Memory Project preserves experiences of Canadian WW2 and Korean War veterans

War veterans are often reluctant to share their experiences with others, feeling non-combatants will never understand the intensity of what they went through.

So the Memory Project is worth a visit this Remembrance Day. Set up by Historica-Dominion Institute with support from the Department of Canadian Heritage, the web site contains the first-person accounts of thousands of veterans from the Second World War and Korea, along with artifacts and memorabilia to give Canadians an insight into their experiences.

You can browse veterans' individual stories or focus on particular battles, campaigns or theatres of war. You can hear the stories in the veterans' own words. The site includes audio recordings as well as transcripts.

There's the story of Clair Hawn of Streetsville, Ont., who joined the army to become a motorcycle dispatch rider.

"Which was really a, kind of a dangerous experience," he recalled. "But this is what I liked at that time."

Hawn said the dispatch riders traded their motorcycles for Jeeps after German troops began stringing wires across roads to knock the riders off their bikes. The Jeeps mounted a blade to cut any wires they encountered. Camped in the Reichwald Forest, Hawn recalled being shelled nightly.

"And I remember one night, it blew up our kitchen and all the pots were all full of holes from shrapnel. And the Germans would come in pretty near every night and go strafing down the highway, to take the transport, our transports off the road."

Hawn recounts a terrible memory of seeing some children playing on a pile of mines that had been removed from the ground.

"... They were not supposed to be there and they were punching them with something and they blew up. Killed nine people. So I had one of the soldiers hit the side of my Jeep and I got out of there pretty fast because it was very very dangerous, the coming in to get the people that got killed there."

Air force veteran Pierre Bauset of Montreal said his war was "very, very short." He was shot down in November 1943 returning from bombing raid on Frankfurt, apparently by a German night fighter.

"The fire started on the port side engine, and the aircraft was in danger of disintegrating, especially the port side wing, which was being attacked by the fire. So the pilot ordered us to jump, and that was the end of my active war with the Royal Canadian Air Force."

Bauset and a fellow crewman came down in occupied France and embarked on a perilous search to establish contact with resistance fighters. With no ID and dressed in clothes donated by farmers, they took a train to Paris.

"Now, I must say that all of this was a little bit dicey because we had no papers, no identification and we were in civilian clothes, which was a very dangerous thing because if we were caught by the German military without any proper identification we could easily have been construed as terrorists and treated as such. We were very, very lucky."

Bauset and a comrade eventually made contact with the Resistance.

"That was my beginning with the organized resistance in France. So I must say that these resistance people stand in very, very high regard. I owe them a debt of gratitude that cannot ever be repaid."

Earle Wagner of Halifax served in the merchant navy aboard an oil tanker during the Battle of the Atlantic.

" . . . sailing alone along the Atlantic east coast, in one day, I counted 14 Allied ships sunk and resting on the ocean floor, with parts of their superstructure [area above the main deck] above water. I am sure I missed other sunken ships. This terrible experience of viewing so many ships worth millions of dollars and the death of so many seafarers was my most vivid experience of Nazi U-boat [submarine] warfare, and left a lasting impression upon me."

Arthur Lortie of Quebec City was the son of a reserve soldier and, too young to serve in the Second World War, enlisted to fight in Korea. Outnumbered Canadians faced Chinese troops in a campaign that was often closer to the First World War's trench warfare than the mobile campaigns of the second great war.

"I recall a raid, among others, very well . . . We climbed the mountain, shouting and firing: grenades, machine guns, other guns. We opened fire as if there were 30 of us. We were only about 10. That was the plan we had been given. They didn't respond with any fire. We were very surprised by that. We had said: 'It's going to be crazy at night, it sure won't be funny!' But no!"

The veterans' individual stories include personal photos and other memorabilia, along with links to more information about where they served.