My first book, Joey Jacobson’s War, was published in January 2018.
In the spring of 1941 Canada sent hundreds of highly trained volunteers to serve in Britain’s Royal Air Force as it began its bombing campaign against Germany. Nearly half of them were killed or captured within a year. This is the story of how one of those men, Joey Jacobson of Westmount, Quebec, was transformed from a raw volunteer to a deadly serious yet idealistic warrior, as told through his own letters and diaries as well as those of his family and friends.
Joey trained as a navigator and bomb-aimer in Western Canada, and after a period of operational training in England, he was posted to 106 Squadron of Bomber Command. He completed 23 bombing sorties over enemy territory. The fatal crash of his aircraft in Holland in January 1942 galvanized local resistance to the Nazi occupation.
Joey recorded in detail what he saw and did, what was happening around him, and what he thought. He wrote about why he enlisted, his life in air force training and combat, the purpose and conduct of the war, his understanding of the strategy, tactics, and the effectiveness of the air war at its lowest point, and how he responded to the inevitable battle stress. He wrote about what all this meant to him as a Canadian and as a Jew, and his idealistic hopes for the post-war world. He communicated much of this to family and friends, in 240 letters, and he kept some of it to himself in several diaries and notebooks. His father Percy (my great-uncle) also kept a diary throughout the war: a record of events on the home front in Montreal and of his own hopes and anxieties. Their written record reveals a deep and maturing relationship between father and son in an uncertain and dangerous time.
I have set Joey’s account in the context of the early war years in Canada and England, and of Bomber Command’s operations at that time, based on my research in Canada, Britain, and the Netherlands. Nearly 10,000 Canadians died serving in Bomber Command. Joey Jacobson’s story is also their story. He did not survive to write a war memoir, but his personal account, written in the moment, brings Canada’s war-time experience to life.
My short account of Joey’s life was published in The Dictionary of Canadian Biography in 2025.
My second book, Battle of Britain Spitfire Ace, was published in June 2024.
Like many young Canadians in the 1930s, Willie Nelson wanted to fly. Unlike all but a few, he fulfilled his ambition beyond imagining. He became a decorated Royal Air Force bomber pilot early in the Second World War, then becoming an ace fighter pilot in the Battle of Britain. Few men fought as both bomber and fighter pilot during the war, even fewer managed to excel at both.
Nelson was a first-generation Canadian Jew of modest background. Unable to afford a university education, he went to work in Montreal’s aircraft industry, but in 1936, at the age of nineteen, he left a humdrum life on the ground to go to England, intent on becoming a pilot in the Royal Air Force.
By the time Nelson was shot down in November 1940, at the age of 23, he had become the pride of Jewish Montreal. His accomplishments were widely publicised at home, his status as the first Canadian Jew to have flown in combat and to have been decorated by the King were celebrated, and his portrait was featured on recruiting posters.
Based on an exhaustive search of military and historical records, coupled with in-person interviews with family members, Nelson’s story provides a vivid portrait of a remarkable man, set in the context of his roots in Jewish Montreal, his life in pre-war England, and the opening aerial battles over Germany and Britain. My book is also the story of a young English woman who was for a short time his wife, and for a long time his widow, and of their son who for much of his life knew little about his father and is still learning about him.