valeriesbookofme

This is a photo of RCAF airman Jack Forrest, taken around 1943-1944. Jack was born in Montreal on April 5, 1921. He would have been 99 years old in a week if World War 2 hadn't intervened. Jack joined up when he was 18, joining the RCAF in Toronto for "general duties." For the next few years he served in various places in Canada and learned to love the skies. He was shipped over to Northern Ireland, to an RAF Base, RAF Archdale, near the border with the Republic of Ireland. He and his fellow crewmen flew Sunderland seaplanes and Catalinas up what was known as "The Donegal Corridor" into the Atlantic, hunting for German submarines that would surface overnight to charge their batteries. They carried depth charges.  (photo courtesy of Chuck Singer, by email) The Donegal Corridor was named such because, during World War 2, the Republic of Ireland was neutral while Northern Ireland, as a part of the UK, was at war. The RAF needed a way to fly wes

I had expected, just a few weeks ago, to be getting ready to head for Phoenix today, to take a flight over to Heathrow/Dublin for a three-week holiday. All plans laid, expectations of meeting up with my cousin Kathleen and, later, other cousins that we have never met. And then Coronavirus happened. From a devastating problem in Wuhan, China, it has spread across the world. There is still so much conflicting information about it—how deadly IS it to people with “normal” health? Is it better to get it and get it over with? Or are we condemning thousands, perhaps millions of elderly and fragile people to death if we don’t enact the kind of measures that haven’t been seen since World War 2. A time when most of us were not yet born. I have often thought, as more and more measures are adopted, as the world closes in more and more so that for so many people, the world is their house/apartment/room, that it’s ironic that this comes at a time when those in the Western world (people in Afric