Memoirs Archives - Legion Magazine

Memoir: Veteran recalls a special relationship with HMCS Bonaventure, Canada’s last aircraft carrier

Ann Burke — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 05:30:12 +0000

I have harboured a deep love of the sea and ships for most of my life. My enlistment into the Royal Canadian Navy in the 1960s was fuelled by this interest and fresh memories of living aboard a yacht on the south coast of England before immigrating to Canada. I recalled being tethered to the …

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Naming the dead

Sharon Adams — Wed, 09 Nov 2022 20:24:44 +0000

Canada’s eight Books of Remembrance honour those soldiers who gave their lives while serving the country During restoration of the Centre Block on Parliament Hill, the Books of Remembrance have been moved from the Peace Tower’s Memorial Chamber to a temporary space under the starry ceiling in the Room of Remembrance in Parliament’s Visitor Welcome …

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The Dieppe Mountie

Edward Hammond Stevenson — Tue, 26 Jul 2022 14:33:42 +0000

An RCMP constable who volunteered for overseas service recalls the infamous raid in his own words Captain Edward Hammond Stevenson commanded the Dieppe detachment of No. 2 Provost Company, a military police unit that was to help direct troops and keep the beach orderly during Operation Jubilee—until the raid went disastrously wrong. As a constable in …

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The man who skipped a line

Murray Brewster — Tue, 28 Sep 2021 14:13:09 +0000

He signed in the wrong place, but representing Canada at Japan’s surrender was still a career highlight for soldier-diplomat Lawrence Cosgrave Laughter rippled over the waves of Pearl Harbor. It was a breezy, cloudless, perfect Hawaiian day not so very long ago. Tourists, clad in all sorts of loud and tasteless vacation getups, clustered around …

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Letters to Mom

Allan Wallace Coburn and Sharon Adams — Sun, 23 Feb 2020 16:53:49 +0000

During the Second World War, 21-year-old Allan Coburn was one of a million young men and women whose sense of duty and hankering for adventure drew them to serve in the Canadian Army. He was “the second son of a farmer, with no passion for farming,” said his son Douglas Coburn of Winnipeg. “So, what …

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Cross Border Doctor

Murray Brewster — Thu, 04 Jul 2019 15:03:07 +0000

It can be extraordinary who and what you will find when digging into family history. In an article for Legion Magazine last year, CBC journalist Murray Brewster wrote about the Battle of Ridgeway and the eyewitness account of his great-great-grandfather, a doctor and United States Civil War veteran, who in June 1866 tended wounded and …

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Pépère’s war story

Michelle T. Lambert — Sat, 02 Feb 2019 17:16:51 +0000

Hormidas Odilon (Henry) Goulet enlisted with the 22nd Battalion in Montreal in 1914. When he gave his name, the officer apparently told him, “We’ll call you Henry.” He fought in France and Belgium until he was wounded in 1916. He was discharged in 1917. His journal was recently adapted into this memoir by his granddaughter …

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Battlefield doctor

Murray Brewster — Fri, 11 May 2018 18:18:38 +0000

My great-great-grandfather was a surgeon who treated soldiers at the Battle of Ridgeway in 1866 It is a largely forgotten battle, even though it was one of the few ever fought on Canadian soil. By the standards of the time, it wasn’t an enormous fight in terms of lives lost or duration. Coming as it …

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Canada’s man in Havana

John W Graham — Mon, 16 Oct 2017 18:58:20 +0000

The story of a young Canadian diplomat spying on the Soviets in Cuba on behalf of the CIA with the blessing of our prime minister is improbable, but no more so than its context. This was the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, when the world came within a hair’s breadth of a nuclear holocaust. The …

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Buried alive at the Somme

Claudia Berry — Fri, 13 Oct 2017 18:00:22 +0000

When I was a young child of four or five, my grandfather would say to me in his cockney accent, “Swee’ar’, fetch me legs for me,” and I would dutifully bring him what he called “his legs”—steel rods screwed into the heels of his shoes for support with a leather cuff at the top which …

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