SCIENCE MUSEUM/SCIENCE AND SOCIETY PICTURE LIBRARY

The bombers and the nightingales

STORY BY STEPHEN J. THORNE

One of the most stirring audio recordings of the Second World War didn’t involve the crack of gunfire, the thunder of explosions, the excitement of a bomber crew under nightfighter attack or the urgent beep-beep-beep of a last, desperate Morse code message emitted from an overrun Pacific outpost.

While all those tapes were made between 1939 and 1945, providing listeners with spellbinding sound, few—if any—bore the poignancy of a nightingale’s song set to the ominous, Beethovian rumble of 197 Allied warplanes passing overhead.

READ MORE

More from Front Lines

• The Queen of the skies: Iconic Lancaster flies again
• Military decoys work as well now as they did eight decades ago
• A good parade

MILART PHOTO ARCHIVE

Forcing the hand of peace

STORY BY PAIGE JASMINE GILMAR

Sixty-three years ago, on July 30, Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, in an attempt to save face, had an announcement to make.

He declared that Canada would make a sizeable contribution to the United Nations intervention in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

But Diefenbaker was hardly acting on his own accord.

READ MORE

More from Military Milestones

• The mathematical miracle of the Gimli Glider
• To Kill the Right to Kill
• Celebrating history’s first nuclear-arms control agreement