Live to Look Again

I really enjoy personal memoirs of the wars of the 20th century, which generally add an intimate and human perspective on an otherwise entirely monstrous enterprise.

Don Fraser was a graduate of the University of Toronto before the war, and joined the RCAF in 1940. He served several years in England and was a pilot on the some of the first “Leigh Light”-equipped anti-submarine bombers, killing people on U-boats in the English Channel and the North Sea over a period of several years. The book is based on the author's daily diary of those years, and has an immediacy and clarity that makes it a gripping, tragic and sometimes funny tale.

I always wonder if my father–who was an instructor with the Commonwealth Air Training Programme from 1940 to 1944–will show up in books like this, and while he didn't, the experiences he lived through are clearly reflected here. He had many stories about his childhood and the friends he grew up with, and every single one of them ended the same way: “And then he went off to war, and never came back.”

Fraser is a quiet, stoic voice reminding us–after a successful career as a botanist and professor of geography–of the death of a generation. His lack of emotional engagement is best summed up by his sole comment on seeing his widowed mother and younger brother for the first time in three years, “Everyone looked fine.”

A generation of young men had their lives destroyed, and every survivor was left wounded in the their soul. Books like this are an unassuming but unequivocal reminder of the utter stupidity of war–the inefficiency, the callousness, the evil–that sends so many young men not to “glorious death in battle” (as if there was such a thing) but to stupid death in training accidents and the like.