DND/LAC/3395589

Remember me: Soldier’s remains identified 106 years after battle

STORY BY STEPHEN J. THORNE

Harry Atherton was just 19 years old when he left the factories, foundries and collieries of his home in Tyldesley, an ancient mill town in the north of England, and came to forge a new life in Canada.

For a young man with Canada in his sights, he couldn’t have found a spot much farther away, or much different, from his home, settling as he did in McBride, B.C., a Rocky Mountain village that in 2021 numbered just 588 people.

It was 1913, a fortuitous time for a carpenter such as Atherton in a place like McBride.

Far from the Roman road that ran through his hometown where urbanization and industrialization took root in the 19th century, McBride was a young settlement located on Mile 90 of the brand-new Grand Trunk Pacific Railway.

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Canadian Flygirls

STORY BY SHARON ADAMS

Female pilots had broken endurance, altitude and speed records before the Second World War, but their hopes of wartime flying careers were stopped in Canada by a thick glass ceiling. Only a handful of very determined Canadian female pilots managed a wartime flying career. And they had to leave the country to do it. Discover some of the amazing Canadian women who fought their way into the skies.

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PL-37207, DND ARCHIVES

How Aircraftman Karl Gravell earned the George Cross

STORY BY SHARON ADAMS

Karl Gravell was a Canadian for only four short years before he gave his life for his new country.

Born in Sweden in 1922, his family emigrated to Canada in 1937, becoming naturalized citizens in September.

Gravell’s interest in aviation and led him to join the Royal Canadian Air Force after he graduated high school. He signed up in March 1941, and in May, while waiting to train as a wireless air gunner, he was posted to No. 12 Service Flying Training School in Brandon, Man.

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Department of Defense via AP

Identify this: NASA launches UFO study

STORY BY STEPHEN J. THORNE

The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration has launched a nine-month study into UFOs or, as the world’s leader in space exploration calls them, UAPs (unidentified aerial phenomena).

The 16-member team includes professors, scientists, an oceanographer and others who study space—former NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and science journalist Nadia Drake among them. Their work began on Oct. 24 with an eye to the future.

“The independent study team will lay the groundwork for future study on the nature of UAPs for NASA and other organizations,” the agency said in a statement.

“To do this, the team will identify how data gathered by civilian government entities, commercial data, and data from other sources can potentially be analyzed to shed light on UAPs. It will then recommend a roadmap for potential UAP data analysis by the agency going forward.”

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Getarchive.net

Overcoming mines and weather, Allied forces take back Walcheren

STORY BY SHARON ADAMS

In September 1944, the Allies captured the port of Antwerp, Belgium, which was vital to supplying arms and materiel to the Allied forces moving from Normandy, France, to Germany.

However, Germans controlled the three islands at the mouth of the 80-kilometre Scheldt estuary in the Netherlands that lead to Antwerp. An unrelenting Hitler had seeded the river and all approaches with more than 2,000 mines and lined the riverbanks with bunkers and large gun batteries. He was determined to deny Antwerp to the Allies.

Thus followed the Battle of the Scheldt, which endured until Nov. 8, 1944.

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Danielk Frymark/Central Museum of Prisioners of War

Archeologists uncover hospital artifacts at notorious PoW camp

STORY BY STEPHEN J. THORNE

Archeologists have uncovered a rare set of artifacts from a former hospital at the site of a notorious prisoner-of-war camp where more than 40,000 Allied captives, including Canadians, died during the Second World War.

The dig was conducted in an overgrown area of what was once the Lamsdorf PoW camp—specifically, the principal subcamp of Stalag VIII known as Stalag VIIIB in what is now Łambinowice, Poland. The archeologists uncovered syringes, a razor fragment, underwear and uniform buttons, utensils and remnants of a heating stove.

“It was a part of the camp that had never before been the subject of field research,” said the project’s head, Dawid Kobiałka of the University of Łódź Institute of Archaeology in central Poland.

“Even the precise location of its individual buildings and their present state of preservation was unknown.”

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Imperial War Museums- wikipedia.org

Trainbusting Canadians busting records in Korea

STORY BY SHARON ADAMS

In late-October 1952, during the Korean War, HMCS Crusader joined the Trainbusters Club in Korea. Within six months, Crusader garnered the club’s championship for Canada.

The club was an informal competition between ships in the conflict which took out adversary trains.

“We had some of the finest gunners in the Canadian navy,” said Irving Larson of Crusader.

It began in July 1952 after an American destroyer, the USS Orleck, demolished two trains in two weeks. It was declared trainbusting champion and a challenge was issued to beat the score.

A ship could only claim trains if they destroyed the engine, regardless of how many rail cars were obliterated.

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