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The following is excerpted from The McGill Tribune review of Blitzkrieg and Jitterbugs by Elizabeth Hillman Waterston.
Elizabeth Hillman Waterston enrolled at McGill in September 1939—the same month that Hitler’s Panzer divisions first rolled into Poland and World War II began. When one thinks about how fraught with tension the McGill campus has been this year, with students locking horns over issues like the Quebec government’s proposed tuition fee increases, it is hard to even imagine how volatile campus politics must have been in Hillman’s time, when government proposals concerned policies of mass conscription, and when fighting for a cause was meant in the literal sense of the word.
Hillman, now a professor emeritus at the University of Guelph, has fortunately made the tricky task of imagining what the McGill campus was like during World War II a much easier one, having just published her memoirs, Blitzkrieg and Jitterbugs: College Life in Wartime, 1939-1942 with the McGill-Queen’s University Press. The book is written in a lively and engaging style, bringing to light a remarkable viewpoint of World War II, and of a very different student life compared to today’s.
On the one hand, Hillman’s view of the war is an abstract one, formed from the confines of an isolated ivory tower which remained unaffected by the fighting itself: Montreal was far from the tangible dangers of the war, and sonorous lectures, “freshette tea parties,” and essay assignments continued in defiance of the Nazi threat.
Yet on the other hand, Hillman makes it patently clear that the war still haunted McGill campus life, radically politicising classes and classmates alike, and transforming the university into a vital cog in Canada’s war machine: many students and younger professors signed up to the armed forces and were shipped off to Europe, the Middle East, or Asia; trigonometry professors were rushed off to help advise the government on how to lay mines and sink U-boats; multilingual professors were commissioned to crack enemy codes; chemistry classes focused on testing different forms of poisonous gases; physics classes specialised in improving radar technologies; psychology research looked at pain tolerance to assess the effects of torture; and female students spent a lot of their classes “knittin’ for Britain,” sending over knitted woolen clothes for families left homeless by the London Blitz.
To learn more about Blitzkrieg and Jitterbugs, or to order online, click here.
To arrange an interview with the editor, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.
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