Documentary exposes Japan’s wartime abuses on Canadians

An item from the Legion Magazine.

Click here to view this newsletter in your browser

Story by Sharon Adams

On Nov. 18, 1942, Canadian spy Gustave Bieler and his wireless operator were parachuted into France to begin work behind German lines.

It was an inauspicious beginning—Bieler seriously injured his back when he landed on some rocks and he spent six weeks recovering in hospital under an assumed name. But he refused to return to England, and soon had set up one of the most successful spy rings in northern France, known as the Musician Network.

Choose our cover for the
next issue of Legion Magazine!

Help choose the January/February 2021 issue of Legion Magazine!

The January/February 2021 issue of Legion Magazine looks at the Battle of Verdun in the First World War. In a terrible war of attrition, the French army resisted multiple attacks by German forces. “They shall not pass!” was a French general’s rallying cry.

Also in the issue: The 43-day Gulf War in 1990-91 was Canada’s first war since Korea. A new research and treatment centre for veterans with chronic pain. The RCN’s worst peacetime accident—the explosion on HMCS Kootenay in 1969. And more!

VOTE NOW

The Fence: Documentary exposes
Japan’s wartime abuses

Story by Stephen J. Thorne

There is a scene an hour into Viveka Melki’s documentary The Fence in which George Peterson, the last surviving soldier of the Winnipeg Grenadiers imprisoned by the Japanese during the Second World War, cannot go on.

It is, perhaps, one of the most poignant living testaments to Second World War suffering that exists anywhere, a Canadian’s first-person account of the abuses their Japanese captors inflicted on them after the fall of Hong Kong in December 1941.

November 18, 1916

British General Douglas Haig halts his army’s offensive at the Somme River in northwestern France, after more than a million soldiers from both sides are killed or wounded.