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Commissioned on July 8, 1954, HMCS Labrador was the first warship to sail across the Northwest Passage, returning to home port in Halifax via the Panama Canal, the first to circumnavigate North America in a single voyage. But the Wind-class icebreaker’s biggest contributions were mapping... -
THE SNIPER In late May or early June 2017 (the exact date is classified), a Canadian Joint Task Force 2 (JTF2) sniper team shattered previous distance records with a stunning 3,540-metre kill shot. The team, serving as part of Canadian Special Operations Forces Command, was providing... -
1 July 2020 Canada Day celebrations on Parliament Hill are replaced with virtual celebrations due to COVID-19. 2 July 1940 HMCS St. Laurent rescues 868 German and Italian internees and PoWs bound for Canada, survivors of the torpedoed liner SS Arandora Star, in one of the largest rescue... -
ERNIE REGEHR is senior fellow with The Simons Foundation of Vancouver and co-founder of Project Ploughshares. Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, the Canadian Armed Forces declared it was ready to mobilize up to 24,000 troops to “assist with humanitarian support, wellness checks, natural disaster responses... -
The Battle of the Somme lasted more than four months, but a single half hour on a single day, the day the battle started, is burned into Newfoundlanders’ hearts. July 1, 1916, was the day the men of the Newfoundland Regiment advanced into a blizzard... -
At 7 p.m. June 25, 1944, at the end of a 10-hour anti-submarine patrol that had taken them 400 kilometres north of Scotland’s Shetland Islands, RCAF Flight Lieutenant David Ernest Hornell and his crew of eight aboard Canso 9754 were thinking of returning to land....
Military History
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A tale of two PoWs
In the spring and summer of 1943, while an officer with the Royal Canadian Air Force was overseeing the secret excavation of tunnels for a mass escape from a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp—the subject of the movie The Great Escape—a German naval officer was doing the same thing for a mass escape from a Canadian PoW camp 6,500 kilometres...
