 SGT.
BILL MCGINNIS wrote many more than just 15 letters home to his wife during
the five years he spent in the RCAF, but these are all that have survived.
There is nothing remarkable about these letters, from a personal or historical
perspective. Bill McGinnis was a good man and a decent soldier who served
his country in that most glory-free of places -- military bases on the
home front. In the letters, he is preoccupied with getting leave and finding
space in overcrowded trains, getting his job done on the various air bases
to which he is assigned, often at a moment's notice, and finally with obtaining
his discharge papers so he can return to his new wife and his interrupted
life. |
 THE
LIFE THAT FOLLOWED THE WAR was as unremarkable as his life in the service
-- my brother and sister can't remember him ever talking about his time
in uniform. There are only the vaguest hints in these letters of the cataclysm
going on in Europe and around the world, or of the nascent tension that
would shake Canada in years to come. I hope you read these letters with
some sense of an ordinary man, caught up in an extraordinary struggle,
striving like so many other men and women to maintain the thread of their
lives in a difficult time. |
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