Archive for January, 1999

Long after I had stopped asking about Santa Claus, I still believed that hockey in this country was a creation of The Royal Canadian Legion. In the fall of 1956, the year I turned eight, my mother gave me the two dollars necessary to sign up for town league hockey. With the two-dollar bill and my birth certificate in pocket, I walked with Brent and Eric, then and still the very best friends in the world, down the hill and along the leaf-splattered Muskoka River to [...]

by Ray Dick “I was in a trench on the outskirts of Mons when the firing stopped,” said Fred Evans, a 101-year-old WW I veteran from Summerville, N.B., while gazing out over the now-peaceful Belgian countryside he hadn’t seen for 80 years. Evans was part of a cavalcade of Great War veterans who had travelled thousands of miles to Mons last November for a Remembrance Day ceremony in a city made famous by war and peace. For it was in Mons where the Allies were first drawn into the war, where the war ended and where the tradition of remembrance began. “We thought [...]

At first glance, South Korea looks like a landscape artist’s paradise. There are tree-covered hills rising in every direction and cities teeming with people. There are also war cemeteries decorated with bonsai trees that look like swirls of soft ice cream. It’s hard to square these images with the black and white photographs of the Korean War. Indeed, many of the photos I’ve seen show Canadian soldiers slogging through mud or along narrow dusty trails. I’ve also seen pictures of convoys on rough mountain roads and of men crammed into slit trenches. It must have been a different Korea back then, [...]

The clock atop the Parniavuk Building in the capital city of Iqaluit on Baffin Island ticks away the days to the birth of Nunavut. Close by, construction workers, rugged against the cold of the arctic winter, are rushing to finish Nunavut’s new Legislative Assembly building. A few doors away in the igloo-shaped office of the Interim Commissioner, Jack Anawak considers his options, now that his job to oversee the design of the new Nunavut government is nearing completion. Nunavut’s first elected ministers will soon be at their desks. Further along the ice-packed street of this 4,000-strong community, John Amagoalik, nicknamed the [...]

Art was Robert Buckham’s life—or at least his sanity. It got him through the hell of two forced marches during his time as a PoW in Germany during WW II. From top to bottom: [...]

by Tom MacGregor In Part 1 of this series we explained how the Department of National Defence is attempting to cut costs while maintaining a combat-ready force. In Part 2, we take a look at the challenges facing the army, the largest of the military’s three branches of service. And in a related story, we zero in on some of the quality of life recommendations made by the House of Commons Standing Committee on National Defence and Veterans Affairs. The army’s primary purpose is to defend the nation and–when called upon–to fight and win in war. This important function or obligation, says [...]

The 75th anniversary year for the Royal Canadian Air Force is also the 55th anniversary year for the Battle of Normandy. Without a doubt, the story of the RCAF’s part in the struggle to liberate France has captured the imaginations of air historians. However, few Canadians have more than the vaguest idea of the scale of the RCAF’s contribution.The major reason for this is spelled out in Jack Granatstein’s book Who Killed Canadian History? But it’s also evident that the postwar pre-occupation with building a national air force meant that wartime experiences under Royal Air Force command were seen as [...]