Archive for May, 2006

Craig Macdonald has been smitten all his life by wanderlust, an itch to travel, not to the summits of the world’s tallest mountains, nor to distant lands and exotic cities, but up and down the waterways of eastern North America. Macdonald, now 59 and a resident of Dwight, Ont., 200 kilometres northeast of Toronto, has paddled, snowshoed [...]

There are many ways to spend $14 during a visit to Ottawa, but anyone who makes the short trek to the Diefenbunker will probably conclude that the museum’s admission price is one of the National Capital Region’s bigger and perhaps more bizarre [...]

When Operation Baytown–the Anglo-Canadian invasion of mainland Italy–was in the planning stages, Major-General Guy Simonds, the general officer commanding 1st Canadian Division, informed his brigade commanders that he would employ mobile battlegroups [...]

In the Atlantic, the first four months of 1943 were dreadful. By April the U-boat fleet had grown to 240 operational submarines and 185 more on trials and training. Convoy battles raged from Greenland to the Azores. During February, the enemy sank 63 [...]

The worst years of the Great Depression followed the Royal Canadian Navy’s adventure in El Salvador (The Invasion Of El Salvador, March/April). The bottom was reached in 1933, the year Adolph Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany. The two [...]

When they piped Rig of the Day on that fateful morning in 1945, they ordered us to don our Burberries, not our greatcoats. It was springtime in Nova Scotia, and we had wakened to a fine day. In HMCS Protector, the naval base at Point Edward near [...]

The starter gun sounds. Half a dozen huge boats that had been sitting motionless on the water explode into action. Two dozen paddles per boat slice the water in unison. Slowly at first, then faster and faster the boats pick up speed. The fierce-eyed dragon heads tipping the prow of each boat seem almost alive as the boats drive forward to the throb of drums and chants of the paddlers. Shouts from thousands of people [...]

Chief of Defence Staff General Rick Hillier presided over a ceremony that marked a significant moment in the transformation of the Canadian Forces Jan. 31 in Ottawa. With four new commands being stood up and the former deputy chief of defence staff [...]

Once again, the Conference of Defence Associations’ annual meeting in Ottawa provided a forum for the Canadian defence world to come together, talk about their visions and share their plans for the future. In theory at least, the seminar was organized around the topic [...]

It took the dramatic suicide bombing of Canadian diplomat Glyn Berry near Kandahar on Sunday, Jan.15, for many Canadians to finally awake to the death of Canadian peacekeeping. Berry’s killing, and the critical wounding of three soldiers who were in the vehicle with him, was only a [...]