Stephen J. Thorne

Growing up in the Cold War and the turbulent ’60s

STORY BY STEPHEN J. THORNE

During a five-month stint in Afghanistan in 2004, my third trip covering the war and its fallout for The Canadian Press wire service, I talked to a UNICEF worker about what it was like for Afghan kids growing up in a war zone.

Afghanistan was in its fourth decade of almost non-stop fighting. How do they cope, I asked. Surprisingly well, he replied. They adapt, as kids do and, for the most part, survive. It’s all they’d ever known. Children’s greatest fears—and parents’ most acute concerns—he told me, were automobiles and ungrated sewers.

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• The myth of the ‘Long Peace’
• The bombers and the nightingales
• The Queen of the skies: Iconic Lancaster flies again

Communist troops of the North Korean People’s Army attack the South on June 25, 1950. They are in Seoul in less than a week. A United Nations coalition resolves to stop them. Canada joins what is by any definition a war. For three years, Canadians fight iconic battles on land, sea and in the air; 516 die and when the killing is over, the more than 26,000 survivors spend years fighting for recognition. They call it a “police action” and the “forgotten war,” but for those Canadians who fought in Korea between 1950 and 1953, neither time nor circumstance can erase the memories of what they saw, smelled and experienced in the hills and valleys around the 38th parallel and beyond.

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Atomic Canada

STORY BY PAIGE JASMINE GILMAR

“These atomic bombs which science burst upon the world that night were strange even to the men who used them,” wrote H.G. Wells in his 1914 sci-fi classic, The World Set Free.

Wells, who holds a track record for predicting technological innovations, was credited by Sir Winston Churchill for dreaming up the use of combat airplanes and tanks before the First World War. Still, The World Set Free added an entirely new colour to scientific inspiration, with Wells theorizing that unbelievable power could be born from splitting the atom.

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More from Military Milestones

• Rangers at Midnight
• Forcing the hand of peace
• The mathematical miracle of the Gimli Glider

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