Entrenching tools like this WW I-era model have long been used for much more than digging. Beginning in 1915, soldiers routinely sharpened the shovel for use as a weapon in close-quarters fighting.
[Auckland Museum]

Dig this: The lowly shovel held in high esteem by soldiers

STORY BY STEPHEN J. THORNE

Ask a veteran of virtually any wartime infantry what piece of kit he valued most, and chances are he’ll say his shovel.

Yes, the lowly shovel, known in military parlance as the entrenching, or intrenching, tool, also called a trenching tool, or simply e-tool—any way you call it, the shovel, or spade, has provided shelter, convenience, security and, to the degree possible, peace of mind to millennia of grunts. So long as you had your shovel, you had options.

With the right combination of arms, shoulders, legs and back at the top end, the business end of the shovel dug life-sustaining wells, trenches and foxholes; filled sandbags and potholes; removed obstacles and erected barriers. It fashioned cooking pits and latrines; chopped wood and pried objects; removed earth, debris and rubble from trapped soldiers and civilians. And it buried the dead.

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Méharicourt Communal Cemetery is the final resting place of numerous Canadian airmen, including Victoria Cross recipient Andrew Mynarski. [Poppy Mercier]

British-born French resident honours locally buried Canadian airmen

STORY BY ALEX BOWERS

In Méharicourt Communal Cemetery, about 45 minutes from Courcelette, France, lies WW II Canadian Victoria Cross recipient Andrew Mynarski. Etched into the white—if weathered—gravestone is the symbol of the Commonwealth’s highest military honour, earned on June 13, 1944, when the Royal Canadian Air Force airman attempted to save a trapped member of his crew while his crippled Lancaster bomber burned around him. Mynarski died shortly after his exploits, but would be remembered.

Immediately beside his final resting place, however, are the names of lesser-known Canadians, who, aboard a different aircraft—KB714—also sacrificed their lives on the same bombing mission that night. Among their number was 28-year-old Flying Officer Russel Nelson Wilson from Landis, Sask., serving with 419 (Moose) Squadron when the pilot and his six other crew members perished amid operations to destroy railyards at Cambrai. Their plane crashed in the Somme, near Courcelette.

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King Charles III waves to the crowd as he and Queen Camilla depart the National War Memorial after placing a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier the day before the 25th anniversary ceremonies.[Stephen J. Thorne/Legion Magazine]

Ceremony marks 25th anniversary of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier

STORY BY STEPHEN J. THORNE

A quarter century ago, an unidentified Canadian soldier killed at the seminal First World War Battle of Vimy Ridge was ceremonially exhumed from his grave 8.5 kilometres away in Cabaret Rouge British Cemetery and brought home to Canada.

Vimy, because it was here, in France in April 1917, that all four divisions of the Canadian Corps fought together for the first time, claiming—under unprecedented Canadian leadership—a victory that would propel the country to its rightful place in the war, and the world. Brought home, because Canadians—indeed, all secure, free-living people—need reminding of what it took, and still takes, to keep them secure and free.

More than 18,000 of the over 66,000 Canadians killed in the Great War were never identified, their names listed on the Vimy Memorial (11,285) and the Menin Gate in Belgium (6,940). This soldier was destined to represent them all and the 27,000 who remain unidentified from the Second World War, 16 from Korea and undetermined others from the Boer War and other conflicts.

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Mandy Shintani admires a samurai sword at the Nikkei National Museum.

“Samurai in Our Closet”: New podcast highlights Japanese-Canadian WW II service and civilian internment

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Mandy Shintani remembers the samurai in her family closet.

Just a child at the time, the third-generation Japanese-Canadian—or Sansei—had little understanding of where, exactly, the sword came from and why it was there.

It belonged to her father, that much she knew, but the reason it stayed hidden away and how it had come into his possession in the first place remained unanswered.

“When I was a kid,” explained Shintani, “I didn’t even know he’d been interned,” referring to Canada’s racially motivated policies of the Second World War where more than 22,000 Japanese-Canadians were forcibly removed from the West Coast, then incarcerated after Japan launched the Dec. 7, 1941, assault on Pearl Harbor.

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A young patient was among those wounded in a Russian missile strike on a Ukrainian children’s hospital in Kyiv on July 8, 2024. Two people were killed and at least 16 wounded in the strike on Okhmatdyt Hospital.[ZelenskyyUa/X]

Wartime attacks on health-care workers and facilities on steep rise

STORY BY STEPHEN J. THORNE

Attacks on clinics, hospitals and health-care workers in conflict zones numbered more than 3,600 in 2024, a 62 per cent increase in two years, says a new report.

More than a third of the attacks targeted Gaza or the West Bank; hundreds more were recorded in Ukraine, Lebanon, Myanmar and Sudan.

The report “Epidemic of Violence: Violence Against Health Care in Conflict 2024,” by the Safeguarding Health in Conflict Coalition, says the attacks consisted of air, missile and drone strikes; shelling; tank fire; shootings; arson; the looting and takeover of health facilities; and the arrest and detention of health workers.

“By far the largest number of attacks on health care—more than 1,300—took place in Gaza and the West Bank, far more than we have ever reported in one conflict in one year, including more than double the number of health workers killed,” wrote coalition chair Len Rubenstein.

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Flying Officer Donald Galloway Watt McKie was returning from a mission when his, and another plane were shot down by U.K. friendly fire. He did not survive. [McKie family]

Remembering Canadian downed by U.K. friendly fire tragedy in WW II

STORY BY ALEX BOWERS

Craig McKie of Fraser Valley, B.C., never met his father.

He was just two months old on May 29, 1944, when Flying Officer Donald Galloway Watt McKie of Toronto, piloting the Wellington bomber LN443, lost his life, along with all five other crew members, following a friendly fire incident near the rural English village of Hazelbury Bryan in Dorset.

The absence the tragedy left never went away. It was “always there,” recalls Craig. There was “always a missing chair.”

As for many families who lost fathers, brothers and sons, the McKie’s never really got over it.

The lost became internalized and its ripple felt for generations, including by people who didn’t even meet him. Craig’s daughter Catriana was one of them.

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