Front Lines

The War of 1812 was at its peak and the Battle of Bladensburg, Maryland, was ending in a British victory just northeast of Washington, D.C. It was August 1814. In a few months, the war would be over. But now the American capital was in a frenzy. British troops were gathering on the horizon and the Battle of Washington was about to begin. Before leaving to monitor military operations, America’s fourth president, James Madison, had asked his wife Dolley if she had the “courage or firmness” to stay put at what was then called the Presidential Mansion until he returned. He asked her to gather important papers and be prepared to abandon their stately home at any moment. Dolley Madison crossed the Potomac River and found sanctuary in northern Virginia. And so Dolley Madison began securin...

An accelerating trend among social media platforms to take down online content they deem too violent or graphic is hampering war-crimes investigations and other important probes, says a top human-rights organization. Human Rights Watch says the material, often removed at the behest of governments, is not being archived in ways that are accessible to investigators and researchers looking to hold criminals to account. “Social media content, particularly photographs and videos, posted by perpetrators, victims, and witnesses to abuses, as well as others has become increasingly central to some prosecutions of war crimes and other international crimes,” the group said in a report entitled “Video Unavailable”—Social Media Platforms Remove Evidence of War Crimes. It says such content ...

Many young volunteers had little idea what they were in for when they enlisted for early service in the First World War. They anticipated a grand adventure, “a jolly good show” and done. The conventional wisdom was that it would all be over by Christmas 1914. Of course, it wasn’t, and as the months turned into years, the longing and suffering deepened. The mud got deeper, the rats more populous, the cynicism sharper, the casualty lists longer. Soldiers’ lifelines were the letters and packages to and from home. Correspondence was the next best thing to being back there: a newsfeed and an outlet (measured, mind you, due to censorship, both officially and self-imposed); reassurance that, whatever madness enveloped you, there was still that familiar place where love and normalcy a...

Lou Bailey pulls the leaflet from his stash of Korean War memorabilia—a box filled with photographs and mementoes of the seven eventful months the Iroquois, Ont., native spent driving supply trucks in the disputed territories of the Korean Peninsula almost 70 years ago. “That’s what we got at Christmastime,” said Bailey, 92, handing over the one-page document. On one half of the remarkably preserved paper is a now-famous David Douglas Duncan photograph of a dirty, miserable U.S. Marine huddled with his meagre rations against the cold of a winter near Chosin. On the other is a Rockwellian-style image of a happy family assembling around a table laden with Christmas turkey. “Frozen rations eaten on the run,” it says below the frontline photograph, which originally appeared in the wee...

A new exhibition at the Canadian War Museum relates the personal stories of dozens of Canadians who had roles in the Second World War, but it is the story of Regina’s Campbell brothers that struck a particular chord with historian Tim Cook. The twins, Pilot Officer Alexander (Grant) Campbell and Flying Officer Robert (Roy) Campbell, both navigators aboard Lancaster bombers, were killed a month apart—Grant on April 11, 1944; Roy on May 13. They were 21 years old. “I can’t imagine the grief and the sorrow of their parents,” said Cook, the exhibition curator and author of 13 books on Canada’s military history. Their parents, Rev. Harvey Campbell and novelist Grace Campbell, travelled to Europe from their home in Montreal in July 1947 to visit their sons’ graves—Roy’s in Adegem Canadi...

It is now a matter of public record that Winston Churchill was racist and worse. But what is less widely known is how his wartime speeches championing resolve, resistance to tyranny and the steadfast defence of freedom and democracy empowered the very people he appeared to loathe. Churchill served two stints as prime minister: 1940-1945 and 1951-1955. But it was during those first five years, as France fell to Nazi Germany and Britain faced a daunting onslaught, that he rose to power, prominence and ultimate victory—largely on the blustery winds of some of the greatest speeches ever written. “All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom; justice; honour; duty; mercy; hope,” he said in summarizing what Adolf Hitler had set out to destroy. But...