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From the Upper Canada Rebellion to a Spitfire cockpit over Nazi Europe, one Toronto family and two centuries of history interrupting the peace.

Shot down over Belgium

My father, Flying Officer Robert “Buck” Buckles, flew Spitfires with the Royal Canadian Air Force over Nazi-occupied Europe. On December 23, 1943 he was shot down and captured.

What happened next surprised him. The German pilots he had been fighting invited him to lunch in the Officers Mess. Hours later he was on his way to Stalag Luft III, the camp made famous by the Great Escape.

On May 3, 1945, in the last days of the war, he climbed another camp’s fence and walked into the forest.

After his death in 2016, I gathered his letters, his logbook and his POW records. But Buck’s story doesn’t begin with him.

 

Two centuries of choices

What began as an account of my father’s war became a family saga: the long peace of the nineteenth century, the two world wars that followed, and my own changing understanding of the challenges of their times and mine.

Buck’s maternal ancestors, newly arrived in Whitevale on the outskirts of Toronto, watched the 1837 Upper Canada Rebellion unfold close at hand. The cemetery was full of them, strong settler men and women with values that embodied the best of early Canada but also expressions of religious intolerance, racism and oppressive patriarchal practices. 
 

When the bugles called

The terrible tragedy of the First World War is clear from a family photograph taken in the summer of 1912.  The Buckles boys played in the backyard of 66 Macdonell Avenue, in Toronto’s Parkdale neighborhood. Robert, on the left, is smiling, a little self-consciously, for the camera. William, in the middle, wears a uniform with military piping. Richard, on the right, looks us straight in the eye as he aims and fires, unaware that his cadet cap is askew. Friends preside over the mock battle. 
Within five years, Robert, my father’s namesake, was killed at Vimy Ridge, William had been wounded at the Somme, and their brother Richard was serving with the artillery.
Jack, my grandfather, waited. At twenty-three, he reluctantly entered the war as a military engineer, building bridges and roads through its last hundred brutal days. By then, the war was no longer greeted with excitement and patriotic fervour, as it had been at the start. It was simply something to be endured until the bitter end.
 

Escape from Luckenwalde

In April 1945, the deadliest war in history was coming to a close. For Flying Officer Robert “Buck” Buckles the promise of peace was still out of reach, beyond the wire surrounding Luckenwalde. The POW camp had become a last stop for prisoners shuttled from across both the Western and Eastern fronts as German forces retreated to Berlin.

As he stood in the dark at the fence, Buck thought of what he might find in the forest beyond. He also thought of his family in the village of his childhood and the leap to freedom he now needed to make. Resolved to leave the war behind, he climbed the fence and crossed into the forest. He wanted to get home.

 

Why I wrote it now

More than eighty years after the defeat of fascism in Europe, authoritarianism and aggressive militarism again threaten Canada and the world. That stirs anger and fear for my two sons, my two grandsons, and peaceful people everywhere.


What are we prepared to do when war interrupts the pursuit of a peaceful life? How firmly will we work to build and defend the peace? These are Canadian choices, and they are the story this book tells.

Get the book

Published as a softcover by Back Lane Studios, Toronto. Contact me to order a copy, or ask your local bookstore to order from Back Lane Studios.


Available as a print-on-demand softcover and e-book: Amazon link. 


Available as an e-book: Indigo link.


Available as an Audiobook: Indigo link. Spotify link. I narrate the preface and epilogue myself; the body of the text is narrated with AI assistance.


ISBN 978-1-0679604-0-7 

210 pages, $25 retail.