Tag Archives: Legion Magazine

Unarmed, unequipped and untrained: Citizen spies outwit occupying armies

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An item from the Legion Magazine.
Front Lines
Stephen J thorne

Wikipedia

Unarmed, unequipped and untrained: Citizen spies outwit occupying armies

STORY BY STEPHEN J. THORNE

On March 22, 2022, Russian forces captured Kherson in southern Ukraine, giving rise to a spontaneous and loosely organized citizen spy ring that would play a crucial role in ending the port city’s brutal occupation in just eight months.

Rooted out of a café at the centre of the city, partisans gathered grassroots intelligence from rooftops, roadsides, security cameras and farm fields, the latter where they pretended to tend livestock while recording the movements of Russian formations.

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Battle of the St. Lawrence: U-boats Attack
Military Milestones

Wikipedia

Port Arthur earns its U-boat bounty

STORY BY SHARON ADAMS

Winston Churchill decided the Royal Navy’s Second World War corvettes should be named after flowers. The idea that a notorious U-boat would be drowned by a vessel with a plant moniker was appealing to him.

The Royal Canadian Navy took a different tack, choosing to name its corvettes after towns and cities, symbolically linking Canadians across the country to the war effort.

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Revera Retirement Living

Vikings’ genetic diversity greater than present-day Scandinavia: study

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An item from the Legion Magazine.
Front Lines
Stephen J thorne

iStock

Vikings’ genetic diversity greater than present-day Scandinavia: study

STORY BY STEPHEN J. THORNE

Mention the word Vikings and one is likely to conjure images of blond-haired, blue-eyed brutes in beards sailing distinctive ships, wielding axes and shields.While the ships, axes and shields are a sure thing, and the beards are a pretty good bet—at least for the men—a new study has found that the adventurers and plunderers who settled in Newfoundland some 500 years before Columbus crossed the ocean were more genetically diverse than the myths would suggest.

In the largest genetic analysis of Viking remains ever conducted, palaeogeneticist Ricardo Rodrı́guez-Varelal and his colleagues at Stockholm University and the Stockholm-based Centre for Palaeogenetics analyzed Scandinavian burials going back 2,000 years.

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Exclusive Pre-sale 1943: The Allies gain the advantage in the Second World War
Military Milestones

Wikipedia

The Canadian who was the real life James Bond

STORY BY SHARON ADAMS

William Samuel Clouston Stanger was born on Jan. 23, 1897, in Winnipeg.

He had a humble childhood, but was destined for greatness.

His birth parents gave him up for adoption because they couldn’t care for him. He took his adopted parents’ surname, Stephenson, and dropped out of school to become a telegrapher.

He eventually became a decorated First World War air ace, a business titan and a spymaster who set up the British espionage system in the Americas, schooled the United States in undercover operations and established a spy school in Canada.

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Nazi treasure: The ever-elusive myth

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An item from the Legion Magazine.
Front Lines
Stephen J thorne

Cpl. Donald R. Ornitz/American Commission For the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments In War Areas/Wikimedia

Nazi treasure: The ever-elusive myth

STORY BY STEPHEN J. THORNE

A story broke recently that purported to divulge a long-lost secret surrounding four German soldiers who buried a cache of ammunition cases laden with treasure as they fled advancing Allied forces in the Netherlands in 1945.

The location of this cache of coins, watches, jewelry, diamonds and other gems supposedly worth more than C$25 million has been a mystery for almost 80 years. German soldiers stole the hoard from a broken bank vault in Arnhem during the final year of the war and buried it in ammunition boxes as they fled.

Recently, among a pile of documents released by the Netherlands national archives, a treasure map has been found with an X evidently marking the spot where the treasure lies buried in what is now a field.

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Exclusive Pre-sale 1943: The Allies gain the advantage in the Second World War
Military Milestones

 Northern BC Archives & Special Collections

Canada’s attempt to become the ultimate Arctic warrior

STORY BY SHARON ADAMS

“Generals January and February mount guard for the Canadian people all year round,” historian Charles P. Snow opined in 1940, to general agreement and relief. The Second World War was to change that opinion.

Adolph Hitler sent more than three million troops to invade Russia on June 22, 1941, mistakenly believing Russia would capitulate to his blitzkrieg as quickly as western European nations at the beginning of the war.

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STORY BY ROBERT AMOS

E.J. Hughes attended the Vancouver School of Art from 1929-1935, and was recognized as the most talented artist of his generation on the West Coast. But the Great Depression made an art career impossible at that time. Reflecting on the years he had enjoyed as a cadet, he enlisted in the army on Aug. 30, 1939, just days before the commencement of the Second World War.

Hughes had joined the artillery, but almost from the start he had higher ambitions. Through his teachers, Fred Varley and Charles H. Scott, Hughes was aware of the War Art Program of the First World War, and he began writing to his superiors, asking for a role as a war artist. At the time, there was no war art program, but early in 1941 he was posted to Ottawa as one of the first three “service artists” in the Canadian Army.

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