The Han Kuang Exercise is an annual military exercise in Taiwan in preparation for a possible attack from China. [Office of the President, Republic of China (Taiwan)/Wikimedia]

World War Three: A prominent historian offers a warning—and a way out—of approaching calamity

STORY BY RICHARD FOOT​​​​​​​

When Canada’s Margaret MacMillan speaks, it’s wise to listen.

That’s especially true when MacMillan—a pre-eminent conflict historian—warns that the present is looking unnervingly like the past in the lead-up to both world wars.

“When a storm is coming, there will always be signs,” MacMillan wrote earlier this month in the New York Times. “A world war is not inevitable, but the threat of a catastrophic conflict between big and well-armed powers is closer than it was for decades.”

She also recently told CBC Radio’s The Current: “It’s always foolish to panic too soon and say, you know, like Chicken Little, ‘the sky is falling.’ But I think we do need to really worry.”

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The main gate at Italian PoW Camp 78, from which Canadian captives Raymond Sherk and Don McLarty escaped in September 1943. [H.R. Dixon/Archives New Zealand/PAColl-1615-05]

Author Karen Farrington on Allied PoWs escaping through Italy in WW II

STORY BY ALEX BOWERS

When Canadian captives Raymond Sherk and Don McLarty saw an opportunity to escape Camp 78, a prisoner-of-war facility in the central Italian region of Abruzzo, they wasted little time. Despite the country having signed an armistice with the Allies in September 1943, the guards would soon be replaced by German troops already en route. The window to act was, in other words, closing—and fast.

“All men who escaped from there and camps like it had a similar experience,” said author Karen Farrington. “That was to go up the nearest mountain. It was the only way you could go.”

Sherk and McLarty did exactly that. For three weeks, the airmen sheltered in a cave roughly 13 kilometres from their former camp, hiding at high elevation as “their personal conditions went downhill.” Only in late October or early November 1943, largely thanks to the help of locals, did the dishevelled duo reach Allied lines.

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