Ben Scaman of Banff, Alberta, was flying Spitfires with the Royal Canadian Air Force when the V-1 flying bombs, often called doodlebugs, began to rain down on England in 1944. Remarkably, Ben pioneered the technique in which a skilled pilot could tip one of these murderous missiles off balance, causing it to crash harmlessly into the countryside. […]
Thousands of lumberjacks, members of the Canadian Forestry Corps, logged the forests of Scotland during the Second World War to produce desperately needed lumber for the war effort. Among them were Carl and Jack Jones, two brothers from Invermere, British Columbia. Canadian Forestry Corps In a world filled with manmade materials, it is easy to […]
Former naval pilot Ted Davis of Toronto never forgot the night of March 17, 1945, when his minesweeper HMCS Guysborough was torpedoed twice by a German submarine. Tony Davis is a former classmate of mine from the Journalism Program at Carleton University in Ottawa. When I learned that his father Ted Davis was still living at […]
Sixty-eight years ago this month, a German submarine torpedoed the SS Caribou, a ferry travelling from Canada to Newfoundland. Within five minutes, the ferry sank to the bottom of the Atlantic. Margaret Brooke valiantly tried to save her friend Agnes Wilkie, who became the only Canadian nursing sister to die from enemy action in World War Two. […]
Eight Indigenous brothers from Battleford, Saskatchewan served in the Canadian Army during World War Two, following in their father’s footsteps. One brother married and fathered a son while stationed in England, but returned to Canada without ever seeing the boy. The marriage ended, and Ben Ballendine died without knowing that both his British son Colin, […]
When Manitoba farm girl Merle Taylor joined the Royal Canadian Air Force, she proved to be such a whiz at Morse Code that she was assigned to instruct the air crews.
Seven decades after German artillery fire blew up one of the Canadian tanks that Stan Stachera was riding in, the folding leather cribbage board he made during his hospital recovery remains his family’s favourite link to his wartime past. (This guest blog was written by my friend Kelsey Verboom, writer and photographer, who recently researched […]
This year, 2016, marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of the writing of one of the most beautiful poems ever composed, “High Flight,” by John Gillespie Magee Junior.
Bud Abbott was just twenty-three years old when he strapped himself into his cockpit, took off from the deck of an aircraft carrier, and headed into aerial combat for the very first time. His target: the Tirpitz, one of the deadliest German battleships ever built.
There’s a reason why it’s called The Greatest Generation – and former RCAF photographer Yvonne Valleau Wildman of Kindersley, Saskatchewan is a shining example.
