The War Museum

Wendy and I visited the new War Museum the day it opened in 2005, when it was packed wall to wall with what seemed to us to be most of the population of Ottawa. Occasionally we caught glimpses of the exhibits when the backs of tall fat people in front of us momentarily parted. It looked very impressive, judging from these fleeting views. It's architecturally very striking, original and evocative, unlike the old Victorian building in which exhibits were too crowded to be seen at their best. Last weekend I saw some of it again with Rebecca who had a pair of complimentary tickets, her reward for performing there recently on behalf of Master Gardeners of Ottawa. We saw only the part which deals with the world war of 1939-45.  I have vivid memories of those war years, of the profound anxiety of 1940-42, bordering on panic, fear and fatalism, the slow replacement of these emotions of lamentation by cautious optimism, then increasing relief and joy as it became clear that the Allies would prevail over the evil of the Nazis and the seemingly cold blooded fanaticism of the Japanese. In my memoirs I mentioned the contributions to the war effort of my various cousins, and my own small schoolboy role as an ARP (Air Raid Precautions) bicycle dispatch rider. I had photos of me and some of my school classmates on our bikes, wearing 'tin hats' like those the soldiers wore on battlefields, but they were lost when I accidentally discarded a box of old photos during a clear-out and tidy-up preparatory to one of our house moves.  One of the last exhibits Rebecca and I saw last weekend was a room containing memorabilia and newsreels of the celebrations on VE Day.- the day the war in Europe ended - and the next room commemorating VJ Day, the end of the war against Japan. These exhibits opened floodgates of memories. (See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y10o_-xlIYw for a movie of the museum).

Here is a little of what I wrote in my memoirs 25 years ago, about that eventful time :

In February 1944, when I was 17½ years old, I started first-year medicine at the University of Adelaide....

The war ended when I was in my second year. We had a spectacular celebration on VE Day, with an impromptu procession through the streets of Adelaide led by an open touring-car remarkably like one often seen in newsreel shots of the commanders of the North African campaign. It contained a uniformed officer who uncannily resembled the war hero General Bernard Montgomery. This man was a university student, an ex-serviceman and amateur actor, wearing his uniform complete with rows of medals. Skilfully made up he fooled many of the people of Adelaide, some of whom really believed that General  Montgomery was leading our victory celebrations. The second victory celebration when the Japanese were defeated in August 1945 was more subdued. The implications of the fact that the Japanese had capitulated after atomic bombs had destroyed two of their cities, were too troubling to overlook. Although we felt profound relief that the war was over and most of us felt vengeful towards the Japanese who were getting their just deserts after the atrocities their soldiers had committed, some of us, myself included, had misgivings about this new weapon, reinforced by Albert Einstein’s words when these appeared in our newspaper later. We realized that something had changed forever.   

I was becoming increasingly aware of the world at that time. I avidly read news reports and commentaries in our parochial local newspapers, and in international magazines from Britain and the USA available in our local library. When I was in the third year of the medical course I started subscribing to the New Yorker, which I continued for the next ten years or so, and read its excellent articles on the world’s problems, which broadened my horizons immeasurably. I became increasingly aware of and sensitive about many of these problems. I still have the New Yorker of August 31, 1946, which was entirely devoted to John Hersey’s account of the survivors of the first atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.  On the troubled Middle East, I argued with an ex-serviceman classmate about the establishment of Israel. He had served in the Middle East, and was full of admiration for what the Zionists were doing to convert Palestine into a fertile land flowing with milk and honey. Despite my partially Jewish origins, I was concerned and confused about the morality of handing over this land to usurpers who were ejecting by force the families who had lived there for many generations. The bloodshed and oppression of the Palestinians that have followed the formation of Israel in 1947, and the transformation of the Israelis into the bullies and thugs of the Middle East, seem to me now to support the position I argued in the days just after the end of World War II, when I could see though my classmate could not, that more wars would be caused by the decisions that the new United Nations Security Council and General Assembly were taking in those years I spent getting my clinical training. My Jewish Uncle Lester had a friend who had come back from the Middle East with horrific stories, including one about a massacre he had witnessed, in which a Palestinian family, including several little children, had been slaughtered by Zionist soldiers (we call them death squads nowadays) who founded the nation-state of Israel. He and Uncle Lester agreed that ultimately no good could come from the violent and brutal founding of a homeland for the Jews in the place where their distant ancestors had lived 2000 years earlier. It would have been better, they believed, to establish a homeland for the Jews, if there had to be one, in the good farming country of Western Victoria.

There is much more in my memoirs, but this is enough to convey my mixed emotions in 1945-47.