What is Oral History?

Some of you may not be familiar with what exactly oral history is, so I have include a brief definition from the Canadian Oral History Association website to give the reader a better understanding of the focus of “Boys of the Clouds.”

For centuries the communication of historical information was exclusively oral. With the advent of writing, however, people came to rely almost entirely on written documents for information about the past, but much that was communicated orally was lost. The advent of sound recording technology has once more enabled students of the past to collect and use information communicated by speech.

Oral history, therefore, refers to recorded interviews with individuals about the past, or first-person reminiscences. The primary form of the oral history document is the recorded human voice. This document, in turn, may be applied as informational source material or directly in sound or transcribed form.

Among those who create and use oral history are professional historians, family and local historians, journalists, broadcasters, archivists, educators, folklorists and sociologists. The Canadian Oral History Association recognizes these practitioners and other kinds of users and is open to those in allied fields who use sound recordings as cultural records.

— Quoted from the Canadian Oral History Association http://oral-history.ncf.ca/

In compiling the content for “Boys of the Clouds”, I used several other sources, not only stories transcribed from taped interviews. Through the course of my research, I was able to obtain a number of unpublished manuscripts that had been written by veterans of the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion. Many others simply jotted down their recollections and mailed them to me for inclusion in the book. I was also able to obtain some after action reports, which were written during the war by the men themselves. Given the nature of this project, I deemed all source material written in the first person by the veterans themselves, to be considered oral history.