The Medak Pocket was, for Canada, the place where peacekeeping went to die. For Dan Drew and the other Canadians who fought in Croatia over those few days in September 1993, the salient dividing Serb and Croation forces became “Canada’s Vietnam”—an obscure battle that for years went unrecognized, its soldiers unthanked, its scars unhealed.
Here is the article at Legion Magazine.
Lancaster pilot Jack Widdicombe was a wide-eyed Prairie farm boy about to be thrust into the inferno of Second World War Europe when he boarded a double-decker bus and toured London. The 21-year-old Manitoba native and a pal set out to see the sights and instead encountered block after block of rubble. Twenty-three bombing missions over Nazi territory and 1,200 hours of combat and other wartime flying lay ahead of him. “It was total destruction,” Widdicombe recalled. “I said ‘how in the world can people do that to one another? Then a year later, I was doing it.
Here is the article at Legion Magazine.
On July 9, 1943, a Dornier Do 217E became separated from the rest of its 10-plane Luftwaffe flight as it entered a cloudbank on its way to bomb London. The market town of East Grinstead in West Sussex lay below. Situated about 15 kilometres as the Spitfire flies from my father’s base at RAF Redhill, it had always been a potential target for Germans passing overhead. Until this day, however, it had never been touched.
Here is the article at Legion Magazine.
