Charley Fox and I enjoying each other’s company at a regimental dinner in 2006.
The man told me my future. It happened back in the 1980s. But back then, Charley Fox, my oldest and dearest veteran friend, looked me straight in the eye and told me what I ought to be doing with the rest of my life.
“It’s your job to tell our stories,” he said. And each time we’d meet – usually every month or so at the Husky truck stop on Hwy 401 just east of London, Ont. – Charley would remind me with a “to-do list,” exactly how I was to research famous battles, conduct first-hand interviews and then write and publish the eye-witness stories of Canadian veterans’ experiences. Forty years and a dozen published books later, I realize Charley was right. History storytelling has become the centre of my life. (more…)
It’s a hole in the ground for a culvert, but could be much more.
A few days ago, my daughter – who’s recently joined me on my morning walks – posed a provocative question:
“How come we haven’t got a bridge in Uxbridge?” she asked.
I didn’t have an answer. But it occurred to both of us that we have an opportunity to change that. Since construction crews have ripped open most of the main thoroughfare through the downtown to make way for the renovation of the underground flow of the Uxbridge Brook, here might be an ideal chance.
Why not, we thought, somewhere along that now gaping throughway for storm and other water passageways, make an effort to include some sort of bridgeworks that might reflect our name? (more…)
The occasion was our 20th wedding anniversary. As a gift to my wife Jayne and me, that spring of 1995, my parents had bestowed airfare to the U.K. We’d barely unpacked in London, when we saw on the news that one of our planned tourist destinations – Winston Churchill’s underground Cabinet War Rooms – was the to be visited by Dame Vera Lynn the next morning.
At a press conference, she’d be launching a fundraiser to assist needy veterans. Jayne and I decided to try to “accidentally” arrive there about the same time. I think we were first in line to tour the site the next morning.
“We understand that Dame Vera will be here,” I shared with the commissionaire at the ticket wicket.
“Oh, really?” the commissionaire kidded. “And who might you be?”
“Just a couple of curious Canadians,” I offered.
“Well, how appropriate. Today, Canadians get in free,” and he directed us – stunned but delighted – directly in. (more…)
Admired for his service in WWII, remembered by 151 Squadron in Oshawa, W/C Lloyd Chadburn lives on in modern cadets.
Not since the Second World War has this country required that young people complete service in the military. The Canadian Forces have relied solely on volunteers since 1945. Consequently, this week, while attending a student awards night at Centennial College, I was surprised to meet a young scholarship recipient who’d previously completed military service. His name was Yonghwan Seok.
“Before I came to Canada in 2018,” he told me, “I dropped out of (school) and went straight into two-year, mandatory military service.” (more…)
Mosquito pilot Russ Bannock (left) and his navigator Robert Bruce, c. 1944.
He was born the same year as the original Felix the Cat cartoon and the inventor of the Kalashnikov rifle. He survived the Spanish flu epidemic the year of his birth and, though he wouldn’t remember it, was a contemporary of the Treaty of Versailles that officially ended the Great War. His lifetime spanned the administrations of 22 Canadian prime ministers and four British monarchs. And tomorrow, Nov. 1, my friend and occasional visitor to our town, Russ Bannock, turns 100.
“The family’s gathering for birthday party – just the immediate family,” Russ told me this week. “They’ll fill a room at the Granite Club.” (more…)
Ted Arnold instructed aircrew cadets for combat roles overseas in WWII.
The last time I spent time with Ted Arnold was in 1991. He had contacted me about his Second World War story. So, I travelled to Port Hope and interviewed him. We communicated again later in the year when he was holidaying in Florida. And while I thought of him often after that, I never actually saw him again. His son Rick contacted me some years later.
“We were wondering if you could help us?” he asked.
I said I would try and then Rick explained that his father had slipped through the cracks at Veterans Affairs Canada. Partly because he was born in Argentina, but mostly because he fell into an odd category as a veteran, the system had denied him veteran status, and therefore funds to cover the expenses at an assisted-living facility in Ontario.
“As you know,” Rick Arnold went on, “he’s not entitled to a veteran’s pension.” (more…)
Members of the BCATP Facebook group (l-r) Ken Meintzer, Les Mroz and Peter Whitfield at Nanton on Aug. 25, 2018.
I drove into the museum parking lot last Saturday morning. Leaning over the tailgate of the pickup parked next to me, several guys in ball caps and jeans surveyed their precious cargo. I peered into the back box of the pickup, but I couldn’t recognize the rusty tangle of metal and wires as anything I’d ever seen before.
“Can you believe it?” one of the guys said. “We salvaged it from a ditch just this morning.” (more…)
It’s a repeating theme in much of his published work, but this week perhaps more than most, Ted Barris’s focus on unheralded Canadian heroism during the Second World War appears to have some resonance.
In recognition of the 75th anniversary of the famous bombing raid against the Ruhr River valley war munitions factories of the Third Reich, Ted Barris offered his first ever talk/presentation on the story of the famous “Dam Busters” raid at the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum in Hamilton.
About 500 museum members, history buffs, some veterans and the general public filled seats in front of the museum’s WWII Lancaster inside the main hangar to hear the talk. Barris borrowed a comment from one of the Royal Air Force officers featured in the 1955 movie The Dam Busters who told Guy Gibson, the wing commander of No. 617 Squadron, “We mustn’t forget the English” when hand-picking airmen for the raid.
“We mustn’t forget the Canadians,!” Barris emphasized in response.
During the 50-minute presentation, Barris drew on research, interviews and narrative featured in his forthcoming book, Dam Busters: Canadian Airmen and the Secret Raid against Nazi Germany, to be published by HarperCollins this year. The raid on May 16-17, 1943 required 19 specially modified Lancaster bombers to travel at treetop altitude – less than 100 feet off the ground and the water – from Scampton air base in Britain to the Ruhr Valley in the heart of Germany to attempt to destroy the Möhne, Eder and Sorpe dams. They breached the first two and damaged the third, but in the course of the combat operation lost eight bombers including 56 airmen.
Barris pointed out that of the 133 airmen specially chosen and trained in seven and a half weeks prior to the raid, nearly a quarter of those were Canadians. Thirty aircrew – pilots, navigators, flight engineers, wireless radio operators, bomb aimers and gunners – came from nearly every province in the country. What made the story equally important as a Canadian story, Barris pointed out, was that nearly half those chosen for the raid received their training in the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan operated principally in Canada between 1939 and 1945.
“The elephant in the room is that almost half the Dam Busters received their air training in Canada,” Barris said, “and that’s not been recognized before.”
The Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum, who staged the presentation, houses among the largest collections of air-worthy wartime aircraft, including the Mynarski Memorial Lancaster, which towered over Barris and the audience during the presentation.
Dam Busters: Canadian Airmen and the Secret Raid against Nazi Germany is due for release in September, as a Patrick Crean Edition book from HarperCollins Canada.
Leslie M. Miller, lieutenant in the Canadian Corps.
The padre stepped up to the lectern this past Sunday morning in Shedden, Ont. The audience at the community centre for the Remembrance service settled into silence. The clergyman unfolded his papers, that I thought would contain a prayer, a piece of scripture or perhaps the words of a hymn. But, no, he looked out at the assembly of cadets, veterans and the public in the audience and introduced his Nov. 11 thoughts this way.
“From simple actions, come astonishing results,” he said. (more…)
RCAF vet Charley Fox leaning on one of his beloved Spitfires; but a day in 2006 nearly topped that.
A student pilot nearly killed him in a training accident in November 1942. While still an instructor in the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, during the Second World War here in Canada, he’d survived a head-on collision with another aircraft near Bagotville, Quebec. And overseas during combat operations flying Spitfires, RCAF airman Charley Fox also survived 234 combat sorties as a fighter pilot. And yet, it was a June evening in 2006, that Charley told me just about topped them all.
“Meeting Dame Vera Lynn,” Fox said, “was a highlight in my life.” (more…)
