The soldiers behind the stats: 13 years of profiling Canada’s war dead

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For the past 13 years, the Ottawa Citizen has honoured Canada’s war dead by writing about one individual randomly selected from the list of those who have lost their lives in service to this country.

That honour roll, in the form of an electronic database, was prepared by Veterans Affairs Canada and includes the names of the more than 118,000 Canadians who, since Confederation, have made the ultimate sacrifice.

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It includes Canadians and Newfoundlanders who died in the South African War, the First World War, the Second War, the Korean War, and the Afghanistan War.

But our series, which goes by the title, “We Are The Dead,” has only featured servicemen from the First and Second World Wars.

During its 13 years, the series has profiled six soldiers from the First World War, and seven members of the Canadian military from the Second World War, all of them men.

That reflects both the nature of the selection process — the name is randomly selected by an internet bot — and the statistical profile of Canada’s war dead.

About half of Canada’s war dead lost their lives in the First World War. According to the Canadian War Museum, 59,544 members of the Canadian Expeditionary Force died during the war, 51,748 of them as a result of enemy action. The others died from training accidents or diseases, such as tuberculosis or influenza. The Royal Canadian Navy reported an additional 150 deaths, and 1,388 more Canadians died while serving with the British Flying Services.

In the Second World War, 42,042 uniformed Canadians died: 22,917 in the Canadian Army, 17,101 in the Royal Canadian Air Force, and 2,024 in the Royal Canadian Navy.

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The Korean War, Canada’s third bloodiest conflict, claimed the lives of 516 uniformed Canadians, while the Afghanistan War — Canada’s longest conflict — killed 158 soldiers. Many of them were victims of improvised explosive devices (IEDs).

In Afghanistan, Canada also suffered its first female combat death when Capt. Nichola Godard was killed in an ambush by militants in an area south of Kandahar on May 17, 2006. About 200 uniformed women have died in service to their country, many of them military nurses.

The 13 people profiled during the Citizen’s long-running series broadly reflect the statistical profile of Canada’s war dead, but there are several anomalies.

The Second World War has been overrepresented in our series, along with the RCAF. Five of the seven Second World War dead profiled in our series were RCAF members, even though more members of the Canadian army died in the war. Most of the army’s casualties came in the final two years of the war as the Allies fought north through the Italian peninsula, and into Belgium and Germany following the Normandy landings.

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The RCAF suffered the highest casualty rates of any branch of the Canadian military. During the Second World War, almost half (46 per cent) of all Allied aircrew who served in Bomber Command were killed.

Many Canadians lost their lives in the bomber offensive against the Ruhr Valley in 1943 and in the bombing campaign against Berlin during the winter of 1943-1944.

Learning to fly during the Second World War was also perilous since recruits were young, inexperienced, and trained in old aircraft. Canada was home to 107 flying schools that formed part of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan.

More than 2,000 members of the RCAF lost their lives in Canada during the Second World War, including Sgt. William John Brown, a wireless air gunner from Theodore, Sask., whom we profiled in 2019. He died on a training flight in southern Ontario. Brown was one of four men who parachuted from the doomed plane after the pilot suffered a seizure. He drowned in Lake Erie.

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