Remembrance Day: 1) City of Barrie to commemorate Remembrance Day; 2) The Royal Canadian Legion turns to Amazon for annual poppy campaign boost; 3) First World War airmen from New Brunswick were pioneers of air warfare
1) City of Barrie to commemorate Remembrance Day
Courtesy Barrie360.com and News Release
Photo supplied by the City of Barrie
To honour and recognize those who have served our country, Barrie’s Royal Canadian Legion Branch and the City of Barrie join communities across Canada in commemorating Remembrance Day. This year marks the 106th anniversary of the end of the First World War and the 79th anniversary of the end of the Second World War.
Five Cadets on rotating shifts will stand vigil at Memorial Square on November 10 from 7 p.m. to midnight, and on November 11 from 6 to 9:30 a.m.
The City also invites the public to participate in the Remembrance Day Parade and Ceremony on November 11 at 10 a.m. The parade will start along Dunlop Street at Mulcaster and march towards Five Points intersection halting in front of the Cenotaph in Memorial Square for the ceremony. During the ceremony, a Feu De Joie (blank gunfire consisting of a rifle salute) will take place. Two minutes of silence will be observed at 11 a.m. followed by the laying of wreaths.
To facilitate the Remembrance Day Ceremony and Parade, the following road closures with no on-street parking will be in effect from 6 a.m. to approximately 12:30 p.m. on November 11:
- Dunlop Street from Clapperton Street to Mulcaster Street
- Dunlop Street from Mulcaster Street to Poyntz Street
- Owen Street from Collier Street to Dunlop Street
The intersection of Dunlop Street East and Mulcaster Street will remain open for northbound and southbound traffic along Mulcaster Street until 9:30am. At that time, the intersection will be closed until approximately 12:30pm to facilitate the parade’s movement towards Meridian Square.
The closure impacts Mulcaster Street from Collier Street to Dunlop Street, and Mulcaster Street from Dunlop Street to Lakeshore Mews to allow the parade to pass safely through the intersection at Dunlop Street and Mulcaster Street.
Members of the community, local organizations or businesses who would like to lay a wreath at the Memorial Square Cenotaph, are asked to call the Legion at 705-728-1412 to make arrangements in advance in order for their wreath to be respectfully placed prior to the ceremony. Requests should be submitted by Saturday, November 9, at 1 p.m. The wreaths will be removed on Wednesday, November 13, at 12 p.m. The public is reminded if they would like to keep their wreath to please pick it up beforehand.
Veterans also ride Barrie Transit free of charge, with one companion, all day on Remembrance Day by showing anything that identifies their status as a veteran.
Remembrance Day Flags
Each fall, the City displays Remembrance Day flags throughout the downtown and waterfront. This year, 16 new flags were added to the series honouring local veterans, and flag locations and details can be viewed on an interactive map.
For more information, visit barrie.ca/RemembranceDay.
2) The Royal Canadian Legion turns to Amazon for annual poppy campaign boost
Courtesy Barrie360.com and Canadian Press
By Nick Wells, November 9, 2024
The Royal Canadian Legion says a new partnership with e-commerce giant Amazon is helping boost its veterans’ fund, and will hopefully expand its donor base in the digital world.
Since the Oct. 25 launch of its Amazon.ca storefront, the legion says it has received nearly 10,000 orders for poppies.
Online shoppers can order lapel poppies on Amazon in exchange for donations or buy items such as “We Remember” lawn signs, Remembrance Day pins and other accessories, with all proceeds going to the legion’s Poppy Trust Fund for Canadian veterans and their families.
Nujma Bond, the legion’s national spokesperson, said the organization sees this move as keeping up with modern purchasing habits.
“As the world around us evolves we have been looking at different ways to distribute poppies and to make it easier for people to access them,” she said in an interview.
“This is definitely a way to reach a wider number of Canadians of all ages. And certainly, younger Canadians are much more active on the web, on social media in general, so we’re also engaging in that way.”
Al Plume, a member of a legion branch in Trenton, Ont., said the online store can also help with outreach to veterans who are far from home.
“For veterans that are overseas and are away, (or) can’t get to a store they can order them online, it’s Amazon,” Plume said.
Plume spent 35 years in the military with the Royal Engineers and retired eight years ago. He said making sure veterans are looked after is his passion.
“I’ve seen the struggles that our veterans have had with Veterans Affairs … and that’s why I got involved, with making sure that the people get to them and help the veterans with their paperwork.”
But the message about the Amazon storefront didn’t appear to reach all of the legion’s locations, with volunteers at Branch 179 on Vancouver’s Commercial Drive saying they hadn’t heard about the online push.
Holly Paddon, the branch’s poppy campaign co-ordinator and bartender, said the Amazon partnership never came up in meetings with other legion volunteers and officials.
“I work at the legion, I work with the Vancouver poppy office and I go to the meetings for the Vancouver poppy campaign — which includes all the legions in Vancouver — and not once has this been mentioned,” she said.
Paddon said the initiative is a great idea, but she would like to have known more about it.
The legion also sells a larger collection of items at poppystore.ca.
3) First World War airmen from New Brunswick were pioneers of air warfare
Courtesy Barrie360.com and Canadian Press
By Hina Alam, November 10, 2024
When pilots took to the air for combat during the First World War, it had been less than 15 years since the Wright brothers’ famous first flight in 1903. Aircraft were in the development stage, made of canvas over a wood frame and held together by something similar to piano wire.
“They were underpowered. They were quite flimsy, and if you happened to land heavily, sometimes they would be damaged,” said J. Brent Wilson, a historian who has just published “War Among the Clouds: New Brunswick Airmen in the Great War.”
Even training could be deadly for the pioneering pilots, he noted.
About 22,000 Canadians served in the British air services during the First World War, mostly from well-educated families in Ontario and Western Canada, Wilson said in a recent interview. But at least 252 were from New Brunswick, many from small farming communities.
They flew not just on the Western Front in France and Belgium, which was the main theatre of operations, but also around the Mediterranean and in Italy, Russia, Macedonia, Egypt and Palestine, Wilson said.
Wilson’s book draws on accounts of their service contained in letters home and in other records. He said he wanted to document the lives of airmen who came from rural New Brunswick. “I think it’s important that we remember that they made an important contribution to the wider war effort in defending the country,” Wilson said.
Tim Cook, chief historian at the Canadian War Museum, said that while flight was relatively new and initially exciting, it evolved during the war to include large-scale dogfights involving dozens of airmen who battled for control of the air.
While the “knights of the skies,” as the glamorous pilots were sometimes called, captured the attention of the public, he said, of greater importance to the armies on the ground, mired in the mud, were slower-moving observation aircraft. They photographed the front, providing crucial intelligence to commanders, gunners and infantry.
Wilson said one of the pilots he found most interesting was Maj. Albert Desbrisay Carter a graduate of Mount Allison University in Sackville, N.B. He was born in New Brunswick’s Westmorland County near Nova Scotia on July 3, 1892, and went on to become a Great War ace, Wilson said.
On Oct. 31, 1916, Carter shot down his first two planes, east of Ypres. In his combat report, detailed in the book, he describes the engagement.
“I dived on three enemy aircraft and picking out one, dived vertically on to it. I came to within 10 yards of it and had to pull out in order not to crash,” the report says. “I fired many bursts into the pilot’s and observer’s seats, starting from 150 yards until I had to pull out …. I could not see what happened to the enemy aircraft when we got near the ground; I finished off considerably under 1,000 feet.”
Over the course of the war, Carter shot down 28 German aircraft before being taken prisoner on May 19, 1918. The book narrates an account from one of Carter’s friends from Saint John, N.B., Capt. Stuart Bell, who recounted a conversation the two had. He described Carter demanding that British officers receive better treatment in German prison camps.
“To this, the German replied, ‘I will give you to understand that you are in Germany and you will do damned well as we tell you to,'” says the book.
“Maj. Carter’s reply to this was, ‘Yes, and that is the reason why the whole world is fighting you. You have no sense of honour or respect for conventions.’ For this, he received three days bread and water and cells.”
On May 22, 1919, the 27-year-old Carter, who had survived a bout of the Spanish flu, died during a training exercise when his plane crashed. He was buried at Old Shoreham Cemetery in England.
Another of the men detailed in the book is Lt. Alfred Belliveau of Fredericton. He began his pilot training at Shoreham in England on a two-seater Maurice Farman aircraft. His diary entries about the plane are documented in the book, writing they were “stable and easy to fly.” Belliveau went on to the top finishing school for fighter pilots at Turnberry, Scotland, where he practised stunt flying, says the book.
“We also did a lot of dogfighting in man-to-man aerial combat, but using cameras in place of machine-guns, the cameras being synchronized with the propeller blades like the machine-guns were, so as to enable us to take pictures of our opponent, through the whirling propellers, in the same manner as an actual combat with machine-guns,” says an entry from the pilot, as recorded in the book.
Wilson said New Brunswickers were a minority among the airmen, but they made an outsized contribution.
“We’d never had airplanes in wars before, so they were pioneers in this new form of warfare, and it had made very strong advances. … By the end of the war, from a technological point of view, aircraft and the role of the air forces had advanced very significantly.”
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