World War Two was one of the largest armed conflicts in history, spanning the entire globe and involving more countries then ever before. It brought about an age of deadly mechanized warfare with the emergence of new weapons and technology, leaving the world in a state of pandemonium and total war.
For me, World War Two hits really close to home. Both of my great grandfathers served for the Royal Canadian Air Force and lived to tell the tale. After hearing their first hand accounts, it truly got me thinking just how lucky we are to live to live in a place of such peace and prosperity. Growing up they were both a major part of my life, and I can only imagine how brutal and scary it would’ve been to stand in their shoes and feel what they felt.
In this assignment, similar to my previous soldier diary, we had to research a Canadian soldier from World War Two and write a journal entry from some part of their life. This time around I found that a lot more soldiers had a significant amount of primary sources, so it didn’t take long before I stumbled upon a soldier by the name of David Earnest Hornell. Hornell was an officer in the Royal Canadian Air Force, similar to my grandfathers, and a recipient of the highly prestigious Victoria Cross. When I looked him up in Canada’s online database, his name popped up with 398 primary sources. By deciphering through the primary sources, I was able to find out where he lived, his wife’s name, who his mother and father were, his rank, how many missions he’d been on, and several accounts of how other soldiers thought of him.
David Earnest Hornell.
Various articles, letters and documents involving David Earnest Hornell.
From the information that I gathered, I did my best to accurately portray Hornell through incorporating a strong tone and voice, with a strong sense of Canadian identity. I also attempted to capture the brutal reality of war and a few of the tough hardships that so many soldiers struggled with back then, and still today. As Hornell died before receiving the honourable Victoria Cross, I based my diary entry between the short period of D Day and his brave last flight that earned him his ever lasting legacy.
Throughout the process of creating my visual, I encountered some difficulty when it came to the formatting it correctly. When I was putting it together in Notability, the text box with all the words would often disappear behind the image. It took a lot of trial and error to get it fitted properly, and even then I wasn’t able to fit all 728 words perfectly. However, I experienced the most difficulty and frustration when it came to embedding my visual into my blog post. I searched the far corners of youtube for nearly two hours and came up with no results on how to convert a pdf file into jpeg. It was driving me crazy! But right when I was about to give up, I finally remembered what I did on my previous soldier diary blog post. It was so simple and it made me feel so stupid. All I had to do was screenshot my note then crop it. This just goes to show that sometimes having patience, composure and a piece of mind can help immensely in both a working and learning environment.