On Wednesday, November 11, Remembrance Day, communications coordinator Ross Murray offered a presentation to assembly regarding the championship football team of 1938 and their later contributions to the war effort.

The team of '38: football heroes, war heroes

As part of my job, I sometimes have to do research, and one of my favourite places to do research is in the old yearbooks. Back in the thirties and forties, they were called “annuals,” and they weren’t just filled with goofy pictures and colourful backgrounds like our yearbooks today. Instead, the annuals were filled with stories and articles about teams and events that went on in the school. Sixty, seventy years later, these annuals are great sources of information.

So in researching a presentation for a Remembrance Day talk, I turned to the old annuals. And in doing so, I came across this:

This is the 1938 football team. I want to read what it says about this team in the 1939 annual:

“This year, the College produced one of the greatest, if not the greatest, football squads in its history. Besides winning the Eastern Townships interscholastic football championship, which, incidentally makes it the fifth time in a row, the Red & White piled up an overwhelming total of 283 points as against a very unimpressive 26 scored by her opponents, and came through the season undefeated. Five shoutouts were meted out in the course of football events.”

This was written in 1939. That fall, Canada would join Great Britain and France in declaring war against Germany. World War II had begun.

By the end of the war in 1945, 22 of the 23 boys on that 1938 football team would serve in the military. The 23rd, incidentally, was refused for medical reasons.

The annuals back in this era are also useful for providing information about alumni, including the men and women in the service during the war. I can’t tell you what happened to all the boys on the ’38 football team, but I can tell you this.

First officer Paul d’Albenas was listed twice as missing in action and was wounded at Bologne but in 1945 was reported safe.

First officer David Schofield, captain of the team, was in 1st year engineering at McGill when he enlisted in 1940. He was a veteran of the European, Malta and North African campaigns as a member of the Royal Air Force’s Spitfire Squadron. He was shot down three times, wounded twice and reported missing, later reported safe.

Flight-Sergeant Terry Modeland was flying a bomber over Germany on September 3, 1941 – his 20th mission – when his crew hit heavy anti-aircraft fire and attempted to return to England. The badly damaged plane crash-landed in Suffolk, demolishing two homes in the process. A family in one of the homes was injured and all of the bomber crew, including Sergeant Modeland, were killed.

John Wells was a signaler with the Royal Canada Artillery when he was killed in action in Holland on October 8, 1944. His parents later created the John Wells Prize for Improvement in French, which is still given every year at Baccalaureate.

That’s just a few of the stories of sacrifice from this small group of young men. The annuals are full of them. The1944 yearbook lists 321 alumni and former teachers who had signed up for military service. By the end of the war the total number of killed would rise to 35. That’s roughly 1 out of 10.

It’s something I don’t think any of us in this room can imagine. Our football players, our hockey players, rugby players – all great guys, but I can’t imagine virtually every single one of them signing up for military service to fight a war halfway around the world. I don’t think that time will ever come again, mainly because the world is not so black and white as we once perceived it to be.

And make no mistake, we are a nation at war. 133 Canadian soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan since 2002. I asked the teachers if they knew of any alumni from the past five or six years who were in the military. I came up with a list of eight names.

The 35 from Stanstead College are just a small portion of the over 44,000 Canadians were killed in World War II. And that is a small portion of the 22-25 million soldiers killed worldwide and the unimaginable 40-50 million civilians killed in this single global conflict.

At the service later this morning, as we honour those who fought and died in the two world wars, I hope you’ll feel a sense of respect for the great sacrifices made by our fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers. But more than that, I think we should stand in absolute awe of their unconditional willingness to put their lives on the line in the defence of liberty. This, I believe, is what we must remember.