Canada Declares War on Germany, 1939, by Dahn Batchelor

From MemoryArchive

Who: Dahn Batchelor
What: Canada's Declaration of War on Germany
When: 1939
Where: Toronto

My name is Dahn Batchelor and in September 1939, I was six years old and in grade one in Toronto when Canada declared war against Germany.

Most citizens had radios at that time but newspapers were not delivered to our homes then. Not only that, we couldn't buy them at stores and the nearest news stand could be blocks away at major intersections only.

The Canadian government decided to inform the citizens of Toronto about Canada's declaration of war in a most unusual manner. Let me explain how it was done.

I had just finished my lunch and was stepping out of the doorway when I suddenly became aware that thousands upon thousands of small leaflets (about the size of post cards) were fluttering down from the sky. Everywhere I looked, all I could see was these leaflets falling out of the sky. They had been dropped by several bombers which by the time I saw the leaflets, were long gone. Needless to say, I was totally confused. I couldn't figure how the leaflets got up there in the first place.

I ran everywhere, grabbing at these pieces of paper as they appeared in the areas within my reach. When I got to school, I had a real handful. The school principal told me (and everyone else) to throw them in the trash cans he had placed in the hallways. He only had to look at one to realize what the message was. One side was in English and the other side was in French.

I don't know if my mother learned about the declartion earlier but she later told me that she knew about the declaration that day.