For years, it was my favourite photograph in the rather extensive album my father assembled chronicling his time overseas as a medical officer with the RCAF during the Second World War. The notation scrawled on the back of the picture in my dad’s unmistakable handwriting identifies the pilot as Flight-Lieutenant W.S. Johnston and places the location and date at Biggin Hill, December 1943. But who was he? Where did he come from? And what became of him?
Here is the article at Legion Magazine.
The story—or, more accurately, stories—behind Robert Capa’s D-Day pictures, like his outsized life, resonate and reverberate, expand and contract, obscure and illuminate to this day. More than any others he snapped over a colourful and accomplished career, these few frames propelled Capa to immortality. Following epic adventures shooting Spain’s civil war and other battlefronts, he became forever known as the greatest combat photographer, famously saying that “if your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.”
Here is the article at Legion Magazine.
The senior surviving officer from U-210, a German U-boat sunk by HMCS Assiniboine in 1942, was despised by crewmates and Allied interrogators alike, a “fanatical Nazi” whose hubris quickly evaporated in a storm of fear and protest the moment his pasty epidermis hit the icy waters of the North Atlantic. Leutnant zur See Günther Göhlich was just 22 years old but despite his youth—perhaps because of it—he was, according to his Canadian and American interrogators, “arrogant and conceited.” He was the boat’s executive officer.
Here is the article at Legion Magazine.
