against one of the first visitors from The People’s Republic of China in the early 1970s. Civilian Ralph Roger was in his 50s by then but he played with the relaxed but unerring accuracy of Gunner Rogow. The letters explain when he honed those skills.
My father told amusing dad jokes, but he wasn’t hilarious. The letters are full of humour, aimed at the discomforts and indignities of Army life. Describing Regimental Police Duty, he laments “5 million flies in the guard hut that never cease biting, buzzing, bombing, bothering, never sleeping, never letting you sleep, pugnacious, carnivorous, ferocious, malicious little devils.”
His scorching commentary on the absurdity of military life equals Catch 22: “During inspection in battle order you wear your steel helmet and under the hot sun, this contraption weighing seven and a half pounds can give you a headache in nothing flat. In action I didn’t wear my steel helmet once. On VE day my rifle was taken away from me and I was issued a Bren gun, but I haven’t been issued any magazines for it so I couldn’t shoot it if I wanted to. … Any soldier who has been in action will tell you that they were the happiest days of his Army career … because there is so little regimentation and no useless spit and polish. Everything you do is bringing the end that much nearer and you feel useful and manly for a change instead of like a wax figure at Madame Tussauds.”
My dad’s thoughtful reflections reveal a young man coming to terms with danger, fear, risk, homesickness and soul crushing loss. It’s touching that he kept these letters his entire life without mentioning them. I’ll never get to ask him why he didn’t share them but my hunch is that he didn’t write them to children he wasn’t even thinking about having, and once we did exist, he wasn’t sure we would understand what he went through. I suspect this is what he meant by his oft-repeated comment: “You have no idea how lucky you are.”
I never liked hearing that but now that I’ve read his letters I have to agree with him. And I have a heightened sense of the gap he felt between himself and those who didn’t live through military service during the Second World War.
I don’t know if he would have shared these letters with me had he lived longer or how he would feel about my reading and writing about them. But I hope it would make him feel better understood. I do know that it deepened my understanding of my Dad. Increased insight is always good and every veteran deserves that.
Robin Roger lives in Toronto.
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