Archive for September, 2005

It was one of those serendipitous events during an eight-hour flight back to Christchurch, New Zealand, from Antarctica that I first came across a reference to Sir Charles Seymour Wright in Diana Preston’s, A First Rate Tragedy: Captain Scott’s Antarctic [...]

World War I British pilots were usually commissioned officers. Non-commissioned officer pilots were a rarity until 1918, and were still greatly outnumbered by officers. And so by late 1919, the pilot’s trade had reverted to being an officer’s [...]

This is the first of a series of articles examining the Canadian contributions to the Allied campaign in Sicily and the Italian mainland. Regular readers of Canadian Military History In Perspective will recall a number of articles published in 1997-98 on this [...]

When the enemy finally came to Canada’s shores in 1918, he ran amok through the fishing fleet and revealed the woeful inadequacy of the nation’s naval defence. Apart from keeping Canada’s coast defence batteries fully manned so the navy could [...]

“I turn 100 this year,” says Priscilla Roland. “And I just feel good being a Canadian.” I’m sitting with this charming near-centenarian under the gaze of southern Alberta pioneer images that line the wall of the front room of Calgary’s Memorial Building. Her statements could equally apply to two of Canada’s western provinces this year: on Sept. 1, 1905, the Saskatchewan Act and the Alberta Act were adopted by Ottawa, carving two spanking-new Canadian provinces out of the Northwest Territories. Priscilla was born a couple of months before that, [...]

High on a ridge above an inaccessible valley in northern Iran sit the remains of Alamut castle, previous stronghold of the Assassins, history’s first political terrorists. Appearing in the 11th century, the Assassins were members of Muslim sects [...]

A few years ago, I was sitting with some Canadian paratroopers about to embark on a combat mission in the mountains of Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan when the subject of my survival came up. Like countless soldiers over the past 150 years or [...]

As of this writing, in early July, no one seems quite sure of the eventual fate of the Defence Policy Statement issued April 19. Some of the people who work for the director general of Public Affairs have been told adamantly not to refer to it as [...]

In the mid-1990s, Elaine Goble created a portrait of six veterans at a Remembrance Day ceremony. A few years later she drew her eight-year-old daughter listening to an elderly woman tell stories about her experiences during and after World War II. [...]

The only award of the Victoria Cross to a Canadian in World War I outside the European theatre stems from heroic action in the Middle East in May 1918. It happened during a vicious battle for the occupation of Jerusalem and the capture of Jericho [...]