Blitzkrieg and Jitterbugs: College Life in Wartime, 1939–1942
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by Elizabeth Hillman Waterston
McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal, 2012 261 pp., illus., $34.95 hardcover
Blitzkrieg and Jitterbugs is like a scrapbook of news stories, journal entries, and memories about how the Second World War affected university life.
In this book that is part memoir, part history, author Elizabeth Hillman Waterston tells the story through the eyes of someone who was a freshman at McGill University and a reporter for the McGill Daily student newspaper. While she is now a professor emeritus at the University of Guelph, Waterston’s journal entries capture the tension between her role as a journalist and her experience as a student during the war.
For example, her class was devastated when one of her professors was conscripted into service. She questioned, “Should the
paper take a stand against Parliament making military service compulsory?” But she remembered that the university’s administration had urged the newspaper to “take it easy” and contribute to the war effort.
Most notable is Waterston’s preoccupation with the circumstances of women. “The roles assigned to women look more and more unfair to me,” she wrote after explaining how the administration replaced young female university staff members because they were concerned with social and moral issues on campus.
Her first-hand accounts combine to create a time capsule of social and intellectual aspects of day-to-day life far from the battlefields.
— Danelle Cloutier (Read bio)
Danelle Cloutier is a Red River College student in Winnipeg and recently completed an internship at Canada's History magazine.