Pictures from my father’s wartime photo album

I was raised on stories and pictures of the Second World War. My father, Dr. Edward L. Thorne, was an air force medical officer who served three of his five Royal Canadian Air Force years (1942-45) overseas with fighter, coastal and bomber squadrons.

The experience shaped the rest of his life. And all of mine.

As I wrote in one of my first features for Legion Magazine, a memoir, “he rarely talked about it and, when he did, it was with such nostalgia, deep emotion and soaring reverence for those with whom he served that he sparked my curiosity and captivated my imagination from childhood to this very day.”

The artifacts from his time overseas, now in the archives of the Canadian War Museum, were subjects of fascination to a young boy growing up in the 1960s, about the same years distant from WW II as I am now from my time as a war correspondent with The Canadian Press in Kosovo and Afghanistan.

His photo album was of particular interest. Thick with page after page of overlapping images, each with detailed dates and IDs written on the back in my dad’s distinctive handwriting, it depicted exhausted pilots, crashed airplanes, wartime weddings, good times and bad.

Here is a small sampling of his work, centred around 401 and 416 squadrons, RCAF, using what I believe was a Kodak Eastman Brown No.1A 616 format camera, which has long since disintegrated.

• Category: Front Lines