James Prinsep Beadle’s painting “Piper James Richardson, VC, Canadian Scottish, Regina Trench, 8.10.1916” hangs in the officers’ mess of the Royal Scots Regiment in Edinburgh. Lance Corporal Richardson is one of four members of the 16th Battalion (Canadian Scottish Regiment) awarded the Victoria Cross during WWI. (BAGPIPE NEWS)

The badass bagpipers of the 16th Battalion

STORY BY STEPHEN J. THORNE

It was Oct. 8, 1916, and the Battle of the Somme had been raging for more than three months. Allied forces were making their final push against fierce German defences dug in at Regina Trench on the heights overlooking the Ancre river valley.

The 16th Battalion (Canadian Scottish Regiment) was crossing more than 600 metres of no man’s land to their objective in the pre-dawn hour, advancing in “long, snake-like lines…by the light of the bursting shells,” as one officer described it, when they were stopped dead in their tracks.

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Steve McQueen (left) with Wally Floody, who was a technical advisor in production of the 1963 film The Great Escape. [Wikipedia]

The Canadian connection to Victoria Cross recipient Edmund De Wind

STORY BY PAIGE JASMINE GILMAR

When Wally Floody was commissioned as a pilot officer in the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1940, he didn’t realize he was going to earn the moniker “The Tunnel King.” Formerly working in the northern Ontario gold mines, Floody’s mining skills were tested when he was taken prisoner and sent to the infamous German Stalag Luft III. There, he became an architect of the Great Escape, one of history’s more iconic prison breaks, in which 76 Allied airmen fleed the facility 80 years ago.

Born in Chatham, Ont., in 1918, Floody enlisted in the RCAF at the outset of the Second World War and was put on the waiting list for the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan. After some persuading—since the RCAF was looking for single men and Floody was married—he was ordered to report to No. 2 Manning Depot in Brandon, Man., on Thanksgiving weekend 1940.

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