McGill remembers
Website commemorates its members who served in World War II
Sixty years after the end of World War II, two McGill staff members have set up a website to honour those members of the University community who served in World War II.
Professor Christopher Milligan, of the Faculty of Education, and Wes Cross, of the Office of the Dean of Students, created the site to mark the 60th anniversary of the war's end, which falls between VE Day, in May, and VJ Day, in August. The site is called "McGill Remembers 1945-2005" and is located at .
The war had a deep impact. More than 5,560 McGill students, including 295 women, served in uniform. Of these, 298 never came home and 52 were taken as prisoners of war. In all, 629 received medals.
McGill staff also served in the war and the Currie Gymnasium, opened in 1939, served as an armoury and military training centre for all. The various McGill fields were used as training grounds for Montreal's Black Watch Regiment as well as the Canadian Officers' Training Corps (COTC), which trained university undergraduates for officer commissions in the Canadian army.
On the website are lists of those who paid the supreme sacrifice for their country (with hotlinks to the websites of the Books of Remembrance and the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, where appropriate).
Links are also provided to collections of newspaper articles about the war, campus photos from the McGill Archives and from R.C. Fetherstonhaugh's 1947 book Ï㽶ÊÓƵ at War, Canadian war posters, and the website of the USS Begor, an American warship named after McGill medical graduate Dr. Fay Broughton Begor, who died in action in September 1943.
One of the newspaper articles is a recent one, from November 2004. It recounts the poignant story of the 1938 McGill football team — Yates Cup Canadian intercollegiate champions that year. Three years after their glorious but innocent victory, every single player on the team had enlisted in the armed services. Seven of them never returned and, every five years, the survivors have gathered to reminisce and remember.