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The Princess Patricias hold the line

Story by Sharon Adams

The first Battle of Ypres in 1914, during Germany’s race to the sea at the start of the First World War, created an eight-kilometre bulge in the front northeast of Ypres, Belgium. Within this salient, Allied lines were surrounded on three sides by German-held territory.

The salient was a thorn the Germans intended to remove from their side, fighting four battles between April 22 and May 13, 1915, together known as the Second Battle of Ypres.

Choose our cover for the July/August 2020 issue of Legion Magazine!

Choose our cover for the next issue of Legion Magazine!

Among its many features, the July/August 2020 issue of Legion Magazine will explore the aftermath of a destroyed Europe and how its people chose to remember, rebuild and recover. Help choose our cover! Cast your vote, give us your opinion and share with your friends on social media!

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German U-boat crews abandoned
plans to scuttle, surrender instead

Story by Stephen J. Thorne

It was a cloudy afternoon on May 13, 1945, when four Canadian navy ships intercepted U-889 some 250 kilometres southeast of Cape Race, N.L. The patrol aircraft that discovered the steaming German submarine circled overhead.

The war had been over less than a week and all German U-boats had been ordered to cease offensive operations, even before the surrender was formalized.

Almost three-quarters of the Unterseeboot crews had died during the war—an unheard of 28,000 of 40,000 men, many of whom fell victim to technologies that outpaced their own. The surrender order no doubt came as bittersweet relief to many in a service that had diminished from primarily volunteer to increasingly pressed crews.