In July 1944, gunner Walter Chater — serving with the Royal Canadian Artillery in Normandy — learned that one of his four brothers, Eric, had also survived the D-Day invasion and was stationed just a few kilometres away.
Chater was a motorcycle dispatch rider, doing the dangerous work of ferrying messages at high speed between the Canadian command post near Juno Beach and the front lines. His commanding officer gave him permission to visit his brother for the night.
“Then, on his trip back to his unit, he hit a landmine on his motorcycle and died there. Quick, violent and done,” his grandson Matthew Chater told CBC News.
That’s the account Matthew and his brother Daniel Chater heard of how their grandfather died in an explosion at age 32. They believe it’s the story brought home by their great uncle Eric, who survived the war.
“It was passed down by word of mouth,” Daniel Chater said. “My mother was told the story, who then told me the story.
“Sadly, if we don’t tell the story to our kids, it ends. And I didn’t want that to happen.”
Walter Chater is now among more than 330,000 slain soldiers from around the world whose biographies and war records make up a remarkable archive describing what wars of the past looked like to those who fought them.
That archive, consisting in part of information culled from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and Veterans Affairs Canada, is accessible through a one-of-a-kind app developed by Calgary-based tech company Memory Anchor.
Veteran Ryan Mullens said his company created the app to help preserve the stories of those who fought and died as the number of living veterans of those conflicts continues to dwindle.
“Some of these soldiers from the First and Second World War, those memories are dying with a lot of these family members,” said Mullens, who retired from the reserves as a corporal in 2010.
“As the generations go further, that is not being transmitted into that next generation … We don’t want to lose these individuals’ stories and their sacrifice.”
Mullens said his team used artificial intelligence to remotely map more than 100 cemeteries in Canada and more than 10 other countries.
Using the Memory Anchor app to scan a veteran’s tombstone pulls up a trove of biographical information and, in some cases, service records, stories and photos.
Like so many other headstones at Beny-sur-Mer Canadian War Cemetery in France, Chater’s marker offers only sparse details like his age, unit and rank. But by using the app, a visitor can now instantly view old photos of him astride his motorcycle and read some of the letters he sent home.
“Dad is doing fine only he would like very much to be home with you so we could all go on picnics together and have some fun,” reads one of Chater’s postcards to his son.
Mullens said that postcard struck him because it’s something he would have said to his own son.
“It’s not just a name on a headstone,” he said. “This is a person that you can look into their eyes. It humanizes them a bit.”
If the app has few details about an individual soldier in its archive, Mullens said, it can deploy AI to show the user where the soldier’s regiment was and what it was doing when he died.
“So we know a little bit about that heroic action that they gave their life in,” he said.
The app, which has been publicly available for more than a year now, also has a navigating system that can guide users to specific gravesites.
It can be difficult for visitors to locate individual graves using registries, roman numerals and a grid system, Mullens said.
Retired major Harry Chadwick used the app in Normandy this year to help find the burial sites of more than 180 1st Hussar soldiers. He was part of a group that placed regimental flags on their sites for the 80th anniversary of D-Day.
Without the app, he said, he would have missed “a lot” of those gravesites.
Chadwick also used the app to pinpoint on a map the place where his great uncle William Vernon Rattee was laid to rest in Malta.
Rattee was killed in action at age 22 while flying with the Royal Canadian Air Force during the Second World War. No one from his family has ever visited the island in Southern Europe to pay their respects, Chadwick said.
Using the app, Chadwick can see exactly where Rattee is buried in the centre of Malta (Capuccini) Naval Cemetery — and even what his headstone looks like.
“I was able to say to a cousin, ‘Tell his nephew that he’s in a place of honour,'” he said, adding he hopes to visit in person one day.
“It’s comforting. I think he’ll forgive us for not getting there yet, but we will get there.”
Daniel and Matthew Chater say they’ve saved their grandfather’s war records and plan on sharing them with their children — but it’s still comforting to know that his story lives on in a new way.
“He felt the need to stand up against something that wasn’t right in his eyes and he did so,” said Matthew Chater.
“I’m proud of that. It’s courageous.”