Sunday September 20th First World War

Many books have been written about the First World War and it is sometimes difficult to know where to start researching this vast subject, which is the focus of a major partnership project led by Thunder Bay Public Library, involving a wide range of institutions and organisations in the city. One way to approach this topic is to consider the war from a national, provincial and local perspective.

Tim Cook has written an excellent and accessible two volume history of Canadians fighting in the Great War. At The Sharp End 1914 – 1916 includes the formation and training of the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF) before it sailed to France, in the biggest Armada that the British Empire had ever assembled. The role of the CEF in the Second Battle of Ypres (when German forces used poison gas for the first time) and the Battle of the Somme (when the Newfoundland Regiment was all but wiped out) is also explored.

The second volume, Shock Troops 1917 – 1918 captures the titanic battles of Vimy Ridge, Passchendaele, and the Hundred Days Campaign through the eyes of Canadian soldiers who never lost a battle in the last two years of the war. Cook combines eyewitness accounts with a wide range of secondary sources to create a narrative that is at the same time personal and epic in scale. The sheer horror of living in the trenches with rats, lice, trench foot, gas and the ever present threat of death is convincingly portrayed.

At the provincial level, Ontario and the First World War 1914 – 1918, is a collection of documents edited with an introduction by Barbara Wilson. The documents cover a variety of themes from the Civic Holiday 1914 to the Armistice, including the home front, loyalty in question, schools, universities, Ontario’s Black and Aboriginal Volunteers, and war artists. These documents draw the reader into events exactly as they happened, and the story is woven together in a comprehensive and swift paced introduction.

The Thunder Bay story can be found In the Face of Danger by George Stanley which recounts the history of the Lake Superior Regiment from its birth in 1885 to the end of the Second World War. There are chapters on the 52nd Battalion, CEF, 1915 – 1916, and From Vimy Ridge to Mons, 1917 -1919. More in depth articles can be found in Papers & Records Volume XLII (2014) published by Thunder Bay Historical Society. This includes pieces on Captain O’Kelly’s Victoria Cross, food control, sport, the home front, Labour at the Lakehead, and the military contribution of Northwestern Ontario to Canada’s war effort.

More local information can also be found on the World War One project website at www.tbpl.ca, including extracts from the minutes of the meetings of the Fort William and Port Arthur City Councils, and newspaper articles and obituaries from the Fort William Daily Times Journal and the Port Arthur News Chronicle, which were the forerunners of today’s Chronicle Journal.

If you have any information  which you would like to contribute to this project – including letters, diaries, medals and other artifacts – please contact any branch of Thunder Bay Public Library. This is a people’s project and we want it to be driven by as much community content as possible. The project will run through to the 100th anniversary of the end of the war in November 2018. Please visit the website for regular updates.

John Pateman