A Digital Terrain Model of the wreck of SMS Cöln, taken at Scapa Flow in January 2017.
[Innes McCartney]

Raising hell: Discovering, and recovering, lost warships

STORY BY STEPHEN J. THORNE

“Rise again! Rise again!” Canadian folksinger Stan Rogers declares in his song The Mary Ellen Carter, the story of a sunken fishing boat forsaken by its owners, only to be salvaged by its grateful and devoted crew.

“For we couldn’t leave her there, you see, to crumble into scale,” he sings. “She’d saved our lives so many times, living through the gale.”

The nature of seafaring, the dependence on a relatively tiny refuge perpetually (hopefully) afloat on vast and volatile waters, breeds in mariners a special affection for the crafts they sail in. It is in part why seamen have always referred to their ships in the feminine— ‘she’ and ‘her’ —for, the story goes, they are motherly, womb-like, life-sustaining vessels, protecting and nurturing their crews through good times and bad.

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More from Front Lines

• Editorial cartoonist Bob Chambers and Halifax in Wartime
• Researchers identify remains of Franklin expedition skipper
• Stolen Churchill portrait coming home

ATTENTION CANADIAN MILITARY FAMILIES : Did you or a family member receive VAC disability benefits between 2003 and 2023?

On 17 January 2024 the Federal Court approved a settlement in a class action involving alleged underpayment of certain disability pension benefits administered by Veterans Affairs Canada (“VAC”) payable to members or former members of the Canadian Armed Forces (“CAF”) and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (“RCMP”) and their spouses, commonlaw partners, survivors, other related individuals, and estates (the “Settlement”).

If you received any of the disability-related benefits listed below at any time between 2003 and 2023, you may be entitled to compensation under the Settlement. As the executor, estate trustee, administrator, or family member of a deceased class member who collected VAC-administered disability benefits, you may also be able to claim on behalf of the estate.

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Alexander Roberts Dunn was the first Canadian to receive the Victoria Cross. [wikimedia]

The forgotten grave of Canada’s first VC recipient Alexander Robert Dunn

STORY BY ALEX BOWERS

Canadian peacekeeper Ben Mitchell was uneasy, and not just about the mines.

“Tensions were very high for not only the Eritrea[n] and Ethiopian armies,” he recalled of the UN mission to mediate a bloody border dispute between the neighbouring East African nations in the early 2000s, “but for us as well.”

In the Eritrean city of Senafe, Mitchell and a comrade were approached by children exclaiming “Canada” and tugging at their hands to follow them. “This thing smelled of an ambush badly,” he wrote, declining to be led to the unknown.

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More from Military Milestones

• Québécois Catch-22: Roméo Dallaire and the FLQ Crisis
• The Battle of Bowmanville
• Night of the Tempest: A British-Canadian pilot versus German Zeppelin L.31

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A convoy of merchant ships assembles in Bedford Basin in 1942. In the upper left corner, the Narrows opens into Halifax Harbour and the North Atlantic beyond. [Nova Scotia Archives]

Editorial cartoonist Bob Chambers and Halifax in Wartime

STORY BY STEPHEN J. THORNE

Through two world wars, Halifax was the anonymous “East Coast port” referenced in military dispatches, government statements and news reports, a censor-imposed vaguery that fooled no one.

Accessed by rail, its proximity to both North American manufacturing hubs and the fighting overseas, facilitated by a large, deep, protected, ice-free harbour, made the capital of Nova Scotia the ideal staging point for transatlantic convoys ferrying troops, equipment, munitions, food and other supplies critical to the Allied war effort.

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More from Front Lines

• Researchers identify remains of Franklin expedition skipper
• Stolen Churchill portrait coming home
• 100 images of the 2024 Legion National Youth Track and Field Championships: Part 2

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ATTENTION CANADIAN MILITARY FAMILIES : Did you or a family member receive VAC disability benefits between 2003 and 2023?

On 17 January 2024 the Federal Court approved a settlement in a class action involving alleged underpayment of certain disability pension benefits administered by Veterans Affairs Canada (“VAC”) payable to members or former members of the Canadian Armed Forces (“CAF”) and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (“RCMP”) and their spouses, commonlaw partners, survivors, other related individuals, and estates (the “Settlement”).

If you received any of the disability-related benefits listed below at any time between 2003 and 2023, you may be entitled to compensation under the Settlement. As the executor, estate trustee, administrator, or family member of a deceased class member who collected VAC-administered disability benefits, you may also be able to claim on behalf of the estate.

READ MORE

Roméo Dallaire served 35 years with the Canadian Armed Forces, including his role in 1993-94 as Commander of the UN Assistance Mission in Rwanda. [UNAC]

Québécois Catch-22: Roméo Dallaire and the FLQ Crisis

STORY BY ALEX BOWERS

Twenty-three-year-old Roméo Dallaire, a lieutenant in 5e Régiment d’artillerie légère du Canada on Oct. 5, 1970, struggled to believe what was happening.

Earlier that day, a separatist cell of the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) had kidnapped British Trade Commissioner James Cross. In doing so, the weeks-long ordeal dubbed the October Crisis (also known as the FLQ Crisis) had begun.

And Dallaire would soon find himself in the centre of an unfolding drama.

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More from Military Milestones

• The Battle of Bowmanville
• Night of the Tempest: A British-Canadian pilot versus German Zeppelin L.31
• Currie’s crossing: Remembering the Battle of Canal du Nord

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