The Valour and the Horror

Canada and the Second World War

So stand by your glasses steady,
This world is a world of lies,
Here's a toast to the boys dead already,
And here's to the next ones to die.

RCAF toast, WWII, author unknown

According to social historian Paul Fussell, "The real war will never get in the history books." But in January l992, 50 years after the fact, Canadians were finally presented with the truth about the nation's involvement in World War II. The web site THE VALOUR AND THE HORROR are based on the television series of the same title. The series consisted of of three two-hour films combining investigative journalism, drama and documentary to tell the unvarnished story of three World War II campaigns. The web sites draw extensively from the television series and contain much additional material, including contrary opinions.

In 1992 the television series was broadcast in English on the CBC Television Network and in French on the Radio-Canada network.

In each film, two veterans return to their battlefields, relive their experiences and meet with men they fought against. In dramatic segments, actors quote the memoirs of survivors, or the letters of the dead. Canadian soldiers re-enact actual battles. There is no fiction. THE VALOUR AND THE HORROR celebrates the valour of those who fought, while it condemns the horror of war. It does the journalism that was never done.

In A Savage Christmas: Hong Kong l94l, veteran sergeants Bob Manchester and Bob Clayton return to chronicle the carnage of a battle that was lost before it was fought. Two thousand untrained Canadian troops were offered up "as lambs to the slaughter", fending off an attack of 50,000 Japanese soldiers. Hundreds of Canadians were killed, many murdered in hospital beds, and the survivors spent the remainder of the war in nightmarish prison slave camps.

In Death by Moonlight: Bomber Command, the film examines the one in three survival rate for the 50,000 Canadians flying; the secret British policy of bombing German civilians; and the catastrophic Nuremberg campaign.

In Desperate Battle: Normandy l944recounts the mistakes, bad luck and poor leadership which led up to the battle of Verrières Ridge, which after Dieppe, was the blackest day for the Canadian army during the war. In one skirmish, the Black Watch regiment was decimated: 325 men attacked, only l5 returned. The veterans who return to Normandy were both majors at Normandy, and rose to great heights in the military following the war: Sydney Radley-Walters became a brigadier general; Jacques Dextraze major general commanding all Canadian forces.