Remembrance Archives - Legion Magazine

Pay Tribute boxes distribute poppies in a new age

14Jan 2021

By Tom MacGregorNo Comments

Pay Tribute boxes distribute poppies in a new age

With your tap debit or credit card, you tap on the bright poppy image on the box and take a poppy. You have just made a $2 donation to the poppy fund. In 2020, The Royal Canadian Legion and HSBC Bank Canada formed a partnership to distribute poppies in special “Pay Tribute” tap-enabled donation boxes. Appealing to Canadians who no longer carry cash about them, HSBC Bank Canada worked with technology partners to ensure the program is in line with latest digital technology. The boxes work with tap-enabled debit and credit cards or mobile and wearable devices like Apple Pay by placing the tap card or pay technology device on the glowing poppy before removing a poppy from the box. “We put out 250 boxes as a pilot project,” said Special Projects Officer Freeman Chute at Legion National He...

6Jan 2021

By Stephen J. ThorneNo Comments

Remembrance

A small sombre service

Remembrance Day 2020 in Ottawa was different but no less poignant The wreaths were almost all placed beforehand, 379 of them neatly lined up in rows at the base of the National War Memorial in Ottawa, each bearing the words Lest We Forget/Nous Nous Souviendrons in gold on purple ribbons. Chairs were spaced several metres apart for a handful of guests and veterans expressly invited to attend the Remembrance Day 2020 ceremony. The usual crowds were not there; only a few of the faithful lingered on the margins. In fact, The Royal Canadian Legion, which produces the annual service, discouraged people from attending in the midst of the worst pandemic in a century. The new challenges wrought by COVID-19, so evident in the gaps surrounding the ceremony on Nov. 11, did not escape the ora...

6Nov 2020

By Stephen J. ThorneNo Comments

Our Veterans, Remembrance

Shipping out

No matter what era, the moment when a soldier ships out is laden with bittersweet emotion—excitement, uncertainty, pride and trepidation For soldiers and those they leave behind, shipping out is all about goodbyes. Iconic photographs of wartime goodbyes the world over tend to focus on loved ones—family and friends massed dockside to bid farewell to waving soldiers swarming a ship’s deck; American soldiers and sailors, filled with bravado, kissing their girls on the steam-clouded platforms of New York’s Penn Station; troops milling about on a tarmac, waiting with stoicism to board a transport flight while family members wave from behind barriers. Mothers and fathers, wives and sweethearts, family and friends. Perhaps no goodbye is more wrenching than that of a son or daughter. Cana...

6Nov 2020

By Joanne CulleyNo Comments

Remembrance

Service & Devotion

My father, Harry Culley, never talked much about the war, I think because he felt he got off easy compared to many others. He seemed to be embarrassed that he wasn’t a heroic pilot flying missions over enemy skies, or a gunner at the front facing the Germans. He served as a musician, occupying, in his opinion, a lower rung in the military hierarchy. Some of his fellow bandmates made self-deprecating comments about their status, such as Al Smith who said that he “fought Hitler with his French horn.” During the Depression years, Harry cobbled together part-time jobs to make a living. By day he was a bookkeeper at a smoke shop on Yonge Street in Toronto. By night he played saxophone and clarinet in downtown venues such as the Savarin Club and the Royal York Hotel. When the war started...

15Oct 2020

By Stephen J. ThorneNo Comments

Remembrance

Artist shows hidden wounds of war

Senior posters first place Intermediate posters first place Junior posters first place Primary posters first place Sixteen-year-old Anggun Rabu noticed something when she began looking into commemorative poster art related to Canadian veterans: the wounded they depicted were most often the victims of physical injuries. Rabu, a Grade 12 student from Abbotsford, B.C., who’s been painting since she was nine, decided to make a poster on the theme of mental health and post-traumatic stress disorder. The compelling result of her efforts, a disjointed portrait of a navy veteran and his memories, won first place in the senior colour category of the National Poster and Literary Contests of the Legion National Foundation...

1Sep 2020

By Stephen J. ThorneNo Comments

Military History, Pictorial, Remembrance

Victory in the Pacific

The defeat of Japan brought horror and joy after years of conflict The war was over. The writing had been on the wall ever since American navy pilots gutted the Japanese fleet at Midway on June 4-7, 1942, six months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, sinking four enemy aircraft carriers and turning the tide of conquest in the Pacific. After a bloody island-hopping campaign that began at Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands in 1942 and worked its way northward, the end came swiftly in a cloud of radioactive dust. The atomic bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 marked the dawn of the nuclear age, a harbinger of the fears—and perhaps a lifesaving lesson—that underscored the Cold War in the decades after. The justification for the nuclear attac...

Remembrance

Pay Tribute boxes distribute poppies in a new age

A small sombre service

Shipping out

Service & Devotion

Artist shows hidden wounds of war

Victory in the Pacific

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