In 1943, women workers made up 30% of the aircraft industry and 40% of the workforce in many gun plants
Women's work on the homefront helped the Allies win the war.
More than a million Canadians served in the Second World War, and millions more did their part on the homefront.
10 things you might not know about Canada's key contributions to Allied victory:
Canadian Elsie MacGill was the first female aeronautical engineer in the world
She was also a polio survivor and the first Canadian woman to earn a degree in electrical engineering (from the University of Toronto, in 1927). During the Second World War, she would become the subject of a comic strip, Queen of the Hurricanes — a moniker she received for her role in helping to launch the Hawker Hurricane aircraft.
MacGill's first 40 Hawker Hurricane fighter planes were delivered five months ahead of schedule
Elsie MacGill's streamlined modular manufacturing process — parts from one airframe are interchangeable with those of another — turned Canadian Car and Foundry (Can Car), a Fort William, Ontario railcar manufacturer, into a state-of-the-art aeronautics plant. It also made it possible for Can Car to beat deadlines, allowing Canadian-made Hurricanes to fight in the Battle of Britain in July - October 1940.
Canada became a naval power almost overnight
In 1939, Canada's navy only had six destroyers and 3,500 sailors. By the end of the war, it had over 400 ships and over 100,000 men and women in uniform, making it one of the largest fleets in the world. The merchant marine experienced similar growth, expanding from 38 oceangoing vessels to 410.
Women's work on the homefront helped the Allies win the war
With a huge percentage of working age men in uniform, Canadian women moved into the workforce like never before. By 1943, women made up more than 30 per cent of workers in the aircraft industry, roughly half the workforce in many gun plants and the majority of munitions testers.
The Battle of the Atlantic was long, deadly and destructive
The battle to keep shipping lanes open between North America and the U.K. lasted the entire length of the war, and Canadian forces played a crucial role securing those lanes, escorting Allied convoys of soldiers, food and supplies and protecting them from German U-boats. Their service came at a great price. Approximately 2,000 members of the Royal Canadian Navy and 1,600 sailors of the Canadian Merchant Navy lost their lives between 1939-45, most of them in the Battle of the Atlantic.
The Battle of the Atlantic was won, in part, at a lab outside of Ottawa
When the Allies managed to obtain a German Henschel Hs 293 glide bomb, both the control unit and the bomb itself were sent to the National Research Council in Ottawa.
There, scientists W.C. Wikinson and Richard Reddie reverse-engineered the glide bomb, discovering a way to jam its signal. Once their Canadian Naval Jammer was rolled out, the accuracy of glide bomb attacks dropped precipitously.
Operation Bonaparte was a high risk operation that seemed destined to fail
Operation Bonaparte sounds like the stuff of spy novels. Two French-Canadian soldiers — serving with British intelligence — pose as French civilians behind enemy lines in occupied France. With the aid of the French Resistance, their task is to help downed Allied airmen get back to Britain. To do this, they must sneak past German patrols and navigate through minefields to an isolated Breton beach - plage Bonaparte - and a rendez vous with a Royal Navy gunboat.
Amazingly, it was actually a tremendous success
The two Canadians, Raymond LaBrosse and Lucien Dumais, successfully sent eight groups of Allied airmen to Britain. They also provided British weapons, money and medical supplies to the French Resistance. By the end of March 1944, they have brought 128 Allied airmen out of Occupied France.
Fourteen thousand Canadians stormed Juno Beach on D-Day
They were part of a larger Allied amphibious landing force of 132,000. Roughly 1,000 of them were killed, wounded or taken prisoner in the initial assault.
Even by the standards of war, sappers had a dangerous job
The task of sappers — the army's front line combat engineers — was to clear a path for their comrades. That meant travelling in small groups, sometimes by bicycle, to remove mines, roadblocks, unexploded ordnance and booby traps. They were often targets for sniper fire and their job meant that they were constantly risking their lives to detonate explosives.