The Sept. 21, 1944, message from SHAEF informing The Canadian Press that Charlie Bruce’s plane was overdue. [CP]

Lost and found: High-flying CP warco survives shoot down

STORY BY STEPHEN J. THORNE

The army message, marked CONFIDENTIAL, arrived in the London bureau of The Canadian Press shortly after lunch on Sept. 21, 1944.

It bore troubling news from General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force: a plane carrying the superintendent of the wire service’s overseas operations, Charlie Bruce, was 18 hours overdue.

Bruce had been covering a resupply mission over the German-occupied Netherlands during the Allies’ ill-fated attempt to bring the war to an early end—an airborne invasion called Operation Market Garden, later to be memorialized in the star-studded 1977 Hollywood film A Bridge Too Far.

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• The Doomsday Clock has never been closer to midnight than it is now
• The U.S., Britain and the WW II bombing campaign in Europe
• War graves, battlefield tours and Canadian Steve Douglas’s little shop of horrors

The Silver Dart in flight. [Wikimedia]

The Silver Dart: Canada’s first successful plane and the RCAF

STORY BY PAIGE JASMINE GILMAR

On Feb. 23, 1909, the Royal Canadian Air Force’s pathway to the stars first began to take shape; the first flight of a powered, heavier-than-air, controlled airplane in Canada—the Silver Dart—was a success. Marking its 115th anniversary this year, the Silver Dart held the promise of a new future for Canada’s military: the possibility of an air force.

In 1907, Alexander Graham Bell, along with engineers J.A.D. (Douglas) McCurdy and Frederick Baldwin and two Americans, formed the Aerial Experiment Association with the financial support of Bell’s wife, Mabel. Their goal was “to get a man into the air.” Two years later, one of their creations was ready.

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• Cold War continental defence
• Remembering Canada’s first national aerobatics team—and its legendary aircraft
• How Canadian volunteer sailors helped win the Battle of the Atlantic

COURTESY OF GOOSE LANE EDITIONS

Rebuilding bodies after WW I

STORY BY KRISTEN DEN HARTOG

This exclusive excerpt from the new book The Roosting Box: Rebuilding the Body After the First World War by Kristen den Hartog explores some of the fascinating work of Toronto’s Christie Street Hospital in supporting wounded Canadian veterans after the conflict. Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Goose Lane Editions.

The roof ward was one of the marvels of the Christie Street Hospital, and came under the direction of a young doctor named Robert Inkerman Harris, who arrived at the facility with a gaggle of “war wrecks” wasting away from tuberculosis. Harris had suffered from tuberculosis as a child, and that old memory apparently fuelled his curiosity about the disease.

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