Beulah Rosen Jaenicke (Primary Source)

Transcript

I was put in the department of recruiting, which was rather strange because a lot of us had regretted that we’d recruited. It wasn’t much fun. I lived in barracks with a lot of other women and the story from there was that I did a number of different jobs for recruiting and it was discovered quite early on that I liked to draw cartoons. And so I did some and all the girls loved it. They just loved these cartoons that I did and then another department called Carkey set up and it was a publishing company in the army and they had a weekly newspaper and they also sent articles to women who were overseas, we all wanted to go overseas but we couldn’t, we had to do work in Ottawa [Ontario] and across the country.

So they had a monthly newsletter that they sent to women overseas and I was asked to do some illustrations to stories that they had for this monthly magazine, which I did. After being in that department, I noticed there were some changes and I had a new boss, Major Dick White, from Montreal [Quebec]. Actually, the Whites owned the Montreal Gazette [also known as The Gazette] and I was on good terms with Major White. And I said, I don’t think I’m doing very much for the war and I think I would like to take a course in drafting. He said he’d look into it.

So I waited a couple of weeks and then he called me in and he said: ‘You know, we have a new department which you’ve probably seen which is called Army Promotion’. And he said: ‘I’m the head. And he said, there’s a place for the CWAC [Canadian Women Army Corps] lieutenant, a rank, officer’s rank.’ He said: ‘I want you to take that position.’ Surprise. I had to write articles for Major White on how he would improve the CWAC, if I had ideas, some of which he didn’t approve of. I thought we should have equal pay to the men, which we didn’t have. And so why not? That was my first move.

And I thought we should be treated more like women, not children. You’re not very respected as an ordinary private or even corporal, whatever. So he wasn’t sure he liked that but he had to take it.

It was decided by a sergeant that I knew, who was interested in art, Charles Redfern was his name, he had organized an art show to be shown across Canada and also in New York. So he begged me to do a painting for the art show and I said: ‘Well, I haven’t painted for a few years, Charlie, but I think I’ll try it.’ It was a much appreciated show. There’d also been an army show that was mostly skits and entertainment. That had shown across Canada as well. So the army didn’t want to ignore anything artist or entertaining and so on. We had to keep our chins up because the war was so absolutely dreadful.

At the end of the war, I was really upset because I was casually engaged to a boy from my hometown. He’d been reported missing for a couple of years and I waited at the end of the war hoping, hoping, hoping, hoping he would turn up. But he didn’t. It was a complicated thing for me to deal with. Lawrence had told me, his name was Lawrence, he had told me before he went overseas that he really wished he hadn’t decided to be an Air Force pilot because he regretted bombing the enemy because the enemy was just the ordinary German people. And this really troubled him. I actually met him in Calgary [Alberta] when he was nearly finished his training and he said he really wished he hadn’t enlisted as he did. This is a rather complex story. There were all kinds of complex stories. Apparently, some of his crew survived and they wrote his parents after the war. But he didn’t survive. I’m not the only one who hoped at the end of the war that this, that or the other prisoner of war or whatever, because there were a lot of prisoners of war, would turn up. So it was a very tense time. Very tense.