CPL. R.A. BIDGO... 的个人资料M.U.L.照片日志列表更多  |  工具 帮助 |
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6月17日 Native soldier honoured at BordenPublished: Wednesday, June 7th, 2006 Cpl. Pegahmagabow was born March 9, 1889 into the Caribou clan, which is now the Shawanaga First Nation on Georgian Bay. He volunteered his services when Canada declared war on Germany in August, 1914. He became a scout and sniper with the 1st Battalion CEF. He received his first award, the Military June 1916, for delivering messages during battles at Ypres, Festubert and Givenchy. In the two years following he earned two bars to go with the medal. The bar he received in 1918 was to recognize his courage after he ran onto the battlefield, during heavy enemy gunfire, to bring ammunition back to the trench. He was presented with his awards along with 200 other soldiers after he returned home. The ceremony was held Aug. 27, 1919 at the Canadian National Exhibition. He died in Parry Sound Aug. 5, 1952. His daughter Marie Anderson and grandson Merle Pegahmagabow were on hand for the ceremony Tuesday. The sounds of a traditional drum circle ushered in two lines of soldiers instead of the usual pipes and drums band. Lt.-Gov. James Bartleman inspected the troops before the ceremony got underway. "It's a special day for my rangers, for Canadian Forces and really, the people of Canada," said the commanding officer of the 3rd Ranger Patrol Group, Lt.-Col. Keith Lawrence. "This is a significant day in our history here at Canadian Forces Base Borden, a history that dates back 90 years to the formation of this base during the First World War," said Col. Stewart Moore, CFB Borden's commander. "Today we're here to celebrate the most highly decorated Canadian Aboriginal veteran of that war - Cpl. Francis Pegahmagabow. "Cpl. Francis Pegahmagabow's outstanding devotion to duty, his bravery and unwavering belief in the cause of freedom serves to remind us of those same principles we continue to observe and defend in the Canadian Forces today." In his speech, Bartleman called Cpl. Pegahmagabow a great role model for all Canadians. "We sometimes forget Natives didn't have the vote until 1960," Bartleman said. "But over 10,000 volunteered for war." Merle Pegahmagabow, Cpl. Pegahmagabow's grandson, was also on hand for the celebration. "It's an honour for our family to be here as you honour our father and our grandfather," he said. "What's happening today should happen for other Indians to recognize what they've done for Canada." He led a prayer and sent a message in his language to his grandfather, letting him know his family was thinking of him. Marie Anderson, Pegahmagabow's last surviving child, helped Bartleman unveil a wall decorated in her father's honour. They also unveiled a memorial cairn in front of the building. It was from river rocks from Cpl. Pegahmagabow's home on Perry Island. The inscription reads, "Dedicated to the memory of Corporal Francis Pegahmagabow, MM 1899-1952. A member of the Perry Island Band, a hero of the First World War and Canada's most decorated Aboriginal soldier." The cairn is located at Ortona Road and Market Place Crescent. 6月13日 Rocket RichardDid You Know? • Joseph-Henri-Maurice Richard was born on Aug. 4, 1921, the eldest of eight children. He grew up in the working-class Bordeaux section of Montreal near Ville Saint-Laurent during the Great Depression. Richard played hockey with the Verdun Maple Leafs and Parc Lafontaine teams, as well as the Montreal Royals. To help support his family, Richard dropped out of school at age 16 to work in a CPR machine shop. • At the outbreak of the Second World War, Richard was desperate to serve his country. He was rejected from military service three times — twice as a soldier (too many unhealed junior hockey injuries) and once as a machinist (not enough formal training). He began machinist training at the Montreal Technical School, but the war ended before he could complete the four-year certification process. 'Incredibly brave man' remembered
Compensation deal close for poisoned soldierC B C . C A N e w s - F u l l S t o r y :
A deal is in the works to compensate a Canadian soldier whose own men were accused of trying to poison him in Croatia in 1993.
One of the lawyers for Matt Stopford says he is hopeful that the federal government will agree to compensation before the case goes to trial in September. "If there is to be a settlement, I think it is very close," retired Col. Michel Drapeau told CBC.CA on Monday. "There are some things to settle before I can say it's a done deal." Stopford's lawyers have been in court-ordered negotiations with the government for about three months. Crown lawyers originally offered about $300,000, but the offer was rejected. Stopford, a former warrant officer, accused the Defence Department and the federal government of failing to warn him about the poisoning attempts and failing to provide proper care when he fell ill after returning to Canada. An RCMP investigator said several soldiers confessed to pouring boot blacking, battery acid and eye drops into Stopford's coffee in an effort to render him unable to carry out his command. The soldiers thought Stopford was too aggressive and reckless and hoped to make him too sick to function. Chain of command knew A military police investigation found that at least six soldiers were involved in the attempted poisoning. About 30 people in the chain of command knew about the attempts, but no one told Stopford until six years later, in 1999. The soldiers were never charged because the statute of limitations had run out. Drapeau said his client is still very sick. "To say that he's not in the best physical shape, that would be an understatement," Drapeau told CBC.CA. "He walks with a cane, he can't see out of one eye and he takes a lot of medication." Drapeau said the coming trial probably helped bring a settlement closer. "As soon as the trial date looms larger and larger, that becomes an incentive," he said. "If there's any one factor, that's the factor." 5月16日 Why My Street Is Called YpresWhy My Street Is Called Ypres
Have you ever wondered… how the name of your street came to be? Well… ok maybe you have never actually taken the time to sit down and think about it and contemplated the meaning of your street name. Maybe you think I have too much time on my hands. But just hear me out and you will be intrigued in the end. In my travels with military I have seen many street names that are the same in different cities and towns. Like, King Street, Queen Street and Division Street. They are named after people, places or things. Some are tokens of remembrance, pride and thanks. Some are named after founders, heroes, actors and celebrities like Sir John A MacDonald, Terry Fox, Mike Myers and Wayne Gretzky. I live on a street named Ypres; at first I put it down as a place, somewhere far away. I had a hard time pronouncing it, “Why-pres?” or “Yee-prez?” It is spelled and pronounced Ieper, without an “s” at the end. As I searched the internet I found out, it meant more than a place. I was not the only one with this problem. The pronunciation has been a problem since WWI or even before that period of time. Ypres is a small Flemish market town, just over the border from France. The British took over the town, during the First World War, as a front line. They renamed it to suit their dialect comfort, and called it “Ypres.” The History books states that on April, 1915, the new borne, non-tested and under equipped Canadian troops, in their first appearance on a European battlefield, fought in the Second Battle of Ypres. They where introduced to modern warfare very quickly. The Germans for the first time in the war used mustarded gas, known as chlorine gas. The Canadians stood there ground, as other allied counties ran away with fear. They adapted and over came; by wearing rags over their faces, filled with mud and urine. They bluffed the Germans into thinking that their gas attacked had failed. These Canadians established a reputation as a formidable fighting force and Canada came of age at that moment. The cost for this was high. In forty-eight hours 6,035 Canadians, one man in every three, was lost from Canada's little force of hastily trained civilians. After the war Ypres became one of the most important European memorials. Kingston Ontario, remembers this day by naming one their street Ypres. I think this poem sums it up best. “For our king and our country; and the promise of glory, we came from Kingston and Brighton to fight on the front lines. Just lads from the farms and boys from the cities, not meant to be soldiers, we lay in the trenches, we'd face the fighting with a smile ... or so we said If only we had known what danger lay ahead.”
5月2日 D-Day: Canada's roleD-Day: Canada's role The sun was just coming up over the Normandy coast at about 5 a.m. on June 6, 1944 – D-Day.
The Allied navies – Canadian, British, American – had brought a huge invasion fleet from England to France in total darkness. For men on the ships, first light showed the black shapes of other nearby vessels. For the Germans on shore, the dawn revealed a vast armada poised to invade occupied France. Shock and Awe, 1917INDEPTH: VIMY RIDGE REMEMBERED Shock and Awe, 1917 Gary Graves, CBC News Online | April 9, 2003 We may marvel at the firepower of the hundreds of missiles and smart bombs used in U.S. attacks on Iraq, but an overwhelming battlefield fusillade creating shock and awe is not a new idea. In fact, Canadian soldiers fighting in the First World War were pioneers of the tactic.
It was at Vimy Ridge, a strategic 14-kilometre long escarpment that overlooks the Douai plain of France. German occupying troops controlled the ridge using a network of trenches that snaked along the crest and down into the valley, connecting with another network of natural caves. 150,000 French and British soldiers had died trying to take it back. Allied commanders believed the ridge to be impregnable. But the Canadians had a plan, the first battle strategy for this new nation's commanders to conceive and execute on their own. Even military "experts" of the time admitted dubiously that the Canadians' plan couldn't be any worse than the British tactics at the Somme, which cost 24,000 Canadian casualties. So the Canadian army – all four divisions, totalling 100,000 men – got the go-ahead. The ground assault had been planned meticulously for months. Full-scale replicas of the Vimy terrain were built to rehearse unit commanders on what to expect both from the enemy and from Canadian units on either side. Canadian spotters had identified and mapped about 80 per cent of the German gun positions. Five kilometres of tunnels were dug in order to move Canadian troops and ammunition up to the front without their being seen by German observers. And for a couple of weeks leading up to the battle, Canadian and British artillery pounded the Germans with 2,500 tons of ammunition per day. At 5:30 in the morning on Easter Monday, April 9, 1917, the assault began. It was raining. It was freezing cold. And it began with a huge artillery barrage… shock and awe 1917-style. Over 1,100 cannons of various descriptions, from British heavy naval guns mounted on railway cars miles behind the battlefield, to portable field artillery pieces dragged into place by horses, mules or soldiers just behind the Canadian lines, fired continuously – in some cases until they exhausted their ammunition. The Canadian battle plan was simple: the withering barrage provided a screen for the Canadian troops to hide behind. Hundreds of shells would land at once, spraying plumes of muddy earth upward like a polluted version of some giant decorative water fountain. Every three minutes the 850 Canadian cannons would aim a little higher, advancing the row of shellfire forward by 90 metres. The attacking Canadian foot soldiers were expected to keep up, advancing, taking and occupying German positions, moving forward, never stopping, never racing ahead. Falling behind would make them clearer targets for German guns mounted higher up the ridge. Getting ahead of the artillery would put them in danger of being blasted by their own guns. The giant naval cannons focused on the reinforced concrete bunkers protecting German heavy gun emplacements. The immense but inaccurate shells sent plumes of dirt, concrete and shrapnel skyward with every impact. The craters left behind were as large as houses. The fight to take Vimy Ridge cost Canada dearly, but it would become the cornerstone of the nation's image of its place in the world. In four days, 3,600 Canadian soldiers died, another 5,000 were wounded. But the ridge was taken, much of it in the first day. The valour of the troops, the originality of the plan, the success where larger, more established armies had failed, all contributed to a new nation's pride. The battle was hailed as the first allied success of the long war, achieved mostly due to the innovation of using a creeping, continuous massive artillery barrage to protect squads of advancing troops. Both sides used the tactic in future battles. But even today we're paying the cost. At Vimy and other former First World War battlefields, the ground is so full of unexploded ordnance that visitors are warned not to stray from marked pathways. The risk from shells that fell and never exploded is still so high that it's too dangerous, nearly a century later, to walk onto the actual battlefield to search for remains of soldiers listed as "missing." Today, there's a large park at Vimy Ridge, dedicated to Canada. The striking memorial features a 30-tonne limestone figure carved from a single block, a hooded figure representing Canada herself, gazing down on a single tomb overlooking the Douai plain. The twin stone pillars list the names of 11,285 Canadian soldiers who died in France and whose remains were never found. 4月27日 Forgotten soldiers'You just can't forget them'MARK HUME VANCOUVER -- RCMP Constable Marc Searle noticed the gaps between the graves first. One day about a year ago, he went for a walk through a section of the Sunnyside Lawn Cemetery in South Surrey where veterans are buried. The plot is known as the Field of Honour, but as he paced along the markers reading the stories of the soldiers who had served Canada, he noticed some empty spaces. They turned out to be the unmarked graves of long-dead soldiers. "When I say they were unmarked, I mean there was nothing there. There was just grass," Constable Searle said. This Saturday, after a year of investigative work in which he used his leverage as a police officer to get people to open dusty old files, Constable Searle and a group of volunteers will fill in those empty spaces. In a remarkable community effort, members of the group will lay markers on the graves to honour the forgotten soldiers. "What we're doing on the weekend with kids and the military and a whole bunch of volunteers is we are actually going to lay the markers ourselves. "There will be active military with connections to Afghanistan, Boy Scouts and kids, firefighters and police officers . . . we'll cut the turf ourselves, lay the four-inch foundation of sand and move into place the markers that we've purchased." Constable Searle said the unusual project led him on a fascinating journey into the history of Canada. It all began because of a comment his father had made to him once about the proper way to honour the dead when walking through a military cemetery. "Dad had told me you have to get off the pavement to walk the grass and read the markers to get the stories of these men. . . . So as I'm doing that, I notice there are spaces, gaps, between the markers. . . . So I went to the city and said, 'what's the deal?' and they said, 'Oh, those are unmarked graves.' " He was told there were 27, but when he did a careful inspection, he found 36. Then the police work began. To find out who was buried there he checked cemetery records, then went to Veterans Affairs to get information about military service. But identifying some of them was difficult. James Irving McMillan turned out to be a real challenge, because his name had been misspelled on his death certificate. "I convinced Chapel Hill funeral parlour to crack all the seals on their original records. And in there are handwritten notes by the funeral parlour director." That gave him the correct spelling and insight into a lonely death. "When he was buried, there was no one there at all. He was simply identified as being a 'fisherman.' " Using military records, he found out that the fisherman had, on April 9, 1917, twice crossed a bloodied patch of ground known as No Man's Land at Vimy Ridge. He was carrying messages to brigade commanders about the progress of the attack in a battle that helped define Canada. "He was awarded the Military Medal for gallantry and he was one of very few privates who was decorated during the war," Constable Searle said. "It was an emotional moment to realize that this war hero had lain for 40 years in an unmarked grave." Mr. McMillan, he said, was recruited in Calgary by the North-West Mounted Police into the 2nd Canadian Mounted Rifles. He signed up on Christmas Eve, 1901, served in the Boer War and after discharge in 1902, served with the South African Constabulary, which was made up mostly of ex-NWMP, in what was really Canada's first peacekeeping effort. In 1916, he joined the 87th Battalion, Canadian Grenadier Guards. He fought in the Battle of the Somme and then went on to Vimy Ridge. "You just can't forget them. Remembrance has to be more than a word. It's our job," Constable Searle said. Sergeant Huf Mullick of the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry is one of the volunteers who have been drawn into the project started by Constable Searle. He said that marking the graves sends a powerful message to those who are serving now, because it reminds them that the sacrifice of soldiers is never forgotten. The grave-marking event starts at 11 a.m., Saturday, at Sunnyside Lawn Cemetery, 150th Street and 28th Avenue, South Surrey. It is open to the public. Making a mess of history Geoff Ellwand is a veteran CBC Radio reporter who normally covers Toronto. In a varied career he has followed some big stories, most notably the Bernardo-Homolka case, and some inconsequential ones, such as the death of an elephant. Recently, Ellwand returned to Tokyo – a city where he worked as a reporter 17 years ago. A Canadian curiosity can be found in the heart of the Edo-Tokyo Museum. The Museum is a spectacular building standing on five-storey-high concrete legs surrounded by the city it celebrates. The copy of the terms of the Japanese surrender displayed in Edo-Tokyo Museum contains a memorable gaffe by Canadian Col. Lawrence Moore Cosgrave — he signed below the intended line, instead of above it. The mistake was corrected on a U.S. copy of the document.
With elaborate models, meticulous reconstructions and video clips it portrays Tokyo's evolution from a 16th Century fortress town of the Shogun, to the world capital it is today. It is in the display devoted to the horrors of the Second World War that I came across a curious piece of Canadiana. It appears on the Japanese copy of the "Terms of Surrender" signed with great ceremony aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on the morning of Sunday, Sept. 2, 1945. Two copies of the document were signed by the Japanese representatives and by the Supreme Allied Commander in the Pacific, Gen. Douglas MacArthur. One copy was for the United States, and one for Japan. The Allied powers, including Canada, also signed. The then-Dominion's involvement in the Pacific war had been limited. Its most tragic contribution was to the hopeless defence of Hong Kong in 1941, in which nearly two thousand Canadians were either killed or captured. The man who signed the historic documents for Canada was 55-year-old Col. Lawrence Moore Cosgrave. At the time he was serving as a Canadian liaison officer in Australia and presumably was the closest available Canadian of sufficient rank to appear at the signing. But the simple act of writing his name was not uneventful. The New York Times correspondent, Robert Trumbull, in a special dispatch to the Globe and Mail wrote, "Colonel Cosgrove emerges as the feature player in an incident [that] … put a touch of humor in the gravest ceremony of our time." For some inexplicable reason —and who among us has not had the same difficulty in filling out a form — Colonel Cosgrove wrote his name not on the line above "The Dominion of Canada," as was intended, but on the line below. It was a blunder that set off a chain reaction, forcing the remaining signatories to sign below the place designated for their country. The New Zealand representative, the last to sign, had to affix his signature in the bottom margin of the page. "Col. Cosgrave's botch … will rank high among the historic bobbles of our time." hooted correspondent Turnbull in the Globe. Several months later, the captain of the USS Missouri recounted what happened when the signing ceremony was over. "The Japanese came forward to pick up the Japanese copy of the surrender papers," Capt. Murray recalled, "and (they) started to question something on it. General (Walter) Sutherland (MacArthur's chief of staff) took a pen and drew a line on the thing and said 'Now that's fine. Now it's all fixed'. So (the Japanese representative) took his copy and folded it up and went on down the gangway." What the famously abrupt Sutherland had done was amend the august surrender document with a series of cross-outs and scribbles. It is the Japanese copy of the surrender, the botched copy, that now resides in the Edo-Tokyo Museum. On the other copy, the one the Americans took back to Washington, Col Cosgrave got it right. While it was nine o'clock Sunday morning on Tokyo Bay, because of the time difference, it was eight o'clock Saturday night in Ottawa. There, Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King was following developments. He had organized a dinner party at a country club to mark the historic signing, and was apparently fed information by aides as events unfolded. "Next came word of the signatures by the U.S. and later the U.S.S.R., the Chinese and Canada." King wrote in his diary that night, "I made the announcement of each of these in turn. All stood when Canada 's signature was announced. The entire company rose." It appears no one in Canada was aware Cosgrove was, literally, making a mess of things. Who was Cosgrove? He was an educated man. He graduated from R.M.C. and McGill. He was a brave man. During the First World War he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order not once but twice, for "conspicuous gallantry in action." France gave him the Croix de Guerre. Incidentally, he also served under Col John McCrae, the author of the famous war poem, "In Flanders Fields." Cosgrave was an accomplished man. He finished the war a Lieutenant Colonel and wrote a book, Afterthoughts of Armageddon published in 1919. He then served in a variety of consular posts throughout Asia and in the 1950s in Europe. In 1945 he was, fatefully, Canada's military attaché in Canberra. Despite his other accomplishments history cruelly remembers him only as the man whose brief walk on the world stage was marred by a misplaced signature. The only other Canadian on the deck of the USS Missouri that day was a 30-year-old naval officer. He was Surgeon-Lieut. George Gayman who was Cosgrave's standby in the event of some problem. He wrote in his journal that after the signing, "T stayed on deck and talked to various people. A mighty air armada passed over out heads, the Marine Band played California, Here I Come and Sidewalks of New York, and everyone was happy, except Japan." And perhaps, Col Cosgrave as well. The Japanese version of the "Terms of Surrender" can be viewed every day but Monday at the impressive Edo-Tokyo Museum, (www.edo-tokyo-museum.or.jp). The nearest stop on the Tokyo Metro is the Ryogokuy station on the Oedo Line. |
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