Special offer just for you!
Dear  MICHAEL K BARBOUR  Barbour,

2018 marks the anniversary of the First World War’s final year. Legion Magazine Shop is offering all customers a FREE Armistice pin to honour the service and sacrifice made by those who fought, 100 years ago. Minimum purchase of $30 before shipping and taxes.

Offer expires August 31, 2018.

Please have a look at the latest Legion Magazine SHOP items below that may be of interest to you.

Winston wets his whistle:
Churchill’s indulgences

Story by Stephen J. Thorne

In December 1941, just days after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, United States president Franklin Delano Roosevelt informed his First Lady that a guest, or guests, would be coming to stay at the White House. “I must have a tumbler of sherry in my room before breakfast,” Churchill told the butler upon arriving at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, “a couple of glasses of scotch and soda before lunch and French champagne, and 90-year-old brandy before I go to sleep at night.”

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August 4, 1944
Bazalgette’s last mission

Born in Calgary in the final weeks of the First World War, Ian Willoughby Bazalgette served just shy of two years in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War, but he packed in a lot of experience, racking up 58 missions before his 26th birthday.

His flying career began in 1942, with No. 115 Squadron, where he flew 13 missions laying mines in the North Sea before transferring to a Lancaster bomber. He displayed “great courage and determination in the face of the enemy,” says the citation for his 1943 Distinguished Flying Cross, awarded after 10 harrowing missions against heavily defended targets, and surviving a crash landing.

After completing his first tour of 28 operations, he served briefly as a flight instructor before being recruited to fly for the No. 8 Pathfinder Force Group, including service during the D-Day Campaign (Click here).

Squadron Leader Bazalgette’s final mission, on Aug. 4, 1944, was to mark the positions of V-1 rocket storage caves at Trossy Saint-Maximin in France for the main bomber force.

His Lancaster heavily damaged and set ablaze by anti-aircraft fire and the bomb aimer badly wounded, Bazalgette kept the burning plane aloft and accurately marked the target. The inner port engine failed and Bazalgette ordered the crew to bail out, then attempted to save two wounded crew members by landing the crippled aircraft. He managed to avoid a village and landed the plane, but it exploded, killing all three aboard.

He was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross (Click here). The citation reads: “As the deputy “master bomber” had already been shot down, the success of the attack depended on Squadron-Leader Bazalgette, and this he knew. Despite the appalling conditions in his burning aircraft, he pressed on gallantly…. That the attack was successful was due to his magnificent effort.”

A junior high school in Calgary, a mountain in Jasper National Park and memorial gardens in New Malden, Surrey, England, have been named after him. The colours and markings of his aircraft have been painted on a reconstructed Avro Lancaster at the Bomber Command Museum of Canada in Nanton, Alta., south of Calgary.

August 4, 1914

Canada declares war on Germany.

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Photographs document the true agents of change—the people

Story by Stephen J. Thorne

It’s telling that the finalists for the most prestigious prize in photojournalism were all connected to some form of conflict, yet the principal subjects in all six photographs were civilians.

For the first time in its 61-year history, the esteemed World Press Photo (WPP) competition this year announced nominees for its grand prize before declaring the Photo of the Year.

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Memorials unveiled 
This week marks the anniversary of two memorials in Europe that have attracted tens of thousands of Canadians over the decades since they were built.

The Menin Gate (Click here) in Ypres, Belgium, has been a destination for pilgrims of remembrance since it was inaugurated on July 24, 1927.

Hundreds of thousands of men passed through the Menin Gate on their way to five major First World War offensives fought on the Ypres Salient. After the war, it was turned into a memorial to the 200,000 Commonwealth soldiers killed nearby. The Menin Gate bears the name of more than 54,000 who have no known grave, including 6,940 Canadians.

Traffic through the gate is stopped for a Last Post ceremony held every evening at 8 p.m. Since 1928, the daily ceremony has been interrupted only during the German occupation of the Second World War, when it was observed instead in England.

It bears two inscriptions. One dedicates the memorial to the “armies of the British Empire who stood here from 1914 to 1918.” A second reads, “Here are recorded names of officers and men who fell in Ypres Salient but to whom the fortune of war denied the known and honoured burial given to their comrades in death.”

Canadian pilgrims have flocked to the Canadian National Vimy Memorial (Click here) in France since it was unveiled by King Edward VIII on July 26, 1936. More than 100,000 attended the event, including 6,000 veterans who travelled from Canada.

France ceded the adjacent land to Canada in 1922. It took 11 years to complete the memorial, which stands on the highest point of Vimy Ridge, seized by the four Canadian divisions attacking together for the first time in a fierce battle April 9-12, 1917.

Twenty symbolic figures grace the memorial, including the figure of Canada Bereft mourning her fallen sons (Click here). Carved into the walls are names of 11,285 Canadian soldiers killed in France who have no known graves.

Its inscription reads: “To the valour of their countrymen in the Great War and in memory of their sixty thousand dead this monument is raised by the people of Canada.”

The long wait for peace

Story by Sharon Adams

The world awaits a peace treaty to formally end the Korean War, 65 years after an armistice ceased the fighting between military forces. The Korean War went into hiatus with the signing of an armistice on July 27, 1953. But a peace treaty was never signed—the war did not officially end.

#KoreanWar65 #LestWeForget

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July 26, 1936

King Edward VIII unveils the Canadian National Vimy Memorial in France.

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