warwriting

"JEREMY KANE" now on Kindle.

2011-10-07T21:24:00.000-07:00

'Pleased to say, another of my printed books has now been also published in a Kindle edition.
"JEREMY KANE: A Canadian historical adventure novel of the 1837 Mackenzie Rebellion and its brutal aftermath in the Australian penal colonies."
See it here:www.1837rebel.info

LIVE REMEMBERING YOU WILL DIE ONE DAY

2011-10-07T21:02:00.000-07:00

The late great, Steve Jobs left many a thoughtful observation, but perhaps his most universal piece of invaluable advice to each of us is this:
"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.
Because almost everything -- all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure -- these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."
-- Steve Jobs.

Feeling sorry for yourself?

2011-10-07T20:43:00.000-07:00

If you think your life is tough
-- read some history books.
-- Bill Maher.

2011-09-13T22:05:00.001-07:00

A Sobering View Of Democracy

According to Alexander Fraser Tyler,

a British contemporary of George Washington:

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government.

It can exist only until the voters discover they can vote themselves

largesse (defined as a liberal gift) out of the public treasury. From that

moment on, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most

benefits from the public treasury, with the result that democracy always

collapses over loose fiscal policy, always to be followed by a dictatorship."

2011-09-11T16:38:00.001-07:00

102 Minutes: The Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers

U.S. GOVERNMENT IGNORED FBI AGENTS' WARNINGS

OF TERRORISTS TRAINING AT ARIZONA FLIGHT SCHOOLS AND MISSED THE OPPORTUNITY TO PREVENT TRAGEDY.

Two months before September 11, 2001, when Islamic terrorist attacks destroyed New York City's Twin Towers, a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent in Phoenix, Arizona, named Kenneth Williams sent a memorandum to senior FBI officials in New York and Washington, DC.

The agent warned about an unusually large number of Muslims taking training at American flight schools.

He wrote: "This is to advise the Bureau and New York authorities of the possibility of a coordinated effort by [UBL] Usama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda to send students to the United States to attend civil aviation universiities.

The Phoenix office has observed an inordinate number of individuals of investigative interest who are attending or have attended civil aviation colleges in the state of Arizona.

The large number of such individuals attending these types of of schools, and fatwas issued by UBL, gives reason to believe that a coordinated effort is underway to establish a cadre of individuals who will one day be working in the civil aviation community around the world. These individuals will be in a position in future to conduct terror activity against civil aviation targets ..."

Agent Williams' warning was ignored at the highest levels of the American intelligence community and government; possibly as consequence of arrogant belief that Moslems were incapable of launching a sophisticated form of attack.

Today, on this sad 10th. anniversary of destruction of the Twin Towers and horrific murder of 2,752 innocent men, women, and children, we can only hope there will never be a repeat of this official failure to respond preventively against the enemies still among us.

2011-07-09T10:52:00.002-07:00

CANADIAN SOLDIERS SAY "ADIOS, AFGHANISTAN!"

Pleased to say, Canadian troops are being withdrawn from Afghanistan, as of today -- July 8, 2011. After 10 years of service there, and suffering 157 dead Canadian soldiers, our part in that lousy, stupid, futile war is at an end. Complete waste of good lives, waste of good money, and absolute waste of time.

2011-06-20T12:30:00.007-07:00

Was Hiram Maxim's invention of the
machine-gun sparked by a boyhood accident caused to his mother?

Countless millions of people have been killed by the machine-gun since its design by the American inventor, Hiram Maxin, in 1884. Improbable as it may seem, his idea for the weapon was literally sparked by an accident during his childhood. Late in life, Maxim reminisced about the incident: "When I was quite a small boy, my mother wanted to shoot an owl she saw in a tree in the garden. So she got a gun from the house, an old flint-lock musket and loaded it, but it would not go off. I was siezed with the idea of applying a hot coal to the powder while my mother aimed the gun. So I rushed into the house, returning triumphantly with a piece of hot cinder in a pair of tongs. This I held to the gun, and as I did so, the owl flew off and the red-hot cinder fell and set fire to my mother's dress, burning her badly. This so upset me that I vowed I would invent an automatic gun which would fire itself."

2011-06-16T22:12:00.003-07:00

The spin doctors view of WW II

Recently, I watched a re-run of a National Geographic TV documentary called The Bombing Of Germany. While emphasising the Allied aerial bombing campaign against Germany in WWII, the programme completely omits the context of it – the Nazi’s preceding merciless air-attacks against Warsaw, Belgrade, London, and virtually every other European country.

It reminded me of the controversial "official" history of the RCAF - The Crucible of War, 1939-1945. Written by Brereton Greenhous and a gaggle of other trendy historians linked with Canada’s Department of National Defence, it included the assertion that Royal Canadian Air Force flyers in WWII were “terrorists.”

The book re-awoke bitter controversy over a CBC-TV series, The Valor and the Horror. All three of these revisionist viewpoints claimed that Allied bombing of Germany in the latter stages of the war was "terror" bombing designed to break civilian morale. The obvious anti-British bias of the V&H series by Brian and Terry McKenna left the impression that there wasn't much difference between how our side and Germany waged war. They claimed that massive air raids ordered by Air Marshal "Bomber" Harris (whom the McKennas renamed "Butcher" Harris) had little effect on German war production and was mostly aimed at civilians.

At the time, many veterans and others took exception to the McKennas' view. Unquestionably there was an aspect of revenge in the RAF bombing raids -- getting even for the indiscriminate bombing blitz on London and Coventry and many other British cities, aimed at crushing the British will to resist -- part of Adolf Hitler’s spoken promise of waging “total war.” Luftwaffe attacks killed 65,000 British civilians, but only strengthened British resolve and morale.

Revisionists’ favourite resentment against Allied bombing of Germany focuses on the RAF/USAAF bombing of Dresden on Feb. 13-15, 1945, which killed approx. 25,000 Germans. This figure was concluded after a five-year research study conducted by the (German) Dresden Historians Commission, and confirmed the estimated casualty report by Dresden’s chief of police in 1945. This figure is far less than the 500,000 death-toll often claimed by far-left groups and sensationalist writers to this day.

The fact is that British and German people share certain valiant characteristics, including that neither nationality collapses easily under pressure or adversity. So it should have been predictable that bombing German cities and inflicting an horrendous 600,000 civilian casualties would not completely break Germany's spirit to continue fighting on, even after it was obvious their defeat was inevitable.

But as Hitler's minister of War Production, Albert Speer later pointed out that, while bombing didn't prevent German factories from producing guns and tanks, it reduced their numbers. Air-raids also resulted in over 19,000 awesome 88-mm. flak-guns produced in 1942-44 being allocated for anti-aircraft defence of the Fatherland, instead of being used on the battle-fronts. And the need to defend cities against air-raids absorbed a million troops who would otherwise have been fighting at the front.

The Allied bombing war on Germany in World War Two cost the lives of 50,000 Royal Air Force crew-members (including 10,000 Canadians) and 50,000 American flyers. A terrible toll, but it did save the lives of countless American, British, Canadian, Russian, and other Allied soldiers. No amount of attempts to re-write history can ever diminish their sacrifice and the rightness of the cause in which they died.

2011-06-16T20:16:00.000-07:00

The proliferation of e-mail that has almost done away with hand-written letters could have a harmful effect on the future of military history records. Newspaper columnist Naomi Lakritz makes a thoughtful comment on this:

“A couple of years ago, while wandering through a military museum, I stopped to chat with a soldier who was working on renovations to a gallery. He said the biggest problem museums face is being caused by new technology. Vast archives of private letters and photos will not exist for future displays, because these days nobody saves digital photos and e-mails. This will leave a huge gap in knowledge for future researchers and historians.”

A sobering and disturbing thought.

2011-05-26T10:26:00.001-07:00

NAZI SABOTEURS CAME

TO BLOW UP AMERICA

On June 13 and June 17, 1942, two groups of German sabotage agents landed from U-boats on shores of Long Island and Florida, as part of a German Abwehr mission, codenamed Operation Pastorius. The mission was named by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, chief of Abwehr, the German military intelligence organization, a sardonic reference to Francis Daniel Pastorius, leader of the first organized settlement of German immigrants to America.

Subsequent events of the sabotage attempt were summarized later in a 1943 report written by British Secret Service agent Victor Rothschild who was sent to United States to be briefed on the incident. His report covered the Nazi mission's objectives; The German personnel sent on the mission; information about the training the German agents received at sabotage school; and the equipment to be used during the operation.

During the first few months after the United States officially entered World War II, America's major contribution to the war was industrial. America was able to produce and supply weapons, ammunition, equipment, and supplies to Britain and other nations already fighting against Germany. This infusion of U.S. arms production so stung the Nazi war machine, that the German high command ordered direct aggressive action to reduce American war supply output. However, with the Atlantic Ocean separating Germany from U.S. facilities, the enemy's ability to use conventional military tactics was limited. So German Intelligence decided that sabotage would be the most effective means available to interrupt American production.

"The task of the saboteurs was to slow down production at certain factories concerned with the American war effort," Rothschild wrote in his report. "The sabotage was not to be done in such a way that it appeared accidental," he noted. "The saboteurs were however told that they must avoid killing or injuring people as this would not benefit Germany."

The saboteurs selected for the mission were eight Germans who had spent time in the United States, and two were American citizens. They were trained at a sabotage school near Berlin, where they studied chemistry, incendiaries, explosives, timing devices, secret writing, and concealment of identity. The U.S. targets planned for their mission included: hydroelectric plants at Niagara Falls, Aluminum Company of America's plants, Ohio River locks, the Horseshoe Curve railroad pass near Altoona, PA, Pennsylvania Railroad's rail yards, a cryolite plant in Philadelphia, Hell Gate Bridge in New York; and Pennsylvania Station in Newark, New Jersey.

The first batch of saboteurs arrived by U-Boat U-202, at Amagansett, Long Island, New York. They wore German military uniforms, so that if caught they would be handled as POWs and not as spies. The second batch came aboard U-boat U-584 and landed at Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida.

The first group included George John Dasch. Victor Rothschild perceptively wrote in his report, "It is abundantly evident that the leader of the first group of saboteurs, George John Dasch, had every intention of giving himself up to the American authorities and compromising the whole expedition, probably from the moment it was suggested to him in Germany that he should go to the USA on a sabotage assignment."

Dasch did exactly as predicted, promptly going to Washington, DC, to turn himself in to FBI headquarters. He simply telephoned FBI headquarters from his Washington hotel room and waited for Federal agents arrived to take him into custody. The FBI at first treated Dasch as if he was mentally unstable, until he showed them $84,000 he was given to fund the operation. His co-operation helped lead to the other seven saboteurs being taken into custody over the next two weeks.

They were put on trial before a secret military tribunal comprised of seven U.S. Army officers appointed by President Roosevelt. The trial was held in the Department of Justice building in Washington. The prosecution team was lead by Attorney General Frances Biddle and the Army Judge Advocate General, Major General Myron C. Cramer. The Defense team was lead by Colonel Kenneth C. Royall, who later became Secretary of War under President Truman, and Major Lausen H. Stone, the son of Harlan Fiske Stone, the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

All eight would-be sabotage agents were found guilty of espionage and sentenced to death. However, because of their cooperation, President Roosevelt commuted the sentences of Peter Burger to life in prison and George Dasch to 30 years in prison. On August 8, 1942, the other six were executed in an electric chair on the third floor of the District of Columbia jail. Their bodies were buried in a cemetery potter's field called Blue Plains in the Anacostia region of Washington.

In 1948, President Truman granted Burger and Dasch executive clemency, and they were deported to the American Zone of then still-occupied Germany.

2011-04-28T13:56:00.001-07:00

HISTORICAL IGNORANCE

My favorite incidence of historical ignorance was told by my late friend, ex-Chief Master Sergeant Lucien Thomas DFM, (ex-RAF, USAAF, USAF)
Lucien had treated his two daughters to expensive university educations (including -- alas -- Berkeley, London School of Economics, and the Sorbonne.)
One of his daughters and another mid-20s young woman came into the room while Lucien was watching a TV movie about the bombing of Nagasaki.
"Who would do such a horrible thing?" his daughter asked.
Though stunned by her ignorance, Lucien said calmly, "America, of course."
"But why? she squealed. "What did the Japanese ever do to us?"
I would have given $50 to see Lucien's face that day ....

2011-04-16T13:12:00.000-07:00

KRUGER'S GOLD:

A novel of the Anglo-Boer War

by Sidney Allinson.

Reader's review, by Renee Cox:

Sidney Allinson's books are always surprises. They can start off unassumingly and build up to rip-snorting sagas of ceaseless adventure. In his finest work yet, Allinson doesn't even start off slowly. Kruger's Gold grips the reader at once and the pace never slows. As I read this action tale of the struggle a century ago between South Africa's Boers, and England and her "colonials," I was repeatedly struck with the idea this would be and should be a wonderful movie. Allinson's experience as a television producer may have given him that hot-shot cameraman's "eye" or it could simply be that any good yarn so stirringly told lends itself to theatre in the best sense.
On these pages, a segment of history that was soon obscured by two ensuing, bloodier world wars leaps to life. It is really the twilight of an era, with Europeans jostling for power and position and, in this case in particular, South African gold. Allinson fills in the historical perspective while following a Canadian soldier and his colonial troops who, late in the war, have been assigned to find the legendary government cache of gold that departing Prime Minister Paul Kruger was said to have stashed before leaving in 1900 for exile in Europe.
Allinson writes sympathetically of the brilliant Boer commandos fighting to retain their homeland and their way of life. His story is not overly revisionist: the Boers have seized this land from the native tribes, after all, and even the most principled among them want to keep the blacks and "coloureds" in their place, lest their
vast numbers overwhelm the white settlers. Even through a more politically correct prism, we must admire the self reliance of these men whose surprise tactics and talented marksmanship enabled them to strike at the enemy, melt away into the bush, and return to attack another day. Many if not most of the men have lost wives and children to the war; yet, while they can be ruthless, they treat surrendered prisoners with a decency and respect that arouses a sense of nostalgia in the reader. Their English counterparts do as well with their own prisoners, for the most part.
The story he includes of the concentration camps where stranded Boer families and prisoners were placed to wait out the war is not as happy a one. (Those places were not "concentration camps" in today's Nazi sense of death-camps. Rather the British camps were set up to litrally "concentrate" Boer civilians who had been forced off their farms.)
However, Allinson paints a grim picture of the horrors where women and children and some men languished in filthy conditions with poor diets and disease and death dogging every step. A few selfless medical workers do their best, but there are no facilities and their supplies are woefully inadequate. The camps were not England's finest legacy to the history texts.
The romances in the book provide a lusty and pleasing counterpoint. Even the horses get to play a heart-warming role. His thorough grasp of military affairs, cavalry warfare, and soldierly detail adds to the feeling of authenticity. And throughout the book, Allinson has peppered the story with fascinating historical minutiae, such as the Boer heroine not being allowed to play ragtime music, then the rage, because it was produced by black performers.
Read this book. It is a treat. http://southafricanwar.info

2011-04-07T20:24:00.000-07:00

Soldiers don't start wars. Politicians start wars.
--- William Westmoreland

2011-03-25T16:45:00.001-07:00

SEX SCENES IN MILITARY-THEMED NOVELS.

True, I included sex scenes in three of my military-themed novels, but without lingering on the obvious bodily details. I like to think my readers have sufficient imagination to understand what is going on.
However, some new, younger, literary agents seem convinced that no manuscript is acceptable unless it is slathered with numerous sex scenes described in excruciatingly gross detail. Typically, such “agents” are gormless, gauche, and quite unsuited to their job.
I treasure the memory of one such poor soul (female), who suggested that I change a WWII manuscript of mine to include a scene in which the soldier hero copulated with a woman war-correspondent aboard a landing-barge speeding through shot and shell while approaching an enemy shore fortress.
Evidently, the agent lacked my experience that when you are under fire, sex tends to be rather the last thing on your mind.
-- Sidney Allinson.

http://www.southafricanwar.info/

2011-03-20T15:18:00.001-07:00

HOW TO CURE WIDESPREAD
IGNORANCE OF MILITARY HISTORY

Writers of military history and historical novels in general have a personal interest in encouraging public knowledge of history – and in rectifying the deplorably high level of historical ignorance. Fashionable anti-war posturing may lend social cachet in liberal circles, but nevertheless some knowledge of the history of warfare is essential to a broader understanding of all human history.

See here why the widespread extent of the problem is inexcusable, and some suggestions how knowledge of history could be made more appealing:

http://www.newsweek.com/2011/03/20/how-to-get-smart-again.html

-- Sidney Allinson.

2011-03-20T12:57:00.001-07:00

BRITAIN'S VIEW OF THE ALLIED
AIR-STRIKES AGAINST LIBYA.

‘Turbulent world, lately, isn’t it? (2011)

To people my age, it seems quite like old times to see Libya in the news again. Benghazi, Tripoli, Tobruk ... Familiar scenes of WWII ding-dong battles back and forth between the British Army and the German Afrika Korps in 1941/42.
Interesting to see how the Allied forces' attack on Gadhaffi’s Libya is seen in Britain today:
http://bit.ly/iayP4w

2011-03-20T12:27:00.005-07:00

ALLIED AIR-STRIKES AGAINST

GADHAFFI'S LIBYA.

Here we go again --- Western nations are once more allies in a thankless war. As we speak (March 20, 2010) a squadron of Canadian fighter planes is about to fly into harm’s way in Libya, alongside USAF, RAF, and French Airforce fighter-planes and naval ships that are already attacking Gadhaffi's forces.
I fear we have possibly just stumbled into yet another cataclysmic war. They all start with us busy-body-ing into “saving” a small nation -- Belgium, Poland, Iraq. Pray, Libya does not widen to pitchfork us into war with a resentful united Moslem world.

2011-03-17T13:40:00.005-07:00

MOST YOUNG CANADIANS ARE IGNORANT

OF THEIR NATION'S MILITARY HISTORY
By Don Butler, Postmedia News March 14, 2011.

Most young Canadians know little or nothing about most of the wars and peacekeeping missions their countrymen have served in, according to a survey done one year ago for Veterans Affairs Canada.

While a bare majority of the 13-to-17-year-olds surveyed claimed to know at least a moderate amount about the Second World War, their knowledge fell off rapidly beyond that.

More than two-thirds said they knew very little or nothing at all about the First World War, and nearly as many were equally unaware of Canadian peacekeeping efforts since 1960.Their ignorance peaked with the Korean War, about which 82 per cent said they knew nothing or very little. Even for the best-known conflict, the Second World War, 37 per cent of the youth said they knew very little, and nine per cent knew nothing at all.
The 514 youth were surveyed last March by Phoenix Strategic Perspectives as part of a $47,600 project for Veterans Affairs designed to assess Canadians' awareness, engagement, and satisfaction with Remembrance Day programming.
"It's discouraging that young people don't know a lot about the events of our past," said Jeremy Diamond, director of development and programs with the Historica-Dominion Institute. But he said there's a real opportunity to use technology to bring these events back to life.
"We can do a lot more now, sharing those stories, than we could a generation ago. I think we're going to see that tide turn a little bit with young people's knowledge of Canadian history."
In the past 18 months, the Historica-Dominion Institute has recorded the stories of more than 2,000 Second World War veterans, Diamond said. It's the largest oral history project of its kind ever in Canada.
Students and others can listen to podcasts of the interviews at thememoryproject.com, Diamond said.He added they can also invite veterans to speak at their schools, which provides a personal connection between veterans and young people.
As well, the approach of the 100th anniversary of the start of the First World War, in 2014, provides a "great opportunity" to help young people learn — perhaps for the first time — about that conflict's important events and individuals, Diamond said.
The Phoenix survey found about eight in 10 of the youth participants expressed at least some interest in learning more about Canada's veterans, though their interest was likelier to be moderate than strong.
About 80 per cent said websites were a good way for them to get information about Canada's military history. Significant numbers also mentioned books, libraries, talking to people, newspapers or magazines, television or radio and social-media sites.
While the survey therefore cannot be considered representative of the youth population, Phoenix tried to ensure that the sample mirrored the regional, linguistic and gender characteristics of Canadian youth.
© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen

http://bit.ly/gzb1Ly

2011-03-16T16:37:00.001-07:00

MAX BRAND -- AMERICA'S MOST PROLIFIC NOVELIST

Max Brand [Frederick Schiller Faust] probably was the most prolific American novelist ever; author of 500 novels -- 30 Million words. A highly popular writer of westerns, his
books were also turned into movie-scripts, including the character of "Doctor Kildare."
In the Second World War, Brand became a war correspondent for Harper's Magazine, assigned to Italy. Within just a couple of weeks of arrival, he insisted on accompanying a platoon of American infantry going into an attack on the village of Santa
Maria Infante, because "I want to study men under fire." He was wounded in the chest by German shrapnel, and died before he could receive medical aid. Max Brand is buried in the American War Cemetery, Netuno, Italy.

Search Amazon.com for Max Brand

2011-03-16T16:25:00.003-07:00

COMBAT

"COMBAT" -- A NOVEL OF WWII.

Several American novelists who had served in WWII wrote only a single book, usually based on their war experiences. Van van Praag is a particularly good example. His 1949 novel "Day Without End" [retitled "Combat" in 1951] is an authentically-written story that follows a US Army platoon in Normandy, 1944. Its accuracy and characterizations are spot-on, unmistakeably a soldier's tale, more than likely based on actual incidents during the war.
Born in New York City in 1920, van Praag was a truck salesman, a World's Fair lecturer, before he volunteered for miltary service. Van van Praag spent five years in the United States Army, was promoted up through the ranks, and commissioned a 2nd Lieutenant. He fought in France as a platoon leader, was severley wounded, and returned home a
casualty.
I read "Combat" many years ago, and I still remember it vividly. It sold 500,000 copies, but far as I know, it was the only book van Praage ever wrote.

2011-03-12T23:37:00.007-08:00

"Hachiko" Bronze Statue, Tokyo, Japan.

FAITHFUL JAPANESE DOG'S 9-YEAR VIGIL

FOR HIS HUMAN FRIEND

There are many accounts of the fidelity of dogs for their owners in peace and war, and sometimes their loyalty strikes a particular chord in its community. One poignant example began in Tokyo, Japan, in 1924, when a stray Akita breed street-dog was adopted by university professor Hidesaburo Ueno, who commuted by train to his job. He named the dog "Hachiko" and it would would meet the professor at the end of his commute every day and walk him home.

The dog met the professor at the same Shibuya Train Station exit every weekday evening, and continued greeting him until a day in 1925, when the owner did not arrive back at his usual time.

The reason was that Ueno had died suddenly at work that day, though the dog obviously did not know. For the next nine years, Hachikō patiently met the same train, at the same station, at the same time, in the vain hope that his master would arrive to walk him home.

Soon, commuters who remembered seeing the professor and the dog walking together began to feed and care for Hachikō at his habitual place on the platform. When one of the professor’s students found out about the dog, he brought it to the attention of a local newspaper, which published the story.

The dog became a national sensation and symbolized the embodiment of Japan's cherished attribute of family loyalty. In 1934, a bronze statue in the dog's likeness was erected at Hachikō-guchi (as the Shibuya Station Exit was renamed in his honor) with Hachikō present at its unveiling.

The loyal dog's vigil ended in March, 1935, when he passed away in the street near the station exit, still awaiting his master. Such was his fame, that Hachiko was stuffed and mounted on display at Japan's National Museum of Nature & Science. The still-famous Akita's monument remains to this day as a reminder of the faithful love given by man's best friend.

[For centuries, the Akita was considered to be Japan's national dog. However, the breed was almost eradicated during World War Two, when they were officially ordered to be slaughtered to provide fur linings for military officers' coats. Only the efforts of one man, Morie Sawataishi, rescued the Akita from extinction, which is now a widely available prized dog again.]

2011-03-12T15:36:00.017-08:00

TOGETHER FOREVER

In life, this brave British soldier, Lance Corporal Liam Tasker,

and his devoted dog "Theo" were inseparable.

Now, in death, they will rest by each other’s side always.

Serving in Afghanistan, the intepid pair uncovered 14 IUD's [Improvised Explosive Devices] and numerous hidden enemy weapons in just five months – a record total for an Army explosives-sniffer dog and his handler. It is deeply moving that they died within hours of each other and made their final journey home together in March, 2011. Theo, a springer spaniel cross, suffered a fatal seizure shortly after his master, L/Cpl Tasker, was shot dead by a Taliban sniper. The 22-month-old dog was said to have died of a broken heart after his Arms & Explosives Search soldier comrade was killed.

During only five months in combat, the pair detected more concealed weaponry than any other dog and handler team during the war. The pair are hailed for saving the lives of countless British soldiers in Afghanistan. And when L/Cpl Tasker, 26, were flown home to Britain,Theo’s ashes were alongside his body in a casket on the RAF Hercules carrying the coffin. The casket containing Theo’s ashes will be handed over to their unit, the 104 Military Working Dog Squadron, then given to L/Cpl Tasker’s grieving family.

L/Cpl Tasker, from Kirkcaldy, Fife, Scotland, was the 358th member of the British armed forces to die since operations in Afghanistan began in 2001. He was killed taking part in a mission in the Nahr-e-Saraj district in Helmand. The pair served in Afghanistan as part of the Theatre Military Working Dogs Support Unit based at Camp Bastion. Theo was the ‘front man’ of a patrol, sniffing out IEDs, weapons, and bomb-making equipment hidden by the Taliban. Consideration is being made to honour Theo with the award of a Dickin Medal – the animal equivalent of the Victoria Cross.

Dickin Medal For Brave Animals

2011-03-09T14:32:00.016-08:00

Famed WWII poet Pilot Officer John Magee (far right) with his

fellow pilot trainees: l-r: Fred Heather, Tom Gain, Duncan

Fowler, at #9 Elementary Flying Training School, Royal

Canadian Air Force Station St. Catharines, Ontario,

Canada, Feb. 5, 1941.

 HIGH FLIGHT


Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air....

Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace.
Where never lark, or even eagle flew —
And, while with silent lifting mind I have trod
The high un-trespassed sanctity of space,
- Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

HIGH FLIGHT remains the most evocative poem of the

Second World War, which has become the most famous

flying poem of all time. It was written by John Magee

in 1943, during his service as a Pilot Officer, Royal

Canadian Air Force

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Canadian_Air_Force

The son of an American father and an English mother,

Anglican missionaries, Magee was born in China in 1921,

and was educated in Britain and the USA. Though he

earned a scholarship to Yale University, Magee chose

instead to volunteer for service with the Royal

Canadian Air Force in September, 1940.

After training as a fighter-pilot, he was posted to

Britain, where he joined a Spitfire squadron.

The exhilaration of flying an aircraft inspired him to

write "High Flight" on September 3, 1941. Only three

months later, at the age of 19, John Magee was killed

when his Spitfire collided with a training aircraft.

His grave is in Holy Cross Cemetery, Scopwick,

Lincolnshire, England.

2011-03-09T13:30:00.005-08:00

Lee Harvey Oswald, lone assassin of US President John F. Kennedy.

REVISIONISM -- CULT OF THE CREDULOUS

Writing about historical events often requires keen vigilance to record the actual truth of events. All too often, the determination to present interpretations which conflict with current popular acceptances is the most critical issue connected with historical research -- the problem of revisionism. Revisionism is a deadly and contagious condition which afflicts some researchers, and its chief characteristic is the need to "reveal" something extraordinary and new to the public. It particulary appeals to credulous folk eager for dramatic revelations, and self-consciously egalitarian youth. These interpetations often cause researchers to radically change their opinion about how and why certain events occurred. Revisionism is not to be confused with research which truthfully enlarges our knowledge and understanding of the causes and effects of history. Legitimate historical research can occasionally discover new evidence that overturns accepted beliefs, and the distinction between that and sensationalism can sometimes be subtle. True revisionism, however, can be clearly identified because its thesis is always shocking in quality and turns an accepted historical happening upside down; black becomes white, and vice versa.

Have you ever noticed the prevalent view that nothing of consequence ever happened the way it was originally explained? Lee HarveyOswald did not kill JFK -- the CIA did. Sirhan did not alone kill RFK; he was a planted 'Manchurian Candidate'. Amelia Earhart did not simply crash her aircraft into the ocean and die; she was shot as a spy by the Japanese. Rudolf Hess was not the person tried at Nuremberg or the one who committed suicide at Spandau in 1987; it was a substitute double, and he was murdered, not a suicide. Napoleon Buonaparte did not die of stomache cancer, he was "murdered by the British."
James Earl Ray did not alone kill Martin Luther King; he was the patsy for some unnamed national conservative conspiracy. Marilyn Monroe did not die of a drug overdose; (you supply the name) murdered her. The same for Elvis; he is now doing undercover work for the DEA.
Although most of these examples are from the 20th Century, wise men throughout the ages have been well aware of this tendency by some to disbelieve the obvious.
Why is this belief in hidden contrarian truths so pervasive? For many members of the public, there seem to be many reasons -- an underlying distrust of anything said by authorities; a need to believe that bad things just do not happen to people in a simple or random manner; and finally, there may just be delight in gossip or sensationalism.
For historians, it is even more complicated. As human beings, they are subject to the other motives, but additionally, the very validity of their field of study rests on their ability to revise. There is a fundamental presumption by some academics and media persons that what is known to have happened did not happen in the generally accepted manner or for the generally accepted reasons. Furthermore, their professional reputations and individual egos are based on their revisions. For instance, any journalist who puts the blame solely on Lee Harvey Oswald for shooting Pres. Kennedy is considered to be hopelessly naive, and any historian who teaches the French Revolution exactly as described in history books is professionally dead.
This drive to radically alter the accepted truth is not the only reason many historians change history. For the most part, revisionism changes facts for cultural or national self-interests.

2011-03-04T14:59:00.005-08:00

Why Americans Can't Help But Keep

Playing Britain’s National Anthem

Americans are thoroughly familiar with the melody of God Save The King – though they sing the words of My Country 'Tis Of Thee to it. US citizens listening always feel their patriotic juices flow as they sing the moving stanzas of the song, also known as America. Few of them know the tune was written by an Englishman, in honour of the British monarch.

Few still Americans realize the melody was written by Dr. John Bull, son of a London goldsmith. He began as -a choir boy in Queen Elizabeth Chapel in 1572. Ten years later, he was appointed organist at Hereford Cathedral. By 1589, he had earned a doctorate of music at Cambridge University and became one of the most famous keyboard musicians and composers in England.

Bull wrote God Save The King in 1619, the same year English settlers arrived in America with an order from King James to celebrate their arrival with a day of thanks, leading the Jamestown colony to celebrate America's first Thanksgiving Day.

John Bull later moved to Belgium, where he became organist at Antwerp Cathedral. He died in 1628, and it was said the piece of music that become God Save The King was found among his papers. It would be over 100 years before his tune was published, in the 1744 English tune book “Thesaurus Musicus.”

In Sept. 1745, the leader of the band at the Drury Lane Theatre Royal arranged for a performance of God Save The King at the end of a play. It was a great success and was repeated nightly. The practice soon spread to other theatres and the custom of honouring the monarch with a finale of what evolved as Britain’s national anthem was born.

Even today, it is played and sung in the United Kingdom as a matter of tradition, though it has never been proclaimed so by any act of parliament or royal proclamation.

Brahms used parts of the tune in some of his own compositions. After hearing it in England, Haydn was moved to write Austria's national anthem. Even Beethoven liked the melody. In his journal, he referred to one of his own compositions in which he used the tune. He wrote, "I must show the English what a blessing they have in God Save The King."

As the song's popularity grew, it spread to the European continent, where it was picked up and used in a German song-book.

A Baptist clergyman from Boston, the Reverend Samuel Francis Smith, was given the book by a friend. In humming some of the tunes, he was struck by the melody of one (guess which). He thought it had a quality appropriate for a song of hope and inspiration. He sat down and put words to it and called it America (though more Americans probably know it best now as My Country ‘Tis Of Thee.)

The first time God Save The King was sung as My Country `Tis Of Thee was on July 4th, 1832, in Boston at the American Independence Day service at Park Street Baptist Church.

The song America made the Reverend Smith famous in his lifetime, but he seems sadly forgotten now. It is doubtful that he knew the tune was the National anthem off the British Empire. Most Americans still don't. Some remain convinced that the British stole it from them, but in all truth, it is the other way around. Regardless of its origin, the stirring melody continues to echo the two nations’ origins and shared values.

2011-03-03T15:30:00.000-08:00

ADVICE ON TERRORISM

"If you who call yourselves men of peace, I say:

You are not safe unless you have men of

action on your side."

-- Thucydides (c. 460-400 BC).

2011-02-28T14:23:00.009-08:00

It is heartening to see that Britain's Royal Air Force and Royal Navy has been so active in effectively rescuing civilians from Libya. In sharp contrast, it seems there is something of national outrage in the USA today, many folk there being indignant at the American government for its failure to send in the US Air Force on similar rescue missions to Libya.

USAF is the largest and best-equipped air force in the world, so its curious failure to lend a hand in the evacuation of its citizens from Libya clearly must have been caused by lack of decision right at the top – the White House. Observers can only suspect either that Pres. Obama tends to favour the Moslem world, or he is simply too timid to intervene for fear of alienating his US political support base.

As an aside, don’t even mention Canada’s craven lack of assistance for Canadians trapped in Libya. Thousands of Canucks were caught in the uprising there, and those who did manage to get out on their own have nothing but contempt for the utter lack of help by Canadian officials on the scene. None of Canada's military aircraft planes have been sent there to help with evacuation either.

Having said that, I am filled with dread at today’s hints by Britain and America they may send a military intervention force into Libya. No! No! No! Any Western troops sent into north Africa, no matter how laudable their intentions to "preserve human rights" by using military might against Gadhafi, will surely unite the entire Arab world in resentment against the West, and could provoke a Jihad holy war against us all.

We must keep our armed forces out of that hell-hole, or we risk Armageddon, a hopless quagmire far worse than even Afghanistan.

2011-02-17T09:58:00.003-08:00

BAHRAIN UPRISING COULD BE HAZARDOUS

FOR UNITED STATES NAVY PRESENCE IN

ARABIAN GULF REGION

The wave of Middle Eastern anti-government rioting that has now rippled into Bahrain could lead to serious problems for the United States Navy's strategic presence in the region. The US Navy's Fifth Fleet is stationed there, which provides a powerful military base of operations against the Taliban and other potential adversaries.

Bahrain's current uprising is largely a sectarian religious struggle between two Islamic sects -- the Sunni-controlled autocratic government of King Hamad, and the largely Shiite population with strong popular links to Iran. If the rebellion does lead to a radical shift in political control, it could include demands for the USN to quit its base there, a potential threat to America's ability to support military efforts by Coalition forces in the region.

2011-02-10T16:24:00.003-08:00

THE NIGHT THE YANKS A-BOMBED CANADA

United States Air Force Convair B-36 bomber

that crashed into the Canadian wilderness.

With the approaching 66th. anniversary of the WWII detonation of two atomic bombs on Japan, it is timely to recall that Canada also experienced the dropping of a similar US weapon, though inadvertently. This now largely-forgotten incident happened on February 13, 1950, five years after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. In 1950, a fearful world was caught in the Cold War, a tense military stand-off between the Soviet Union and the United States, then the world’s most powerful rivals.

Late in the afternoon of that day, a Convair B-36 “Peacemaker” heavy bomber aircraft of the United States Strategic Air Command took off from Eileson Air Force Base, Anchorage, Alaska, during a bitterly cold blizzard. Its high-altitude flight-path would pass over British Columbia en route to California on a simulated combat mission to test San Francisco’s defences against possible future Soviet attack. The plane’s mission was typical of that era’s airborne practice exercises by U.S. and Canadian air forces, which closely co-operated to defend North America against possible incursions by Soviet bombers.

The six-engined giant B-36 had a wingspan of 70 metres (230 feet), making it the largest bomber ever built by the U.S. It cost $6 million and carried 17 crewmen. Also aboard was an inert atomic bomb much like the 19-kiloton weapon - dubbed “Fatman” – that had been dropped on Nagasaki in the Second World War. Though the practice bomb aboard the B-36 was a fully-functioning weapon, it contained lead for the core instead of plutonium, and so was not capable of creating a devastating thermonuclear blast. Still, it was armed lethally enough, packing several thousand pounds of conventional TNT high explosive for emergency use in vaporizing the shell of IA-grade uranium (which itself did not present any radiation danger.)

"Fatman" atomic bomb similar to the

weapon detonated over Canada in 1950.

The B-36's routine training mission turned into a nightmare for the crew and even threatened British Columbians as they slept innocently below its droning passage through the black winter night.

Six hours into the flight, the huge plane encountered an increasingly violent winter storm that rapidly built up heavy icing on the wings and pusher-propeller engines. The aircraft’s pilot, Capt. H.L. Barry, said afterwards, “We were at about forty-thousand feet when iced-up carburetors caused three engines to burst into flames, the aircraft became very difficult to control, and we started to lose altitude"

Down to 14.000 feet, he radioed an urgent distress call for assistance at 11:25 p.m. "Engines on fire. Contemplate ditching on Queen Charlotte Sound. Keep lookout for flares or wreckage.” Lt. Paul Gerhart was the plane’s radar officer; if required, he was also responsible for dropping and detonating the bomb so as to avoid it falling into the hands of possible enemies. There was always anxiety in Washington that Soviet intelligence agents might try to retrieve a U.S. atomic weapon if one ever went down intact, to examine its secrets. With the plane obviously about to go down, there was urgent need to neutralize its deadly cargo.

“It was about midnight when I salvoed the bomb,” Gerhart recalled, “It detonated about 4,000 feet above the Pacific. There was a tremendous flash in the sky somewhere near Hectate Strait, apparently not witnessed by anyone below.”

The massive B-36 was falling 300 feet per minute when Capt. Barry set the automatic pilot to fly southwest, and ordered his crew to bail out immediately. Radio Sgt. Vitale Trippoldi’s last act was to tie down his Morse key so it would keep transmitting a steady location-fix for rescuers. Then the 17 crewmen parachuted out in rapid succession, and as they floated down caught sight of their blazing bomber still flying in a slanting course.

The first response to the distress call came from the Royal Canadian Air Force’s 123 Search & Rescue Squadron based at Sea Island, Vancouver, BC. There was quick follow-up by the destroyer HMCS Cayuga, then ships from Victoria, and various vessels and planes from RCAF Base Pat Bay. All of them sped northward along Vancouver Island.

Soon, they were joined by an armada of two dozen American ships and 70 aircraft that converged in a large-scale effort to locate the missing aircrew. Because their exact whereabouts were unknown, the search covered an area about 50 miles wide and 400 miles long, stretching along the coast of British Columbia.

Weather had turned nasty, with low temperatures, high waves, driving rain, and thick fog that made poor visibility. As there was scant chance of the downed flyers surviving long in the freezing-cold Pacific, search efforts concentrated first on the ocean waters.

The crash caused great interest in the city of Victoria, where people followed the details and anxiously waited for any news of survivors. But hope faded after 48 hours, when no trace of the airmen could be found at sea despite the massive search efforts. Teams of U.S. and Canadian service personnel, together with local On land, First Nations people, turned to scouring the wooded ravines of islands in Queen Charlotte Sound.

Then glad news came with a radio call from Vince King, captain of the B.C. fishing-boat Port Perry, who said he was bringing in nine survivors of the B-36 crew. Soon afterwards, HMCS Cayuga announced the rescue of another two USAF men from Price Island. Eventually, 12 of the missing airmen were rescued from various locations on rugged Princess Royal Island.

Sad to say, the first five men to evacuate the aircraft were never seen again after they parachuted into the darkness. Apparently, they drowned in the cold Pacific waters. Three others who fell into the sea were able to inflate their small life-rafts and survive long enough to be found by searchers. Most of the rest had been fortunate enough to fall on land, although they were widely separated from each other, lost in the densely-wooded rough terrain of the sparsely inhabited islands.

A few airmen were critically injured when they hit the ground, particularly Sgt. Trippoldi. His parachute snagged in a tree, injuring his shoulder and leaving him hanging upside-down by an ankle for 12 hours before being found by two of his crew-mates. Other airmen suffered broken bones or frostbite, but all were safely hospitalized or returned to their thankful families within hours.

American officials were fulsome in their gratitude to the Canadian rescuers, but they made it clear that the accident was classified as top secret. For months after, USAF insisted on carrying out its own search for the missing aircraft – and any of its atomic weaponry that might be recovered. However, no trace of the wreck could be found, and location efforts were finally abandoned.

The mystery of the missing bomber was finally solved three years later. In June, 1953, people searching for a downed Canadian civilian aircraft instead came across the B-36’s remains strewn along a high ridge on Kaloget Mountain beside Kispiok Valley, 360 metres from where its crew bailed out. The investigators retrieved a few bits of radar equipment, the used explosives to demolish the airframe fragments.

Today, the resting-place of the first plane to lose an American atomic bomb is designated a “heritage wreck-site” protected forever by the B.C. Archeology Branch.

2011-02-08T17:26:00.007-08:00

"HERZL STREET" NOVEL IS SET DURING PALESTINE’S THREE-WAY CONFLICT.

Today’s continual turmoil in the Middle East has its roots in the decades-long bitter enmity between Arabs and Israelis. Though historical events there have been dramatically violent and complicated, there are strangely few fiction novels set there. One rare example, though, is Herzl Street by Maurice Tugwell, published by Xlibris.

Victoria, Canada, author Maurice Tugwell's fine novel is set in 1948 Palestine, just short days before the founding of present-day Israel. As well as being a "rattling good read," his book helps explain why even now -- more than 60 years after the end of the Palestine Mandate made way for the state of Israel -- the region still remains the centre of continuous political wrangling and sporadic warfare.

Herzl Street offers insights into this tangled arena, through the fact-based fictional experiences of a 19-year-old second lieutenant in the British army. Maurice Tugwell has first-hand knowledge of his subject, being a retired brigadier of the British Army who himself served in Palestine as a junior officer with the Parachute Regiment. He clearly explains how the conflict actually involved a complicated three-way war; Arabs and Jews against the British, Jews against Arabs, and Jews against Jews.

Tugwell effortlessly weaves into his tale details of how ordinary British soldiers coped with their thankless task of overseeing the formation of the new country of Israel, while keeping the peace between Arabs and Jews who were already at each other's throats. Each side committed' atrocities, and guerrilla warfare killed 147 of the hapless “Tommies” who were caught in the middle.

This labyrinthine atmosphere forms the backdrop for Tugwell's story of intrigue, violence, and treachery. His youthful protagonist, Second Lt. Jonathan Wildblood, faces hostility from jaded officers before being pitched into combat against Arab and Jews equally determined to kill him. Along the way, he discovers a conspiracy of gun-running by a few members of a neighbouring army unit.

Along the way, Wildblood experiences a sensuous love affair with a gorgeous young Arab woman, and also encounters a cellarful of admirable enemy agents. Herzl Street is written in lean prose, with the perfect pitch of authentic 1940s attitudes. Maurice Tugwcll's paratroopers talk the way British soldiers actually spoke back then, sharing their deadpan humour and comradeship, and he gives both Jews and Arabs their say a well.

-- S.A.

Film footage - 1947 Palestine:
http://www.britishpathe.com/record.php?id=57324

2011-01-31T17:25:00.011-08:00

"BLACK DIARIES" OF CASEMENT AUTHENTICATED

AS GENUINE BY EXPERTS.

Sir Roger Casement,

executed for treason in 1916.

Expert researchers have authenticated the notorious diaries of Irish rebel Sir Roger Casement which record his homosexual activities and perhaps contributed to his execution for high treason in 1916.

Some of Casement's supporters have contended the so-called "black diaries" were forged to smear his character during his trial. Since they were made available for study in 1959, there has been a reluctantly growing acceptance they might in fact be authentic, and now experts have declared the diaries be genuine.

Casement, born in 1864, was a formerly respected British civil servant knighted for his crusading accounts of Belgian exploitation of natives in the Congo and by rubber-plantations in South America. Disillusioned with Britain's refusal to grant independence for Ireland, he travelled by U-boat to Germany during the First World War to seek funding and weapons for an Irish uprising. He also visited several prisoner-of-war camps in Germany in vain attempts to recruit Irish soldiers to change sides and fight against England.

Casement was captured by British soldiers after he sailed back to Ireland aboard a trawler carrying 20,000 German rifles. The subsequent Easter Rising in Dublin failed and seven commanders were shot by firing squad. Casement was taken to London, where Prime Minister Herbert Asquith and his cabinet debated his fate. He was tried at the Old Bailey Court on charges of high treason and hanged in 1916.

During his trial, Casement's personal diaries were introduced into evidence. The handwritten diaries recorded graphic details of Casement picking up young men and teenaged boys for sex in Africa and Ireland. Documents released in 1995 showed British authorities in 1916 used the diaries to smear Casement. At the time, sodomy was considered to be gross indecency, and a criminal offence. "I see not the slightest objection to hanging Casement and afterwards giving as much publicity to the contents of his diary as decency permits," wrote Sir Ernley Blackwell, undersecretary at the Home Office.

Now, the diaries have been subjected to handwriting analysis, ultraviolet light, and electrostatic detection tests, said forensic scientist Prof. Bill McCormack of Goldsmiths College, University of London. "The inescapable conclusion is that they are authentic," he said. "I am very confident, because of the scale of this operation."

Whether the diaries made a difference in Casement's fate remains debatable. "I am not a professional historian, but my educated guess, is that he would have been reprieved in the absence of the diaries," McCormack said.

Seamus Osiochain, a biographer of Casement, disagrees. "His trial happened at the same time as the Battle of the Somme was raging, and he had conspired with the Germans," Osiochain said. "I don't think it [the diaries]would have swung the outcome either way."

2011-01-29T17:05:00.009-08:00

LT.COL. JOAN KENNEDY -- CANADA'S FIRST

FEMALE SOLDIER

by Sidney Allinson.

Joan Kennedy was the first Canadian woman

to receive an Army commission

Canadian women who now rightly enjoy full equality in every walk of life may not realize how much they owe to an almost forgotten housewife who was instrumental in forming the Canadian Women's Army Corps [CWAC] early in World War Two.

More than half a century ago, Joan Kennedy assumed command of the Canadian Women's Army Corps that was formed by her personal initiative, despite official short-sightedness and gender prejudice. From local beginnings as leader of a group of volunteers, she went on to spearhead the national formation of the CWAC, in which women became part of the Canadian army for the first time.

She was born Joan Barbara Fensham in Middlesex, England, in 1908, daughter of an immigrant banker who became an Alberta farmer. Having contracted malaria during the First World War, Harry Fensham resettled his family in the gentler climate of Victoria. After matriculation from highschool, Joan worked as a telephone switchboard operator, then became an accountant with the B.C. Bond Corporation.

Described as "a slim, vivacious girl with short wavy hair and blue eyes, fond of a good time," she married Norman R. Kennedy, a B.C. government engineer in 1929. The bride dutifully quit her employment, as was then expected of women upon getting married. The change to being "Mrs. Norman Kennedy, attractive young housewife and club-woman," cannot have fully suited her energetic temperament. Still, she occupied herself with vigorous fund-raising for Tiny Tim Cots in Victoria hospitals.

Evidently, she was also a shrewd observer of world affairs and the growing threat of war with Nazi Germany. Early in 1939. Joan Kennedy joined with other like-minded women to form the British Columbia Women's Service Corps,' and became its commandant. Without any government' support, members of the BCWSC made their own military-style blue uniforms and trained themselves in practical skills likely to be needed in a war.
The British Columbia women were first, then similar groups formed in other provinces across Canada. Each proved their foresightedness and value after the Second World War was declared in September, 1939. Few, if any, women in Canada at the time expressed the slightest desire to go into front-line combat. Nevertheless. they held strong patriotic feelings. and were determined to serve in any vital support roles opened to them.

The aptitude of women to perform a variety of military jobs caught Kennedy's imagination. Almost single-handedly, she began a determined campaign to persuade the Dominion government to co-ordinate various women's voluntary organizations into a national army unit. For more than two years, she faced total indifference from politicians and downright hostility from military headquarters. Calmly, she kept' pointing out the successful example of half a million women already serving in the British armed forces. But hide-bound attitudes and well-entrenched prejudice towards women prevailed in Canada in those days. One brass-hat spluttered to her, "A petticoat army madness!"

After being turned down by three successive ministers of defence, Joan Kennedy's persistent lobbying finally paid off. On Aug. 13, 1941, the Hon. John Ralston signed an Order-in-Council to authorize formation of the Canadian Women's Army Corps. The new unit suddenly gained priority; and Elizabeth Smellie, matron in-chief of the Canadian Army Nursing Service, was seconded to organize the CWAC's administration.

CWACs on parade

Meantime, Joan Kennedv was admitted into the army with the rank of major -- the first Canadian woman to receive an Army commission - and appointed Staff Officer CWAC: Military District 11, headquartered at Work Point Barracks, Victoria. Because of Kennedy’s obvious suitability Chief Matron Smiellie soon recommended her to be appointed as commander of the CWAC, promoted to the rank of lieutenant-colonel.

By then, Canada's women had become part of an enormous effort to gear up: the country’s post-Depression industry into a powerful wartime production effort. Previously, the full potential of women had been untapped, relegated to occupations thought of be "suitable women's' work." However, females soon showed their stuff in jobs as welders and lathe-operators, helping build ships and tanks and aircraft.

Even more of a novelty in Canada was the innovative sight of women in military uniform. CWACs were outfitted in well-cut khaki tunics, shirts, and skirts, plus trousers usually worn only while on such duties as driving trucks. Each individual woman's clothing measurements were forwarded to Army Central Stores in Ottawa, so individual uniforms were tailor-made. Officers were allowed silk stockings, while other-rank legs wore lisle, and an allowance was paid for the purchase of civilian lingerie.

Regulations required female recruits aged between 21 and 40, with a minimum height of five feet, weight no less than 105 pounds, and having no dependents.. They were to have at least Grade 8 education, and be British subjects, as Canadian citizens were at the time. Basic training consisted of squad drill, marching, physical education, and military^, deportment, but without any weapons instruction.

When critics suggested that rigid army life could turn females into masculine individuals, Kennedy snapped, "No, life in the CWAC will never rob a girl of her charm or her womanly qualities! Whatever tasks they undertake, they'll do them in a woman's way:"

She was forthright about what were tasks to be expected. "Any woman who goes into this with the idea of finding glamour is entirely misled;" she said. "Her job will probably be pounding a typewriter, scrubbing floors, cooking, or something equally commonplace but necessary."

Kennedy's emphasis continued to be on craning women capable of non-combat duties to relieve men for front-line service. Early requirements were for clerks, telephonists, cooks, and drivers, out eventually CWACs were performing scores of demanding military skills, including code-ciphering, motor-mechanics; and map-mating.

Whatever their rank, women received only two-thirds the pay of a male soldier. female private got 90 cents per day, compared with $1.30 for a man. Lt. Col. Kennedy's daily pay was $6.70. (A man in an equivalent position, commanding an entiire corps, usually held the rank of general.)

In 1943, after some understandable grumbling about inequality of earnings, CWAC pay was raised to 80 percent of a man's rate_

Early on, Kennedy did not see her unit having any revolutionary effect on women's status in society. In 1942, she said, "We are only in for the duration, In post-war years, women will return to the same position they enjoy in the business world. They are the housewives of tomorrow."

Her perception changed rapidly, though, when she saw her womens’ enormous capabilities, and she began to muse publicly about her changed view of the near future. "Canadian women on active service won't be content with a frivolous or idle life after the war is over. A life of teas, bridge, and gossip will be empty, after the important job they're doing now w Most will want to do something more useful in their community.”

Within a few months of the unit's formation. 80 members were sent to Washington, D.C., working at the British Military Mission.-They made such an impression in the U.S. capital, a platoon of them were invited to march in a U.S. armed forces parade down Fifth Avenue, New York.

One newspaper gushed, “Those smart Canadian gals in khaki stole the show!"

The first draft of 350 CWACs went overseas in November, 1942, to serve in London, England, and eventually 3000 served overseas. They bravely endured Luftwaffe bombing raids, and in Nothwest Europe, the first female Canadian soldiers to come under fire. Later in the war, 43 CWACs served in Italy, 156 in Northwest Europe, and eventually 4,000 were stationed overseas. During the war, 25 CWACs died in WWII, as result of accident, injury, or disease. No CWACs were killed by enemy action, but four were wounded by a German V2-missile attack on Antwerp in 1945.

After being posted to Britain for a while in 1944, Lt.-Col. Kennedy returned to Canada to be appointed General Staff Officer in charge of training for the CWAC. Her ability was further recognized by being appointed to an army board to organize formation of the new Royal Canadian Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, a highly technical regiment. Having demonstrated her versatility yet again, she returned to administering the CWACs until after war's end in August, 1945.

The competence shown by females in general during the Second World War helped change forever the way in which women were viewed by the military establishment and Canadian civilian society in general. Success of the 21,000 "Kennedy CWACs" not only paved the way to equal status for females in the Canadian Forces. They had an even wider influence on later generations' radically changed perception of women in all career roles.

The CWAC was disbanded in September, 1946, then re-formed three years later, including a local Victoria platoon of women in 155 Coy., RCASC, later the 11 (Victoria) Service Battalion. After Canadian unification of the three armed forces in 1968, women blended into the ranks of most units, becoming simply soldiers, sailors, and airforce personnel. Finally, in 1989, the Human Rights Commission ordered that women were to be fully integrated into all aspects of the military.

Meanwhile, Joan Kennedy herself had been let go from the army in 1946, She returned to Victoria, obtained a divorce, and quickly adapted to home-town life again. She took mischievous fun in telling how previous military comrades of both sexes often passed by without recognizing her in civilian clothes.

The post-war years gradually became more difficult for her. Despite her executive skills, she faced an increasing straggle to make ends meet, and ended up trying to build a small secretarial business.

The whole city was shocked when she died suddenly of a heart attack at her Rockland Avenue home on Oct.11, 1956. She was only 47 years of age; her early death more than likely the result of strain from overwork during five gruelling years of wartime responsibility.

The only Canadian woman ever to be accorded a funeral with full military honours, her casket was draped with the Union Jack and home on a gun-carriage flanked by six army officers as pallbearers. The procession marched slowly; through streets lined by Victorians standing to show their respect. Then Joan Kennedy's ashes were laid to rest in an unmarked grave at Hatley Park Memorial Gardens, Colwood, British Columbia. Forty-three years later, in 1999, a special plaque dedicated to her was unveiled at the Ashton Garrison Museum, Victoria, BC, where her personal effects are held. It has become the primary museum of the CWAC, which houses a large collection of female uniforms and related artefacts. Other CWAC related materials are held by the Museum of Esquimalt Naval Base, Victoria, BC.

Further recognition took place in August, 2001, to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Canadian Women's Army Corps. A military guard of honour from the II (Victoria) Service Battalion paraded for a special religious ceremony at Lieutenant-Colonel Joan Kennedy's burial-place, where a suitably inscribed headstone is to be erected to memorialize Canada's first female soldier.

Lt. Col. Joan Kennedy, founding Commandant of the Canadian Woman's Army Corps (CWAC) and staff officer second to assist in the formation of the Royal Canadian Electrical Mechanical Engineers (RCEME), was the first Canadian Woman to receive a full military funeral in 1956. There was no graveside service after Kennedy's funeral, and this pioneer for all Canadian military women was buried in an unmarked grave and largely forgotten.
Many ex-CWACs stayed in close contact with each other for many years after their demobilization in 1946, to keep alive the memory of their service together. One such group of women in Kitchener, Ontario, proudly arranged a statue to their corps.

However, Joan Kennedy herself and her remarkable achievements had not been entirely forgotten. Aware of Kennedy's shamefully unmarked grave, the Ashton Armoury Museum made representation to Veteran's affairs Canada to rectify things, and also worked in partnership with the Last Post Society to provide a suitable headstone, which was erected in June 2001. Following the Remembrance Day Ceremony later that year, 11 (Victoria) Service Battalion, veteran CWAC's and RCEME, the Royal Canadian Legion, the Korean Veteran's Association, a Colour Party, and a large convoy of vintage World War vehicles made a long slow procession to the gravesite. So Lt.-Col Joan Kennedy finally received the long overdue graveside service and historical recognition that a woman of her accomplishments and stature was due.

Movie about Canadian women in military service during WWII:

http://archives.cbc.ca/war_conflict/second_world_war/topics/855/

2011-01-24T20:52:00.009-08:00

A MANX "TAIL" OF THE WWII AIR-WAR

Many a strange tale – real or imaginary – emerged from the Second World War. One in particular that has always intrigued me was told by my late close friend, ex-Chief Master Sergeant Lucian I. Thomas DFM. Though Virginia-born, he volunteered to serve as an air-gunner with the Royal Canadian Air Force and then the United States Army Air Force throughout WWII.
He shared with me the saga of why there are now so many tail-less cats to be seen in the Flensburg area on the German-Danish border. Lucien swore he had first-hand factual knowledge that their presence is the aftermath of the crash of a Royal Air Force bomber aircraft in the Second World War.

On the night of October 1, 1942, 27 Halifax bombers of 4 Group RAF attacked the U-Boat base at Flensburg, of which 12 planes were shot down. Kurt Peuschel, then a 14-year-old local boy, and some of his school friends, were allowed by German Luftwaffe guards to inspect one of the crashed bombers, believed to be A/C serial number W7717 of 10 Squadron, RAF.
Guards told them that five of its Canadian crew had been captured uninjured and sent to a POW camp. Before leaving, the prisoners asked their captors to look for the crew's pet tomcat that had escaped from the wrecked bomber and fled into the darkness. The RAF flyers were all very fond of their feline mascot, which they had acquired while training on the Isle of Man.
It was a Manx cat, the unique tail-less breed that would be easily identifiable to searchers. Apparently, Kurt and his young friends were enlisted to help search the area for the tail-less cat, but without result.
Kurt later moved away to live in Switzerland, and visited his homeland many years later. While there, he saw a local TV station report commenting on the large number of cats without tails to be seen in the Flensburg area. The report attributed them to the wartime rumour of an RAF mascot survivor that went missing in action.
Kurt told his wartime story to the TV station, and a search for the survivors of the crew was taken up by the Canadian Embassy in Berne, but without success after such a long time has passed. Still, I like to think it is true that many descendants of a mascot Manx cat who fell from the sky long ago still roam the streets of Flensburg

2011-01-21T22:12:00.019-08:00

SECRET GERMAN WEATHER STATION

ON CANADA'S LABRADOR COAST DISCOVERED

30 YEARS AFTER END OF WWII

-- Donna Andrew,

Marine Liasion Officer,
Transport Canada.

Kapitan-Leutnant Peter Schrewe was only 23 years of age when ordered by the German navy to take command of his first U-boat. Mission: to establish, in the autumn of 1943, an unmanned automatic weather station in the northern Labrador Territory of Newfoundland. Purpose; to improve western Atlantic weather analysis for the German navy and air force (Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe).

Kapitan-Leutnant Peter Schrewe

I was personally involved in helping solve this little-known mystery, when I embarked in Canada's largest icebreaker, the Louis S. St. Laurent, a Canadian Coast Guard expedition steamed through the frigid waters along the Labrador coast. Off its northernmost point, at Cape Chidley, the expedition found signs of one of the few Nazi operations on North American soil during the Second World War.

The tip-off about the covert operation came from retired German engineer, Franz Selinger. Selinger, who joined J. Y. Clarke, Canadian Coast Guard's fleet director, and Dr. Alec Douglas, official historian for the Department of National Defence, on board the St. Laurent in Dartmouth, N.S., on 12 July 1981.

Herr Selinger brought with him powerful evidence, not then wholly conclusive, that the Germans had landed on what was then the British Crown colony of Labrador, which became the Canadian province of Newfoundland-Labrador in 1949. It was obvious that if Selinger's evidence could be verified, we had a national news story on our hands. So I signed up for the trip.

For Douglas, the story began two years previously, when he received a letter from the Austrian-born Selinger, who is preparing a book on Arctic weather reconnaissance. Selinger wrote to Douglas at the suggestion of Prof. Dr. Rowher, of Germany's Stuttgart library for contemporary history. Rowher and Douglas had met at a maritime conference in Germany some years earlier.

Selinger's 1979 letter asked Douglas for details of two weather installation activities during the war. "There were, as we know," wrote Selinger, "contemporary actions of Germans and Canadian Forces in the same region where weather reconnaissance activities were to be observed." The first was on the German-controlled Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, north of Norway, where a Canadian raiding-force had landed in 1941, destroyed the coal-mines and evacuated the inhabitants to Britain. After the Canadian force left, German troops re-landed and operated a manned weather observation post there between October 1941 and July 1942.

"Later in the war," continued Selinger, "German U-boats landed on the coast of Labrador and established an automatic weather station that was later captured by the forces of your country." In the same letter, Selinger said that he had seen a photograph of such a station and would be "obliged" if Douglas would give him further details of the automatic weather station installed in Labrador.

U-boat crew emplacing Weather Station "Kurt"
on isolated coast of Labrador

Historian Douglas could tell Selinger much about Spitzbergen, but wrote back that he had no knowledge of any Labrador operation. "You get a little weary of unsubstantiated reports 40 years after the fact," explained Douglas. "All kinds of so-called sightings of Germans on Canadian shores during the war had been reported. To the last one, reports have been checked out but none of them has been conclusive: the evidence just never supports the rumor." Douglas suggested to Selinger that the automatic weather station to which he referred was "the one in Greenland, as Canada had certain interests there at the time."

Selinger was not deterred. The paper-chase was on. He wrote Douglas again. "You say there were no landings of German U-boats on the Labrador coast, but I wonder where the enclosed information comes from." In the course of his research, Selinger found and included in his letter to Douglas a photocopied reference to the WFL6 Weather Station Kurt (one of of a series of 21 wetterfunkgerat) established by a U-boat on the Labrador coast. Douglas conducted an exhaustive search. He inspected the files from the Royal Canadian Navy's Flag Officer Newfoundland. Nothing. He checked out resources of the commander in chief Canadian Northwest Atlantic; another dead end. The Eastern Air Command of the Royal Canadian Air Force had no positive authentic evidence. War diaries and military, federal, and archival records -- all were silent on the subject.

"It didn't help my search to discover that all headquarters operational records of naval intelligence had been destroyed in Ottawa five years after the war," said Douglas. "Some overzealous bureaucrat had tossed them -- all of them -- to the shredder."

Selinger, while investigating documents held by the son of a German meteorological scientist, Herr Sommermeyer, had stumbled on a series of photographs of which two in particular showed a German U-boat, and in the background, a different kind of terrain from all the others.

More importantly, there was something peculiar about the U-boat in the two pictures. The U-boat was a type IXC submarine, without the usual 20-mm. quadruple antiaircraft flak gun. [Unknown by Canadians at the time, the AA-guns had been torn off the U-boat by a fierce Atlantic storm during the voyage from Germany.]
These were important clues. First, the photos were definitely not Spitzbergen, Bear Island, or any other eastern Atlantic/Arctic site. Secondly, the type IXC boat suggested a distant operation. Such boats were selected for long-range missions. Thirdly, this boat should be easy to identify. Its armament was distinctive. Selinger thus had fresh evidence. In a search that took him through hundreds of U-boat logs, he found at last the log book of U-537 and the name of its young commander, Peter-Schrewe. There, unmistakably stated in Schrewe's meticulous recording of his 1943 mission was this entry from Kiel:

Sept. 18 1943 Leaving port for first operational cruise

09:00 h Orders are to erect an automatic weather station on Labrador Coast--Canada.

Selinger immediately phoned Douglas in Canada, who called an old friend, Jim Clarke. Captain Clarke, commanding officer of HMCS Athabaskan in the 1960s, knew Douglas as a young naval officer. Both hadd kept in touch over the years. Alec filled me in on the investigative events of the preceding two years. He told me about Franz Selinger, about Peter Schrewe's log book, about the photographs. And above all he told me about Canada's sheer ignorance in face of the facts He also knew that our Canadian Coast Guard icebreakers made routine summer Arctic deployments up the Labrador coast to Lancaster Sound. Would it be possible, he asked, for Selinger to board one of our - icebreakers to chase down this amazing piece of research?"

Clarke became convinced of the incontrovertible evidence held by the German. It was certainly possible for Selinger to take passage in a Coast Guard icebreaker up to Labrador. In addition, said Clarke, it is withinthe mandate of the Coast Guard to assist other government departments on research matters. He would arrange not only for Selinger, but for Douglas and himself, to take the trip into the Arctic. "I had intended to spend time aboard a ship of the fleet this summer," Clarke said. "That we might find a little piece of history on our way was a further incentive."

Clarke, Selinger, Douglas, and I left Dartmouth on July 16, 1983, aboard the Coastguard patrol vessel 'Louis S. St. Laurent', under the command of Captain M. S. Tanner and at 14,000 tonnes the largest icebreaker in the Coast Guard fleet. Destination: Martin Bay, 32 kilometers south of Cape Chidley, due south of Baffin Island on the northern tip of the Labrador coast. On July 21, early in the Arctic morning, the icebreaker dropped anchor16 nautical miles from the rock-bound coast.

With Selinger's wartime photos showing prominent land features, and Peter Schrewe's navigational records, we boarded the St.-Laurent's helicopter and flew towards the coast. Making just a single pass around the mountain, we traced what must have been U-537's path up through the channel between Home and Avayalook Islands,-thence over Martin Bay.

"There it is," cried the chopper's pilot Les Bennetts, "Down there, on-the left." As carefully as a baby put down to sleep, the Bell 206LI set us down on a rocky ledge. Twenty meters away lay the remains of the German weather station.

Cape Chidley, Martin Bay, Labrador.

The discovery has since been widely recorded in the national and international news media. Peter Schrewe had indeed successfully completed, through a navigational nightmare, his mission to erect a weather station in Martin Bay, Labrador.
KaLu Schrewe later died on another U-boat mission, when U-537 was sunk with all hands by torpedoes launched from the American submarine "USS Flounder" off Java in 1944. He could never know that 38 years later the drama and danger of his mission were uncovered by a fellow German. Nor would he ever know that his mission would create international headlines and make him a public name in his homeland.
We found the corroded remains of that station, intact except for the transmitter, parts of the encoding device, and one of the module cannisters. German manufacturers' labels were visible on batteries and assorted devices.

Someone had been there before us, though whoever it was had probably dismissed it as a Canadian relay station. For Peter Schrewe's crew had convincingly carved on one of the weather canister heads the falsified inscription "Canadian Weather Service."

Like the layer upon layer which form the spectacular pack-ice of the Canadian Arctic, this story contains others within it. There is the story that captured international headlines. How a Canadian Coast Guard team located the first known evidence that this Nazi installation had been established on North American shores, 38 years after the event.

There is the story -- a highly technical one -- of how in the early 1940s, Germany held the state-of-the-art technology in radio communications.

There is a jigsaw story to delight any armchair military buff's sense of battle and history. Just how did this automatic station, transmitting weather information for the Germans during the late 1943 and early 1944, affect the timing and events of a most crucial phase of the U-boat war in the Atlantic?

There is a story to authenticate. Who dismantled the station in Martin Bay and when? [Subsequent research established that the radio device had not been dismantled; it simply ceased to transmit weather information only a few months after it was set up.] Did the Germans come back? Was it a casual Inuit hunting party? Was it a Canadian search and destroy team? Why was the transmitter taken? And who left behind a single undated .303 rifle cartridge shell, with the inscription "British Dominion?"

But the real story belongs to Peter Schrewe and Franz Selinger. It is “KaLu” Peter Schrewe, young and green, who guided his large submarine across an enemy-infested ocean and snaked past rocks and shoals to the barren shores of Martin Bay. Unwittingly, he made history in 1943. And it was Selinger, in pursuit of the facts, like a terrier chasing a fox to earth, who brought Canadian history back to Canada.

German Weather Station "Kurt" is now on display

at the Canadian War Mudeum, Ottawa.

2011-01-21T17:19:00.009-08:00

RUSSIAN WAR DOGS SACRIFICED TO ATTACK GERMAN PANZER TANKS

Dogs and other innocent animals have been sacrificed by humans in warfare throughout history. One particularly affecting incidence is the use of trained dogs as anti-tank weapons by the Soviet Army to destroy German panzer tanks during the Second World War.

Initial tank-encounters during the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 virtually wiped out the pre-war armoured inventory of the USSR tanks of the BT series, the T28 and T35. But soon the Nazi armour faced sterner opposition. Against the German Mark III and Mark IV. Soviet Army employed with great effect its highly-effective new T34 tank, its heavy KVI tank, and of course its land mines. But in addition it devised a new anti-tank weapon -- the mine-carrying dog.

Soviet Army anti-tank dogs. The dogs were kept hungry and trained to crawl under tanks to get their food. In the combat area, they were fitted with a special fabric harness which contained 10-12 kg of high explosive in four pouches. On top of the harness was a spring-loaded trigger pin. When the dog crawled under a tank the trigger pin was depressed setting off a detonator and exploding the charge.

Large contingents of dog-handlers were formed to train hundreds of large dogs to act as “suicide-bombers.” There is evidence that the dog was sent into battle during the 1941 autumn offensive against Moscow, and in South Russia in the areas of Kursk, Rostov, Stalingrad, and the Maikop oilfields.

During the siege of Stalingrad "a squad of tank-destroyer dogs," each carrying a load of high explosives, knocked out a total of thirteen German tanks, according to the book, Anti Tank Warfare, by the USSR's MG G. Biryukov and COL G. Melnikov (Progress Publishers, Moscow.) However, they devote only a scant two paragraphs to this innovative method of antitank defence.
"During the Great Patriotic War," they wrote, "dogs were used to destroy tanks. They usually attacked tanks from a distance of 150-200 metres. As the dog dashed under a tank frontally or at a 45 degree angle, the trigger of the explosive charge caught on the bottom of the tank and detonated with enormous force. In one such incident, in the Glukhova sector of the 160th Infantry Division, six dogs destroyed five enemy panzers within an hour.
"At Stalingrad, in the vicinity of the airfield, a squad of tank destroyer dogs destroyed thirteen tanks. At Kursk, in the zone of the 6th Guards Army, sixteen dogs destroyed twelve tanks that had broken through into the depth of the Soviet defences in the area of Tamarovka, Bykovo, Hill 244.5."
Dennis A. Seguin, of Hibbing, Minn., an expert in military vehicles, described the dog mine in detail in a short article in AFV News of November 1968 (vol. 3, no.. 6), published by the AFV Association. The explosive charge was twenty-six pounds, carried in two canvas pouches. The ignition device was a metal fuse box containing the standard Russian-type fuse, which was coupled to a booster charge and detonating cord. The booster consisted of about 200 grams of explosives. A wooden lever with the aid of a tension spring and safety pin held back the fuse plunger. When the safety pin was removed, the wooden trip lever extended over the dog's head and body. When the dog attempted to crawl under a tank, the lever would strike the hull bottom and ignite the charge so as to breach the tank's armour at its weakest point.

A Soviet dog attack is mentioned in Operation of the 5th SS Panzergrenadier Division Wiking at Rostov and the Maikop Oilfields (Summer 1942). In describing the division's successful operation near Malye Sali and the Kolmyskaya River, the report stated, "An attack on our tanks by mine-carrying dogs was, thanks to the alertness of our tank crews and infantry, rendered harmless by shooting the dogs." In a short paragraph it explained how the dogs were equipped and how they operated. However, despite this effusive Nazi propaganda, contrary indications are that the self-immolating Russian dogs did destroy numerous enemy tanks in combat.

"Russian Combat Methods in World War II," one of the historical studies in the German Report Series, prepared by the Historical Division, SSUSA, refers briefly to the antitank dogs. This study, published as DA Pamphlet 20-230, with date of November 1950, devotes two paragraphs to the dogs, as follows:
"In the autumn offensive in 1941 against Moscow, the Russians employed so-called mine dogs for destroying German tanks. In the manner of pack animals medium sized dogs carried demolition charges which were connected to a spindle fastened to the dog's back . . . . The dogs were trained to run under approaching tanks. In so doing the animal inadvertently brought the upright spindle, which was about six inches long, into contact with the belly of the tank and set off the charge.

"News of this insidious improvisation caused some alarm in the German panzer units and made them fire at all approaching dogs on sight. So far there is no evidence of any case where a German tank was destroyed by a mine dog. On the other hand, it was reported that several mine dogs fleeing from the fire of German tanks sought protection underneath Russian tanks which promptly blew up. One thing is certain: the spectre of mine dogs ceased just as abruptly as it had begun."
Contrdictary reports by both German and Russian sources mention numerous instances of panzers being destroyed by trained war-dogs bearing explosives. Soviet claims give credit of as many as 300 panzers having destroyed by this method.
As late as 1957, the US Department of the Army's TM 5-223 document, Foreign Mine Warfare Equipment summarizes use of the Soviet dog mine. But the United States was apparently not interested in developing an antitank dog corps of its own. It is pleasant to report that according to William H.. Hanson, the librarian of the U.S. Armor School, Fort Knox., there is no evidence that the American Army ever tested the concept of dog-versus-tank nor even showed any interest in the idea.

--------------

Combat films of anti-tank dogs in action:

http://www.armchairgeneral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=103416

http://chanditalenteddog.com/tag/dogs

2011-01-17T17:04:00.006-08:00

Masculine Compensatory Fantasy

The incidence of "wannabes" claiming to be veterans, war heroes, or members of elite military units has reached ridiculous proportions. Just a couple of months ago, I heard of two more cases of exposure of such fraud by men claiming to have been Vietnam-era SEALs; one in Naples, Florida, and the other in Mobile, Alabama. Many SpecOps veterans I have spoken to have their own favorite stories about these phonies, and I have even encountered a few cases myself.

Last summer, my wife and I fell into casual conversation with a young man in a London restaurant, who within minutes proceeded to tell us wildly improbable tales of his purported adventures while serving with Britain's elite Special Air Services Regiment. This pathetic fantasist did not even know that members of the SAS are under orders never to publicly reveal they are even members of the regiment, much less ever reveal details of operations in which they took part. His ignorant naivete is typical of these individuals who in their own rational minds surely must know that their stories will inevitably be disbelieved or challenged, but something in their psyches compels them to continue living their imaginary martial lies.

What kind of psychological make-up causes some individuals to claim to be what they never were? It is all the more puzzling when most of these men are highly respectable in their fields of endeavour. For example, I read of two regular US Navy lieutenants who falsely (and stupidly) wore the SEAL badge in the company of genuine SEAL officers. Similarly, a naval reserve captain, who was successful in civilian life and who commanded a large reserve unit in California, was caught wearing unauthorized SEAL insignia, when challenged, averred that he was entitled to wear it. Only when confronted by his commanding admiral did he finally remove the device.

Such individuals surely must know that their stories will inevitably be challenged, but something in their psyches compels them to continue living their lies. What kind of psychological make-up causes some individuals to claim to be heroic or members of elite units? It is all the more puzzling when most of these men are quite respectable in their real-life fields of endeavour. For example, two regular US Navy lieutenants were exposed as frauds when they stupidly (and falsely) wore the SEAL badge in the company of genuine SEAL officers. Similarly, a naval reserve captain, who was highly successful in civilian life and who commanded a large reserve unit in California, was caught wearing the same badge of the elite to which he was not entitled, and, when challenged, claimed that he was entitled to wear it. Only when confronted by his commanding admiral did he finally remove the insignia. The most tragic example is that of US Navy Admiral Boorda, who foolishly and improperly wore the “V” for Valour badge on his Vietnam Service ribbon. He was inevitably exposed, causing this otherwise splendid officer so much shame that he took his own life.

In my attempt to understand the psychological functioning of individuals who impersonate SEALs or similar special warriors, I read about a clinical psychologist in Maryland who reviewed the psychological and psychiatric literature on the impostor phenomenon. The doctor considered that individuals who impersonate heroic or admirable others can be found suffering from many forms of mental illness. The most disturbed of these are suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, and they have a fixed belief that they are somehow someone else greater than themselves.

There are also those who have “bipolar disorder,” a condition in which the individual develops a grandiose sense of self. I also learned that sufferers of narcissistic personality disorders take on the roles of idealized persons to further their sense of superiority. All too often, this occurs in the cases of qualified SpecOps personnel who grossly exaggerate their combat prowess, just to satisfy some deep-rooted longing for recognition.

The doctor also discussed individuals who have personality dysfunction, the most damaging of which is anti-social personality disorder Anyone suffering from this disorder assumes the role of some heroic figure for reasons of personal gain or to exploit somebody for financial or emotional gain. These individuals are the most reprehensible of the phonies.

I learned that a very common theme among impostors is low self-esteem. This disturbance in their sense of self leads them to create ever-more-intricate webs of lies and fantasies in order to make themselves feel more important. This is a condition known as pseudologia fantastica. When the individual takes this web of lies and begins mixing it into reality, e.g., dressing as a Green Beret, Paratrooper wings, or wearing a SEAL badge, it is referred to as the "impostor phenomenon."

Often, especially when it relates to impersonating members of Special Operations Forces, the individual is engaging in a so-called “masculine compensatory fantasy. All SEALs, Special Forces soldiers, Rangers, Commandos, Marines, and similar renowned combat units represent the very epitome of masculinity. This is why SpecOps personnel are the frequent objects of impersonation. For many, these perceived-to-be-elite personnel are the fantasized optimal persons that an impostor wishes to be.

Posturing by false warriors has become so prevalent, it has become the focus of clinical study, revealing how such impersonators tend to feel grossly inadequate. Individuals with very low self-esteem and a lack of sense of identity could easily seduce themselves step-by-step over the course of time into a belief that they are the fantasized superior warriors of our era. Those with low self-esteem, who genuinely need our compassion, are a far cry from those deceitful anti-social individuals who prey on trusting and unsuspecting individuals for the purpose of exploiting them financially and/or emotionally. It is these anti-social personalities who impersonate members of the SpecOps community who do the greatest damage to the trust America and Britain place in that brotherhood.

2011-01-15T22:52:00.001-08:00

REVOCATION OF MILITARY MEDALS.

Recently convicted sex murderer ex-Col. R. Williams is a disgrace to the Canadian Air Force. The official act of burning his uniforms is quite understandable, and without historical precedent. Revocation of medals and decorations is another matter entirely. In the past, there were several incidences of even the Victoria Cross being revoked. That practice was discontinued after the famous case of Pte. James Collis, who had been awarded the VC during the Second Afghan War. His medal was revoked a few years later, because of his conviction for bigamy. When Collis died in 1918, his sister wrote to King George V, pleading for restoration of her brother’s medal. The King was so touched, he intervened to have the medal award restored to Collis, strongly expressing his Royal opinion that: “No matter the crime committed by anyone on whom the VC has been conferred, the decoration should not be forfeited. Even were a VC recipient to be sentenced to be hanged for murder, he should be allowed to wear his medal on the scaffold.”

http://www.bantamsoldiers.com

THE N-WORD & THE DAM BUSTERS

2011-01-12T21:44:00.015-08:00

This current furor over censoring "Nigger" from Huckleberry Finn reminds me that the same word recently prevented a planned re-make of the 1955 movie, THE DAM BUSTERS. The movie, based on actual historical events, is about the famous 617 Squadron, Royal Air Force, which bombed the German Ruhr dams in WWII. (Mainly British airmen, the squadron also included several Canadians and a few Americans.) Their leader was W/C Guy Gibson VC, whose labrador retriever was named "Nigger," a common name for black dogs then, used without racist intent.

Those being less introspective days, the dog's name was spoken often throughout the film, including the fact that "Nigger" was the code-word radioed back to signal the mission had been carried out successfully.
However, when production started on a re-make of the movie in England in 2008, a PC uproar started against use of the dog's name; historical accuracy be damned. The remake's producers then decided to go ahead by changing the dog's name to "Nidge." Which understandably caused a public uproar the other way, by many British people who still honour the memory of Gibson VC and his dog. So, in the end, THE DAM BUSTERS film was never re-made, all for squabbling over a word.

It is touching how strongly the memory of W/C Gibson's dog lives on. The faithful labrador was run over and killed by a car just an hour before 617 Squadron aircraft took off for the historic raid to breach the Ruhr dams. Saddened, Gibson asked his Flight-Sergeant to bury the dog that same evening at midnight, the exact time the squadron was expected to be over the target in Germany that night. Nigger's grave still remains at RAF Scampton airfield, and his resting-place is visited by hundreds of people every year to this day.

To learn more, here are some film-clips from THE DAM BUSTERS:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgePEO7GUtE

http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=dambusters&docid=404346242526&mid=38F3B9C32506A5E0F84E38F3B9C32506A5E0F84E&FORM=LKVR4

http://www.britishcinemagreats.com/films_page/the_dambusters/the_dambusters_page_two.htm

2011-01-05T20:00:00.015-08:00

FALL OF THE ARROW

From the breathless reviews of a recently revived stage-play about the demise of Canada’s CF-105 Avro Arrow fighter aircraft 50-odd years ago, it is clear the anti-American revisionists are still rewriting history, and also that media people now have not the slightest idea of what all the fuss was about. As I personally observed the events while they took place, I would like to add a less sensational but more factual account of the real circumstances that led to cancellation of the Arrow.
I well recall that cold Friday afternoon of Feb. 20, 1959, as I trudged among a silent crowd streaming out of the Avro Aircraft plant at Malton, Ontario. Just minutes before, we had been abruptly told over the loudspeakers that our employment was terminated, as of that moment, and all workers were ordered to vacate the buildings immediately. Numbly, we lined up at the chain-link gates to allow unusually subdued security guards to inspect our briefcases and lunch buckets, to prevent any disgruntled ex-employees from smuggling out valuables or documentation.

I remember each man and woman pausing as we left to look one last time at the sleek white fighter plane on the runway. Then we turned our backs and walked away, leaving the Arrow to history.
Soon afterwards, while driving home along Sargent Rd. in Georgetown, I saw little family groups outside every house; mothers with small children. Some were already greeting their man, back early today, confirming shocking TV/radio news of unemployment for virtually everyone in the entire subdivision, mostly inhabited by Avro employees. I spotted two homes that actually had For Sale signs up already.
As I pulled into the driveway of our brand-new semi-detached mortgage, my wife stood holding up our new baby at the kitchen window, our 2-year-old son waving beside them. Word had already reached her, and I threw them a brave grin. Being laid off was worrying for everyone concerned, but I at least knew I was going in for my second interview for an editor’s job I’d already applied for at MacLean-Hunter Publishing a couple of weeks previously -- right after hearing “government reassurance” that the Arrow project was not going to be cancelled. (Incidentally, I did start work on my new job there a week later.)
Still, I can claim that I was among the 14,528 Avro employees who summarily got the chop that unforgettable Black Friday. The ripple effect of the Avro plant closing was far wider – scores of smaller supply companies were also affected nationwide, causing a further 14,000 workers to lose their jobs elsewhere. Yet, for some engineers and technical staff, the massive layoff turned into a doorway to enormously better opportunities. Soon after Avro’s closure, scores of American employee recruiters arrived in Toronto, eager to hire people with aviation expertise. So many ex-Avro engineers and production workers were hired by Boeing Aircraft that Seattle was dubbed “Malton West.”

Left to Right: Robert Lindley, Chief Designer; Jim Floyd, VP of Engineering; Guest Hake, Arrow Project Designer;

Jim Chamberlain, Chief Aerodynamisist.

More significantly, the US Air & Space Agency hired some of Canada’s most innovative engineers and designers. On notable example was Jim Chamberlain, Avro’s chief aerodynamicist, who became a senior designer for the American Gemini space programme, and led a contingent of 32 other engineers from Malton to join him down south.
It's astonishing to realize the Arrow shutdown happened over a half-century ago now, the affair now part of Canada's history. Few people now remember how the Arrow had its origin in the early days of the aviation industry in Canada, which became for a while one of the great achievements of this country. At outset of World War Two, the Royal Canadian Air Force had only about 270 aircraft, of which only 40 wore suitable for combat. Worse, there were few airplane factories in the country, employing less than 4,000 people. By 1945, Canada had a massive aircraft industry that had produced almost 11,000 warplanes that helped play a vital role in the air war against the Axis powers. Giant among these firms was Victory Aircraft of Malton, Ontario, which employed 10,000 people and manufactured 430 Lancaster heavy bombers. Soon after war's end, this company became A.V. Roe Canada.
Politics and personalities had a lot to do with the corporation's postwar evolution. There was its main founder, Sir Roy Dobson, a blunt Yorkshire industrialist; production manager Fred Smye; and the Liberal government's hard-driving Minister of Munitions – C.D Howe. Also add a cast of brilliant designers, notably Jim Floyd and Jim Chamberlin. To support them, was a large skilled workforce, many of them immigrants from Britain.
Avro began manufacturing a series of advanced design aircraft. First there came the innovative C-102 Avro Jetliner (a world first) which flew in 1949. Then came the CF-100, a high-performance fighter plane. Finally, work began on the CF-105 Avro Arrow high-altitude fighter, powered by Canadian-designed Orenda engines. The futuristic delta-winged Arrow then seemed like something off the cover of a science fiction magazine. The new plane had its beginnings in 1948, when a new design was sought to meet the Royal Canadian Air Force’s requirement for a high-altitude long-range fighter plane capable of defending Canada’s skies against the threat of Soviet Union bombers.

From the start, it had the support of Howe, a powerful member of the Liberal Party government, and in this lay the seeds of the eventual Arrow disaster. The 1957 general election brought a change in power when the Conservative Party headed by John Diefenbaker was voted into Parliament. I recall Avro employees’ wide amusement when company managers hasty removed icon-like photos of Liberal power-broker C.D. Howe from office walls right after the election. The new government quickly began to harrumph about “Liberal’s rampant overspending” and singled out the Arrow project as a particularly costly example.

Signs that the county’s military policy had quickly changed when Canada signed the NORAD [North American Air Defence] Agreement with the United States in August, 1957, becoming a partner in joint continental air defence. Main element of the plan called for automation by placement of BOMARC nuclear-tipped anti-aircraft missiles. Initial worrying rumours that this meant the Arrow would be discontinued soon died away as assembly-line work busily continued on completing five airframes.

On March 24, 1958, all of Avro’s employees stood on the tarmac at Malton to witness the CF-105’s maiden flight, with test-pilot Jan Zurakowski at its controls. That beautiful bird’s roaring lift-off was a moment none who were there would ever forget. The entire country was uplifted by it, proudly hailed as a magnificent Canadian achievement.

However, strong hints of trouble for the Arrow started within days of the event. Media reports emphasised the lobbying efforts by Ottawa to convince the United States government to buy a fleet of Arrows for the American air force, a massive purchase that would go a long way to financing Avro’s production costs. When these sales-talks fell through, reporters began to speculate about a “conspiracy” by the US Central Intelligence Agency to scupper the deal. That sensationalist myth endures to this day.
At this time, I had been employed by Avro as a writer/editor, and was busily working on a script for a public relations film about the plane. The project was suddenly declared ‘high priority’ so it required a movie-making marathon in which I endured viewing over 30, 000 feet of 16mm. colour film. Working with the Photographic Department, I indexed every single scene in the entire run of film which was a record of the Arrow's development.

This involved listing every action that had been filmed, its place in the Arrow development program, and the photographic quality of each shot. The index provided means of quickly locating any particular scene of film footage needed, from the plane’s early design stages, through assembly-line progress, to the complete airframe, and the plane in flight.
After 15 hours of watching the screen, my bleary eyes had selected scenes totalling 1000 feet of film suitable for use in a half-hour movie aimed at giving the public greater insight of what goes into the design evolution and construction of au ultra-modern fighter aircraft.
All the rush was caused by top management suddenly considering it a high priority for viewing by the public to help increase taxpayer support for the Arrow despite its cost. After I screened a preview of the film to a pleased management committee, one jovial executive asked me what I suggested for its title. Reminded of a popular song of the day, I impishly said, “There’s A Goldmine In The Sky!” Nervous laughter all ‘round, and a baleful glare at me from my immediate boss.
My fly-on-the-wall presence at management discussions let me listen in to senior executives expressing daily concerns about possible government cancellation. More ominously, the Avro plant received a visit from the new Minister of Defence, General [rtd.] George Pearkes, V.C., a highly respected war hero. The distinguished old soldier was sent to make a speech to bolster the assembled Avro workers, bringing the Prime Minister’s personal denial of any rumours of cancellation and assurance that the Arrow project was not going to be cancelled.

I was in the crowd that morning, when Gen. Pearkes’ words sparked memory of the only political advice my father ever gave me: “No rumour is confirmed until it is officially denied.” So I turned to my friend and said quietly, “Okay, that does it – I’m going to look for another job!” And I did, the very next week; just as well for me, as it turned out.
Production of the Arrow was suddenly cancelled just a couple of weeks afterwards. It is fashionable today, for revisionists to ludicrously ascribe the fall of the Arrow to complicated schemes by CIA agents working for American industrialists jealous of the plane’s superior performance. But the real motivation was far different. Very soon after the Conservative Party took power, Canada’s Defence Committee behind closed doors had repeatedly requested cancellation of the project, for mixed reasons of expense and unsuitability.
General Pearke’s explanation was only publicly revealed much later:- “We did not cancel the CF-105 because there was no [Russian] threat, but because there was a lesser threat, and we got the BOMARC in lieu of more aircraft to look after this.” That reasoning also happened to conveniently help the new incumbent Conservative government to discredit the previous Liberal Party administration’s wisdom.
Now, more than a half-century later, it is fashionable for revisionists and conspiracy buffs to ascribe the fall of the Arrow to dark schemes by the American government. But I harbour clear memories of home-grown Canadian party politics being really at the bottom of things. To me and most other ex-Avro people who went on to different careers, the CF-105 Arrow still remains a sad example of a national aviation dream destroyed by the short-sighted squabbles of politicians.
The Arrow project was not only cancelled, Ottawa ordered the senseless destruction of the five airframes that had been built, so that its physical existence disappeared without a trace. One friend who was briefly re-called to the Avro plant to help collect company movies for burning, told me he saw three complete airframes being sliced apart like aluminum bananas. Not only were no samples of the aircraft preserved even for a museum, the process extended to making sure that no blueprints survived as possible rebukes in future years.
But at least a print of one of my movies did survive, complete with the Royal Canadian Air Force’s official march as background music. To my surprise and pride, I stumbled across FLIGHT OF THE ARROW posted on YouTube. If you want to see this superb aircraft in its glory days, here is the link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8lTGTPQlDE

2011-01-01T14:55:00.002-08:00

BLURRING FICTION NOVELS WITH FACTUAL HISTORY BOOKS.

Authors of historical novels are rightly proud of the fictional
characters and situations they create, and the accuracy of
the historical background included in their novels. Simply
defined, they write about fictional characters set in actual
historical atmosphere and military events during days gone by.

But something odd has happened in public libraries
gradually over time -- shelving historical fiction
titles amidst non-fiction history books. To come
across a book you know is a novel nestling amidst
History titles is jarring, to say the least.

Evidently, some librarians nowadays have a somewhat
wobbly grasp of what is factual history and what is
historical fiction, which results in blurred genres.

Three examples of fictional novels being mistakenly
shelved in the non-fiction History Section that I have
come across:

THE GREAT PACIFIC WAR, by Hector C. Bywater
SCHINDLER'S LIST (SCHINDLER’S ARK) by Thomas Keneally.
ROOTS, by Alex Haley

Likely, you have noticed a few others yourself. If
you do encounter these or similar historical novels
being mis-catalogued in libraries and well-meaningly
feel urged to tell a librarian about it, take warning
-- you are in for a frustrating experience. :-)

First, you are automatically assumed to be mistaken.
i.e., wrong.

Second, you will find yourself trapped into giving
an interminable explanation, in face of a bemused
librarian who likely just hears you out politely,
has not the faintest idea what you are talking about,
and will not correct the book's classification in the
slightest.

Black African Troops In World War One Struggle For Africa.

2010-12-29T13:35:00.000-08:00

No Insignificant Part: The Rhodesia Native Regiment in the East African Campaign of the First World War, Tim Stapleton, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Waterloo, 188 pages, photos, maps, index, glossary, bibliography.
This book presents rare insights about a little-known aspect of the 1914-1918 conflict. It is the first history of the only primarily black African military unit raised by the British in Northern Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe) to fight in World War One. Like their German opponents, the British recruited “native” troops in various regions of Southern Africa. Typical RNR volunteers were ex-miners or farm workers living in what are now Zimbabwe, Zambia, Mozambique, and Malawi. They were commanded by European officers, mostly British settlers or frontiersmen seconded from the British South Africa Police. Despite tropical heat, meagre food, and fatal diseases, the RNR fought well in a gruelling campaign for two years against German and African forces led by the wily General Paul von Lettow Vorbeck.
Stapleton’s researches into unit war diaries, personal reminiscences, previously unpublished manuscripts, and Zimbabwean National Archives formed the basis of this unique military history. Sad to say, even though some of its members received British medals for bravery, the Rhodesia Native Regiment was quickly disbanded after the war and soon forgotten. He found it was also ill-served by the current Zimbabwean government’s anti-colonial policy that led to the destruction of all local monuments to these valiant but unheralded Africans who died in white men’s wars.
-- Sidney Allinson.

2010-12-12T17:07:00.004-08:00

THE CHRISTMAS TRUCE - 1914

by Sidney Allinson

Shortly after dawn on Dec. 25, 1914, the first Christmas Day of the First World War, hundreds of British and German troops spontaneously climbed out of their trench fortifications and crossed the usually deadly No Man's Land between to shake hands with their enemies, exchange gifts, and sing carols together. Considering they had been fighting each other for almost five deadly months, costing the lives of half a million men already, this brief unofficial truce still remains one of the most astonishing but heart-warming Christmas stories of peace during war.
In the 96 years since, the world's attitude toward warfare has changed immensely. If the very idea of millions of civilized volunteer soldiers killing each other is incomprehensible to most people now, the fact that thousands of them called a temporary truce in 1914 and greeted each other with brotherly love does have an appeal to modem-day pacifism. Considering that between August and December, 1914, the small British Expeditionary Force had lost 89,964 trained soldiers and Germans suffered similar heavy casualties, it is all the more surprising their survivors took part in this legendary Christmas Truce.
When repeated attacks proved unable to force either side to retreat, the Western Front battlefield became deadlocked into a line of opposing trenches that stretched from the Swiss border to the Belgian coast. Crouching in these muddy ditches, often knee-deep in freezing water, the hapless soldiers endured continual shellfire and counterattacks day and night without any let-up.
It was bitterly cold that frosty Christmas Eve along the British sector between Messines and Neuve Chappele in Flanders, with crystal-clear moonlight illuminating the enemy trenches opposite. Both foes had often shouted insults or even jokes across the mere 90 metres that separated them at some points, but this time the Germans began to sing Christmas hymns instead. They harmonized Stile Nacht, Heilige Nacht, in reply to which, British choirs raised their voices in Silent Night. One Scotsman later recalled ruefully, "I don't think we were as harmonious as the Jerries,"
All gunfire stopped and a suddenly friendly atmosphere grew at nightfall when candle-lit Christmas trees and paper lanterns began to appear on the German parapets, accompanied by harmonious singing of Oh, Tannenbaurn. Then came Teutonic calls of, "How are you tonight, Tommy?" British soldiers shouted back their own goodwill, "Nice singing, Fritz! Merry Christmas!"
The overtures were not a complete surprise, though, as rumours had been circulating since the night before that an unauthorized live-and-let-live period might honour the Holy Day. It seems to have been initiated by a few German junior officers. They carried lanterns while they came across to British lines the previous night to propose a temporary ceasefire period during the Christmas Season.
British front line commanders agreed, at first seeing it mostly as an opportunity to safely recover the bodies of their men who still lay in No Man's Land. They sent out burial parties who worked peaceably alongside Germans who were recovering their own dead.
Senior British officers who caught wind of the arrangement had a somewhat less sentimental attitude. On Dec. 24, Field Marshal Sir John French had sent a message to all British units. "It is thought that the enemy may be contemplating an attack during Christmas or New Year. Therefore, special vigilance will be maintained during these periods." As the commander-in-chief was ensconced in safe comfort well to the rear, front-line officers turned a blind eye to their men's respite from combat by fraternizing on Christmas morning.
For hours, enemy soldiers - Saxons and Scots, Bavarians and Englishmen - patted each other on the back, exchanged buttons off their uniforms as souvenirs, sang carols together, gave gifts of British cigarettes or Berlin cigars, admired family photos, and laughed heartily at the latest London music-hall jokes. A surprising number of the German soldiers had been working in England just a few weeks before, and spoke nostalgically of happier times. The few who did boast they would be marching victoriously through London within a month were only laughed down by Tommies. Several soccer games between national teams were arranged, with hardened troops kicking improvised footballs in the snow like carefree schoolboys.
A British soldier later wrote home, "Just think, while you were eating your turkey, I was out talking and shaking hands with the very men I had been trying to kill a few hours before! It was astounding!" One German participant commented, "It was a day of peace in war. It is only a pity that it was not decisive peace."
Capt. Bruce Bairnsfather, who became a hugely popular cartoonist, recalled, "This was my first real sight of them at close quarters - actual soldiers of the German army. There was not an atom of hate shown on either side that day. Yet, on our side, not for a moment was the will to beat them relaxed. It was just like the interval between the rounds in a friendly boxing match."
A certain young Austrian soldier named Adolf Hitler in a reserve trench was furious when his comrades went forward to join the truce. He shouted after them, "Such a thing should never happen in wartime! Have you no sense of German honour at all?"
Henry Williamson, later a prolific novelist and wildlife conservationist, recalled, "I took the addresses of two German soldiers, promising to write to them after the war. I had a childlike idea that if all those in Germany could know what the soldiers had to suffer, it might spread, this truce of Christ on the battlefield, to the minds of all."
Despite such congeniality, few participants forgot the grim realities for long. One veteran sergeant of the Norfolk Regiment warned his platoon, "Remember lads, we're still at war, so keep a sharp lookout." He noticed that among the smiling Germans were a few quietly watchful men wearing mud-caked uniforms that bore the green shoulder-lanyards denoting trained snipers. He warned off one who was obviously taking stock of British defence positions, "That's close enough, Fritz. Now hop it!"
British officers also took advantage of the opportunity to observe details behind enemy lines. Capt. Sir Edward Hulse of the Scots Guards disguised his rank with a stocking cap and corporal's overcoat to escort some visiting Germans back to their barbed-wire line. "Having a jolly good look around all the time, picking up various little bits of information. We parted after an exchange of cigarettes, and I went straight to HQ to report what I had seen.”
By nightfall of Christmas Day, infuriated senior commanders on both sides sent firm orders that such unauthorized peacefulness must end. "Hostilities to re-commence immediately." German and British officers arranged to start fighting again around midnight on Boxing Day. They symbolically fired their revolvers into the air, saluted and wished each other good luck.
The First World War was to grind on mercilessly for another four years without pause, that single early Christmas Truce forgotten. Eventually, the war cost the lives of almost a million British Commonwealth troops and many more French and Germans before the final Armistice was signed on Nov. 11, 1918.

Victoria historian Sidney Allinson is
author of "The Bantams; The Untold
Story of World War One."

2010-11-16T17:57:00.004-08:00

THE SOMME AND TOLKIEN -- A POINT OF VIEW
By Lisa Jardine, BBC News Magazone.

Ninety years ago, Allied commanders launched the World War I offensive lastingly remembered as the Battle of the Somme. At 7.30am on 1 July, 1916, officers blew their whistles to signal the start of the attack. As 11 British divisions clambered out of their trenches and walked slowly towards the enemy lines, German machine guns opened fire, causing wholesale carnage. The first day of that battle was the bloodiest in the whole history of the British Army. By the end of the day, the British had suffered 60,000 casualties; almost 20,000 were dead, including 60% of all the officers involved.

One of those who survived that horrific first assault, and who endured the prolonged ghastliness of the months of fighting that followed, was the young JRR Tolkien.

The Allied plan had been to launch a coordinated Anglo-French assault. The British would attack along a 15-mile front north of the meandering river Somme. Five French divisions would attack along an eight-mile front through rolling farmland south of the Somme. To ensure a rapid advance with minimal resistance, Allied artillery had been pounding German lines for a week beforehand, firing over a million and a half shells at the enemy.

British soldiers recalled later how throughout the night before the battle, the entire length of the English trenches shuddered and vibrated from the reverberating shock waves of uninterrupted big gun bombardment of the enemy lines.

The saturation bombardment was supposed to annihilate the opposing forces, leaving their positions undefended. Cavalry units would then pour through to pursue the fleeing Germans. But open preparations for the assault gave clear advance warning of an impending attack, and German troops simply moved into underground concrete bunkers and waited.

Almost five months later, the Allies had advanced only five miles, at a cost of over half a million lives. Early in 1917, the Germans fell back from their positions for strategic reasons. Their withdrawal made a mockery of the months of bitter battle and appalling loss of life. It had all been for 'a few acres of mud'.
Intended to be a decisive breakthrough, the Battle of the Somme instead became a byword for futile and indiscriminate slaughter.
At the Somme, the new, devastatingly efficient weapons of mass destruction -the tank, mustard-gas and the machine gun - marked the beginning of mechanised warfare on a huge scale. War would never be the same again.
The poet Wilfred Owen was killed in the final week of World War I at the age of 25. His poems offered searing testimony to the way this new kind of war ended any possibility of romanticising personal sacrifice, or elevating the individual in combat to the status of hero.

For me, his Anthem for Doomed Youth captures better than any military history an absolute disenchantment, no matter how "good and true" the cause:

"What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns?
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle?
Can patter out their hasty orisons."

A more mundane kind of eye-witness account - but as compelling - comes from an extraordinary collection of audio-recordings of the recollections of ordinary serving soldiers, to be found on the Imperial War Museum website as part of a virtual Somme commemoration.
Pte Don Murray, for instance, recalls how, as he and his comrades walked towards the enemy lines, the Germans appeared from their bunkers: "They just wound up their guns on automatic and fired... and of course they just mowed us down."
And he goes on to evoke the sense of numbing isolation, still vivid to him all those years later, he says: "And it seemed to me eventually there was just one man left, I couldn't see anybody at all, all I could see was men lying dead, men screaming... and I thought what can I do, I was just alone in a hell of fire and smoke and stink."

Tolkien had just graduated from Oxford with a first-class degree in literature when he saw his first active service at the Somme. From July 1916 until he was invalided out with trench fever at the end of October, he experienced the full relentless ghastliness of day after day of trench life under fire - the discomfort, the cold, the mud, the lice, the fear, the unspeakable horrors witnessed.

He had taken comfort from the fact that he was fighting alongside his three oldest and dearest friends from his school-days - a quartet of gifted would-be-poets who hoped to become outstanding literary men. But by November, two of those friends were dead.

Tolkien and the one other surviving member of their "club" were never able to rebuild a closeness shattered by the enormity of what had occurred - by the sense of total loss, the obliteration of the band of friends almost before their creative lives had begun.

Imagination is a uniquely human attribute. Freely exercised, it allows each of us to transform our everyday experience, elevating it into something more consolingly meaningful. How, then, does the human imagination cope with trauma of the kind Tolkien and his fellow-soldiers experienced in 1916?

We might expect those months of unremitting horror in the trenches of the Somme to have fed into, and coloured, the ferocious battles and scenes of slaughter in Tolkien's three-part "Lord of the Rings" (begun in the 1930s), or in "The Fall of Gondolin" which he began writing while convalescing in the spring of 1917.

2010-11-16T17:52:00.002-08:00

War: first, one hopes to win;
then one expects the enemy to lose;
then one is satisfied that he too is suffering;
in the end, one is surprised that everyone has lost.
--Karl Kraus

2010-10-29T14:11:00.013-07:00

BREAKER MORANT DID NOT SAY,

“SHOOT STRAIGHT, YOU BASTARDS!”

The movie, “Breaker Morant” is generally an excellent portrayal of the 1902 contemporary atmosphere in South Africa during the Second Anglo-Boer War. However, it distorts several historical events. Though Lt. Harry “Breaker” Morant was a gallant soldier in real life, there is no escaping the reality that Morant was guilty of murder as charged, and he wrote a confession to that effect the night before his death.
Among other distortions, is the movie’s melodramatic portrayal of the moments before his execution, when the actor has Morant shout at the firing-squad, “Shoot straight, you bastards!”
The facts of Morant’s last moments were described in a letter written at the time by an Australian eye-witness, Mr. J. H. Morrow, warder of the Pretoria Gaol, with reference to the shooting of Lieutenant Morant and Handcock. The letter was mailed to a mutual friend, dated March 1, 1902, and published in an Adelaide newspaper. The letter states :-
"Dear George, I write these few lines to you on behalf of Lieutenant H. H. Morant, who was shot here on February 27, two days ago, by order of court-martial. His last word was that I should write and tell you that there were four officers -- one South Australian, one Victorian, one New South Welshman, and one New Zealander, all Australians -- concerned. The South Australian and the New South Welshman were shot, and the others were transported [to prison]."
"It is quite a mystery here regarding the deed. All I know is that they shot 38 Boers, and there are rumours circulating that these Boers surrendered to them. Morant told me that he was guilty of shooting the Boers because they shot his captain.”
“I was the warder who was in charge of the officers the last week they had on earth, and they faced their doom as brave as men could do. Everyone said it was a pity to shoot two such brave men. Morant came out here with the South Australian Mounted Rifles with which you and I enlisted. Morant got a commission with the Bushveldt Carbineers, and I went on the railway here, and I was only transferred to this prison about six weeks ago. I was not here when they came here.
They had been in prison at Pietersburg for four months, and then they were transferred to Pretoria, where sentence was passed upon them. They were shot next morning at 6 o'clock, and were buried at 5 o'clock in the evening. There were a large number of Australians at the funeral; no less than 30 of them were Australian officers. I felt it very much.”
“The only reply given by the two men when asked if they were ready was, 'Yes, where is your shooting party?” and the men marched out hand in hand. The firing party went to blindfold the men, but Morant said, 'Take this thing off,” and pulled the handkerchief off. As the two sat in the chair awaiting death Morant remarked, 'Be sure and make a good job of it.' Morant folded his arms across his chest and looked them straight in the face. The firing party fired, and Morant got all in the left side, and died at once. With his arms folded and his eyes open you would have thought he was alive."
[See other passing reference in “KRUGER’S GOLD: A novel of the Anglo-Boer War.”]
http://www.amazon.com/Krugers-Gold-Novel-Anglo-Boer-War/dp/0738865850

2010-10-28T17:19:00.001-07:00

Military history books, and related writings in general, still keep generally high standards of literacy and clarity. But even in this genre, the discerning reader is starting to notice lapses in language.
Possibly more depressing, there is also a steady decline of public interest in the entire subject. One can repeat until blue in the face the wise old saw, "A nation ignorant of its history is doomed to repeat it."
Here is one likely cause of the circumstance:
Historian Jack Granatstein, an outspoken critic of the public school system, said there is no doubt in his mind that "standards have collapsed."
After becoming director of the Canadian War Museum, Mr. Granatstein said one of the reasons he left his long-time teaching position at York University was that "the students were so depressingly bad."
"They could not write a sentence, they could not read or understand complex things, they had lost the ability to speak in sentences, and... on top of that, they had no knowledge of history," said Mr. Granatstein, author of his controversial book, Who Killed Canadian History? (HarperCollins).
He blames the schools and teachers in large measure. "They could all use a computer," he said of his former students at YorkU, "Perhaps they had some skills I didn't know about."

2010-10-19T15:28:00.012-07:00

“KRUGER’S GOLD” EXPOSES UNPALATABLE FACTS ABOUT

BOTH SIDES IN THE
ANGLO-BOER WAR.

In 1902, just as in 2010, guerrilla fighters challenged the might of the pre-eminent world power. A 100 years ago it was Dutch settlers, called Boers, fighting Great Britain for possession of South Africa. Today, a band of Islamic extremists attack the United States and its allies everywhere.
The lesson from both: small forces are potent. Kruger's Gold is not a dry military history book, nor does the reader miss anything if, like this reviewer, he or she comes to it more or less ignorant of the Anglo-Boer War that took place in 1899-1902.
Victoria author Sidney Allinson has written the sort of gripping, fast-moving novel that keeps you turning pages long after bedtime. The characters and their loves and hatreds, their ideals and weaknesses, failures and triumphs, would have provided the human material for a thoroughly satisfying novel even if presented in an imaginary setting.
The novel's hero is a Canadian volunteer from Victoria, Lieut. Harry Lanyard serving with the British Army. Given the choice between disgrace before a court martial and leading a particularly hazardous mission, Lanyard takes the latter. With a rag-tag troop of mainly Canadian mounted infantry, Lanyard is ordered to recover a king's ransom in stolen gold bullion - enough money to keep the Boers fighting for goodness knows how many more years.
The gold had been looted by Boer president Paul Kruger, hence the book's title -- an actual real-life hidden treasure, portions of which are still being discovered to this day. And hence also, the skilful merging of the fictional characters in the foreground of the story with the meticulously researched historical events that provide the backdrop.
We are introduced to the tough Afrikaner Boer fighters whose title "Commando" has been handed down through generations since as the hallmark of military excellence. We discover to our chagrin that the South African War also fathered the concentration camp, a term now synonymous with death. Although these camps were devised initially by the British as shelter for destitute families whose homes had been torched by one side or the other in this increasingly cruel campaign, disgraceful mismanagement and rampant disease reduced the camps to death-traps.
Meanwhile, the action continues: ambush, deception, guerrilla warfare, espionage mutiny, pitched battles and encounters with bandits - while a forbidden romance struggles to survive across the invisible line separating friend from foe.
Lieut. Lanyard would be a real asset in today's Special Forces; but is this enough to gain his two objectives, Kruger's gold, and the love of his life, the Boer-American girl, Beth?
This book has stirred great interest among historians and military buffs of the period, some of whom have been brought up on "official" versions of events that omit what is unpalatable about your own side. The truth is that war brings out the best and the, worst in mankind and there never was an unblemished battle record. Sidney Allinson pays his respects to Boers, Brits, and colonials, and avoids any temptation to portray the fighting in terms of good guys and bad. To assist the keen researcher, the author includes a glossary, casualty statistics and bibliography, plus a summary of later events in South Africa.

Reviewer Maurice Tugwell is a retired brigadier of the British Army, and director of the Toronto-based Mackenzie Institute.
http://www.amazon.com/Krugers-Gold-Novel-Anglo-Boer-War/dp/0738865850

New findings cast more doubt on value of Canada’s 1917 military draft.

2010-10-17T17:36:00.000-07:00

The conscription crisis caused lasting rifts in Canada. Now a self-taught expert has found the price paid brought less value than historians thought, writes Randy Boswell, in The Ottawa Citizen. Published: Monday, April 16, 2007.
A roofing salesman who studies Canada's military past in his spare time has prompted the country's professional historians to rethink one of the great controversies of the First World War: the success -- or not -- of the conscription policy that created a deep national divide along French-English lines.
Michel Gravel, a history buff from Cornwall, Ont., has unearthed what appears to be a significant error in the traditional calculation of how many conscripted soldiers were sent into battle before the end of the war. And the find has been hailed as "a great service to scholars" by none other than Jack Granatstein, the dean of Canadian historians.
Generations of war chroniclers -- most notably Mr. Granatstein himself, author of a book on the subject, as well as the conscription entry in the Canadian Encyclopedia -- have accepted the figure of 24,132 compulsory recruits who reached the front lines in Europe.
Mr. Gravel probed the conscription question while researching his recently published biography of Ottawa native Sgt. Hillie Foley, a long-overlooked hero from the First World War. Part-time researcher Gravel discovered evidence that as many as half of the supposed Canadian conscripts were actually British-born Americans who volunteered for overseas duty through a U.S.-based recruitment drive orchestrated by British patriots in North America.
The British-American recruits were sent north to enlist in Canada until mid-1918, when the U.S. military announced its own draft.
"The error came about because both volunteers obtained by the recruiting missions in the U.S.A. and conscripts raised in Canada were assigned regimental numbers from the same block (3,000,000 to 4,000,000)," Mr. Gravel writes in an appendix to his book about Foley.
"This made it impossible to tell the American volunteers apart from the Canadian conscripts ...The contribution to the great Canadian victories of 1918 by these late-war volunteers from the U.S.A. has never been examined."
Mr. Gravel's conclusions about the conscription numbers have impressed Mr. Granatstein.
"Gravel launches a full frontal assault on the standard and accepted numbers of conscripts who went overseas in 1918. I'm one of the people he attacks, and I'm afraid I must agree that he is likely right," Mr. Granatstein writes in the latest edition of Legion magazine.
"I took as fact the number of 24,132 put forth in Col. G.W.L. Nicholson's official history (as did everyone else), but Gravel -- who comes to it all with a fresh, skeptical eye -- has done a great service to scholars by parsing the data with exemplary care.
"By studying regimental numbers, by examining the late war volunteers for the Canadian Expeditionary Force recruited in the U.S., Gravel has forced me to reassess matters. The Military Service Act of 1917 clearly worked less well than the politicians -- and the historians -- believed."
The act was passed in August 1917 by the wartime Conservative government of Robert Borden. Opposition to the plan in French Canada was intense and nearly universal, prompting realignments in Parliament and riots in Quebec in response to a measure that forced thousands of young men to fight in what some Canadians viewed as an essentially "foreign" war.
Borden, who had once pledged not to impose a military draft, had become convinced by the summer of 1917 that the terrible carnage in Europe -- even in victories such as Vimy Ridge, the focus of a landmark 90th anniversary commemoration in France last week -- meant Canada's army would collapse without a faster flow of reinforcements than voluntary recruitment alone could supply.
But recognizing the huge political risks, Borden invited rival Liberals who would back conscription to join his Tories in a bipartisan Union government. Many from English Canada did, but Quebec MPs remained solidly against the policy, crippling the Conservative party in that province and deepening the country's French-English rift.
And what was achieved? Though the policy was intended to raise 100,000 front-line soldiers, the war ended in November 1918 with the number of deployed conscripts still well short of the target. To many historians, including Mr. Granatstein, even the 24,132 figure represented a failure for Borden's policy.
The much lower number suggested by Mr. Gravel's research could erase any lingering doubts about whether conscription was worth the trouble it caused for Canada.
Mr. Gravel, who spent five years and $15,000 to publish his book, says Mr. Granatstein's "gracious" endorsement of his discovery is deeply satisfying -- particularly since "I never went to university, and make my living selling roofing materials."

ROYAL CANADIAN MILITARY INSTITUTE TO MOVE TO A NEW LOCATION

2010-10-14T23:09:00.006-07:00

Royal Canadian Military Institute: 100 YEARS 1890-1990

Sad news for many Canadian enthusiasts of military affairs, with the announcement that the 120-year-old Royal Canadian Military Institute closed the doors of its historic building on University Avenue, Toronto, in October, 2010. and will be moving to modern new quarters elsewhere in Toronto.
The announcement is particularly poignant for me personally. I have been a member of the RCMI for over 30 year, had the honour to be a member of the Board Of Directors, and was editior of both the RCMI Yearbook and SITREP Newsletter.
Here's a description of the Institute's cloising days, reported by Peter Kuitenbrouwer in the National Post.:

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"Director Captain Charles Scot-Brown stood on Friday in the lounge of the Royal Canadian Military Institute, at 426 University Avenue, resplendent in his navy blazer with polished RCMI brass buttons. On his lapel glittered the wings which attest to his participation, as a Can-Loan military officer with the British troops, in the ill-fated paratrooper drop into Arnhem, the Netherlands, in 1944 (immortalized in the film A Bridge Too Far.)
Yesterday Cpt. Scot-Brown, 87, prepared to give his last tour of this 100-year old Institute before wreckers demolish it to make way for a 42-storey condo. I asked his feelings.
“It’s like watching your mother-in-law go over a cliff in a new Cadillac,” he said. “Mixed emotions.”
Few living Canadians know this place as well as Capt. Scot-Brown. “I first came here as a boy in 1936 when I was getting ready to go to Jarvis Collegiate,” he recalls. He was a guest of his father, also a soldier. Six years later his father was killed in the bombing of Bristol, 1942. “Luckily I was overseas so I was able to go to the funeral.”
Thousands of memories cram the privately owned Institute, which bristles with pistols, rifles, swords, bayonets, even clubs and boomerangs, and made me well up with nationalistic pride. Canadian Forces rifles, from the 18th century to those used today, line one side of a hall; across from them are enemy rifles, including the weapon of choice for the Métis in Louis Riel’s Northwest frontier rebellion: an “Indian-modified American Army model 1863 rifled musket.”
Another case contains the history of pistols, ranging from a 1775 Wilson flintlock pistol through a “Great War 1911 German Army P-08 Luger semi-automatic pistol” to a black Browning hi-power Mark 1 automatic pistol, labeled, “1944-present.”
Cpt. Scott-Brown showed us what used to be known as “the Ladies room.” Until 1974 the club required all women to enter through the rear, with only two exceptions: the Queen Mother and Queen Elizabeth II. “Their men’s club was their men’s club, and they didn’t like women around,” he recalled.
Pauline McGibbon, the first female lieutenant-governor of Ontario, changed that. “She wasn’t about to come in the back door,” our tour guide recalled.
The plan gives the club floors two through six in the new Tribute Communities tower, and club staff said that most members approved it.
Last fall city council overrode planning staff to approve the project. Staff had said the tower, with 210 one-bedroom and 105 bachelor units, five times the size permitted by the zoning and with just nine parking spaces, “is not considered appropriate.”
Some members had other objections: Brian Lawrie, a member, worries for the future of the collection. On Friday Lt.-Col. (ret’d) Jeffrey Dorfman, chairman of the building committee here, promised that, “It’s being all packed up and crated and going off to Fine Art Storage. The library and museum will be brought back two years later.”
Today the two British field artillery 9-pounder canons that flanked the entrance are already gone into storage. They will return when the new building opens.
In the meantime the members will meet at the Albany Club, Church and King streets; their bartender, Mike Leavy, is moving there too.
Capt. Scot-Brown remains unconvinced of the wisdom of the move: “I’m a crusty old sucker. I was brought up in a generation where you didn’t sell the family farm,” he says. But then he reached for a more optimistic metaphor: “It’s almost like a mother watching her child go off to kindergarten. It’s emotional.”

Rewriting history.

2010-10-02T23:45:00.001-07:00

Revisionism.
The most critical issue connected with historical writing in general, and historical novels in particular, is the problem of revisionism. Revisionism is a deadly and contagious condition which afflicts some researchers – and more than a few novelists. Its chief characteristic is the urge to "reveal" something extraordinary to the public, which will cause readers to completely change their opinion about how and why the event being described occurred.

Revisionism is not to be confused with valid new research which fills broadens our knowledge and understanding of historical incidents. This is what legitimate historical research is all about, though the distinction between the two can sometimes by subtle. Revisionism, however, can be clearly identified because its theory is always astoundingly new and sensational and turns an accepted historical happening upside down.

Have you ever noticed that nowadays nothing of consequence happened the way it was originally explained? Napoleon Bonaparte died of cancer, yet now two centuries later, it is widely accepted that he was poisoned by his British guards. Millions of credulous folk firmly believe Princess Diana was not simply killed in an automobile accident caused by her drunk driver, she was "murdered by the British Secret Service". Lone assassin” Lee Harvey Oswald did not kill JFK” -- the dastardly CIA did it. Amelia Earhart did not crash her plane into the Pacific and die; “she came down on a desert island and was shot as a spy by the Japanese.” James Earl Ray did not kill Martin Luther King; he was the patsy for some huge conservative conspiracy. These are just a few typical examples of fashionable (and comical) revisionism.

Although most of these examples are from the 20th Century, wise men throughout the ages have been well aware of this tendency by some to disbelieve the obvious. Why is this belief in "hidden truth" so pervasive? For the public, there are many reasons: an under-lying distrust of anything said by authorities; a need to believe that bad things just could not happen to people in a simple or random manner; and finally, there may be the delight caused by gossip or sensationalism.

For historians, it is even more complicated. As human beings, they are subject to the other motives, but additionally, the very validity of their field of study rests on their ability to revise. There is a fundamental presumption within the discipline that what is known to have happened did not happen in the generally accepted manner or for the generally accepted reasons. Furthermore, their professional reputations and individual egos are based on their revisions. Any historian who investigates the French Revolution and discovers that it simply happened exactly as described in history books is professionally dead. This drive to radically alter the accepted truth is not the only reason many historians change history; they also change it for cultural or national self-interests, or the simple urge for political correctness.

WWII MASS GRAVE REBURIAL IN POLAND

2009-08-16T18:19:00.004-07:00

Mass Polish reburial of war dead.
By Adam Easton, BBC.

The remains of more than 2,000 people discovered in Poland's largest mass grave from World War II have been reburied in a military cemetery.

Polish and German officials presided over the ceremony at a cemetery for German soldiers in north-west Poland, near the border between the countries.

The victims are believed to be German civilians who died in the last months of the conflict, in early 1945.

The mass grave was discovered in the Polish city of Malbork last October.

Because no-one was prepared to pay for expensive DNA testing, the historians' best guess is that the victims were German civilians caught up in the Red Army's assault on the city.

At the time Malbork was Marienberg, a German city.

The first skeletons were unearthed by workmen digging the foundations of a new hotel near the city's medieval castle.

In the end, more than 2,000 skeletons were discovered, two-thirds of them belonging to women and children.

There were no accompanying documents, clothing or personal items except for one pair of child's spectacles.

Issues over the war have often divided Germany and Poland in the past, but not in this case.

Neither side voiced recriminations and they worked together to finally give the victims a dignified burial.

2009-08-14T16:49:00.002-07:00

Military historical novel

KRUGER'S GOLD

South Africans in particular could enjoy KRUGER'S GOLD, my adventure novel set during the 2nd. Anglo-Boer War. See:http://tinyurl.com/6cwl3a

A FURTHER LOOK AT THE EPIC BATTLE OF VIMY RIDGE

2009-08-09T13:06:00.005-07:00

VIMY RIDGE: A Canadian Reassessment, Edited by Geoffrey Hayes, Andrew Iarocci, & Mike Bechtold, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Waterloo, 353 pages, photographs, maps, bibliography, index.

The three military historians who compiled this study are acknowledged experts on Canadian participation in World War One, particularly well-equipped to select these commentaries on one of our country’s most epic battles. The result is a compendium of twenty cogently written opinions and reports about the final bloody struggle for possession of Vimy Ridge, now considered not only an important military victory but also a defining moment for Canadian nationhood.
They tell how (unusually for those days) the Canadian troops at all levels of rank were given detailed briefings on the planned strategy before the attack was launched, which enabled even private soldiers to surge forward confidently to fight a “corporal’s battle,” often independent of direction by officers.
The book puts the struggle in context; the hill’s strategic significance, the seldom-mentioned British participation, and the German point-of-view. It also provides insights about the personalities and military styles of various senior officers – including General Julian Byng, Canadian Corps commander, and Major. Gen Arthur Currie, who insisted on meticulous preparations before the attack by his First Canadian Division.

Excellent photographs movingly show Canadian warriors of all ranks who fought so valiantly that day, and good clear maps help readers follow various tactical moves during the battle. This retrospective provides a thorough explanation of exactly why those monumental concrete towers now stand atop Vimy Ridge.
-- Sidney Allinson

NEW BOOK ABOUT THE SECOND WORLD WAR.

2009-08-08T15:16:00.001-07:00

Military history

THE STORM OF WAR. (Blackwell, UK)

‘The second world war lasted for 2,174 days, cost $1.5 trillion and claimed the lives of over 50 million people. That represents 23,000 lives lost every day, or more than six people killed every minute, for six long years.’ This neat summary is characteristic of the way Andrew Roberts uses statistics to bring home to the reader the enormity, the waste and the horror of that terrible conflict. The book is long, but it is tightly written, every page packed with terse comment, well-organised facts and, often, telling details.

It has a thesis: Hitler lost the war essentially because he was a Nazi, and allowed his race theories and ideological cruelty to get in the way of rational decision-taking. It is not true, Roberts says, that German atrocities began only in the closing stages of the war. On 27 May 1940, 97 British prisoners of war of the Royal Norfolks were massacred in cold blood by the SS, and the following day 90 POWs of the Warwickshire were slaughtered by grenades and rifles, the killers being from the Adolf Hitler Regiment. At the same time Hitler was allowing his political views to prevent the annihilation of the British Expeditionary Force. We originally calculated that the Dunkirk operation could save at most 45,000 troops. Thanks largely to Hitler’s interference, between dawn on Sunday 26 May and 03.30 on Tuesday 4 June 1940, 338,226 Allied soldiers were rescued, the largest military evacuation in history.

At the beginning of 1941, Hitler was master of Europe. By the end of the war he was doomed. He and his ideology were entirely responsible for his two greatest mistakes: to invade Russia, and to declare war on America. In both cases he hugely underestimated the power of the states he voluntarily made his mortal enemies. Russia seemed an easy target. The Germans destroyed 1,200 Soviet war-planes on the ground during the first morning of their invasion. They killed 27 million Russians, and took 5.7 prisoners, 3.3 million of whom (58 per cent) died in captivity. But the Russians kept on coming, and soon their production of tanks outstripped Germany’s. In the two-month battle of Kursk in 1943, the biggest and largest tank battle in history, the Germans lost 500,000 men, 3,000 tanks, 1,000 guns, 5,000 motor vehicles and 1,400 aircraft. The Russian losses were 50 per cent heavier, but could be absorbed, and the Germans lost the battle.
-- Andrew Roberts.

History of The Royal Canadian Regiment

2009-08-08T15:02:00.000-07:00

Military history

Establishing A Legacy: The history of The Royal Canadian Regiment 1883-1953, by Bernd Horn.

This regimental unit history is particularly well done, likely because it was written by a distinguished army officer. Colonel Bern Horn clearly did Trojan work to distil a wealth of archives and reminiscences into a highly readable book.

He tells how The Royal Canadian Regiment started out as an infantry school corps to train the Militia. Soon it became a fully-formed army unit, and is now Canada's oldest permanent force infantry regiment. First, its soldiers took part in helping to suppress the Riel Rebellion, then provided the Yukon Field Force. A grimmer period followed, when the RCR went to South Africa with the Canadian contingent in the Anglo-Boer War, where "The Royals" acquitted themselves during the crucial battle of Paadeberg.

But it was the regiment's service in two world wars that tested the bravery and combat expertise of Canadian volunteer soldiers. The book gives a splendid account of RCR service in the 1914-1918 war, but provides most coverage of the RCR fighting in Italy during World War Two. There are harrowing descriptions of combat in both major conflicts, and the now almost forgotten Korean War.

Numerous atmospheric photographs are included, showing regimental activities in various campaigns across the years. One photo is especially poignant, showing two senior officers together just a couple of days before both were killed in action. Good maps are also included, which help the reader follow the battles described.

Sidney Allinson.

COMOX AUTHOR PENS SEA-GOING HISTORICAL ADVENTURE NOVEL.

2009-08-06T20:06:00.001-07:00

Military history

Successful Vancouver Island author Sean Thomas Russell has combined his twin passions for sailing and history to write a splendid naval historical novel, ‘Under Enemy Colors.’ Published by Putnam/Penguin in September, it is a rollicking good read that follows the adventures of Royal Navy Lt. Charles Hayden in 1797 during Britain’s war with Revolutionary France.

The book’s fact-based focus is quite a departure for the 55-year-old Russell, who has written nine previous books during the past 15 years, all in the genre of “fantasy fiction.” First published in the United States, they are also available in eight languages world-wide, with one version awarded France’s Imaginale Award for best fantasy novel in translation.

Asked why this latest creation is so different from his usual Tolkien-like tales, Russell says, “I guess I needed a break from what I had been doing before. Besides, I have a collection of over 500 books on sailing and history, which started me thinking about doing a straight historical novel for about five years before I tackled writing one.”

“I am a great admirer of John le Carré, who writes really a hybrid of a genre novel and a literary novel. So I wanted to emulate the way he writes genre novels that also have some literary merit. Also, I am absolutely enthralled by the language of the 18th Century, not just the speech of sailors but of everyday people as well back then. I really wanted to capture their rich, vibrant language, and long, lyrical sentences in a novel. The Oxford English Dictionary became my friend during the two years I was writing ‘Under Enemy Colors.’ Incidentally, my US publishers insisted on using the American spelling of ‘Color’ on the cover title, even though the entire text throughout uses my original British-style spelling.”

To compose a meticulously accurate account, Russell drew on his personal knowledge of sailboat racing and nautical lore, spent five weeks travelling in England and France familiarizing himself with details of various locations, and added more volumes to his already extensive reference library. The result is a salty tale of naval derring-do that also includes enough introspection about the morality of war, divided loyalties, and sympathy for the enemy, to appeal to readers as much interested in the clash of ideas as the crash of cannon.

Russell enthuses, “The story takes place soon after the revolutions in America and France, which brought about huge social changes everywhere. It was a fascinating watershed in human affairs, outcomes of the writings of egalitarian thinkers like Thomas Paine about the rights of man. I wanted to go back to look at that turbulent period, and shrink the concept of revolution itself down to the size of a single ship. It let me look at the characters, circumstances, and emotions of revolutionaries who typically incite a mutiny.

The novel’s protagonist, Lt. Hayden, has the leadership qualities worthy of a Master and Commander, but his promotion is held back by lack of political connections, and having a French mother which opens him to unfounded suspicion of divided loyalties. So instead he is posted to HMS Themis, under the orders of cowardly Capt. Josh Hart, whose arrogance and harsh discipline soon drives his crew to mutiny.

With all that tension aboard, the frigate is also soon in the thick of dangerous storms, coastal patrols, and bloody sea-battles. Along the way, Haydon confronts his dastardly captain and settles a crew of violent mutineers, slips ashore in France on a secret spying mission, plus becoming romantically smitten with a delightful young Englishwoman along the way.

Russell says, “It took a terrific amount of research, but writing it was a lot of fun.” He modestly does not mention that it was also a lot of hard work. Russell produces all his books by following a disciplined regimen of writing six or seven hours a day, five days a week. He is a relentless re-writer as well, revising entire drafts, ruthlessly going over and over what he has written to prune and improve wording until it says exactly what he intends. “I just have to get all the period details exactly right as well, and I take a lot of care to prune out any anachronisms that might have sneaked in.”

He has an ideal writing-place -- a book-lined study in the Comox home he shares with his wife and nine-year-old son, looking out at glorious seascape views and surrounding mountains. As an occasional break from pounding the keyboard, Russell loves to board his wooden sailboat and cruise the waters of south Vancouver Island. His first-hand experience with handling ropes, canvas, and tiller shines through particularly when he describes a hazardous escape in an open boat across the stormy English Channel.

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VON RICHTHOFEN DISPLAY IN LIBRARY OF THE ROYAL CANADIAN MILITARY INSTITUTE.

2009-08-05T15:16:00.011-07:00

The "Red Baron" display case in the Library of the Royal Canadian Military Institute, Toronto, holds artefacts from the downed Fokker Triplane in which famed German fighter-ace Rittmeister Manfred von Richtofen's met his death, on the morning of 21st April, 1918. They include the aircraft's seat, wingtip, and piece of fuselage fabric bearing the German Airforce cross. These central objects of the Wings Room are well known to students of military aviation history and members of the Institute. Visitors also take particular interest in the displayed Spandau machine-gun, typical armament aboard von Richthofen's Fokker and many German military aircraft during the First World War.
Canadian fighter-pilot Captain Roy Brown somehow obtained the seat shortly after von Richtofen's death, and donated the seat to the Institute in 1920, where it has remained ever since. The seat is of sheet aluminum and plywood, covered with a red ochre fabric: very light construction. The holes in the seat centre are not bullet holes (despite a persistent but inaccurate legend.) They are actually mounting-holes for rivets which joined the seat to the fuselage. The side holes were caused by the force of the mounting bolts being torn out by the impetus of the Triplane's crash.
Mr. Arthur Bishop, son of the famous Great War ace Air Marshal William "Billy" Bishop VC, donated the Fokker Triplane wingtip to the Museum in 1968. This joined the seat and fabric piece to create the exciting trinity in the display case. The fuselage fabric cross is believed to have also been donated by Captain Roy Brown at some unknown exact date. The fabric shows the German late-version Latin Cross of 1918, and an area of paint has been scraped away for the signatures of eleven members of 209 Squadron, including Roy Brown and "Wop" May.

The Institute has the responsibility of caring for these artefacts for the benefit of future generations, and this has been done. The Museum Committee arranged for professional restoration work on the wingtip and fabric piece. Conservator Moya Gillett removed a large glue stain on the wingtip, and reframed and stabilized the fabric, which was slowly flaking away. We are sure these artefacts will last for another 70 years. The RCMI will always be indebted to Captain Brown for his generosity in giving to the Institute these very important Great War artefacts.

Sad to say, the Royal Canadian Military Institute closed its 110-year-old doors on University Avenue, Toronto, in October, 2010, in preparation for its move to new premises expected to re-open in two years or so. At that time, all its unique collection of military memorabilia will be available for viewing once more.

D-DAY TO CARPIQUET

2009-08-05T14:32:00.000-07:00

Military history
D-DAY TO CARPIQUET: The North Shore Regiment and the liberation of Europe, Marc Milner, Goose Lane Editions, Fredericton, NB, 138 pages, photos, maps, index, bibliography. $16.95
The North Shore (New Brunswick) Regiment is little known today; seldom mentioned even in official accounts of Canadians in the Second World War. Yet their heroic front-line achievements during the early days of the liberation of Normandy deserve far more recognition. Now at last, proper homage is paid to them in this authoritatively written study by well-known military historian Marc Milner.
The NFR was an unassuming outfit, composed of sturdy farmers, fishermen, lumbermen, and millhands, who made ideal infantry soldiers. After three years of training in Britain, they landed on Juno Beach on D-Day, June 6, 1944, and fought their way inland. Milner includes many personal accounts of combat experiences, which vividly convey their bravery in face of carnage.
Clear maps help the reader to follow description of various actions during this short but costly campaign. Over 200 NSR men were killed or wounded during the bloody battle for the village of Carpiquet that lasted just six days, and became known ever after as the “regiment’s graveyard.”
The book includes numerous photographs of members of the regiment, often identified by personal names. Another photographic feature is the inclusion of printed frames from film footage of the regiment’s landing on D-Day, printed on successive pages that can be “played” in motion by fanning them from front to back.
-- Sidney Allinson.

2009-08-04T22:28:00.010-07:00

"THE BANTAMS" TELLS THE LITTLE KNOWN SAGA OF FIVE-FOOT WARRIORS

IN WORLD WAR ONE.

"THE BANTAMS: The Untold Story Of World War One" is a newly revised military history by Canadian historian, Sidney Allinson, published in July, 2009, by Pen & Sword Books, UK.

"The Bantams" recounts the factual but well-nigh incredible story of how the British and Canadian Army recruited over 50,000 men who were below the regulation minimum height of 5ft. 3ins. to serve as front-line soldiers. Short but sturdy volunteers stepped forward all over Britain, until there were Bantam battalions in a score of famed regiments, plus two Bantam units raised in Canada.
Sidney Allinson's researches took him off on a three-year quest for information, journeying across Canada, the U.S., Britain, and the old Western Front battlefields of France and Belgium, and interviewed over 300 survivors of the Bantams, to obtain the many first-hand accounts of battle told in his book. The result is a fascinating picture of social conditions of the 1914-1918 era, army recruiting methods, and unblinking personal descriptions of brutal trench warfare.
He graphically describes how the patriotic fervour in Britain at the time enabled recruitment of Bantam-sized volunteers to join the demand for a huge citizen army to feed a conflict of murderous attrition. English and Scottish Bantams fought along the Somme front, while Welsh Bantams helped win the Battle of Bourlon despite hideously large casualties that virtually annihilated them.
Originally published some years ago, this revised version of THE BANTAMS reveals disturbing new information about battlefield executions by firing-squads that was only recently released from British official records long held secret from the public. It adds even more poignancy to the story of how thousands of patriots not much taller than a rifle themselves flocked to the colours.
Sidney Allinson was born in England, served overseas with the Royal Air Force, emigrated to Canada, and became an advertising executive, film producer, and communications consultant. He is author of six books, a past-Director of the Royal Canadian Military Institute, and now lives in Victoria, British Columbia. Allinson is Chairman of the Pacific Coast Branch of the Western Front Association, and President of the Sir Winston Churchill Society of Vancouver Island.
For more details about the Bantams," click here: http://offto.net/d8wpzx/

ALLINSON CONNECTION WITH FAMED WWI POEM, "IN FLANDERS FIELDS."

2009-08-04T22:09:00.007-07:00

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row

That mark our place; and in the sky

The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

Loved and were loved, and now we lie

In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high.

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields.

-- Maj. John McCrea.

Maj. John McCrae, Canadian Army Medical Corp.,

wrote famed war poem "In Flanders Fields" in 1915.

My own late father, Private Thomas W. Allinson, served in the First World War, as a private soldier with The Green Howards, a famous infantry regiment of the British Army. To my eternal regret, I seldom took the opportunity to break through his modest silence about the horrors he faced in the trenches and learn his battlefield experiences. However, I did remember one casual mention by him that our family had a connection with the author of the most famous war poem of all time: “In Flanders Fields.” It did not dawn on me as significant until many years later, when I finally set about learning the background details.
The incident is described in "Welcome to Flanders Fields - The Great Canadian Battle of the Great War: Ypres, 1915", by Daniel G. Dancocks. It recounts:
"On May 3, Maj. McCrae had spent 17 weary days performing surgery on hundreds of wounded soldiers, and took a brief respite on the back of an ambulance near his dressing station beside the Canal de l'Yser. McCrae vented his anguish by composing a poem. In the nearby cemetery, McCrae could see the wild poppies that sprang up in the ditches there, and he spent twenty minutes of precious rest time scribbling fifteen lines of verse in a notebook."
"A young soldier watched him write it. Cyril Allinson, a twenty-two year old sergeant-major, was delivering mail that day when he spotted McCrae. The major looked up as Allinson approached, then went on writing while the sergeant-major stood there quietly. 'His face was very tired but calm as he wrote,' Allinson recalled. 'He looked around from time to time, his eyes straying to Lt. Helmer's grave.' When McCrae finished five minutes later, he took his mail from Allinson and, without saying a word, handed his pad to the young NCO."
"Sgt. Maj. Allinson was moved by what he read, saying later, 'The poem was an exact description of the scene in front of us both. He used the word 'blow' in that line because the poppies actually were being blown that morning by a gentle east wind. It never occurred to me at that time that it would ever be published. It seemed to me just an exact description of the scene.'"
I now feel a quiet pride that an Allinson relative -- Canadian cousin of my father -- was the first person to read the immortal words of "In Flanders Field" moments after it was penned by Major John McCrae.
-- Sidney Allinson.

The British Columbia Bantams

2008-07-08T16:45:00.006-07:00

The B.C. Bantams

by Sidney Allinson.

The little men in khaki seemed impossibly short to be Canadian soldiers. Barely over five feet in height, they marched proudly, four abreast, to tunes of their brass band, smiling at the cheering crowds that lined Humboldt Street, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, that bright morning of February 10, 1917.

These tiny soldiers of the 143rd Overseas Battalion (B.C. Bantams), were being given a civic send-off by fellow townspeople with mixed emotions. After three years of what was known as the Great War, the notably patriotic city of Victoria had previously bade 'adieu' to seven other army units. -- including splendid soldiers of the Canadian Scottish Regiment, strapping Naval reservists, and picked men of the Victoria Rifles. But never had they expressed such a fond farewell or sent off a more improbable unit than these almost Lilliputian warriors.

Boots polished to a black sheen, buttons bright and puttees tight, soft peaked caps square on heads, bearing heavy back-packs, the men were like miniature Guardsmen in their smart military turnout, singing lustily:.

"Good-bye-ee,

Don't cry-ee,

Wipe that tear from your eye,

Good-bye-eeee..."

The British Columbia Bantams were volunteers all, and keen to be getting a chance to fight at last. Almost half of them would never see Canada again.

More thoughtful observers that morning might have wondered about the departing soldiers for other reasons than their novelty. Here were perhaps living symbols of the extreme scarcity of British Empire manpower reserves, that now such undersized recruits were needed to make up for the carnage of trench warfare on the bloody Western Front.

Slaughtered, ignored, their survivors even dismissed as failures, the Bantams formed one of the most unusual and little-known chapters in the annals of military history. Theirs is a neglected story, which involved over 50,000 British and Canadian soldiers who never quite made it into the war books. They volunteered to serve when they could have stayed safely at home, suffered physical hardship often beyond their capacities, and sometimes endured with good humor the ridicule of less-courageous men, all for the privilege of fighting for their country in some of the fiercest battles of the First World War. Among them were almost a 1,000 men who served in a little-known unit dubbed proudly, "The B.C. Bantams".

It was modelled on 20 other Bantam battalions raised by the British Army, to mobilize the many volunteers who were below the regulation minimum height. Revised medical standards to allow for bantam-size troops specified acceptable heights between 4ft.l0ins, and 5ft.3ins. "with a proportionately good chest expansion."

Mobilization was authorized for the 143rd Overseas Battalion (B.C. Bantams) and recruiting begin in Victoria on February 20, 1916. Driving force behind this unique formation was Lieutenant Colonel A. Bruce Powley, a front-line veteran, who had been wounded twice in battle before being invalided home to Victoria. Eager to get back into the fray, he managed to gain command of the 143rd, and engaged a talented group of local officers to assist with recruiting.

There was steady stream of volunteers towards the hoped-for total of 1,000 men, but LCol. Powley soon found it difficult to find accouunodation for the thousand men he hoped to sign up. The situation was solved by a grant of $9,000 by the city of Victoria, to secure building materials for a new camp at Beacon Hill Park parade-ground. The recruits themselves built wooden structures for sleeping barracks, cook-house, and headquarters, far more comfortable than the usual canvas tents.

At this stage of the war, Canada had 200,000 men under arms, all volunteers. The nation had been quick to supply fighting-men after the outbreak of war, and many Victorians were among the First Contingent that sailed in October, 1914. By early 1916, Canada had sent three divisions to the Western Front, forming the Canadian Corps. They had fought in many major battles, always in the thick of things, and suffered heavy casualties. (The 1914-1918 war cost Canada a total of 65,000 war dead.)

Sparsely-settled British Columbia had responded wholeheartedly early in the war. Intensely loyal, with a high proportion of British immigrant stock quick to volunteer, BC had virtually shot its bolt by early 1916 in its capacity to supply manpower.

With recruits at a premium, the coal-mining communities up-Island promised the likeliest source of strongly-built bantam-sized men. One of them was Benjamin Barnes, a redheaded Cornishman who volunteered from his well-paid job as fire-boss of Coal Creek Mine. Another was Peter Campbell, an office worker from Sidney, who joined "B" Company in camp just down the road from his home. Allan Bell came over from Vancouver on the same ferry that brought Humbert Campbell back from his job on an Alberta ranch.

"It seemed the greatest adventure in the world", said Bell. "The sun shone on the water and the mountains stood out against the sky as we sailed across that day, and I felt my chest swell as if we were all setting out on a great crusade. My comrades proved to be such happy chaps, forever telling jokes, with never a cross word, and I never felt so happy in all my eighteen years."

Despite such enthusiastic recruits, LCol. Powley could not enlist enough suitable men at the pace needed. He regretfully reported to Ottawa on Oct. 15, 1916. "We were finally forced to take in some larger men as well, with a view to exchanging them later for smaller men from other units. But exchanges are not easy, and the result is I have a battalion of over half bantam, and the balance of larger men, though the average height is still below 5ft. 4ins."

When the unit returned from a summer of hard training at Sidney Camp, its members were so outspokenly impatient to be sent to France, they were known as "The Fire-eaters". Their attitude was all the more remarkable, considering the high proportion of family men in the ranks. Oldest of whom was Joseph Daniel, a 43-year-old Sidney resident who managed to wangle his way to combat in France.

Among those chafing to get overseas, was Ben Barnes, who as an accomplished cornet-player, found himself in the battalion band. In January, 1917, he wrote to his brother in immaculate penmanship from the Dominion Hotel. "We are all classed as soldiers, and though bandsmen do not put in as much time now with a rifle, we are all well prepared for the firing-line. Each of us in the band has learned machine-gun drill, signalling, first-aid, and stretcher-bearing."

He wrote again, soon after, excited by news of embarkation, but depressed by feelings of foreboding. "I get a little down-hearted when I dwell too much on my home, but shake it off as best I can, and will be content when I get a little more excitement at the front. If I get a bullet to put me to sleep, I will only be among my comrades, so I should not worry."

With men so keen, there was some disappointment when Ottawa announced the 143rd would be sent to France as a Railway Construction battalion, instead of as infantry. However, they were mollified by learning that trench railway duty was as vital as it was dangerous, a prime target of German artillery.

News of their departure brought out a tremendous wave of affection from Victoria residents, who cheered the little men all along their march from Beacon Hill, past flag-draped balconies of St. Joseph's Hospital where patients and nurses gave rousing cheers. Banners proclaiming "Good Luck - God Speed" hung from buildings at the mouth of Courtney Street, and people leaned through open windows, adding their applause to those packing the sidewalks.

By the time the soldiers reached the wharf on Bellville Street, they had to break ranks and march in single file through the press of dense crowds. It gave opportunity for many emotional scenes; last-minute kisses from families, friends and sweethearts, Quickly, the 32 officers and 667 other ranks boarded two CPR ferries, ‘Princess Victoria’ and ‘Princess Mary.’ where many climbed the rigging for better views as the vessels pulled away. Cheers, cries, and shouted well-wishes mingled with a cacophony of horn-blowing from other ships in the harbor, while the Bantams' band played a last refrain of "Old Lang Syne" as they sailed off to war.

Three weeks later, the British Columbians were in England, at the Canadian Holding Depot, Shorncliff. "We felt like cattle, the way they treated us there," said Allan Bell. The Canadian Corps needed more men in France in a hurry, and made no secret that we were viewed as cannon-fodder. One could not help but notice that while ordinary soldiers were getting this treatment, there were over five hundred lieutenants lounging around camp, many of whom had stayed there in safety since the previous summer."

"But that was the least of our irritations, because it didn't take long to figure out that the BC Bantams as a unit were about to be broken up forthwith!"

Peter Campbell recalled how it was for the crestfallen Victoria battalion. "After a brief landing-leave in London, we were called before a medical board at Shorncliff. The 143rd was broken up so suddenly that Local. Powley and his officers were not even given time to say farewell to us."

About a third of the unit became railway troops, while the rest were sent to the trenches as infantry after all. Ben Barnes was among a draft of 667 men from the B.C. Bantams who went to the 24th Canadian Reserve Battalion in France on May 11, 1917. They joined the new formations thrown immediately into the hideous meat-grinder known as the Battle of Lens.

This affair was yet another brain-wave of Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, British commander in chief. He decided to increase pressure on the Flanders front, and as part of some grand strategy, flung the Canadian Corps against Lens as the first objective.

The Canadians surveyed the black slag-heaps, the shellchurned graveyard of so many troops before them, and were not inspired. "If we have to fight there at all", said General Sir Arthur Currie, the one-time Victoria school-teacher who was now corps commander, "Let us fight for something worth having.". Why not try to sidestep Lens, he asked, and burst out into open mobile warfare? But Haig was adamant. Lens was to be taken by direct assault.

On August 15th, the Canadians took Hill 70; little more than a low mound, really, but riddled with concrete pillboxes, machine-gun nests, and concealed artillery. In a single morning, they captured the hill which had repulsed the British Guards Division in 1915, and pushed on through smoke and poison gas and shrapnel into the mining hamlets on the outskirts of lens itself. The ruined suburbs -- St. Emilie, St. Pierre, Calonne -- were made up of clumps of miners' cottages and pithead workings, and had been fortified in an interlocking maze of strong German defences over the past two years.

All Lens was like that; street after street of rubbled buildings hiding blockhouses and m.g. posts inter-connected by miles of passage-ways knocked through cellar walls. Alex Batchelor recalled an officer telling him, "Fix your bayonet, soldier. We have to winkle the Huns out."

Batchelor and other Bantams found their small size to be an advantage during the next ten endless days and nights, though it singled them out them for very hazardous duty. "We could pop through those tunnels as easy as could be. We left our packs off, stripped down to undershirts and went crawling around with a bagful of bombs and a revolver. Find a Heiniehole, bung a grenade through, then nip in after it before the dust settled." Batchelor explained, still matter-of-fact in his old age. "After a while, I could tell if no bomb was needed in the next cellar. My nose would tell me when the Heinies in there had been dead for a long time."

Allan Bell fought there, too, attaching himself to some Nova Scotian machine-gunners to keep them supplied with ammunition. He would make repeated trips back through the hellish streets, casually employing his Lee-Enfield to snipe stray Prussians who tried to stop him. On one such journey, he stopped to aid the wounded Humbert Campbell, the clergyman's son he'd first met on a British Columbia ferry.

Street by street, the 4th Prussian Guards were forced back, dying hard for every cellar and crossroad. On the third day, reinforcements came in: two more Guards Divisions, the 11th Reserve, and the Saxon Brigade, until there were 46 German battalions battling to keep the Canadians from capturing the battered compost-heap that used to be the town of Lens.

Ben Barnes told a little of this to the folks at home. "Had a busy time of it," he pencilled in flawless copperplate on YMCA stationery. "But we all went forward and accomplished our objective. It was mostly street fighting, and we worked hard for protection from gunfire. When we got settled in our new ground, Fritz did not give us much rest as he had our range down pretty fair."

The indomitable attitude of Barnes and his comrades comes out in his final paragraph. "The Bantams certainly made a name for themselves this time. We are all of British stock here and fight with British spirit, and the Canadian Bantams are not going back without a name worthy of being set down in history for future generations to take notice."

He was never to know the eventual irony of those words he wrote on the battlefield. There have been so many other cataclysms throughout this century, that there is scant public memory now of distant heroism. Yet the belief sustained this modest soldier, whose letters were filled with loving memories for nephews and nieces he had met for only a few precious days. Though he had already seen so many friends cut down six thousand miles from homes they left in beautiful British Columbia, he retained his generation's simple faith in posterity's appreciation. It was a faith that sustained so many men through the misery of the First World War..

Then the Canadians went north to Flanders again, summoned to help break the deadlock on a vile, mad place called Passchendaele. This dread region in the Ypres Salient had already become the graveyard of hundreds of thousands of dead, and for four months previously British, Australian, and New Zealand regiments had lost entire battalions in a matter of days. On October 26, 1917, it became the Canadians turn, and they went forward through torrential rain mingled with the sleet of lead and steel from German guns. After a week of some of the war's most desperate fighting, four Canadian divisions managed to capture the previouslyimpregnable Passchendaele at last, on November 6, 1917.

The day after the battle ended, Sir Launcelot Kiggel, Haig's chief of staff, arrived to take his first look at the battlefield. When his Daimler limousine began to lurch through the mud, the general stared out unbelievingly at the endless quagmire, then burst into tears. "My God!", he moaned. "Did we send men to fight in this ?"

One of the men who had, was Benjamin Barnes. On October 29, during a lull, he wrote home in despair. "Had a very busy time of it for eight straight days and nights. I am sorry to say my pal Alf Patterson got napooed [killed] yesterday. I had many narrow escapes myself. One shell burst outside the dug-out, buried three of us. One blinded, one wounded, and all I got was shock. When I heard about A1f, it brought tears to my eyes, and I had the painful duty of writing to his aunt in Cumberland. Kindly excuse scribble, as I am quite upset. Au-re-voir."

As there was no conscription in Canada, fresh volunteer replacements were getting scarcer every month for the embattled Canadian Army. Veteran troops were kept in the line until death, or a lucky "Blighty" wound released them to hospital. Barnes managed to get letters home past the indulgent censorship of his officers. "Not many of the originals left now," he wrote on January 22, 1918. "If we did not get our rum ration, we would be laid up more often, as we are subject to wet feet and chills through our system. Disappointed at no leave, anxiously awaiting a square deal, and we cannot see why we have not had it yet."

There were only a few more letters from Barnes that year, in which he made no further mention of warfare, other than his address, "In the trenches." He sent a stream of suggestions about how to make his nieces and nephew happy, and often sent them what money he could afford.

His last letter was devoted to them. "Whenever you feel like making up a parcel for me, fix things fine, then let the children have a party of their own instead, to enjoy the contents ... Not much time to write. Continually on the alert. We Bantams are in a battle platoon, so we are not here as ornaments."

A week later, he heard his C.O. read out a commendation for his gallantry in rescuing a wounded comrade. The same day, August 11, 1918, Ben Barnes' luck finally ran out. He was killed in an obscure skirmish near Amiens -- one of the last of the B.C. Bantams to die in the Great War.

-end

Victoria writer Sidney Allinson is author of "The Bantams: the untold story of World War One", Pen & Sword Books, UK, 2009.

THE BANTAMS march again!

2008-06-10T21:56:00.008-07:00

NEW REVISED EDITION OF MY MILITARY HISTORY BOOK, "THE BANTAMS", TO BE PUBLISHED BY PEN & SWORD BOOKS IN BRITAIN IN 2009.

"The untold story of World War One" is the sub-title of "The Bantams", a recently revised military history book by Canadian author, Sidney Allinson.
"The Bantams" provides fascinating additional details to the factual but nigh incredible story of how the British and Canadian armies recruited over 50,000 tiny men who volunteered to serve as front-line soldiers. Such Bantam battalions eventually numbered over twenty units in Britain, plus two battalions from Canada. The movement spread all over Britain, particularly the coal mining regions of Wales and Northern England, then to Canada, particularly among British immigrants there.
Originally published by Howard Baker Press, London, in 1981, this revised 2008 version includes new material, and reveals disturbing new information about battlefield executions by firing squads that was only recently released from British official records long held secret from the public. It adds even more poignancy to the story of how thousands of patriotic ‘bantams’ -- not much taller than a rifle themselves -- well below the army’s 5ft. 3ins. minimum regulation height, flocked to the colours.
Canadian military historian Sidney Allinson's researches took him off on a three-year quest for information, journeying across Britain, Canada, the U.S., and the old battlefields of Flanders. He contacted over 300 survivors of the Bantams, to gather the many first-hand accounts of battle told in his book.
It also recreates the social conditions in Britain and Canada during the First World War. Patriotic fervour enabled many famed British regiments to recruit eager volunteers for bantam-designated battalions. English and Scottish Bantams fought along the Somme front, while Welsh Bantams helped win the Battle of Bourlon despite hideously large casualties. In Canada, the 216th Bantam (Toronto) Battalion was recruited within a few weeks, and the 143rd B.C. Bantams was quickly raised on Vancouver Island. Soldiers from both these now-forgotten Canadian units served at Vimy Ridge and in other later battles.
"The Bantams" has been recognized as an important new volume of original military research into the Great War of 1914-1918. Allinson served overseas in the Royal Air Force, and is a past director of the Royal Canadian Military Institute, Toronto. He now lives in Victoria, British Columbia, where he is Chairman of the Pacific Coast Branch of the Western Front Association. Contact him at: allsid@shaw.ca

For a free sample chapter, go here:
https://www2.xlibris.com/bookstore/bookdisplay.asp?bookid=22708

"The Onion Files."

2008-05-26T19:40:00.001-07:00

[Victoria Times Colonist, May 25, 2008.]

Ex-Intelligence Chief Val Pattee Now

A Successful Author of Spy Novels.

By Sidney Allinson.

Val Pattee is fit-looking and courteous, with a wry humour and shrewd observations about the current perilous state of international affairs – a retired military general perfectly suited to his new career as writer of espionage novels. Still tanned from spending three months in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, with his artist wife Joan, he says, “Our annual winter vacation works very well for us both creatively; Joan busy at her easel, painting local scenes, and me at the keyboard almost non-stop, writing a sequel to “The Onion Files.”

That title of his first book, which came out last fall, refers to a multi-layered plot of international intrigue that reflects a good deal of his own first-hand involvement with the grim world of espionage. Starting as a young Canadian Air Force jet-fighter pilot, Maj.-Gen. Pattee eventually became Chief of Intelligence & Security at headquarters of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization [NATO] in Mons, Belgium, during the Cold War with the Soviet Union.

He recalls, “Every morning, my desk would be flooded with new secret information from space satellites, signal intercepts, allied counter-intelligence services, and our espionage agents in potentially hostile countries. My job was to quickly assess all this detail and boil it down into a concise daily situation report for military and political leaders of NATO’s sixteen European member nations, including Canada, the United States, and Britain.”

Pattee also worked in Paris to help combat Action Direct terrorism, and in Germany when the Red Army Faction was creating havoc across Europe. On leaving the Canadian Forces, he moved to British Columbia to become Assistant Deputy Minister of Police Services, then the Director of BC Ambulance Services, and finally “retired” for good in Victoria five years ago.

All this front-line knowledge of dangerous international intrigue uniquely equips him to become a successful author of spy thrillers. He says, “Considering what I do these days, it’s almost funny that most of my professional life required me to compress masses of information into a very tight digest form for strategic briefings. Now, as a novelist, the situation is reversed, and I’m faced instead with the need to expand material to make entertaining novels. Usually I aim for about 96,000 words.” He did not just stumble onto that particular number, his study of the trade having found most publishers ideally prefer book-lengths to total just below 100,000 words.

Pattee obviously tackles writing novel-writing with great enjoyment. “I find the process of writing comes easy to me. I just capture related thoughts, character traits, and incidents, and flesh them out. My approach is not the usual first-draft, second-draft, and so on. I continually rewrite or rearrange the manuscript daily, as the story unfolds. That’s where my laptop word-processor is so marvellous. You can go back to revise a paragraph to suit a time-line, or move an entire chapter from here to there. The technology makes the physical act of writing so easy, I can’t imagine how authors did it in the old typewriter-and-paper days. I’ve got the second book pretty much all down already. I just have to refine it, add some details, and it should be ready for publication in a couple of months. Unlike a lot of techno-thrillers, I don’t add a lot of fluff; those clumps of extraneous details that can bore readers and don’t move the story along at all.”

There is no danger of that, judging by his first book. “The Onion Files” flings us into a fast-paced chillingly-possible scenario that never lets up. It is that rarity, a believable spy yarn, whose heroes and villains alike seem credible human beings, unlike the comic-strip characters who populate some thrillers. The lifelike opponents include a pair of intrepid agents from the Central (Defense) Intelligence Agency, abetted by a sympathetic Soviet spy, who battle evil master-mind Osama bin Laden and his fanatical cohorts across the world. They are portrayed in such an authentic atmosphere, that many so-called fictional incidents portrayed in it could have actually occurred. He confirms that by saying, “Many of the anecdotes in my book are the real stuff, encounters during my own experience, altered just enough for security’s sake.”

Not to give away the story, but his book focuses on countering a devilishly clever terrorist scheme to cause a catastrophic disaster aimed at killing millions of civilians across the United States. Drawing on his insider knowledge, Val Pattee expertly describes the technicalities of how to cause this mass atrocity so well, one hopes his novel does not fall into the wrong hands and give them another nasty idea to use against us. Moreover, “The Onion Files” could make a useful defensive primer for governmental security agencies on both sides of our border.

His strategic skills obviously helped make careful analysis of the publishing process and the modern author’s prospects for getting into print. “I find that the entire publishing trade is in a state of turmoil,” he says. “Large conventional publishing houses are overwhelmed by changes in public reading tastes, and by computer innovations that affect printing, marketing, and distribution. New print-on-demand technology that can instantly publish one or a thousand copies at push of a button is doing away with the need for bricks-and-mortar warehouses. Authors too are suffering, from the squeeze for shelf-space in bookstores, a huge increase in the number of people writing books, and most seriously by the difficulty of getting into print the old-fashioned way.”

“Prospects for most writers to get their work accepted are pretty limited today. Few if any publishing houses will accept manuscripts if they are not submitted by a literary agent. That goes to the near impossibility of getting an agent to take on new unknown authors. Time and again, agents sent back my own writing, saying, ’Good story, but you have to understand we get hundreds of unsolicited manuscripts every month, so we simply cannot handle most of them.’”

“Had I been writing twenty years ago, I might have had it much easier. This style of book was very popular then – and Clancy, Forsythe, McCarry, Ludlum, and company were very big sellers. But by the time I jumped in, I found myself way behind the power-curve in terms of readership, and that’s mainly a question of time. Societal change, too. Now, there’s what can be best described as general disinterest in espionage, military subjects, and so on. Notwithstanding people are aware of Afghanistan and Iraq, there simply are so many other diversions that people find it hard to be as interested in those conflicts the way they did back in the Sixties and Seventies when the threat of nuclear war was very real to everyone. So the market for my kind of book has shrunk somewhat.”

All of which is why Val Pattee decided to self-publish his book, and turned to Agio Publishing House, of Victoria to produce it. He seems very happy with the result. “Now here I am, an old Cold War warrior who even had to learn how to type, with a published-on-demand book in hard cover and paperback, plus a web site and a podcast. Even though the podcast doesn’t directly give me any return financially yet, the idea is to start some buzz on the Internet and spread worldwide awareness of my book’s availability. And that it’s done in spades, as my book is already the sixth most popular title on Podiobooks. Sales are definitely starting to look up, and better still, I am having a lot of fun writing -- which is the main thing after all!”

Victoria-based novelist Sidney Allinson

is a past-Director of the Royal Canadian

Military Institute.

Military history

VIMY RIDGE: A Canadian Reassessment.

2008-05-26T19:35:00.000-07:00

VIMY RIDGE: A Canadian Reassessment, Edited by Geoffrey Hayes, Andrew Iarocci, & Mike Bechtold, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Waterloo, 353 pages, photographs, maps, bibliography, index.

The three military historians who compiled this study are acknowledged experts on Canadian participation in World War One, particularly well-equipped to select these commentaries on one of our country’s most epic battles. The result is a compendium of twenty cogently written opinions and reports about the final bloody struggle for possession of Vimy Ridge, now considered not only an important military victory but also a defining moment for Canadian nationhood.

They tell how (unusually for those days) the Canadian troops at all levels of rank were given detailed briefings on the planned strategy before the attack was launched, which enabled even private soldiers to surge forward confidently to fight a “corporal’s battle,” often independent of direction by officers.

The book puts the struggle in context; the hill’s strategic significance, the seldom-mentioned British participation, and the German point-of-view. It also provides insights about the personalities and military styles of various senior officers – including General Julian Byng, Canadian Corps commander, and Major. Gen Arthur Currie, who insisted on meticulous preparations before the attack by his First Canadian Division.

Excellent photographs movingly show Canadian warriors of all ranks who fought so valiantly that day, and good clear maps help readers follow various tactical moves during the battle. This retrospective provides a thorough explanation of exactly why those monumental concrete towers now stand atop Vimy Ridge.

-- Sidney Allinson

Military history

"In Flanders Fields."

2008-05-26T18:21:00.004-07:00

My own late father, Private Thomas Allinson, served in the First World War as a soldier with The Green Howards, a famous regiment of the British Army. To my eternal regret, I seldom made enough of the opportunity to break through his modest silence about the horrors he faced in the trenches. However, one casual mention by him that our family had a connection with the author of the most famous war poem of all time: “In Flanders Fields.” did not dawn on me as significant until many years later, when I finally set about learning the details.

The incident is described in "Welcome to Flanders Fields - The Great Canadian Battle of the Great War: Ypres, 1915", by Daniel G. Dancocks. It recounts:

"On May 3, Maj. McCrae had spent 17 weary days performing surgery on hundreds of wounded soldiers, and took a brief respite on the back of an ambulance near his dressing station beside the Canal de l'Yser. McCrae vented his anguish by composing a poem. In the nearby cemetery, McCrae could see the wild poppies that sprang up in the ditches there, and he spent twenty minutes of precious rest time scribbling fifteen lines of verse in a notebook."

"A young soldier watched him write it. Cyril Allinson, a twenty-two year old sergeant-major, was delivering mail that day when he spotted McCrae. The major looked up as Allinson approached, then went on writing while the sergeant-major stood there quietly. 'His face was very tired but calm as he wrote,' Allinson recalled. 'He looked around from time to time, his eyes straying to Lt. Helmer's grave.' When McCrae finished five minutes later, he took his mail from Allinson and, without saying a word, handed his pad to the young NCO."

"Sgt. Maj. Allinson was moved by what he read, saying later, 'The poem was an exact description of the scene in front of us both. He used the word 'blow' in that line because the poppies actually were being blown that morning by a gentle east wind. It never occurred to me at that time that it would ever be published. It seemed to me just an exact description of the scene.'"

I now feel a quiet pride that an Allinson relative -- Canadian cousin of my father -- was the first person to read the immortal words of "In Flanders Field" moments after it was penned by Major John McCrae.

Sidney Allinson.

WHAT REALLY HAPPENED WHEN BREAKER MORANT WAS SHOT BY FIRING-SQUAD

2008-05-26T17:59:00.003-07:00

"Breaker Morant" is one of the best motion pictures set during the Anglo-Boer War ever filmed. However, it took a lot of liberties with the actual historical events concerning the execution of Lt. Harry "Breaker" Morant. It did not mention that Morant was not Australian -- being in fact an Englishman -- or that on the night before his execution he met with the Reverend Canon Scott and signed a note in which he confessed his guilt of shooting Boer prisoners -- contrary to the movie's premise that he was an innocent scapegoat. One particular dramatic scene in the film depicts Morant shouting defiantly at the firing-squad: "Shoot straight, you bastards!" In reality, he said nothing of the kind. Here is an eye-witness account of his real last words and the calm manner of his dying, published soon afterwards in an Australian newspaper.

THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD - 3 April 1902

LETTER FROM A PRETORIA PRISON WARDER: AN ACCOUNT OF THE EXECUTION of LT. MORANT.

Mr. G. Aldridge, who was a member of the Second South Australian Contingent, has received a sad letter from Mr. J. H. Morrow, warder of the Pretoria Gaol, with reference to the shooting of Lieutenants Morant and Handcock. Aldridge was a friend of Morant's. The letter was dated March 1, 1902, and is as follows :-

"Dear George, I write these few lines to you on behalf of Lieutenant H. H. Morant, who was shot here on February 27, two days ago, by order of court-martial. His last word was that I should write and tell you that there were four officers- one South Australian, one Victorian, one New South Welshman, and one New Zealander, all Australians - concerned. The South Australian and the New South Welshman were shot, and the others were transported. It is quite a mystery here regarding the deed. All I know is that they shot 38 Boers, and there are rumours circulating that these Boers surrendered to them. Morant told me that he was guilty of shooting the Boers because they shot his captain.

I was the warder who was in charge of the officers the last week they had on earth, and they faced their doom as brave as men could do. Everyone said it was a pity to shoot two such brave men. Morant came out here with the South Australian Mounted Rifles with which you and I enlisted. Morant got a commission with the Bushveldt Carbineers, and I went on the railway duty here, and I was only transferred to this prison about six weeks ago. I was not here when they came here. They had been in prison at Pietersburg for four months, and then they were transferred to Pretoria, where sentence was passed upon them.

They were shot next morning at 6 o'clock, and were buried at 5 o'clock in the evening. There were a large number of Australians at the funeral; no less than 30 of them were Australian officers. I felt it very much. The only reply given by the two men when asked if they were ready was, 'Yes, where is your shooting party?' and the men marched out hand in hand.

The firing party went to blindfold the men, but Morant said, ‘Take this thing off,’ and pulled the handkerchief off. As the two sat in the chair awaiting death Morant remarked, ‘Be sure and make a good job of it.’ Morant folded his arms across his chest and looked them straight in the face. The firing-party fired, and Morant got all in the left side, and died at once. With his arms folded and his eyes open, you would have thought he was alive."

Military history

JEREMY KANE: a Canadian historical novel of the 1837 Mackenzie Rebellion.

2007-08-13T21:36:00.000-07:00

JEREMY KANE: a Canadian historical novel of the 1837 Mackenzie Rebellion and its brutal aftermath in the penal colonies of Australia.

This is a BIG book. Big in its geographical scope and its extraordinary capacity to bring alive the Canada and Australia of the 1830s, and the author's ability to spin his compelling story through the words and deeds and thoughts of his main character. Yes, Kane is the hero, yet so completely is he submerged in the actual events that overtake him that we accept the man as every bit as real as the true life governors, colonels, rebel leaders and jailors with whom he mingles.

This is the art of historical fiction, and Sidney Allinson has it in spades. Without once distorting or overstating the often terrifying events and conditions that confront Kane and his fellows, the author breathes life into a fascinating period of history about which all too little is understood. We meet Jeremy Kane during the heady days that led up to the Mackenzie Rebellion in colonial Upper Canada - today's Ontario. Reformist and populist, the rebellion was led by the crabby old Scot whose name commemorates it.

The trusting and rather unworldly young Kane supports Mackenzie as an act of patriotism. Canada is being misgoverned by the 'Family Compact' of local shysters, and the lackadaisical British do nothing about it. The insurrection comes and goes, the rebels are scattered, captured, or killed, and Kane is saved from the gallows only to be deported with one hundred others to a penal colony on Tasmania, off the coast of Australia.It is hard to credit that conditions such as Kane encounters in this book existed only 160 years ago: the plague-ridden convict ships, sadistic torture camps approved by the authorities, a veritable Gulag flying the Union Flag.

This is not light reading, but you'll keep the pages turning, believe me. Still there is hope. Hope that transcends rational calculation and imbues the convicts with the will to survive. This can take one form only: escape. And when the terrors of the sea have been vanquished, there are the horrors of cannibalism in a land so vast and forbidding that the chances of survival shrink daily until, after all manner of adventures, Jeremy Kane, alone, proves that hope reinforced by straight thinking and determination pays off.

For this reader, it was the story with its myriad characters, their encounters with danger, and the impact of events on character development that held me. In the aftermath, however, I found myself contemplating the significance of the historical lesson concealed within the story. Did Canada miss an unique opportunity when the mishandled Mackenzie rebellion failed: Has Canada yet risen above a modern version of the Family Compact? Since Canada had inherited from Britain a top-down form of government, and the Americans had established a bottom-up form, to what extent was opposition to Mackenzie's reforms based on fear that any move towards true democracy would undercut the political rationale for a separate North American nation?

As for Australia, the author dares to defy political correctness by describing aboriginal life, warts and all, an important corrective to the myth that such societies enjoyed some kind of Golden Age until this was overturned by newcomers. Whatever your interests, read Jeremy Kane and enjoy.

– Brig. (Rtd.) Maurice Tugwell, Founding Director, Centre for Conflict Studies, University of New Brunswick, Canada.

PALESTINE: The roots of conflict.

2007-08-13T20:47:00.004-07:00

The Palestine Mandate:

"Lucky Tommy: in the middle again."

by Sidney Allinson.

America's current experience of bloody resentment by many of the Iraqi people they liberated from Saddam Hussein's dictatorship has a close resemblance to Britain's problems in Palestine over half a century ago. Recalling those historical events may help to better understand the origins of present-day strife in the Middle East.

Until December 1917, Palestine had long been part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire, an ally of Germany in World War One. This rule was finally broken by the conquest of Jerusalem by British and Australian troops under the command of General Allenby.

In 1922, the League of Nations presented Britain with the Palestine Mandate to administer the region. Terms of the Mandate included founding a new Jewish state in the territory, set out in the Balfour Declaration of 1917. This was sent in a letter from Arthur Balfour, Britain's Secretary of State, addressed to Baron Lionel Rothschild, stating:

'His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing will be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.'

If more attention had been paid to the old boy's stricture, the Levant could have become a more peaceful region than it is today. As things turned out, the number of Jews immigrating rapidly increased their population from 60,000 to 600,000 during the next two decades. Those 26 years were turbulent, to say the least, with increasing violence between Arabs and Jews, fighting over land occupation and political influence.

Though there was a small garrison of Imperial troops, the bulk of peacekeeping duties was the job of the Palestine Police. Mainly British, these civilian police also included a large number of Arabs and Jews, who managed to carry out their duties with remarkable impartiality. Their unbiased fairness only drew violent enmity from both opposing sides, and today the only monuments to the 'Pal Police' are 320 long-forgotten graves.

During the early 1930s, guerrilla warfare became so prevalent that units of the British Army were brought in to combat both camps of extremists. It was an all-too-familiar role for "Tommy Atkins," the affectionate nickname for British soldiers. Used to handling peace-keeper jobs in foreign lands, they resignedly accepted being once more, "Lucky Tommy - in the middle again". Their thankless position then in Palestine is strikingly similar to the Coalition Forces’ present entanglement in the Persian Gulf region now.

The Arab Revolt of 1936-1939 flared because of Palestinian Arabs' resentment against the growth of Jewish immigration, but the violence soon turned against the British as well, because of their firmness in combating the uprising. During the three years it took to finally put down `The Arab Troubles', there were 236 Jews killed by Arabs, 435 Arabs killed by Jews, plus 1,200 rebels killed by police and military action. The British cost came high, too; nearly 200 dead policemen and soldiers.

In World War Two, Britain's Eighth Army defended the Middle East from Germany's Afrika Korps, and Gen. Montgomery's victory at El Alamein saved Palestine's Jewish population from becoming victims of the Nazi's Final Solution. But after WWII's end in 1945, the hideous ordeal of the Holocaust made world Jewry unwilling to settle for anything less than the establishment of an independent State of Israel within Palestine, and demanded that Britain relinquish control there. The deadly earnestness of Zionist extremists was first signalled by their assassination of Lord Moyne, British Minister of State, in Cairo, November 6, 1944.

The Arabs, who then still formed most of the local population, were just as adamant that Palestine must be entirely controlled by them. Britain's newly-elected Labour government led by Prime Minister Clement Atlee strongly sympathized with Zionism's goal, yet hoped to remain friendly with the Arabs also.

Parliament cited the Balfour Declaration's original terms to support concerns that too rapid an increase in newcomers could further alienate the local Arab population and destabilize the entire Middle East. Britain's prediction of serious consequences from unlimited immigration was viewed by America and other members of the United Nations Organization as mere colonialism – or even disguised racial discrimination.

Opponents of British concerns could not see the nigh-inevitable tragic results of a destabilized Middle East for generations to come. So the UK government was pressured into the nigh-hopeless role of trying to arrange a compromise political solution agreeable to Jews and Arabs alike.

Meanwhile, in what became a public relations nightmare, Britain imposed a sea blockade to limit the numbers of Jewish immigrants to Palestine. It caused a devastating impression of a callous Britain, shown worldwide in cinema newsreels of Royal Navy vessels turning back ships crammed with refugees. Repeated images of burly Tommies flailing pick-handles at emaciated concentration camp survivors to prevent them from landing in the Promised Land had a ruinous effect on the UK's reputation. Those scenes made most of the world unsympathetic to Britain at the same time Zionist partisans began a wide campaign of violence to support demands for a separate Jewish state. It was carried out by two insurgent groups: LEHI known as the 'Stern Gang,' under operations chief Yitzk Shamir, and the Irgun Zwei Leumi led by Menachem Begin -- both of whom later became prime ministers of Israel.

Though Winston Churchill had been a staunch supporter of the Zionist cause throughout his political life, the events in Palestine brought this comment from him, "A race that has suffered the virtual extermination of its national existence cannot be expected to be entirely reasonable. But the activities of terrorists, who tried to gain their ends by the assassination of British officials and soldiers, were an odious act of ingratitude that left a profound impression."

Facing international hostility at the UN, and hotly debated in Parliament, the government still continued to send military reinforcements to the Holy Land. These included many peacetime draftees, 19-year-old British males conscripted for their period of compulsory National Service, who formed a large part of the 100,000 troops stationed in Palestine. These units were kept under orders to behave with restraint despite being targeted by increasingly ruthless Jewish guerrillas.

Individual British Army soldiers and Royal Air Force personnel began to be picked off from ambush, often while unarmed and off-duty, easy targets for assassins who ran scant risk of being caught. Troop trains were machine-gunned, mined and derailed; tented camps, airfields, and police stations were attacked, with steadily mounting casualties. One example was the deliberate murder of seven soldiers of the Royal Artillery, shot whilst sleeping in their tents. In perhaps the most infamous incident, two British sergeants, Clifford Martin and Mervin Paice, were kidnapped in Tel Aviv and hanged from orange trees, their bodies booby-trapped with explosives.

Civilians were not exempt as victims, either, often from car-bombs left in Arab marketplaces. On 22 July, 1946, Irgun saboteurs blew up Jerusalem's King David Hotel, with great loss of life; 91 British, Arab, and Jewish men and women being killed, none of whom were soldiers. The heads of the Jewish Agency hastened to denounce the explosion by expressing "our feelings of horror at the base and unparalleled act perpetrated today by a gang of criminals." The death toll among British servicemen and civilian bystanders from increasingly ruthless terrorist attacks continued. Letter bombs were sent to army officers' families in the UK, causing deaths and injuries to civilian relatives.

Understandably, this pressure began to affect the morale of troops. They could see no point to doing their peacekeeping job among people who resented them, or worse. Many Tommies felt their hands were tied by political priorities and regulations that forbade them from combating the attackers more aggressively. Back home in a Britain already weary from WWII, young soldiers' mothers began to question a government that was sending their sons to die in an unappreciated cause. During the Jewish Insurgency from August 1945 to August 1947, British casualties totalled 141 killed and 475 wounded.

Faced with these mounting casualties and the political and financial costs of maintaining order in Palestine, Britain turned over responsibility to the UN for establishment of a bi-national Jewish-Arab state under United Nations trusteeship. On 14 May 1948, the last British soldier sailed from Haifa, and the Palestine Mandate ended. On that same date, the new State of Israel was born, and continues its battle for survival to this day.

Army Quarterly & Defence Journal.

Historical Ignorance.

2007-08-13T20:32:00.000-07:00

"D-Day, 1899, and President Denzel Washington is leading the liberation of New Zealand from the Nazis."

By Chris Hasting and Julie Henry, Daily Telegraph, UK.

It is 1899 and Denzel Washington, the American president, orders Anne Frank and her troops to storm the beaches of Nazi-occupied New Zealand ...

This may not be how you remember D-Day, but for a worrying number of Britain's children this is the confused scenario they associate with the events of June 6, 1944.

A survey of 1,309 British pupils aged between 10 and 14, from 24 different schools, found alarming levels of ignorance about the invasion of Normandy 60 years ago.

Only 28 per cent of primary and secondary pupils who sat the quiz last week were able to say that D-Day, involving the largest invasion force ever mounted, was the start of the Allied liberation of occupied western Europe.

Many of them could only say that it was something to do with the Second World War - though 26 per cent were flummoxed by even that fact. Some thought it took place in the First World War, or was the day war broke out, or the Blitz, and even Remembrance Sunday.

"It's a day when everyone remembers the dead who fought," said a 14-year-old girl at a north Devon secondary school. Only 16 per cent of 918 participating primary school children had the answer right.

One 10-year-old thought it was the day the "Americans came to rescue the English". Another thought D-Day involved "the invasion of Portsmouth". Various dates for the assault were 1066, 1776, 1899, and 1948.

Children also had great difficulty in naming Britain's war-time prime minister. Less than half of the overall sample and only 39 per cent of primary school children correctly identified him as Winston Churchill; a significant number opted for Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair.

Seventeen per cent of the sample and only 38 per cent of secondary school children identified Franklin D Roosevelt as the then President of the United States. Other candidates offered by both age groups were Denzel Washington (the actor), George Washington, John F Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln, and George W Bush. Some said simply: "George Bush's dad."

Ignorance about the Allied leaders, however, contrasted sharply with knowledge about Adolf Hitler. Overall, 71 per cent of the sample and 64 per cent of primary school children were able correctly to name the Nazi leader. Only one in three could identify the broad location of D-Day, with a number saying that it happened in New Zealand, Skegness, or Germany.

Thirteen per cent could name two of the beaches involved, and only 10 per cent of the sample knew that Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower was the Supreme Allied Commander. Others thought that the invasion was led by Anne Frank, or Private Ryan (the hero of the Steven Spielberg D-Day fictional epic), or Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, Eisenhower's deputy.

The disclosure that school children know so little about D-Day comes a week before the country prepares to celebrate the anniversary and will again focus attention on what sort of history is being taught in schools.

Even in those schools where the Second World War is taught, the emphasis is not on military events or even wartime leaders. One primary school teacher said: "We do study the Second World War, but we do not tend to concentrate on particular military events or leaders. We look at issues that are relevant to children themselves. They learn about civilian evacuation for instance, or the issuing of gas masks."

Dr David Starkey, the historian and television broadcaster, said yesterday that the survey had uncovered what he called a climate of "unfortunately reduced horizons and expectations".

It was "absurd", he said, that children were spending so much time discussing Hitler and Stalin to the detriment of everything else connected with the war.

"There is nothing difficult about the concepts being discussed and no reason why a child of primary school age should not be able to understand."

He said that he did not want to go back to a situation where history teaching was nothing but dates and battles, but he said he feared that the pendulum had swung too far in the other direction.

"I think that trying to begin any subject by relating to a child's own experience is a useful tool. But education is about teaching children things they do not know."

Chris Grayling, the shadow education minister, said: "These are really very recent events that have shaped the lives of all of us.

"It is a real worry that so few children seem to know the basics of what happened during the Second World War. We must not allow this to continue."

Interview With Wilbur Smith

2007-08-09T19:31:00.000-07:00

BEST-SELLING AUTHOR WILBUR SMITH TELLS ME HOW HE WRITES SUPERB AFRICAN ADVENTURE NOVELS.

By Sidney Allinson.

“Victoria’s delightful,” says best-selling author Wilbur Smith, sitting at a window in the Empress Hotel, admiring the Inner Harbour of Victoria, British Columbia. “You have everything here, perfect scenery, beautiful mountains, and salt water, which I love.” Appreciative praise indeed from the much-travelled Smith, who was visiting here for the first time, during a cross-Canada promotional tour. The effort seems almost superfluous, considering his books now top 100 million copies in total sales.

Smith is tall, tanned, and fit-looking for his 73 years, a friendly raconteur with a hearty laugh. Considering he is one of the highest-paid authors in the world, he is open, cordial, and not in the least full of himself.

The death of his third wife of many years devastated him for a sad period, until he married again in 2003. He introduces his gracious, gorgeous young wife, Mokhiniso Rahkimova, who is 38 years younger than him. A Muslim from the Central Asian republic of Tajikistan, Niso was a law student when Smith first met her, appropriately in a London bookshop. Proudly uxorious, he says, “Thanks to her, this is the best period of my life.”

They are in town to plug his latest opus, “The Quest,” fourth in the wildly popular River God series about Taita, Egyptian master of the supernatural. Not to give away the plot, but this time the River Nile dries up, a catastrophe caused by mysterious happenings far away. In desperation for a solution, the Pharaoh sends for the long-lived Warlock, Taita (pronounced “Ty-ee-tah”.)

He sets off on an epic journey, during which his strange powers equip him to win through to the source of the Nile and combat the cause of the disasters. To triumph, Taita must overcome dangerous challenges that are as much psychic as physical, and is awarded an astonishing regeneration that foreshadows modern stem-cell growth.

Smith’s stories set in ancient Egypt are a sharp turn away from his previous action-packed novels about battle, murder, and sudden death -- portraying muscular white hunters, fearless explorers, and lusty female characters in bygone eras. His historically accurate portrayal of how they actually behaved at the time, without inserting any fashionable authorial disapproval, has drawn some flak from liberal-minded critics.

Smith laughs uproariously, “So what? I revel in being politically incorrect! Hah, they’ve even called me sexist, too. I love women! Gutsy women, fiery women. I believe that women are superior in many ways, their resilience and courage. Furthermore, most of my readers are female.”

Whatever his unfashionable views, they reflect his own origins. Smith was born in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) in 1933, the son of English settlers. His earliest childhood memories are of his artist mother reading adventure stories to him. He grew up to be a voracious reader, between rifle-toting forays into the bush, where at age thirteen he shot his first lion. His father, an implacable big-game hunter who claimed to have never read a book in his life, sternly discouraged young Wilbur’s ambition to become a journalist. “You’d starve doing that -- get a real job!”

So he reluctantly became a government tax accountant, married twice, both ending in divorce, and then turned to writing novels. In 1963, he scored enormous first success with “When The Lion Feeds,” and never stopped from then on, having since written 31 international best-sellers.

He explains matter-of-factly how he produces them in such volume. “After a lot of research, I just go to my writing place every second February and start writing. I keep doing that seven hours a day, five days a week, and at the end of eight months or so I have another manuscript ready.”

This workmanlike routine has earned him great wealth and the freedom to live life to the fullest -- posh homes in Cape Town, London, and Davos, leisure for skiing, hunting safaris, deep-sea fishing, and luxurious travel, with time out to write another novel every second year.

Asked why his last four books have veered away from his previous usual theme of two-fisted outdoor adventure into supernatural fantasy, he says, “I wanted to create an entirely different focus, and I was always fascinated by ancient Egyptian lore, whence the River God series. Now, with “The Quest” I like to think I have come up with something even newer again, both in story and narrative style. Writing it gave me a tremendous amount of pleasure, and favourable public response has been huge already, especially among young women, I might add.”

He says the story in his latest book owes a debt to many other authors, particularly Rider Haggard, whose Victorian novel ‘She’ was the first adult book Smith ever read. Fans of Smith's series set in early Egypt will be interested to know “The Quest” takes another leap forward from an historical basis to a mystical one, in which the continuing character Taita encounters a evil superhuman entity.

Summing up, the contented multi-millionaire author says, “My books are each offered as a finished piece, to enjoy or not. They have all been enormous fun. From my early thirties, I have called no man master. I have been able to choose exactly what I want to write about, free to shoot my mouth off on any subject. Quite a lot of people like me for it, and I have given pleasure to many and offence to few. So it’s been a good life.” Wilbur Smith beams happily towards Niso, “And it’s not over yet.”

-- Sidney Allinson is author of
"KRUGER'S GOLD: A novel of the Anglo-Boer War."
www.xlibris.com/krugersgold.html