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An apology, 70 years in the coming, was finally given to Canadian prisoners of war held in brutal Japanese work camps during the Second World War. The apology was delivered on Dec. 8, at 4:10 p.m. Japan time, by Toshiyuki Kato, Japan’s parliamentary vice-minister for Foreign Affairs, to a delegation of three surviving PoWs. “Japan has apologized several times in the past, but it has always been for political reasons,” Derrill Henderson, the national secretary of the Hong Kong Veterans Commemorative Association (HKVCA) told Legion Magazine. The association is made up of mostly children and grandchildren of the Hong Kong Veterans Association of Canada (HKVA) whose members were all prisoners. “The veterans didn’t want any Canadian politicians in the room. It was just the veterans and the minister.”

During the 200th anniversary period of the War of 1812, Legion Magazine will present a few photo essays by Ottawa photographer Dan Ward which will look at battlefields of the war as they are today. Each essay will present contemporary photographs where historic events took place, juxtaposed with archival images that capture the tumultuous events. The first focuses on the Battle of Châteauguay.

There was a moment in the Memorial Chamber when Patty Braun seemed to lose her composure. There, on Parliament Hill, in the chamber devoted to Canada’s war dead, she looked into the Seventh Book of Remembrance where she could see her son’s name, “Corporal Braun, David Robert William, 22 August 2006, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry.”

It’s a war that didn’t change any borders, but in many ways it shaped Canada, speeding it along the road to Confederation.

A plane missing since the Second World War has been found in the heart of Ontario’s cottage country by a group of dedicated volunteers with a fish finder. The members of the Lost Airmen in Muskoka Project (LAMP) have been trying to locate and identify missing wartime planes in the area for a number of years. A few years ago they thought they had enough information from historical accounts to find the Northrop A-17 Nomad that crashed on Dec. 13, 1940. That plane, flown by Flight Lieutenant Peter Campbell, 24, of the Royal Air Force and Leading Aircraftman Theodore Bates, 27, of [...]

The service and sacrifice of Canadian men and women who served in Afghanistan will be perpetually commemorated by an oak tree and an Inukshuk on the lawn at Legion House in Kanata, Ont. The tree was ceremonially planted on Sept. 10 by Dominion President Pat Varga and General Walter Natynczyk, the chief of defence staff, on the building’s front lawn, now known as the Memorial Garden. The Central Band of the Canadian Forces played while members of Dominion Executive Council (DEC), local politicians and invited guests took their seats on the lawn. Not far off is the tree planted last year [...]

Guns fired in the distance as the 26 members of The Royal Canadian Legion’s Youth Leaders’ Pilgrimage of Remembrance stepped off the coach amid endless rows of potatoes and other vegetables in Belgium. These were not the guns of long past battles, but merely the propane gas guns that randomly fire to scare away birds from the maturing crops that rise from the First World War battlefields.

Like the community itself, the Legion’s Barrhaven Branch has flourished in the past few years. From a new branch with the required 50 new members in 2005, the branch has more than doubled its space and increased its membership to 460 today. “We’ve never had a membership campaign,” said the branch’s lay chaplain and first president Ray Desjardins. “It has just been neighbour talking to neighbour and we’ve grown.” Barrhaven sits just outside Ottawa’s Greenbelt, a swath of mixed farm, recreational and conservation lands which keeps the city’s urban sprawl in check. It had been a rural part of the former city [...]

Claude Choules, a sailor believed to be the last combat veteran from the First World War, died May 5 in Perth, Australia, at the age of 110. His death follows shortly after that of Frank Buckles, the United States’ last surviving First World War veteran who died Feb. 27, also at the age of 110. Choules, who was known as Chuckles, was born March 3, 1901, in the British town of Pershore, Worcestershire. His strong sense of family later in life is said to have been a reaction to having been abandoned by his mother when he was five. Although he [...]

Veterans Affairs Canada is setting aside $1 million a year for community and volunteer organizations to erect new cenotaphs or make major additions to existing ones. “We are encouraging Canadians to make remembrance more than something they feel by making it something they do,” said Veterans Affairs Minister Jean-Pierre Blackburn. “With the new program, communities will show they remember by constructing new places to honour Canada’s truest heroes—our veterans.” The Community War Memorial Program will provide funding up to 50 per cent of the total project cost, to a maximum amount of $50,000 to non-profit organizations, such as Legion branches. The money [...]