Browse Case Studies

“…and with maps I make him familiar with the topography of Golgotha.” This line, from a letter written in 1918 by the soldier-poet Wilfred Owen, conjures an ominous picture of the landscape confronting all initiates to the trenches. But it also touches on an aspect of the war that, even today, remains largely unknown and unrecognized.

At the mid point of World War II, in August 1942, the tragic events at Dieppe demonstrated the terrible risks of attacking a heavily-defended port. The Western Allies knew that a massive amphibious assault was necessary in order to loosen Hitler’s stronghold on Europe, but how to execute such an operation effectively, without again suffering huge losses, was a vexing and complex problem. A vital part of the solution was the construction of artificial harbours, codenamed Mulberry.

The Canadian YMCA provided a wide variety of services – educational, social, spiritual, practical and even psychological – for Canadian troops serving overseas during the First World War. In a revealing and affectionate series of letters, William Fingland, an officer serving with the “Y”, provided vivid insights into his daily life to his sweetheart, waiting at home.

While her physician husband studied, Jane Abbott spent much of the summer of 1914 absorbing the art and culture of Vienna. Typical Americans abroad, they were eager to absorb all that Europe had to offer. However, their stay was to be cut short by an event which, when its repercussions finally ended, was to cost almost 20 million lives.

The letters of the McDaniel brothers, RCAF ground crewmen stationed in northern England during the Second World War, are filled with the war-time experiences, momentous and mundane, of two young men, offering a glimpse into the often overlooked lives of ground unit personnel.

The letters of British pilot John Lisle, who spent two years as a German prisoner of war (1943-45), as well as revealing the tedium and sense of isolation of the prisoner’s life, provide insights into the ways the prisoners tried to live as “normally” as they could.

The Christmas Truce of December 1914 has become the stuff of legend. In a savage war which dragged on for four long years and in which perhaps eight million people died, it seems almost inconceivable that groups of soldiers in the trenches, the declared enemies of one another, could have exchanged songs and cigarettes, even for a brief interlude. Gerald Blake was there.

Constance Malleson, in a series of letters to her former lover and lifelong friend Bertrand Russell, provides a vivid account of life during World War II. She writes first from her home in the English countryside, later from Finland, and then, following her escape from attack by the Soviet Union, from Sweden. Her letters provide valuable insights into the hardships of war, as seen from the civilian perspective.

Established in Toronto in 1935, the Canadian Youth Congress “expressed the thought of awakened and intelligent youth” in favour of peace. The movement, claiming some four hundred thousand members at its height, faced almost insuperable odds as first the Spanish Civil War and then the Second World War broke out.