A collage of veteran Ann Burke’s time as a radar plotter in the Royal Canadian Navy in the 1960s. [Courtesy Ann Burke]

Memoir: Veteran recalls a special relationship with HMCS Bonaventure, Canada’s last aircraft carrier

STORY BY ANN BURKE

I have harboured a deep love of the sea and ships for most of my life. My enlistment into the Royal Canadian Navy in the 1960s was fuelled by this interest and fresh memories of living aboard a yacht on the south coast of England before immigrating to Canada. I recalled being tethered to the mast in a sudden English Channel gale and, earlier in my life, a reckless excursion of rowing beyond the limits of an Isle of Wight harbour with another girl to get a close-up look at HMS Queen Elizabeth. Fortunately, the latter adventure ended happily after a little help from the Royal National Lifeboat Institution.

As a youngster, I would sit for hours listening to stories shared by a Royal Navy chaplain who secretly delivered mail to ships off the coast of the Isle of Wight as they covertly awaited their orders for the D-Day invasion. I also spent hours looking at the wonderful ships he made from matchsticks, and I treasure the paintings he gave me as a child.

READ MORE

More from Front Lines

• The seizing of Europe’s bells
• Undying love, Part 2: A grieving mother secrets her Great War soldier son’s remains home to Canada
• Undying love, Part 1: A grieving mother secrets her Great War soldier son’s remains home to Canada

The new graphic novel Separated from Santo. [Courtesy Heritage House Publishing]

New graphic novel highlights Italian-Canadian internment during WW II

STORY BY ALEX BOWERS

Teacher Brian Barazzuol was around eight years old when he first heard the wartime story of his great-grandfather, Santo Pasqualini. It was a tale not of fortitude in battle, nor even of bearing arms for King and country at all.

The resiliency was there, unquestionably, but the familial fight in the Second World War had taken on a far more personal guise, a then-adolescent Barazzuol had discovered. His ancestor was one of 31,000 Italian Canadians declared so-called enemy aliens, some 600 of whom—Pasqualini among them—were interned.

READ MORE

More from The Briefing

• Children’s book published on Canadian WW II dog mascot
• Forgotten Japanese-Canadian soldiers added to Richmond, B.C., cenotaph
• WW II researcher on Canadian airmen in Burma

Member Benefit Partner

Learn More

Captain William Arthur Peel Durie died near Hill 70 in France in late December 1917. [LAC]

Undying love, Part 2: A grieving mother secrets her Great War soldier son’s remains home to Canada

STORY BY STEPHEN J. THORNE

Three years later to the day of Captain William Arthur Peel Durie’s death, a soldier wrote Durie’s mother Anna to tell her details of how “Bill” died as he made his way along the communication trench a half-hour into the attack.

“In December we were ordered to the Trenches in a very wicked part of the line just North of ‘Lens,’” W.H. Edwards wrote in 1920, “and on December 29, 1917, the ‘Hun’ placed a very heavy Gunfire ‘barrage’ on our front, resulting in Bills’ [sic] men catching it very heavy.

“As usual, he was out in it all, encouraging his men, when he could have been lying in his dugout under cover, but not him, out he went, collected the few men left, and stayed with them, until his sergeant remonstrated with him to get below, he refused to leave and was struck down, resulting in the loss of the biggest man the Battalion ever had.”

READ MORE

More from Front Lines

• Undying love, Part 1: A grieving mother secrets her Great War soldier son’s remains home to Canada
• High fliers: The legacy of Malcom McBean Bell-Irving and other Great War pilots
• Remembering Mynarski: A marker and a broken treeline at VR-A’s crash site

Historian Debbie Jiang poses with photos of Japanese-Canadian WW I veterans Hikotaro Koyanagi and Kazuo Harada whose names were added to the cenotaph in Richmond, B.C., in October 2024. [Courtesy Debbie Jiang]

Forgotten Japanese-Canadian soldiers added to Richmond, B.C., cenotaph

STORY BY ALEX BOWERS

Richmond, B.C., historian Debbie Jiang used to gaze upon the local cenotaph in traffic. “Every time I drove by,” she said to Legion Magazine, “I’d stop at a red light on No. 3 Road. There, I’d look at the side displaying the First World War. It always got me wondering if there could potentially be missing names.”

She was right on at least two counts—and potentially, indeed likely, more.

Japanese-Canadian soldiers Hikotaro Koyanagi and Kazuo Harada fought and died within nine months of each other during the Great War. Both adorned the uniform of a country that didn’t allow them to vote, that denied them the equal rights afforded to a sizable proportion of white compatriots, and treated them like second-class citizens—or frequently, worse. Yet die for Canada they did.

READ MORE

More from The Briefing

• WW II researcher on Canadian airmen in Burma
• Walking “Civvy Street” with the Canadian Armed Forces Transition Group
• The British Home Children who fought for Canada

Member Benefit Partner

Learn More