Honouring Aboriginal veterans

Story by Sharon Adams

In Confederation Park, just a block or so down the hill from the National War Memorial in Ottawa, the National Aboriginal Veterans Monument was unveiled on National Indigenous Peoples Day, June 21, 2001, the year Canada entered the war in Afghanistan.

It was a long time coming, for tens of thousands of First Nations, Métis and Inuit people have served in Canada’s military and the Canadian Rangers at home and abroad, and more than 500 have died.

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Euphemisms, acronyms and outright lies:
The language of war

Story by Stephen J. Thorne

For decades, politicians referred to the Korean War as the ‘Korean Conflict,’ as if the soldiers who fought and died on the battlefields of the disputed peninsula were somehow less soldierly or less dead if killed by conflict rather than war.

Some 2.5 million people died in the Koreas between 1950 and 1953, including 516 Canadians, and the war is not over yet. The armistice only put a pause on the fighting; 66 years later, there still has been no peace treaty signed to end it.

Officially, there was no declaration of war in Korea—it was a ‘police action’ (another euphemism)—so, technically, the politicians were correct, though ‘conflict’ suggests something more in the nature of a marital tiff than all-out war. Whoever came up with the phrase probably never saw a day of action in their life.

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June 22, 1813

Laura Secord walks 32 kilometres to warn the British that the Americans are planning an attack.

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George Alfred Newburn:
A soldier of the First World War

Story by Stephen J. Thorne

His name was George Alfred Newburn, a labourer from Victoria who was killed during the Battle of Hill 70 in France on Aug. 15, 1917. He was just 18 years old, although Newburn would have you believe he was 20.

For almost a century, Private Newburn was listed as missing in action. Then one day in July 2017, construction workers uncovered the skeletal remains of five soldiers near rue Léon Droux in the village of Vendin-le-Vieil.

In February, after extensive historical, genealogical, anthropological, archaeological and DNA analysis, the military’s Casualty Identification Review Board confirmed the identity of a single set of remains as those of Newburn.

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Sister ships take part in evacuations

Story by Sharon Adams

HMCS St. Laurent and HMCS Restigouche fired Canadian warships’ first shots of the Second World War on June 11, 1940, in the final echoes of the six-week Battle of France, during which more than half a million Allied troops and civilians were evacuated from ports in France, under great menace from the invading German army.

The biggest rescue happened May 26-June 4 at Dunkirk, France. British and French armies were trapped and surrounded during the German panzer drive to the English Channel. A Herculean effort by military and merchant ships, cargo boats and pleasure vessels managed to evacuate a third of a million troops.

But there were more troops, troops that had not yet been snared in the German net. On June 5, German attention turned to them.

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June 13, 1916

Troops under command of Major-General Arthur Currie counterattack at Mount Sorrel in Belgium, restoring front lines at a cost of 8,000 Canadians killed, wounded or captured.

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