[LINK] "Historicist: Life in Wartime"

[rfmcdonald]

This Saturday just past at Torontoist, Kevin Plummer wrote an interesting article about what things were like in Toronto and for Torontonians during the Second World War.

On September 10, 1939, Prime Minister Mackenzie King officially declared war on Germany. Toronto was impacted by the war almost immediately. Drawn by patriotism, adventure-seeking, or just the lure of a job after nearly a decade of the Great Depression, thousands of young Torontonians spilled into recruiting stations and from there into manning depots. In Bill McNeil's Voices of a War Remembered (Doubleday Canada Limited, 1991), Torontonian Ella Trow recalled how every family was touched by the Second World War. "My brothers and my husband went into the services," she wrote, "and most of my friends were in the same boat."

By the fall of 1942, Mike Filey wrote in his Sun column of March 25, 2001, military vehicles were as common a sight on city streets as servicemen in uniforms. Training exercises and mock battles were staged in Riverdale and Eglinton parks. From boats moored in Humber Bay, an attacking Canadian force stormed entrenched "enemy" positions on Sunnyside Beach. Blackouts were expected, if infrequent, training exercises. On a set day but at a surprise time air-raid sirens would blare, signalling for the lights to go out in a four-hundred-square-mile area from Bronte to Highland Creek, preparing locals for the possibility of an attack on North American soil. In May 1942, a blackout drill, Filey recounts, was given added drama because a German POW, recently escaped from a camp in Bowmanville, was thought to be "prowling the darkened city streets." The Star reported that police were called when a transient taking shelter in a Brampton barn was thought to be the prisoner.

Civilian life was thrown into turmoil as well, as industrial manufacturing converted to wartime industries and ramped up production, providing new employment opportunities for women. In some ways the city's transformation brought citizens closer together as a community, cooperating on fundraising drives and other initiatives. Some people, however, saw fault in the transformation. "I don't believe that the Toronto I grew up in," Trow wrote, "existed at all once the war started. In my mind, the changes were not for the good." The massive influx of industrial workers and their families created a housing shortage and, to Trow, the people on the now-crowded streets grew less considerate. For better or worse, the Second World War altered the patterns of daily life for almost all Torontonians.

Everything from sex and romance to to home economics to popular culture was transformed. Go, read.