Front Lines

Imagine you are a Scottish soldier and you're handed a pair of wire cutters, then told to cross no man's land and open the wire in front of the German trenches in the midst of one of the bloodiest battles of the First World War.   Those were the orders given to Private James Arthur Heysham Johnstone of the 5th Battalion (Scottish Rifles)—known as the Cameronians—near Mametz Wood on the night of July 19-20, 1916. It was less than three weeks into the 141-day Somme offensive and the losses had already been staggering.

New evidence uncovered long after a prehistoric cemetery was discovered in Sudan suggest that its inhabitants weren't killed in what was believed to be one of humankind's earliest known battles but may instead have died over the course of protracted warfare. Furthermore, the study by paleoanthropologist Isabelle Crevecoeur of the University of Bordeaux, France, and her team of anthropologists, geochemists and prehistorians suggests the ongoing series of raids, ambushes and other violence was likely attributable to an issue all too familiar to 21st-century society: climate change.

The sinking of U-94 by an American aircraft and HMCS Oakville off Cuba on the night of Aug. 27-28, 1942, brought to a dramatic end the submarine's relatively long and eventful service in the Kriegsmarine. Commissioned in August 1940, U-94 had sunk 26 Allied ships in two years, totalling 141,852 gross register tons, under the successive command of two Knight's Cross recipients, Kapitänleutnant Herbert Kuppisch and Oberleutnant zur See Otto Ites.

The last thing Corporal Sean Teal said to Warrant Officer Rick Nolan was: “Do you want a Life Saver?” Before Nolan could reply, a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) fired by a Taliban fighter struck the windshield of their G-Wagon and killed him. Teal, driving in the seat right next to him, was concussed but functional. “All of a sudden, wham, there was this huge flash and I was smashed back in my seat,” Teal recalled in an interview with Legion Magazine. “Everything just went black. All you could smell was burning plastic and burning hair and it was like there was no air...

Tufts Cove is a shallow, innocuous little inlet nestled at the back end of Halifax Harbour on the Dartmouth side between a power station and the abandoned military neighbourhood of Shannon Park. Because of its proximity to the 56-year-old generating plant and what was once housing for Cold War-era sailors and their families, the cove is fenced off, blocking access to both the water and land. No one ever goes there, anyway; they have no reason to..

The graveyard of empires appears to have claimed another victim. But why couldn't a high-powered coalition that included the United States, United Kingdom and Canada defeat a radically fundamentalist group of murderous zealots? Many said from the beginning that the post-9/11 invaders of Afghanistan were doomed to follow the Persians, Greeks, Arabs, Turks, Mongols, Britons (three times) and Soviets—none of whom managed a permanent presence or far-reaching impact in the parched and willfully independent land of deserts, mountains and open plains...

Osama bin Laden had more in mind than inflicting incidental death and mayhem when he dispatched 19 al-Qaida terrorists to strike at the heart of American economic and military might two decades ago. With hatred rooted in real and perceived abuse and exploitation, he aimed to lure the West, specifically the United States, into a protracted and costly war of attrition on home soil, where devout jihadists would be motivated and readily available...

It's snowing as I write this—heavily. They tell us to expect 40 centimetres in Ottawa. It's one of those storms that I remember as a kid, before the responsibility of shoveling—or much responsibility at all—was foisted upon me. In those days, winter storms were somehow always big and what excited me most then, and what I remember with great fondness and no small amount of awe now, is that they meant a new round of war play—new forts, tunnels, trenches, bunkers, and epic snowball fights....

The worst peacetime disaster in Canadian naval history occurred 51 years ago this week when nine crew were killed and another 53 injured in an explosion and fire aboard HMCS Kootenay. The engine-room accident on Oct. 23, 1969, marked the last time Canadian service personnel were required to be buried overseas and it helped bring about sweeping changes to shipboard fire-prevention and firefighting systems...

The First World War is known for stagnancy and stalemate—trench-bound days of misery and boredom punctuated by periodic terror and wholesale slaughter. Soldiers from both sides lived in 2,490 kilometres of trenchworks winding southward from the North Sea through Belgium and France. For them it was a waiting game—a long, cold, mud-soaked ordeal broken only by the call to go “over the top,” a suicidal charge into a hail of bullets, usually at a whistle's blow...

Everyone knows what a Victoria Cross recipient is made of. But what about the Victoria Cross itself? Instituted by Queen Victoria at the end of the Crimean War, it has long been believed that the British Empire's highest award for valour was originally made from bronze taken from Russian cannons captured at Sevastopol in 1855...

In December 2015, a “mudlark” treasure-hunting along the bank of the Thames River in southern England found a corroded metal cross buried in the ooze exposed at low tide. His name was Tobias Neto, and the hunk of rusty metal was none other than a Victoria Cross. Or was it?

It was the night of April 27-28, 1944, and Lancaster R-ND 781/G of 622 Squadron, Royal Air Force, piloted by Flight Lieutenant James Andrew Watson of Hamilton, Ont., was on a bombing mission to Friedrichshafen, Germany. R-ND would never reach its target, but Watson's heroic actions that black night over occupied territory would inspire an unsuccessful campaign to award him a posthumous Victoria Cross...

Months before it entered the Second World War in December 1941, the United States invested heavily in the Allied cause by instituting the US$50.1-billion Lend-Lease policy, providing food and war materiel to Britain and other friendly nations. Worth nearly US$600 billion in today's currency, the measures under what was formally known as An Act to Promote the Defense of the United States lasted the rest of the war and helped turn the tide of battle both in Europe and the Pacific...

There were six of them, Robertsons all, who joined the Canadian forces, left their hometown of Campbellton, N.B., and sailed overseas to serve in the Second World War. Every one of the brothers survived the fighting, yet each died before his time, victims of more insidious killers than Axis bullets and bombs—namely, cancer and cardiopulmonary disease. None saw the age of 80...

Pierre Berton called him one of the toughest war correspondents he ever knew, a trusted and familiar newsman who “ate censors for breakfast.” Recently, an Ontario firm auctioned off the estate of Gerard William Ramaut (Bill) Boss, 13 years after he died of pneumonia in an Ottawa hospital, age 90.

The First World War is synonymous with torrential rain, deathly deep mud and bitter cold. It seems no stalemate or major battle was without these added miseries that brought with them disproportionate infection, disease and death. Now a new scientific study says a once-in-a-lifetime climate anomaly is to blame for the horrendous weather that contributed to hundreds of thousands of battlefield deaths and the 1918 Spanish flu (H1N1) pandemic that cost tens of millions of lives worldwide...

The first casualty of war may be the truth, but the last and just as certain is the non-combatant. As many as 85 million people were killed during the Second World War but fewer than 30 per cent were military. More of the dead were victims of war crimes than legitimate battle...

For many outside the battle zones of Europe, the Second World War is a matter of textbooks and faded black-and-white photographs. But for those whose roots lay in the paths of Adolf Hitler's conquest, the war remains close, a tactile connection to tragedy and loss even 75 years and three generations removed from 85 million deaths and untold suffering. Siblings, children, grandchildren feel the pang of lost relatives many never knew. In Germany, where the war began and ended, the fate of more than a million soldiers and citizens remains unknown. Many were taken prisoner by Red Army troops, never to be seen again...

British prime minister Winston Churchill called the 1940 evacuation of British and Allied troops from the French port at Dunkirk “a colossal military disaster.” He also called it “a miracle of deliverance.” Somehow, defeat had turned to victory, of sorts. Between May 27 and June 4, a ragtag fleet of 850 barges, ferries, fishing boats, lifeboats and pleasure craft, all summoned by the small-craft section of the British Ministry of Shipping, set sail from Ramsgate and made its way 40 kilometres across the English Channel...

Pierre Gauthier landed on D-Day with his Régiment de la Chaudière and fought through France, Belgium and into the Netherlands before a second wound ended his war. His regiment lost 58 men killed on June 6, 1944, and 248 before the fighting ended 11 months later, but among the most unsettling images that remain burned in the veteran's mind are those of the people they had liberated turning on each other and on those who had defeated them four or five years earlier...

The Second World War set a new standard for disappearances. Unprecedented millions simply vanished during the maelstrom in Europe and the Far East, many under genocidal conquests by Japanese forces in China and Nazis on the continent. The German penchant for detail and meticulous record-keeping answered the questions of many who suspected Jewish and other relatives had been shuttled off to concentration camps, only to die by gas or gun...

The end of the Second World War in Europe led to celebrations in Allied cities the world over, but for many Europeans devastated by tragedy and loss over six long years of conflict, the continent must have seemed a post-apocalyptic wasteland. It was no place for celebration. The cost of fascism's march across Europe and subsequent occupations was exacted on non-combatants more than anyone. Fewer than 30 per cent of the 85 million people killed during the war were military, and the vast majority were citizens of Allied countries— primarily the Soviet Union and China...

It was a cloudy afternoon on May 10, 1945, when four Canadian navy ships intercepted U-889 some 250 kilometres southeast of Cape Race, Nfld. The patrol aircraft that discovered the steaming German submarine circled overhead. The war had been over less than a week and all German U-boats had been ordered to cease offensive operations, even before the surrender was formalized...

“I would rather suffer with coffee than be senseless.” – Napoleon Bonaparte   When times are tough and you're far from home, it's often the little things that mean the most. You'd be hard-pressed to find a soldier who wouldn't put coffee near the top of that list....

Spanish authorities recently captured a 22-metre submarine after its three crewmen transported US$121-million worth of cocaine 7,700 kilometres across the Atlantic Ocean from Colombia, then scuttled it and ran. It's the biggest narcotics submarine ever found, and the first confirmed to have transported drugs from the Americas to Europe, signalling what experts have characterized as a new era in the distribution of illicit drugs...

The night letters started arriving at his parents' home in Afghanistan's Helmand province soon after Ahmad Sajad Kazimi took a job translating for Canadian and other NATO forces fighting the war on terror. “Tell your son to quit his job and stop working for coalition forces,” one said. “Otherwise we kill your son because he is co-operating with the Infidels!”...

Over the course of three Canadian army tours in their parched and war-ravaged homeland, Alex Watson came to know and respect the long-suffering Afghan people for their courage, resilience, devotion and unfailing courtesy. As a CiMiC (civilian-military co-operation) officer and later as a company commander attached to an Afghan National Army battalion, Watson became intimately acquainted with the citizens and culture Canadian troops were sent to protect...

They are among the most iconic images of the Second World War—blurred, grainy and, the best of them, as stirring and in-the-moment as any battlefield photographs ever taken. There are only 11 pictures—and nine surviving negatives—from that early morning of Tuesday, June 6, 1944, on Omaha Beach, the bloodiest of the D-Day landings, the one depicted in the movie Saving Private Ryan. But two of Hungarian photojournalist Robert Capa's images, taken for the weekly Life magazine, stand out...

James Victor (Vic) Johnson was a 25-year-old second lieutenant still in training at the Royal Canadian School of Military Engineering in Chilliwack, B.C., when he was mistakenly tagged to go off to war just before Christmas 1951. The Eston, Sask., native had been in no rush to get to the front, but there were two Second Lieutenant Johnsons in training at the time and the other one, who had served several years and wanted a field assignment, had expressed his desire to go...

On Nov. 13, 1821, Captain Barnabas Lincoln and his crew, including a Newfoundlander, set sail from Boston aboard the schooner Exertion. They were bound for the Cuban town of Trinidad loaded with foodstuffs and furniture. They had no idea what they were in for, but the tome-like title of the skipper's 40-page account, completed in April 1822, pretty much sums it up: Narrative of the Capture, Sufferings and Escape of Capt. Barnabas Lincoln And His Crew, Who Were Taken By a Piratical Schooner, December, 1821, Off Key Largo; Together With Facts Illustrating the Character of Those Piratical Cruisers....

Lancaster pilot Jack Widdicombe was a wide-eyed Prairie farm boy about to be thrust into the inferno of Second World War Europe when he boarded a double-decker bus and toured London shortly after arriving in England. The 21-year-old native of Foxwarren, Man., and a pal set out to see the sights and instead encountered block after block of rubble. Twenty-three bombing missions over Nazi territory and 1,200 hours of combat  and other wartime flying lay ahead of him...

As a member of 5 Field Ambulance in Afghanistan, medic Macha Khoudja-Poirier treated so many patients with such a variety of ills and injures, she didn't know what more she could see to fill out her “trauma book.” Better known in English as a casualty book, the journal is a log of the cases a medic handles, like the “life list” birders keep of the birds they see or the logbook a pilot maintains of the planes they fly and the hours spent airborne....

They provided medical aid, comfort and peace to wounded and dying soldiers throughout decades of conflict, but it was during the First World War that the nursing sisters of the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps came into their own. Nicknamed “Bluebirds” for their blue dresses and white veils, many soldiers considered the 3,141 nursing sisters who volunteered their services between 1914 and 1918 more angel than mortal....

Rob Purvis was 20 years old when he, Butch, Larry and Billy—school buddies from Winnipeg—crossed the border and joined the United States Army in Fargo, N.D. It was 1968, they needed work and they yearned for adventure. They got work, all right, and more adventure than they had bargained for. They all wanted to go to Vietnam, and they all did. Larry Collins, 22, would die there. Purvis and the others would eventually return home changed men to an indifferent Canadian public that, for the most part, didn't know and didn't care where they had been or what they had done...

“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....

The use of performance-enhancing drugs has a long history in war, both as a product of state-sanctioned programs and illicit use by participants. Aggression, energy and alertness have always been critical to any warfighter, but artificial means of achieving and maintaining a state of combat readiness have evolved—or devolved, as the case may be—and possibly spread in recent decades..

In March 2002, on a mountain near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border known as the Whale's Back, a company from the vaunted U.S. 10th Mountain Division joined 400 Canadian troops and a handful of U.S. Navy Seals on an assault to clear enemy positions, bunkers and suspected cave complexes. The undulating rock overlooked a valley through which Taliban and al-Qaida fighters were escaping into mountain passes that led them to safety in Pakistan's hinterlands a few kilometres away...

When I was young, the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo launches out of Cape Canaveral were family television events without parallel. There was a sense of awe surrounding those NASA missions, culminating years later in the triumphant moon landings. We followed every one, minute-by-transfixed-minute, on a big old black-and-white TV with four legs, rabbit ears and an outsized wood-veneer cabinet...

In December 1941, just days after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, United States president Franklin Delano Roosevelt informed his wife Eleanor that a guest, or guests, would be coming to stay at the White House. “He told me I could not know who was coming, nor how many, but I must be prepared to have them stay over Christmas,” Eleanor Roosevelt wrote years later in The Atlantic. “He added as an afterthought that I must see to it that we had good champagne and brandy in the house and plenty of whiskey.”...

Celebrated officers wore the feathered crowns of egrets. British infantrymen wear “hackles.” Italian shock troops, known as Bersaglieri, rather flamboyantly sport the feathers of a particular wood grouse known as a capercaillie. Military tradition has spawned a bizarre menagerie of headgear, both for dress occasions and battle. The practice is virtually as old as warfare. It knows no borders and, at times, it seems to defy logic...

He ranked No. 24 on the list of Germany's Second World War U-boat aces but, in sheer chutzpah, few could compare with Reinhard Hardegen. Hardegen died in Germany on June 9 at age 105, the last of a breed both reviled and respected for preying on all manner of Allied ships from beneath the waves—a cloak of invisibility that offered them large measures of both risk and reward...

Less than a century after the Americans were defeated in the War of 1812, the U.S. Naval War College, Class of 1894, came up with a hypothetical plan to give it another try—by invading Halifax and destroying Pictou County's coal mines...

In early March 2018, the co-founder of Microsoft, Paul Allen, led an expedition 800 kilometres east of Australia, where he found the long-lost wreck of the USS Lexington, an aircraft carrier sunk during the Battle of the Coral Sea almost 76 years ago...

Seventy-five years ago, on July 9, 1943, a Dornier Do 217E became separated from the rest of its 10-plane Luftwaffe flight as it entered a cloudbank on its way to bomb London.  Likely based near the town of Toulouse, France, close to the Spanish border, the German bombers had crossed the English coast at Hastings on one of hundreds of raids that dropped tens of thousands of tonnes of bombs over the course of the Second World War, killing some 60,000 British civilians and injuring 80,000 more—most of them Londoners.

Ask Canada's last-surviving Battle of Britain veteran which aircraft he preferred, the Supermarine Spitfire or the North American P-51 Mustang, and the 102-year-old fighter pilot doesn't bat an eye. “The Spitfire every time,” says John Stewart Hart, a Second World War squadron leader who flew both, as well as Hurricanes, during six years of combat...

There was a bit of a row across the pond recently after the Scottish Maritime Museum decided to adopt gender-neutral signage for its vessels.  Museum director David Mann told The Guardian newspaper the decision to drop “she” for “it” when referencing ships was made after two signs were vandalized, presumably by folks opposed to the feminization of inanimate objects, a practice also applied to man's other favourite toys: planes, trains and automobiles...

In his orders of the day on June 6, 1944, Lieutenant-General Henry D.G. (Harry) Crerar told some 14,500 Canadian soldiers destined for the beaches and drop zones of Normandy that their impending success was thanks largely to the disaster at Dieppe.  Almost two years earlier, 5,000 Canadians, 1,000 British and 50 U.S. Army Rangers launched an ill-planned and poorly supported raid on the French seaside town northeast of the D-Day beaches...

A field report submitted by Adolf Hitler's commander-in-chief on the western front said the Allies' invading D-Day forces gained a foothold in occupied Europe due to four key factors. In the report filed two weeks after the June 6, 1944, invasion, Field Marshal Karl R. Gerd von Rundstedt said the Allies' “complete mastery in the air” was the No. 1 contributor to their early successes in Normandy....

The American employed soaring oratory in calling D-Day troops to “the Great Crusade.” The Brit summoned the words of a 17th-century soldier-poet as he urged the “team” on in their “great and righteous cause.”   The Canadian, on the other hand, reminded his troops of the “knowledge and experience bought and paid for” by brothers-in-arms who had gone down to abject defeat at Dieppe two years earlier....   Music by Vera Lynn – We'll meet again (Fair Use – Editorial)

The original sat in a musty filing cabinet in the Halifax office of The Canadian Press for years: a sheaf of rice paper, its first page scrawled with the words “Passed by Censor 1942” across the top, just above the typed “BULLETIN.”  It was dated Oct. 16 out of Sydney, N.S., the first news report of the sinking of the SS Caribou two days earlier at the hands of a German U-boat, U-69. The file had long since disappeared when I left CP in 2012....