TBPL is leading a WW1 Centennial Project with a wide
range of cultural partners. Our aim is to remember the impact that the Great
War had on the people of the Lakehead between 1914-1918. Thunder Bay and its
hinterland recorded one of the highest recruitment rates in Ontario, if not
Canada as a whole. People from all kinds of backgrounds rushed to join the
local regiments. Many lied about their age.
Old Enough To Fight: Canada’s Boy Soldiers in the First World War
by Dan Black and John Boileau tells their stories. Between 15,000 and 20,000
underage youths, some as young as ten, signed up to fight in Canada’s armed
forces in WW1. They served in the
trenches alongside their elders and fought in all the major battles:
Ypres, the Somme, Vimy Ridge, and Passchendaele. Many were injured or suffered
psychological wounds. Many died. This book uses research, photographs,
paintings and maps to narrate their lives.
Thunder Bay’s local regiment, the fighting 52nd,
was an infantry unit, but many local men also fought in the artillery. Thunder in the Skies: A Canadian Gunner inthe Great War by Derek Grout describes what it was like to be a field
gunner. He draws on the unpublished letters and diary of field gunner
Lieutenant Bert Sargent and his fellow soldiers to take the reader from
enlistment in late 1914, through training camp, to the Western Front, the
Hundred Days Offensive, and home again with peace. Posted just behind the front lines, Sargent and
field gunners like him spent gruelling months supporting the infantry in the
trenches. Theirs was a very different war, as dangerous or more at times as the
one on the front lines. As an ordinary Canadian writing letters home to
ordinary people, Sargent gives a wrenching, insightful account of a tight-knit
band of soldiers swept up in some of the most important battles of the war that
shaped the 20th century and forged Canada as a nation.
Personal testimony is often the richest form of
history. And We Go In: a memoir of the
Great War by Will Bird tells of his life working on a farm in Saskatchewan
in the autumn of 1915 when the ghost of his brother, Stephen, killed by German
mines in France, appeared before him in uniform. Rattled, Bird rushed home to
Nova Scotia and enlisted in the army to take his dead brother’s place. His
memoir is a remarkable and harrowing account of his two years in the trenches
from October 1916 until the Armistice.
It has been hailed by many veterans as the most
authentic account of the war experience, uncompromising in its portrayal of the
horror and savagery, while also honoring the bravery, camaraderie and
unexpected spirituality that flourished among the enlisted men. This nuanced
response to the trauma of war is suffused with an interest in the spiritual and
the paranormal not found in other war literature.
All wars create amazing deeds of bravery,
self-sacrifice and extreme devotion to duty. For Valour: Canadians and the Victoria Cross in the Great War byGerald Gliddon details every Canadian VC recipient in WW1. These ordinary men
carried out acts of extraordinary bravery under fire. They include our very own
Captain Christopher O'Kelly of the 52nd Regiment who was
awarded the VC ‘for most conspicuous
bravery in an action in which he led his company with extraordinary skill and
determination.’ Capt. O'Kelly advanced his command over
1,000 yards under heavy fire without any artillery barrage, took the enemy
positions on the crest of the hill by storm, and then personally organized and
led a series of attacks capturing six enemy positions with 100 prisoners and 10
machine guns. We are planning an exhibition at the Thunder Bay Art Gallery in
1917 featuring Captain O’Kelly’s Victoria Cross and war paintings by local
artist Mary
Riter Hamilton.
John Pateman
No comments:
Post a Comment