Archive for November, 2004

In 1890, the legendary railway baron Sir William Van Horne stopped off at the resort town of St. Andrews in the southwestern part of New Brunswick. He had come to negotiate a railway lease, but while soaking up the sights of the Loyalist town he fell in love with the beauty of Passamaquoddy Bay and its islands, so much so he decided to build a summer home on Minister’s Island, just around a point from […]

On the day 100,000 men of the Canadian Corps captured Vimy Ridge in April 1917, the Royal Canadian Navy had 10 ships in commission and a dozen auxiliary vessels, manned by fewer than 9,000 sailors. The fleet was larger by the time Canadians spearheaded Allied victory in Europe in 1918, but when heavily armed U-boats cut a swath through the east coast fishing fleet that year, the RCN still had nothing to fight them with. “Mr. (George) Desbarats fiddled while our […]

When the government of Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany decided to change the balance of power in Europe by military action, it did so in the firm belief that the war would be won in less than a year. By the end of 1915, when the casualty toll was estimated at two million Russian, 2.1 million Austro-Hungarian, 1.3 million French, 0.6 million German and 0.3 million British, the war seemed to have become a permanent part of […]

Army cooperation flying had been the central role of aircraft during World War I (Eyes In The Skies, March/April). In the interwar years, the Royal Canadian Air Force survived budget cuts and government indifference by making itself useful through “aid […]

by Jean Peirson

I remember the hustle and bustle that filled our house on the morning of November 11th. It was the 1960s and our small home in Summerside, P.E.I., was crowded: Ten kids, most of us dressed in Brownie, Girl Guide or cadet uniforms, ready to be rushed out the door to the Remembrance Day parade and ceremony at the cenotaph. Mom, a member […]

by David J. Bercuson

The army is currently planning to spend some $600 million on converting its now virtually useless tracked Air Defence Anti-Tank System into a wheeled Multi-Mission Effects Vehicle (MMEV) to supplement the Mobile Gun System it is soon to acquire to support infantry on the battlefield.

Maybe it shouldn’t.

There is a disturbing trend in Canadian defence spending: life extension programs and conversion projects have recently wasted billions of vital defence dollars. This isn’t a new pattern, either. The hundreds of millions of dollars spent […]

by Natalie Salat

The sight of an empty donation box at the Legion made Doug Willoughby do it. When the retired businessman and member of Norwood, Ont., Branch, noticed that the box—put there last November by a lady from the nearby seniors home seeking donations for local troops—remained bare, “I just went ballistic,” recalled Willoughby. “It was a flimsy box, and the message on it wasn’t quite clear, but […]

by Natalie Salat

The Department of National Defence wants the readers of Legion Magazine, and particularly World War II veterans—to help identify where thousands of tonnes of chemical and biological (CB) warfare agents were dumped off Canada’s coasts at the end of WW II. Nearly 60 years on from the war’s end, these deadly agents, such as mustard gas and lewisite, remain under the sea.

During WW […]

Do you have a hankering for the culinary delights enjoyed by Canadian soldiers during World War II? Do you have $17.50 (U.S.)?

Thanks to some “out-of-shape, thirtysomething guys” in Oregon who share a love of British military history, authentic reproductions of Canadian, British, American, Australian and Russian combat rations from WW II are being sold over the Internet. And business at the “Knacker Squaddies Quartermaster Depot” is surprisingly brisk.

The part-time business (http://17th division.tripod.com) was launched when one of the founders, who worked for a veterans’ organization in Oregon, […]

by Pat Sullivan

History credits Prussia’s Frederick the Great with defining an army as a “group of men who demand daily feeding.” Nicole Bélanger-Drapeau knows exactly what he meant.

As project director for the Canadian Forces’ combat rations program, the Ottawa-based dietitian oversees the in-the-field nutritional needs of 55,000 military personnel. Not only is she responsible for selecting the one million to 1.5 million Individual Meal Packs (IMPs) the Department of National […]