Lest we forget the sacrifices of those whose voices were bound by duty and silence. Jonathan Vance discusses the reluctance of some veterans to break a decades-old silence about their experiences.
Recognizing the Silence of Sacrifice
Remembrance Day is all about recognizing the sacrifices of those men and women who served their country in time of war, but what about those people whose work demanded that they not be recognized? Anyone who took part in underground or clandestine work during the Second World War was required to sign some version of the Official Secrets Act (as it was called in Britain), which bound them to silence and prohibited them from discussing their work with anyone who hadn’t signed the same document. The pledge was to take effect as soon as you added your signature, but there was no indication of when it would expire.
Over the years I’ve talked to a good number of veterans who, for whatever reason, were required to sign a document like this during the war. Some assumed that once the war was over, the need for secrecy had passed and they were free to discuss their work. Others, however, still regard their signature as a solemn pledge –- they will categorically refuse to talk about their experiences, even if the details have been available in books for decades.
I sometimes wonder how Ken Macalister and Frank Pickersgill would have dealt with this dilemma had they survived the war. In the 1950s and 1960s, books by and about secret agents became very hot commodities. Many of them became best-sellers, and at least one, Carve Her Name With Pride, about the agent Violette Szabo, was made into a successful motion picture. Had they lived out their mission and worked with Physician, one of the most famous resistance networks in France, Ken and Frank could probably have picked any publisher and named their price.
But would they have wanted to? Ken probably would have regarded his military service as a closed book –- a good experience, but not something to be relived through memoir. He was naturally shy and self-effacing, and might well have resisted anything that put him in the spotlight. Frank would have been a little more interested -– because he dreamed of being a journalist and had an obvious talent for the profession, he could easily have used a memoir as a way to kick-start a career as a writer.
But somehow I think both men would have declined to tell their stories. They might well have joined a Remembrance Day parade, but I imagine them being like the vast majority of veterans I have met over decades of research and writing –- modest to a fault.
How They Became Unlikely Soldiers
When we were casting around for possible titles for the book, Unlikely Soldiers struck me as particularly appropriate. On the one hand, it really suited what I wanted to say about Ken Macalister and Frank Pickersgill. It would have been difficult to find two men who were less suited for military service, both physically and temperamentally. Both of their fathers had served in the First World War, but the sons never showed the slightest inclination to involve themselves in anything military. Frank even wrote, after the Second World War had begun, that he had no intention of enlisting for anything. Nevertheless, both men found their way into uniform and took on one of the riskiest jobs imaginable, one that involved direct, personal contact with the enemy.
On the other hand, Unlikely Soldiers gave the story a broader relevance. Ken and Frank were unusual guys in their background and educational attainments, but their experience in enlisting wasn’t unusual. In fact, most Canadians who served in the military were "unlikely soldiers." Canada has always had a very small professional army, and choosing the military as a career is less common here than it is in many other countries.
So, there aren’t too many people who would be considered likely soldiers. The story of Ken and Frank, then, is really the story of the citizen-soldier that Canada has come to rely on -– people for whom military service is merely an interruption in civilian life. They enlist, they do their bit, and then they come home and get on with their lives.
The real tragedy is those who don’t get to come home. We have no way of knowing what Ken and Frank would have achieved had they survived the war; they showed sufficient potential that they could have accomplished just about anything. But we also have no way of knowing what the other 100,000 men and women who died in service could have achieved. How much poorer has the country been for the loss of these unlikely soldiers?
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Remembering Remembrance Day
The Least We Can Do to Remember
