Canada's forgotten war babies: some Canadian soldiers left behind a second family

Esprit de Corps, May, 2005 by Jacqueline Chartier

In the first installment I introduced one of the most contentious social issues surrounding Canada's participation in the Second World War: the thousands of abandoned and illegitimate offspring that our servicemen fathered abroad.

Today these war "babies" are in or nearing their sixties and a good number are determined to solve the mystery of their origins and are actively engaged in searching for their Canadian roots. Many appreciate the fact that there is little time left and, as a result, their firmness and resolve have only grown more intense. In recent years, groups of elderly veterans re-visiting Europe have been gently approached by middle-aged people bearing placards that read: "Are you my father?"

There are virtually no formal organizations or registries to assist these individuals, the products of brief wartime romances. On continental Europe, only Holland has an organization to help search. Vereniging Bevrijdingskinderen (Association of Liberation Children) was founded in 1984. Britain's ODAC (Our Dads are Canadian) also helps wartime offspring find ex-servicemen fathers. Carol Wilson of Manchester founded the group when she was in the process of attempting to locate her own birth father.

Inevitably, vague and sometimes erroneous information are some of the fundamental barriers confronting war children engaged in trying to uncover their paternal lineage. For example, one British woman discovered when she was in her early thirties that her father, a Canadian soldier, had been named William Green. This was all the information she had at her disposal, and because the name is so ordinary it was like searching for a proverbial needle in a haystack. She wrote to at least 60 Canadians named William Green, hoping desperately that one of her letters might reach the appropriate man. Predictably, she never received a response and continues searching.

Carol Wilson of ODAC was confronted with a similar dilemma. She grew up thinking her stepfather was her dad, but when she was 15, she saw her birth certificate for the first time. The name of her father had not been filled in because, her mother acknowledged, he was a Canadian soldier who had left following the war. After her mother's death, Wilson's aunt gave her a photograph of her father and mother on a beach near the popular resort of Blackpool. Her mother had been so secretive about her father that she had burned all of her pictures of him and refused to say anything about his origins or whereabouts.

Wilson's personal quest came to a bittersweet end in 1996, when she learned that her father was deceased. Undaunted, she travelled to Canada to meet her paternal relatives and to acquire a sense of closure after years of searching. She also went on Canadian television to highlight the plight of others in her situation and to lobby the Canadian government for a relaxation of its rigid privacy laws. Canadian officials had severely restricted Wilson's ability to search by denying her written requests for information. "They make us feel like we're the guilty party, and we're really not," she said at the time. "We're the innocent ones."

BUREAUCRATIC NIGHTMARE

For decades Canadian privacy laws have remained the leading source of frustration for war children in search of their fathers. Like American GIs, Canadian servicemen left a legacy of children born to women overseas. Unlike GI children, those of Canadian veterans often have little chance of finding out who their fathers are. A mass of bureaucratic red tape in Canada, including far-reaching privacy laws, prevents them from gaining access to records.

Here, the law does not recognize wartime offspring living overseas or grant them equal rights with their Canadian half-siblings. Specifically, the right to request information under both the Privacy Act and the Access to Information Act is limited to Canadian citizens and permanent residents; these acts do not give any particular status to war children. They are essentially regarded in the same manner as any other foreign citizen or non-relative when they attempt to access information pertaining to their biological fathers through the National Archives of Canada.

Another problem inherent with the Canadian Privacy Act is that it restricts the release of information on Canadian soldiers until 20 years after their death. The only exception to this is when the veteran being sought gives his written permission.

For people such as Carol Wilson, the regulation is totally unacceptable. "We're not trying to cause any problems," said Wilson. "We're just trying to find out who we are." She questions why war children should have to wait until they are around 80 years old and their fathers are long dead before they can finally discover their roots. By then it will be decades too late!

Some officials at the Privacy Commission in Ottawa have argued they would like to assist the war children and that they can sympathize with their situation. But they stress the information probably wouldn't be available even if the Privacy Act wasn't in place, and that government agencies aren't in the business of finding people.