As the battles of the Second World War raged — as far away as East Asia, and as close to home as Halifax, where U-boats prowled silently just off the harbour mouth — a steady succession of grim, terse telegrams arrived at Toronto homes.
The total of Toronto's war dead mounted and the city clerk's office quietly prepared a card file, working from official casualty lists that included home addresses.
After the war, the file was used as a research tool to prepare Toronto's Book of Remembrance, a list those from Toronto who died in the Second World War. The book is now on display at City Hall.
In 2010, Patrick Cain, TorontoToday's data reporter, spent some time in the city archives converting the card file into a spreadsheet and then assigning the next of kin's addresses to a map.
The dataset below represents 3,223 veterans who lived in Toronto and died during the Second World War. Their names, military rank, location and date of their deaths are included.
Zoom in on the map below and click on a point, labelled with a poppy to explore the data.
Army casualties surged dramatically in the data during the Dieppe Raid in August 1942, a catastrophe that killed 127 Toronto soldiers in a single day. (The toll was bloodier than the city's previous worst day for casualties, which saw 111 Toronto-based men die during the First World War at Vimy Ridge in April of 1917.)
Air force casualties showed a different pattern: a steady rate of two or three deaths a day, consistently. By war's end, the air force death toll roughly equalled that of Toronto's army members.
Click for maps focusing on Normandy, Belgium and the Netherlands, Italy and casualties at sea.
