So many stories, so few years. But here’s Elsa Lessard, 94, a member of the Women’s Royal Canadian Navy Reserve (the Wrens) who tirelessly put in days and nights at a remote wireless hut on the Newfoundland coast during WWII. She and her sisters intercepted and translated German U-boat messages. The information was used to find and destroy the submarines. If Elsa got the same warning about secrecy as other women engaged in such work, she was told that if she ever broke her vow of silence she would be shot as a traitor.
I would like to write to Elsa my mother had the same job in the airforce, codes and ciphers office at Eastern Air Command. We had pictures of periscopes in the St. Lawrence River.