NORTH BATTLEFORD — Those who gathered to have lunch with the Fallen Soldier at Legion No.70 in North Battleford saw a man quietly circulating among the crowd while holding an intricate army model in his hand.
His name is Doug Keall, a retiree from North Battleford, and the miniature model he was holding resulted from three months of work — 18 hours a day — during which he immersed himself in a room full of books he found in the secondary market.
“I'm the last person who would want to go to war. I'm not a big war enthusiast. I'm more of an amateur historian.
“But why did we come here [to the Legion] today? (We are here) to remember the sacrifice these guys made, that guy that didn't make it out of there, so he put his life on the line…” he said while pointing to his model.
Keall said he has invested roughly $20,000 on the material, all of which was carefully sourced over the past few years – while his passion for war history has been a lifelong interest.
From the responses he's received in the room, Keall is confident that he's the only person in town pursuing this unique craft.
“(When I was crafting the model), I was thinking about the crews that had to do this [fight in war], and they're getting shot at for real… There are a crew of five in here. This poor guy that sits here, he has no hatch,” said Keall of the top seat in the model tank.
His research into the Second World War has been fueled by thousands of books, one of which he called a priceless resource. “Everything you want to know is in here, in one source. It's unbelievable how much I refer to this thing,” he noted, flipping through the pages of the well-worn volume.
“Unfortunately, I have never been able to speak to Second World War veterans about their time, and most of them are gone now. So the only record is if someone has interviewed them in the past in a video, or they contributed to somebody's book.
“Otherwise, it's lost.”
Reflecting on the difficulty many veterans face when discussing their wartime experiences, Keall said that he had only one opportunity to speak with a veteran who served in tanks.
“He wouldn’t talk about it,” he recalled. “His face was burned. He was the loader on a tank, and he didn’t survive the blast. (Now) he’d rather forget.”
The model earned silver in the Western Canadian Regional AMPS Model Show in Edmonton this past August, and now, Keall is bringing it home to share the stories he uncovered through his research at the Legion’s event.
“I was competing against the best of the best of the guys in Canada, so I was disappointed to only get silver. But considering the competition, I'm happy with silver. Some of those guys are incredible.”
Determined to ensure these stories are not forgotten, Keall plans to continue preserving history through his dioramas. He is already working on his next project: a scene from the battlefield featuring a Sherman tank clearing a minefield.
“The more you learn, the more interested you get, and the more interested you get, the more you learn. It's a wonderful spiral of stories.”
