I’ve got your back

Story and photography by Stephen J. Thorne
There is an adage that is embraced by all the military, but especially the infantry: I’ve got your back.

It’s fundamental to any successful endeavour against an enemy in battle. But who’s got your back when the battlefield is life and the enemy is yourself?

Mutual support and endurance were common threads among the 27 wounded veterans of Afghanistan who I interviewed and photographed for the Legion Magazine series The Wounded, which is now an exhibition at the Canadian War Museum. For me, those attributes were highlights of the project.

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Chasing U-744

It was a fat target for German U-boats: close to five dozen cargo ships laden with explosives, fuel and lumber for the war effort and life-sustaining food—grain, sugar, meat and frozen foods—which left Halifax on Feb. 22, 1944, bound for wartorn Britain.

Escorting the convoy were HMS Icarus, a destroyer, HMCS St. Catharines and four corvettes HMC ships Chaudière, Gatineau, Chilliwack and St. Fennel. They were about to take part in the second longest U-boat hunt of the Second World War.

Gatineau’s asdic (sonar) detected a U-boat on March 5. Immediately, the escorts, joined by British corvette HMS Kenilworth Castle, began to attack. U-744, commanded by Oberleutnant zur See Heinz Blischke, dove deep, manoeuvring to escape his attackers through that night and the next day.

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March 7-10, 1945

Lieutenant-General Guy Simonds proceeds with Operation Blockbuster II,
to capture Xanten. The German town is taken within three days.

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Always the first one to know

“Sometimes it’s going to be a smell. Sometimes it’s going to be a sound,”
says Hélène LeScelleur. “And then it reminds me of the horror that we’ve been through.”

Story and photography by Stephen J. Thorne
“Seeing people decapitated, it’s not that usual for anyone,” says former army medic Hélène LeScelleur. “I saw a lot.”

It wasn’t an image she had contemplated when she signed up for the militia and fell in love with the military.

LeScelleur had challenged authority her entire youth, so when military brass told the newly minted lieutenant and by then 12-year army veteran that she was “too junior” to carry out her duties in Afghanistan, she went on the offensive.

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Fierce fighting at Reichswald Forest

On Feb. 19, 1945, midway through Operation Veritable, the Allied plan to surge into Germany, the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry and Essex Scottish were in a tight spot.

They were part of a pincer movement launched on Feb. 8 and wrapped up in March, in which the British XXX Corps and 3rd Canadian Division in the north and U.S. 9th Army in the south intended to destroy German forces west of the Rhine River.

However, the Americans had been delayed by flooding, allowing the Germans to focus their efforts on the Canadian advance.

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February 18, 2010

John Babcock, last known Canadian First World War veteran, dies.

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