A new app is helping to rescue veterans' stories from fading memories

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.