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On Dec. 24, 1993, Sérgio Vieira de Mello, the United Nations Protection Force’s director of political affairs in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, summoned his new military aide, Canadian Major John Russell, to his office. “John, we’re going to break the siege,” the diplomat declared. “I want you to... -
On Aug. 7, 1950, Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent addressed the nation by radio. The subject was North Korea’s attack on South Korea and the response by the United Nations and Canada. “Our objective is not to make war. We are…doing our best to prevent... -
On July 10, 1943, the 1st Canadian Infantry Division—about 18,000 men—stormed ashore in Sicily as part of Operation Husky and filed into the island’s mountainous heart. The division had been the first Canadians to deploy to Britain in December 1939. Now they marched to battle.... -
Down there, they will throw bombs at us,” Archduke Franz Ferdinand joked as he set out from Vienna, Austria, to the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo. As inspector general of Austria-Hungary’s armed forces, Ferdinand ostensibly travelled to observe army manoeuvres but also to showcase his wife publicly... -
On Aug. 8, 1944, Sydney Radley-Walters was a newly minted 24-year-old major who had seen his first tank only two years earlier, when the Sherbrooke Fusiliers converted from infantry to armour. “Not one of us knew anything about armour or even what a tank looked... -
In 1899, the press in English Canada had a cause that filled the front pages. Britain was preparing to fight a war in South Africa against the Boer republics of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal, ostensibly to protect the rights of uitlanders. These...
Heroes And Villains
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Alfred Booker and John O’Neill
On the morning of June 2, 1866, Lieutenant-Colonel Alfred Booker led about 850 Canadians, mostly men of the 13th Battalion (today’s Royal Hamilton Light Infantry) and Toronto’s Queen’s Own Rifles, from the village of Ridgeway in Canada West toward a Fenian force that had seized the town of Fort Erie on the Niagara River...
