Archive for July, 2010

It was a display of Eastern Canadian dominance at this year’s Royal Canadian Legion Dominion Darts Championships, held May 7-10 at F.E. Butler Branch in Chester, N.S. The tourney began on Saturday morning with a brief piper-led parade around the branch before the ceremony started at the cenotaph in the lower parking lot. President Marion Fryday-Cook read the Act of Remembrance. Dominion representative Ed Pigeau, the vice-chairman of the Dominion Command Sports Committee and Ontario Command president, placed a wreath. The darts soon began flying across the branch’s upper hall as the doubles competition began. While last year’s winning team was from [...]

Canada is a large, rough country. It took tough, determined men and women to explore it, map it and give it place names. But when it came to defining the country in the minds of its citizens, it took artists, painters, novelists and poets. For Canada’s early English-language poets, they had the classics of literature to draw their skill from, but when they came to describing this land, it was new. No one had written about it before. Many doubted that anyone would ever write about it. But as Confederation became a reality and the railway began to unite the scattered populations [...]

The tides were in the home team’s favour April 23-25, as the Dominion Command Cribbage Championships turned into a Maritime sweep for cribbage players from across Canada meeting at Sussex, N.B., Branch. Prince Edward Island won the singles competition while Nova Scotia won the doubles and the host province, New Brunswick, took the all-important team title in a gruelling three-way contest with Nova Scotia and British Columbia. For the New Brunswick team of Paul Calhoun, Carl Nash, Roger LeBlanc and Dean McLaughlin of Marysville Branch in Fredericton, it was a sweet victory. Calhoun and Nash had been part of the team representing [...]

Roughly one hundred metres above the Gulf of Oman: cargo door open; all senses engaged. Shadows and human silhouettes against sunlit water; vibrations still typing rhythmic pattern up spine to neck; deep muffled engine and main rotor noise in helmet overlaid with sudden invite from 423 Squadron’s Captain Adam Power: “Would you like to come up and fly for awhile?”

Here are the answers to our questions in the special Readers’ Quiz we had in our July/August issue dealing with poppies. John McCrae was serving in the medical corps as a doctor near Ypres, Belgium, during the Second Battles of Ypres when he wrote In Flanders Fields. Punch Magazine published In Flanders Fields anonymously on Dec. 8, 1915. Moina Michael who was living in New York during the First World War wrote We Shall Keep The Faith. Anna Guerin convinced Field Marshall Earl Haig that the manufacture of poppies could help raise funds for injured war veterans. The shops where poppies and other items were [...]

Legion House in Kanata played host to a very special visitor May 11 as Princess Margriet of the Netherlands came to Dominion Command headquarters to plant a symbolic tree and pay her respects to the Canadian servicemen and women who helped to liberate her homeland 65 years ago. Princess Margriet and her husband, Professor Pieter van Vollenhoven, joined Dominion President Wilf Edmond in the ceremonial planting of the young London Planetree in Legion House’s front garden. “It is a real pleasure for me to have such a distinguished member of the Dutch royal family and her husband here today,” said Edmond, standing [...]

It was the longest and hardest battle ever fought at sea. During six protracted years, more humans, ships and materiel were lost than in all the naval campaigns of the previous 500 years combined. It was arguably also the most decisive campaign of the Second World War and lasted for the entire duration of the war in Europe, from September 1939 to May 1945.

His name was Alfred Guibault, and he lived near the Ottawa River in Aylmer, Que. He was a private, and he died horribly during the fighting for Regina Trench in 1916. Ninety-two years after the First World War the circumstances of his service and the circumstances of thousands of others who served are available for all to see—but only if you want to see. Adam Gutoskie wanted to see. The Grade 11 student from D’Arcy McGee High School in Gatineau, Que., was one of several students who earlier in the school year made use of a popular learning experience through the [...]

In mid-April 1945, 18-year-old North Shore (N.B.) Regiment Private Stewart MacDonald sheltered under a bridge near the rail station in Zutphen, the Netherlands. He was chest-deep in the Ijssel River, waiting for a lethal rain of shrapnel to stop. Across the river, townspeople, including 17-year-old Frits Hasper and his family huddled underground in vaulted basements and tunnels, waiting for the Second World War to end.

This is Part 3 of Legion Magazine’s series on the Canadian effort to win hearts and minds in Salavat, a restive community in Kandahar Province’s notorious Panjwai district.