Memory and Valour

On 2 May 1915, on the bank of a canal in Belgium, a Canadian doctor named John McCrae buried a friend because the chaplain was somewhere else. Within a day he had written fifteen lines of verse that would be recited for more than a century. This is the story of those fifteen lines, and of the people who wrote beside them. A physician, a painter, a cricketer and a fireman; a famous father searching...

The Germans never meant the Hindenburg Line to be a wall. It was an answer to arithmetic: too much front, too few soldiers. In this episode, we look at how it was built over a single winter by tens of thousands of labourers, why the Germans burned and poisoned the ground they gave up to reach it, and what the veterans of the 49th Battalion thought of the old field marshal whose name it carried. Th...

Dogs never carried a rifle in the First World War, but they may have been its most effective piece of equipment. This episode follows the mercy dogs who searched no man's land for the wounded and the messenger dogs trained to clear barbed wire at a dead run while men fired rifles over their heads, on purpose. Featuring Captain and Prusco in France, a German dog named Steif who took a bullet an...

Barbed wire never fired a shot. It didn't need to. This episode traces how a cheap farm fencing technology became one of the deadliest features of the First World War, from the first Somme bombardment that couldn't cut it, to Vimy's careful planning around it, to the tanks that finally crushed it in 1918. Along the way: Piper James Cleland Richardson's Victoria Cross, a doomed wire...

1917. Passchendaele earns its reputation. Three years of shelling had wrecked the drainage in that stretch of Flanders, and when the rain came and didn't stop, the battlefield turned into a swamp of flooded shell craters, deep enough to drown a man, with the only dry ground a few inches of duckboard track that could get you killed just for stepping off it in the dark. That's the ground six...

What killed more First World War soldiers than the machine gun, the flamethrower, and the tank combined? Artillery. Six in ten battlefield casualties in the First World War were caused by shellfire, according to the British Army's own medical statistics. It is the deadliest weapon of the war, and the one almost nobody today can name. In this episode of Memory and Valour, five Canadian First Wo...

Canada fought a war after the war ended. Between October 1918 and June 1919, this country sent almost five thousand soldiers to Russia; a nation Canada was not at war with, to fight an enemy Canada had never declared war on, for reasons its own Cabinet could not agree on. Two forces went, and they had almost opposite wars. Four thousand two hundred went to Vladivostok. Roughly forty per cent were...

Twelve days past his 21st birthday, a Winnipeg pilot named Harry V. Smith was shot down over occupied Siam with four secret agents aboard, on the last mission of his tour in May 1945. What followed involves a jungle crash-landing borrowed from bush pilots, a resistance movement run by an entire government in secret, a getaway flown by the head of the Thai air force, and a hiding place no one would...

Four hundred and fifty rounds a minute. Seven and a half rounds every second. One London inventor built the Maxim machine gun in 1884 after a friend joked he should help Europeans "cut each other's throats with greater facility." Thirty years later, that joke had built the Western Front. This episode traces the machine gun from Hiram Maxim's workshop to the beaten zones of the So...

On July 1st, 1916, the First Battalion of the Newfoundland Regiment went forward at Beaumont-Hamel. Of 801 men, there were 710 casualties in thirty minutes. Every officer down. In this 110th anniversary episode, we follow two brothers — Harry and Alfred Hynes of F Company — from a railway town on the Gander River to the worst morning of the First World War. One never came home. The other was wound...

A thousand men in eight days. A parade square turned into a suburb with four little lakes. A bronze general on a horse that nobody who lives there can name. His name was Griesbach. Edmonton's youngest-ever mayor, son of Canada's first Mountie, and the officer who raised the 49th Battalion in a single frozen week of 1915. The north-Edmonton neighbourhood built on his old army base is now on...

In 1916, a German soldier watched the first tank loom out of the fog and ran for his life, screaming that a crocodile was crawling into the trenches. This is the story of the tank on the Western Front, and it's a Canadian story from beginning to end. Canadians were there at the machine's terrifying combat debut at Courcelette in September 1916; the day before Chip Kerr of the 49th Battalio...

One wounded man. Sixty-two prisoners. A quarter-mile of enemy trench. Here's how an Edmonton farmer pulled it off, and why it was genius, not luck. On 16 September 1916, on the Somme, Private John Chipman "Chip" Kerr of Edmonton's 49th Battalion was clearing a German trench with a bombing party that was running out of grenades. So, with a finger freshly blown off, he climbed out onto the parados,...

Canada entered the First World War without an air force; not a small one, not a token one; none. Yet, somehow produced some of the most extraordinary fighter pilots of the entire conflict. This episode tells the stories of five of them: Billy Bishop, whose Victoria Cross action may have been embellished; Raymond Collishaw, who outscored almost everyone and came home almost unknown; William Barker,...

On July 30th, 1915, at a ruined château called Hooge, the German Army turned flamethrowers on British troops for the first time. Within minutes, a battalion broke. Not from shells or gas: from fire. In Episode 27, we trace the full arc of the flamethrower in the First World War — from Hooge to the mud of Passchendaele and the German Spring Offensive of 1918. At the centre of the story is the Canad...

At Vimy Ridge, one man’s actions helped secure the line and cost him his life. Lance Sergeant Ellis Sifton’s Victoria Cross is often reduced to a single moment of heroism. In this episode, I’m joined by historian Blair Ferguson to place that moment back into its full context: Sifton's life pre-war, what was happening on the ground, what the records actually show, and why Sifton’s story still matte...

They saved lives, but they didn’t always leave the dead alone. In the First World War, the Canadian Army Medical Corps stood between life and death, pulling wounded men from the battlefield and fighting to keep them alive against impossible odds. But behind that story lies a lesser-known truth. Drawing on the work of Dr. Tim Cook, this episode explores the hidden side of Canada’s medical war, wher...

They joked about dying. Not because it was funny, but because it was the only way to survive it. In the trenches of the First World War, soldiers turned fear into sarcasm and horror into humour. Shellfire became “just a bit of a strafe.” Terror was softened into “the wind up.” And sometimes, a wound meant a darkly joked-about “ticket home.” But it went further than that. They wrote parody songs, s...

April 9th, 1917—Canada stepped onto the world stage at Vimy Ridge. For the first time, all four divisions of the Canadian Expeditionary Force advanced together in a single, coordinated assault—executed with precision, preparation, and discipline that set them apart on the Western Front. In this episode of Memory and Valour , we go beyond the familiar story to explore how Vimy Ridge became more tha...

1915 is the year the war stopped being an "adventure". What began as a war of movement and expectation hardened into something far more brutal: static trench lines, failed offensives, and a battlefield dominated by machines rather than men. From the costly assaults at the Battle of Neuve Chapelle and Battle of Festubert… to the devastating lessons of the Battle of Loos, we trace how Allied strateg...

When the First World War erupted in 1914, Canada answered the call without hesitation. But among those who stepped forward were men who, under Canadian law, were not even recognized as citizens. In this episode of Memory and Valour, we uncover the powerful and often overlooked story of Indigenous men who volunteered to serve in the Canadian Expeditionary Force. Drawn from communities across the co...

In 1916, an explosion tore through the Barnbow Munitions Factory in Leeds, killing 35 women in an instant. They were known as the Barnbow Lasses. Young workers fueling the First World War from the factory floor… until disaster struck. For decades, the truth of what happened that night was softened, reshaped, and in some cases, silenced entirely. In this episode of Memory and Valour, I sit down wit...

During the First World War, Canadian POWs faced starvation, forced labour, and brutal marches in German camps, while thousands of civilians in Canada — many Ukrainian and German immigrants — were imprisoned as “enemy aliens.” Through diaries, letters, and rare firsthand accounts, this episode uncovers the parallel worlds of captivity that shaped Canada’s WWI story. “We were not soldiers, yet we li...

On June 2, 1916, the ground beneath Canadian soldiers at Mount Sorrel exploded. German mines and artillery shattered the front line near Ypres, killing hundreds in minutes and throwing the Canadian position into chaos. After weeks of preparation, German forces opened a massive artillery bombardment against the Canadian lines. Beneath the trenches, carefully planted mines detonated, tearing apart t...

In 1917, as Canadian soldiers bled at Vimy Ridge and endured the mud of Passchendaele, the war exploded at home. With First World War casualties mounting and enlistment collapsing, Prime Minister Robert Borden introduced conscription. The result was the Canadian Conscription Crisis of 1917; one of the most divisive moments in our history. Riots in Quebec City. English and French Canada set against...