This blog post may look quite familiar to a previous one I had done, that is because it is the exact same thing but in a different time period. This unit had been all around World War II, including the Great Depression and The Roaring 20’s. If you never saw the first blog post I will link it here, but I will also explain briefly what the assignment was.
So our goal was to write a diary entry about a real person who fought in World War II. We had to find our person using the a website our teacher gave us as a reference. This website can be amazing but also a pain in the butt. Pretty much it has everyone who fought in WWII on it and you can search by name, place, service number and stuff like that. But the problem is that you needed to find someone with a lot of primary documents so you can gather enough information to create a diary entry that is someone true.
After search for quite a while I finally came across someone who had some documents. This person was Colin Homer Smith. Colin Homer Smith was a 24 year old stolider from Burlington Ontario who took him life fighting for the country he loved. In high school Colin was an amazing stupid, top of his class and was athlete of the year 3 years in a row. Colin joined the war and wanted to become part of the Royal Canadian Air Force, and be a pilot. Once he did all his training and was accepted into the program he flew a few time and had never gone a big mission solo yet. On June 6th he was assigned to fly to holland and try and defeat and/ or damage enemy bombers. He left early in the morning and was never heard of or found again. Letters were sent home every day after he went missing until they came to the conclusion he had died.
Throughout our diary entry our teacher wanted us to try and use tone and voice and our knowledge to try to write a diary entry that was realistic and emotional. I decided to write mine from the day before he was going to fly to holland. My diary entry starts off with Colin being excited about doing a big mission by himself and as he is writing he is starting to realize what is likely to happen tomorrow and how he just wants one last goodbye with his family.
I actually quite enjoy doing this diary entry because it is super interesting to try and put yourself into someone else position, in a time that we can not even imagine. Try to imagine what they were felling and how they were dealing with everything. It also really allows you to understand what these men did to provide and protect our country. If you want to look at some of Colin’s documents, click the link below!