Canada and the Second World War: Essays in Honour of Terry Copp

3. “To Hold on High the Torch of Liberty”: Canadian Youth and the Second World War

33 3 “To Hold on High theTorch of Liberty” CanadianYouth and the SecondWorldWar Cynthia Comacchio For many young Canadians, the national call to arms that sounded in September 1939, scarcely more than a generation after the “war to end all wars,” signalled a personal obligation to be “taken seriously by the whole population, not just those who rushed to join the colours.” As one woman recalled, although “terrified” at the prospect of war, “All of us, of all ages, accepted that we must do something, no matter how little.”1 Another member of the generation that came of age during the Second World War—famously dubbed “The Greatest Generation” by American journalist Tom Brokaw— affirmed that young Canadians “believed that we were fighting for our survival, and for the survival of civilization … I would have volunteered proudly, if I had not been too young to fight.”2 Still others recall their sense of adventure and excited anticipation: writer Budge Wilson, a Halifax teenager at the time, was secretly thrilled to be experiencing the war in a city “on the edge” of warfare while herself poised “on the edge of childhood and very close to adulthood.”3 What is important about being young in the midst of world-historic events such as war, what connects the multitude of personal and often divergent experiences, what imprints individual and collective memory, is not the universality of experience so much as the fundamental elements of age and life stage. Age profoundly mediates the experience of world events, making them “historic” on myriad levels. The sense of belonging to a “wartime generation” shaped a particular generational consciousness, both among peers and in relation to those younger and older. Whether enlisted or participating in 34 “To Hold on High theTorch of Liberty” homefront activities, rural or urban-based, in school or earning wages, male or female—and despite variations in class, race, culture—for many Canadians, the Second World War was distinguished by the simple fact of belonging to a certain age cohort and sharing its life stage perspectives, challenges, and opportunities at that precise historical moment. It is not the veracity or accuracy of what is remembered about coming of age in wartime that reveals the generational stamp of war, but the ways in which that experience is framed, both by contemporaries and by those looking backward.4 Personal recollections and contemporary commentaries alike testify to its generational impact. While this naturally applies to all ages and life stages, it could be argued that those “on the edge of childhood”—the adolescents who, by the 1940s, were becoming popularly known as “teenagers”—were in many ways the most affected of the wartime generations.5 At least officially, many were too young to fight or to take on authoritative homefront roles. Yet, more aware than their younger siblings of the meaning of war, they were very much “in the midst” of the tumult, challenge, and opportunity presented by both their adolescent condition and the historic situation that served as its context. War necessarily focuses attention on the population, the essential resource for its successful prosecution, and especially on those who are young, healthy, and male. The public discourses of the time recognized that youth embody both the dread and the promise of war. Young Canadians were both strongly urged to participate in the war effort and especially commended for it, in public acknowledgment that the greatest burden of war is shouldered by the young. Just as Depression youth had paid a steep price in deferred ambitions for a “normal” life, so would wartime adolescents, some of whom would sacrifice life itself. Thus the Second World War constituted an “even bigger challenge” to youth than had the economic crisis that it effectively ended, for “the children of a depression and its handicaps” had become “the adolescents of another war era and the hazards that accompany it.”6 Among such hazards were the vulnerability of “latch-key” children obliged to fend for themselves in empty homes; the impulsive curtailing of education in favour of wellpaying jobs; the “running off” to enlist of under-age boys and even girls; and the promiscuity and delinquency evidently encouraged by the failure of adult supervision in the urgent atmosphere of wartime.7 As well, like those who had come of age during the Depression, wartime adolescents were shaken by 35 Cynthia Comacchio their insecure prospects. The Young Women’s Christian...