A new app helps save veterans' stories from fading memories

In July 1944, artilleryman 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 kilometers away.

Chater was a motorcyclist and did the dangerous job of delivering messages at high speed between the Canadian command post at Juno Beach and the front lines. His commander gave him permission to visit his brother for a night.

“While traveling back to his unit, he hit a landmine with his motorcycle and died there. Fast, violent and ready,” his grandson Matthew Chater told CBC News.

That's the story Matthew and his brother Daniel Chater heard about how their grandfather died in an explosion at the age of 32. They believe this is the story of their great-uncle Eric, who survived the war.

“It was passed on verbally,” Daniel Chater said. “My mother was told the story, and she then told me the story.

“Unfortunately, if we don't tell the story to our children, it ends. And I didn't want that to happen.”

Walter Chater is now among more than 330,000 dead soldiers from around the world, whose biographies and war accounts form a remarkable archive describing what past wars looked like to those who fought them.

That archive, which consists in part of information provided by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and Veterans Affairs Canada, can be accessed through a unique app developed by Calgary-based technology 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 World War I and World War II, those memories die with many of these family members,” said Mullens, who retired from the reserves as a corporal in 2010.

“As the generations go on, that is not passed on to the next generation… We don't want to lose the stories of these individuals 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 gravestone will provide you with a wealth of biographical information and, in some cases, service records, stories and photos.

Like many other headstones at the Beny-sur-Mer Canadian War Cemetery in France, Chater's marker provides only sparse details such as his age, unit and rank. But by using the app, a visitor can now instantly view old photos of him on his motorcycle and read some of the letters he sent home.

“Dad is doing well, but he would really like to be at your house so we can all have a picnic together and have some fun,” reads one of Chater's postcards to his son.

Mullens said that postcard struck him because he would have said it to his own son.

“It's not just a name on a gravestone,” he said. “This is a person you can look in the eye. It makes them a little more human.”

If the app has few details about an individual soldier in its archives, Mullens says 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 something about that heroic action where they gave their lives,” he said.

The app, which has been publicly available for over a year now, also features a navigation system that can direct users to specific graves.

It can be difficult for visitors to locate individual graves using registers, Roman numerals and a grid system, Mullens said.

Retired Major Harry Chadwick used the app in Normandy this year to help find the burial places of more than 180 soldiers of the 1st Hussars. He was part of a group that placed regimental flags at their sites to mark the 80th anniversary of D-Day.

Without the app he would have missed “a lot” of those graves, he says.

Chadwick also used the app to pinpoint on a map the place where his great-uncle William Vernon Rattee was buried in Malta.

Rattee was killed at the age of 22 while flying in the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War II. None of his family have 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 center of Malta (Capuccini) Naval Cemetery – and even what his gravestone looks like.

“I was able to say to a cousin, 'Tell his cousin he's in a place of honor,'” he said, adding that he hopes to visit in person one day.

'It's reassuring. I think he will forgive us for not being there yet, but we will get there.”

Daniel and Matthew Chater say they have saved their grandfather's war records and plan to share them with their children — but it's still comforting to know his story lives on in a new way.

“He felt the need to stand up to something that wasn't right in his eyes and he did that,” said Matthew Chater.

“I'm proud of that. It's brave.”