Testaments of Honour was born by chance. Blake Heathcote had set out to archive his grandfather's wartime scrapbooks and sketches, only to realize what a treasure the documents were. He decided to set out in his car to record the memories of other World War II veterans across Canada before it was too late. Over several years Heathcote contacted hundreds of veterans from the so-called Silent Generation, men and women who had never told their stories before, often not even to their own families. Many had come back dramatically changed, unable to communicate with loved ones. "Sometimes," Heathcote writes, "it took fifty years for them to come out again." The book's intensity comes from the fact that Heathcote lets the veterans tell their stories in the first person, full of bravery, humour, and tragedy. Much has been written about how the courage of the wartime generation transformed Canada from a small rural society into one of the world's main armed powers.