Estate auction chronicles the colourful life
of war correspondent Bill Boss

Story by Stephen J. Thorne

Pierre Berton called him one of the toughest war correspondents he ever knew, a trusted and familiar newsman who “ate censors for breakfast.”

Recently, an Ontario firm auctioned off the estate of Gerard William Ramaut (Bill) Boss, 13 years after he died of pneumonia in an Ottawa hospital, age 90.

The collection of art, books, photographs, newspaper tearsheets, letters, telegrams, mementoes and press credentials showed the man known affectionately by his wire-service initials “bb” to generations of Canadian Press reporters and editors for what he was—a Renaissance man of the highest order. He was an eclectic, highly cultured, much-travelled and multi-talented writer and raconteur.

READ MORE

The disappearance of HMCS Shawinigan

Story by Sharon Adams

After the ferry SS Caribou was sunk by a U-boat in October 1942 with a loss of 137, including many women and children, the navy provided escorts to ensure the safety of passengers.

Near the end of the war, HMCS Shawinigan was in Cabot Strait off Newfoundland. The corvette was not new to escort duty. Commissioned in late 1941, Shawinigan spent two years escorting convoys back and forth across the Atlantic. In 1944, it began escort duty in home waters, seeing East Coast ferries safely to and from port and patrolling for submarines.

READ MORE

November 28, 1917

The Newfoundland Regiment is designated ‘Royal’ by King George V.

READ MORE

Spy was great Canadian hero

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.

READ MORE

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.

READ MORE

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.

READ MORE