Passchendaele. Say it out loud and it already sounds like an ending. Ask most people what they know about it and you’ll get the same handful of words back: mud, futility, generals who didn’t know when to stop. And there’s truth in that shorthand, but it undersells what the place actually was. This wasn’t ordinary mud.
Three years of shelling had pulverized the drainage system of that stretch of Flanders into nothing, and then the rain came and never really stopped, so the battlefield itself turned into something closer to a swamp built entirely out of shell craters, each one deep enough to drown a man in, and plenty of them did exactly that. Soldiers on both sides wrote about the smell more than almost anything else, the reek of gas and rot and turned earth that never left you even after you’d been pulled out of the line.
Duckboard tracks were the only dry ground for miles, single-file paths a few inches wide, and stepping off one in the dark, under fire, with sixty pounds of kit on your back, could be the last mistake you ever made. This was the ground six hundred men of the Edmonton Regiment’s 49th Battalion were ordered to cross, uphill, toward a village that had already been reduced to a smear of brick dust on a map.
Cecil Kinross V.C.
This episode walks into that ground properly, the way Tim Cook and G.W.L. Nicholson walked into it, the way Lyn MacDonald walked into it when she sat down with the actual veterans decades later and just let them talk. At the center of it is a young 49th Battalion runner named Hughie John McDonald, whose job that October might have been the single worst assignment in the entire First World War, out of the relative shelter of a shell hole and back into the open, again and again, carrying messages across ground that killed men for the crime of standing up.
Sir Arthur Currie
Along the way you’ll also meet Cecil Kinross, Henry Norwest, and Sergeant Chester Owen McGowan, another 49th Battalion runner whose own service file turned up its own quiet, hard-won story. And woven through it all, nineteen real voices: Canadian veterans recorded for CBC’s “In Flanders Fields” in January of 1965, most of them never named, all of them finally getting a little more of their due. Six hundred men of the 49th went forward that morning. A hundred and forty-five were still standing when the sun went down.
Pte. Hughie John McDonaldPte. Henry Louis NorwestSgt. Chester Owen McGowan
This is their ground, and their names, brought back one more time.
Where memory endures, valour lives on.
Want to hear more of Hughie John McDonald’s story? Check out my book, “The Endurance of Private Hughie John McDonald: A Runner’s Bravery in the Great War,” part of myGreat War Series, and go back to Episode 5 for the conversation with his grandson John McDonald.
Sources
Books – Lyn MacDonald, They Called It Passchendaele – Tim Cook, Shock Troops – G.W.L. Nicholson, Official History of the Canadian Army in the First World War: Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914–1919 – Samantha McCrea, The Endurance of Private Hughie John McDonald: A Runner’s Bravery in the Great War (Great War Series, October 2025)
Archival records – CEF personnel file, Pte. Hughie John McDonald, Reg. No. 812200 (service record and pay ledger) – CEF personnel file, Sgt. Chester Owen McGowan, Reg. No. 101605 (service record, medical examination form, and casualty/promotion ledger card) – London Gazette, Victoria Cross citation for Cecil John Kinross – “The Forty-Niner” — 49th Battalion (Edmonton Regiment) honours and awards history
Audio – CBC, “In Flanders Fields,” episode 10, broadcast January 17, 1965 (19 clips used throughout this episode)
Institutional sources – Veterans Affairs Canada – Canadian War Museum – Vimy Foundation – Loyal Edmonton Regiment Museum, “Billy’s Own” regimental history pages
18 pounders at 3rd Ypres, 19171917 Canadian Field Artillery using captured German 47 inch Howitzer
Artillery caused roughly six in ten battlefield casualties in the First World War, more than the machine gun, the flamethrower, and the tank combined. That figure comes from the British Army’s own medical and statistical history, published in 1931. It is the weapon that did the most killing in this war, and the one modern audiences can least often name.
Minenwerfer
This episode is built around five Canadian veterans, recorded decades after the war for oral history archives, describing artillery from underneath: Private Harry Routhier and Lieutenant John Percy Copp of the 46th Battalion, Private Donald Stevenson of the 217th and later the 46th, Gunner Thomas Wood of the 1st and 57th Batteries, and Private George Hatch of the 20th Battalion. Copp describes carrying an unexploded eighty pound German shell out of a dugout kitchen by hand. Hatch describes surviving a premature explosion in his own Stokes mortar crew by pure chance of timing. Wood describes the barrage at Vimy Ridge as “out of this world,” twice, from the position of an eighteen pounder crew firing behind it.
18 Pounder shrapnel shell
The episode also traces the technical history of the war’s deadliest weapon, from the ground up. The 1914 shrapnel doctrine, and why it failed against trenches and barbed wire. The distinction between guns and howitzers that explains why Germany, alone among the major armies, went to war already equipped for trench fighting. The 1915 Shell Crisis, when a single British battery at Neuve Chapelle was allotted thirty two shells to suppress thirty five German batteries, and how it handed Canada the largest industrial project in its history under the Imperial Munitions Board, producing more than half of all British eighteen pounder shrapnel by 1918. And the counter battery science built from 1917 onward under Andrew McNaughton, a McGill trained engineer, using sound ranging, flash spotting, and aerial photography to locate German guns that could not be seen.
Mary Mays Campbell
Two Canadian war diaries anchor the comparison at the heart of the episode. In April 1916 at Saint Eloi, a gun brigade recruited across Alberta could not locate a single German battery across six days of fighting, while Canadian infantry died a few thousand yards away. By August 1918 at Amiens, and again in September 1918 at Canal du Nord, the same corps was opening fire at zero hour with no ranging shots at all, laid entirely by survey and mathematical calibration. The cost of that progress is also part of the story: Major Thomas Ringwood, who raised the 60th Battery at Regina in 1916, was killed by German shellfire on the third day of the greatest artillery success the Canadian Corps had ever managed.
Episode 20 of my podcast “Barnbow Lasses” featured author Antony J. Bell, whose great grandmother was a “Canary Girl”; a munitions worker in the ill-fated Barnbow Munitions Factory, outside Yorkshire, England. In December 1916, an explosion took her life, along with 34 other women working in the factory. You can visit his website and order his books at: Antony J Bell Author A Penny a Shell : Heartbreaking Story about Barnbow Secret #1 Shell filling factory
War diary, 14th Brigade, Canadian Field Artillery, 1–31 August 1918. Library and Archives Canada, RG 9 III-D-3.
War diary, 5th Brigade, Canadian Field Artillery, April 1916. Library and Archives Canada, RG 9 III-D-3.
War diary, 49th Battalion, Canadian Infantry, August 1918. Library and Archives Canada, RG 9 III-D-3.
Diary of the 61st Battery, Canadian Field Artillery, 1916–1919.
Field Artillery Training, 1914. War Office, General Staff. His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1914.
SS139/3 Artillery Notes No. 3: Counter Battery Work. General Headquarters, February 1917.
Veteran interviews
Donald Robert Stevenson, 217th Battalion / 46th Battalion: Oppy Front and Canal du Nord accounts. Veterans Affairs Canada, Heroes Remember collection, veterans.gc.ca.
George Frederick Hatch, 20th Battalion: Stokes gun account. Veterans Affairs Canada, Heroes Remember collection, veterans.gc.ca.
[Individual video URLs and interview dates to be added once pulled per the RIGHTS note above.]
Published sources
G.W.L. Nicholson, Official History of the Canadian Army in the First World War: Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914–1919. Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1962.
G.W.L. Nicholson, The Gunners of Canada: The History of the Royal Regiment of Canadian Artillery, Volume I, 1534–1919. Toronto and Montreal: McClelland and Stewart, 1967.
Tim Cook, “The Battle of the St. Eloi Craters.” Canadian Military History, Volume 5, Number 2, Autumn 1996.
Tim Cook, “Fighting Words: Canadian Soldiers’ Slang and Swearing in the Great War.” War in History, Volume 20, Number 3, 2013.
Tim Cook, “The Gunners at Vimy,” in Geoffrey Hayes, Andrew Iarocci and Mike Bechthold, eds., Vimy Ridge: A Canadian Reassessment. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2007.
Tim Cook, At the Sharp End (2007), Shock Troops (2008), and The Secret History of Soldiers (2018).
T.J. Mitchell and G.M. Smith, History of the Great War: Medical Services, Casualties and Medical Statistics of the Great War. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1931.
William Van der Kloot, “Lawrence Bragg’s Role in the Development of Sound-Ranging in World War I.” Notes and Records of the Royal Society, Volume 59, Number 3, September 2005.
Brendan Alexander Vincent Patrick Hogan, “Operational Research and the Canadian Corps, 1915–1918.” MA thesis, Royal Military College of Canada, August 2021.
John Swettenham, McNaughton, Volume 1, 1887–1939. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1968. Cited as the apparent origin of the 83 per cent Vimy claim.
Peter Chasseaud, Artillery’s Astrologers: A History of British Survey and Mapping on the Western Front, 1914–1918. Lewes: Mapbooks, 1999.
Reginald H. Roy, ed., The Journal of Private Fraser, 1914–1918, Canadian Expeditionary Force.
Online resources
Canadian War Museum, “Generals: A.G.L. McNaughton” and “The Battle of Vimy Ridge, April 9 to 12, 1917,” warmuseum.ca.
Parks Canada, national historic person designation for A.G.L. McNaughton, parks.canada.ca.
Library and Archives Canada, “Canal-du-Nord and Cambrai,” bac-lac.gc.ca.
Australian War Memorial, “8 August 1918: The Black Day of the German Army,” awm.gov.au.
Commonwealth War Graves Commission, “The Iron Harvest: a warning from history,” cwgc.org.
warhistory.org, biographical entry for Georg Bruchmüller.
Veterans Affairs Canada, Heroes Remember / Video Gallery, veterans.gc.ca.
The Royal Canadian Artillery Museum, rcamuseum.com; Royal Regiment of Canadian Artillery roll of honour, rca-arc.org.
Loyal Edmonton Regiment Military Museum chronology, lermuseum.org.
Commonwealth War Graves Commission, cwgc.org.
A note on Dr. Tim Cook
Dr. Tim Cook died in October 2025. This episode rests on his work more heavily than most this show has produced: his book chapters, his journal articles, and above all a piece he wrote in 1996, at twenty-five, arguing that the Canadians at Saint Eloi deserved better than the sterile account the official history had given them.
The Great War ended on the eleventh of November, 1918. Canada was still fighting in Russia the following June.
The 19th Alberta Dragoons (est. 1908) was the first regiment to leave Edmonton, enroute to becoming the first to see active service in France. Pictured here at Victoria Armoury (10523-100 Ave.) with Arlington Apts. in the background. C. 1913. *Second Row – kneeling – 5th from the left : Griesbach, 6th from left: Jamieson*
Between October 1918 and June 1919, this country deployed almost five thousand soldiers into a nation it was not at war with, to fight an enemy it had never declared war on, for reasons its own Cabinet could not agree on and its own military command had warned against in writing before a single ship sailed.
Two forces went, and they had almost opposite wars.
Four thousand two hundred went to Vladivostok, roughly forty per cent of them conscripts; some marched to the docks at bayonet point. They arrived to find orders forbidding them to fight, and spent fourteen weeks in a Pacific port doing nothing on purpose.
Fewer than five hundred went to Archangel, on the Arctic coast. Every one of them a volunteer, most already veterans of the Western Front. They fought on frozen rivers against artillery that outranged them, and one of the worst days they had was the eleventh of November, 1918.
This episode is the story of both.
In this episode:
Siberia – the Canadian Siberian Expeditionary Force. Based at Vladivostok. Roughly 4,200 men and one woman. About forty per cent conscripts. Commanded by Major-General James Elmsley. Essentially no combat. Twenty-one dead.
North Russia – the 16th Brigade, Canadian Field Artillery. Based at Archangel. Around five hundred gunners. All volunteers, most of them Western Front veterans. Commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Sharman. Action at Tulgas, Kadish, Ust Padenga and Shenkursk. Eight killed, sixteen wounded.
A note on the numbers:
Sources disagree about how many Canadians went to Siberia and how many died there. Where they conflict, this episode says so rather than choosing the tidier figure.
The monument raised on the first of June, 1919, counts nineteen dead. The true total is twenty-one. Men were still dying when the stone was carved. Private Richard Massey died at William Head on the thirtieth of May. Rifleman Peter McMillan died there on the sixth of June, five days after the stone was unveiled in Russia.
Sources:
Primary anchors:
G.W.L. Nicholson, Canadian Expeditionary Force 1914–1919 (Queen’s Printer, 1962), “Intervention in Siberia,” pp. 517–523
Benjamin Isitt, From Victoria to Vladivostok: Canada’s Siberian Expedition, 1917–19 (UBC Press, 2010)
Benjamin Isitt, “Mutiny from Victoria to Vladivostok, December 1918,” Canadian Historical Review 87:2
Benjamin Isitt, “Court-Martial at Vladivostok: Mutiny and Military Justice during the First World War,” in Canadian State Trials, Vol. IV
Canadian Army Historical Section, Report No. 82, “Operations in North Russia, 1918–1919”
Supporting
Mark Osborne Humphries, The Last Plague: Spanish Influenza and the Politics of Public Health in Canada (2012)
Mark Osborne Humphries, “The Horror at Home: The Canadian Military and the ‘Great’ Influenza Pandemic of 1918,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 16:1
J.L. Granatstein, “Gunners on Ice,” Legion Magazine
Patrick Brennan, “‘Completely Worn Out by Service in France’: Combat Stress and Breakdown among Senior Officers in the Canadian Corps,” Canadian Military History 18:2
Gaddis Smith, “Canada and the Siberian Intervention, 1918–1919,” American Historical Review 64:4
Ian Edwards, Our Quarrel with the Foe: Edmonton’s Soldiers, 1914–1918 (Friesen Press, 2020)
John Ward, With the “Die-Hards” in Siberia (Cassell, 1920)
Dawn Fraser, The Mud-Red Volunteers: Songs of Siberia and Rhymes of the Road (Eastern Publishing, c. 1919)
Canada, Report of Debates of the House of Commons, 10 June 1919, p. 3298
University of Victoria Special Collections — Military Oral History Collection, SC 141
Commonwealth War Graves Commission
Loyal Edmonton Regiment Military Museum
City of Edmonton Archives
Digital archive
Benjamin Isitt’s Siberian Expedition Virtual Exhibition and Digital Archive: siberianexpedition.ca holds more than two thousand photographs, war diary appendices, court martial material and veteran audio, in English, French and Russian. It is free, and it is the reason this episode was possible.
Support this work
Research for this episode meant archival fees, and those come out of pocket. If it was worth your time, a coffee goes straight back into the next one.
In 1882, in Vienna, an American inventor named Hiram Maxim was told by a friend that if he wanted to make real money, he should invent something to help Europeans “cut each other’s throats with greater facility.” Two years later, he had built the world’s first fully automatic machine gun.
By August 1914, every major army in Europe had some version of Maxim’s design. Nobody had fully reckoned with what happens when both sides of a war have the same weapon in large numbers.
This episode traces that reckoning from Maxim’s London workshop, through the beaten zones and interlocking machine gun fire that built the Western Front, to the Canadian Corps’ long, costly education in how to use the weapon that had nearly destroyed it.
Canadian Automobile Machine Gun BrigadeBrigadier General Raymond Brutinel
It’s a story that runs through an Edmonton newspaperman who talked the Canadian government into funding the country’s first mechanized fighting force three weeks into the war, through the mathematics of indirect fire at Vimy Ridge, and into the voices of five Canadian veterans who lived through what all of that meant on the ground.
In this episode
How Hiram Maxim’s 1884 invention became the standard weapon of every major European army by 1914
Why the “beaten zone” and enfilading fire made the machine gun the single biggest reason the Western Front became a war of trenches
Raymond Brutinel, the French-born, Edmonton-based newspaperman and Grand Trunk Railway surveyor who convinced the Canadian government to fund the Canadian Automobile Machine Gun Brigade in August 1914
How the Lewis gun changed infantry tactics at the platoon level, and how the Canadian Machine Gun Corps (established April 16, 1917) turned machine gun fire into a precisely calculated, artillery-like weapon of indirect fire
The numbers behind Vimy Ridge: 362 Vickers guns, 258 of them firing in the indirect barrage role, nearly five million rounds allocated to the fire plan
The Canadian Independent Force of 1918: 80 machine guns and bicycle infantry, described by historian John A. English as the first mechanized formation in Commonwealth military history and the forerunner of the armoured division
Five Canadian veterans, in their own recorded voices: Charles Darwood Skeates (46th Battalion), Leonard Wood (Oakville, Ontario), Colin Bond (128th/46th Battalion), Allan “Spike” Smith (46th Battalion, Military Medal), and James Neil MacLeod (24th Battalion)
Sources & Further Reading
Primary and archival sources
Hiram Maxim, My Life (London: Methuen, 1915): Maxim’s own account of the 1882 conversation in Vienna that led to the Maxim Gun
Veterans Affairs Canada, Heroes Remember collection: recorded interviews with Charles Skeates, Colin Bond, Allan “Spike” Smith, and James Neil MacLeod
Leonard Wood interview (1978), filmed by Gordon Reid, courtesy of the Town of Oakville YouTube channel
Secondary sources — primary anchor
G.W.L. Nicholson, Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914–1919: Official History of the Canadian Army in the First World War (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1962): the standing primary research anchor for this podcast; used throughout for CEF organizational history, the Canadian Automobile Machine Gun Brigade, the Canadian Machine Gun Corps, and the Canadian Independent Force
Secondary sources — human/experiential anchor
Tim Cook, At the Sharp End: Canadians Fighting the Great War, 1914–1916 (Toronto: Viking Canada, 2007)
Tim Cook, Shock Troops: Canadians Fighting the Great War, 1917–1918 (Toronto: Viking Canada, 2008)
Additional research
John A. English, on the Canadian Independent Force as the first mechanized formation in Commonwealth military history
Loyal Edmonton Regiment Military Museum (LERMM): regimental history reference and collection consultation (the Museum holds examples of the Maxim, Vickers, Lewis, and German MG 08)
Imperial War Museums: casualty figures and background on the Somme offensive
Canadian War Museum and Library and Archives Canada: supplementary verification of unit establishment dates and equipment specifications
The Loyal Edmonton Regiment Military Museum holds examples of the Vickers, Lewis, and German MG 08 machine guns discussed in this episode. https://www.lermuseum.org/visitor-information
Memory and Valour is produced and hosted by Samantha McCrea.
On the morning of July 1st, 1916, more than 57,000 British and Dominion soldiers became casualties along the Somme front; the bloodiest single day in the history of the British Army.
At a village called Beaumont-Hamel, the First Battalion of the Newfoundland Regiment was sent forward into open ground with the wire still standing and the machine guns already aimed. 710 men out of 801 became casualties in approximately thirty minutes.
In this episode, we follow two brothers from that regiment: Harry and Alfred Hynes of Glenwood, Newfoundland, through enlistment, the crossing, and the field itself.
Harry was listed missing on July 1st, 1916. He was twenty-one years old.
Alfred survived Beaumont-Hamel, recovered, and returned to the line three times, wounded each time, carrying a piece of German shrapnel that surgeons never removed.
Alfred Lacey Hynes (Wounded)Harry Raymond Hynes (Missing)
In Newfoundland and Labrador, July 1st is Memorial Day. This episode is why.
Hawthorn Ridge Mine Explosion – July 1st 1916, 07:20 hrs
Sources
Primary Sources
Service file, Private Harry Raymond Hynes, No. 1621, First Battalion, Newfoundland Regiment — including attestation paper, conduct sheet, casualty form, and correspondence from the Colonial Secretary’s office. Library and Archives Canada / The Rooms, Provincial Archives of Newfoundland and Labrador.
Service file, Corporal Alfred Lacey Hynes, No. 1463, First Battalion, Newfoundland Regiment — including attestation paper, medical history, casualty forms (Army Form B.103), Medical Report on a Soldier Boarded (Army Form B.179A), conduct sheet, and discharge documentation. Library and Archives Canada / The Rooms, Provincial Archives of Newfoundland and Labrador.
CWGC commemoration certificate, Private Harry Raymond Hynes — Beaumont-Hamel (Newfoundland) Memorial. Commonwealth War Graves Commission.
Newfoundland Postal Telegraphs forms — missing and wounded notifications to Esau Hynes, July 1916. From both brothers’ service files.
Memorial Plaque receipt — signed by Esau Hynes, Norris Arm, 1921. Harry Hynes service file.
Secondary Sources
Nicholson, G.W.L. The Fighting Newfoundlander: A History of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment. Government of Newfoundland, 1964. — Official regimental history. Primary reference for the Newfoundland Regiment’s order of battle, engagement details at Beaumont-Hamel, Monchy-le-Preux, and Cambrai, and the regiment’s broader wartime record.
Cook, Tim. At the Sharp End: Canadians Fighting the Great War, 1914–1916. Vol. 1. Viking, 2007. — Essential context for the Western Front in 1916, the Somme offensive, and the experience of soldiers in the line.
Cook, Tim. Shock Troops: Canadians Fighting the Great War, 1917–1918. Vol. 2. Viking, 2008. — Context for Cambrai and the later war period.
Royal Newfoundland Regiment Museum. “Beaumont-Hamel — July 1, 1916.” — Unit-level account of the engagement, including battalion war diary figures.
Royal Newfoundland Regiment Museum. “Arras 1917 (Monchy-le-Preux).” — Account of the April 1917 engagement and casualties.
Veterans Affairs Canada. “The Newfoundland Regiment and the Battle of Beaumont-Hamel.” — Casualty figures and regimental overview.
The Rooms, Provincial Archives of Newfoundland and Labrador. “The First Five Hundred.” — Enlistment, early training, and the Blue Puttees.
Heritage Newfoundland and Labrador. “Beaumont Hamel: July 1, 1916.” — Tactical overview, German 119th Reserve Regiment defensive preparations, Hawthorn Ridge mine.
Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Beaumont-Hamel (Newfoundland) Memorial — memorial record and panel inscriptions. cwgc.org.
A Note on Sources
No quotes are attributed to Harry or Alfred Hynes beyond what appears in the documentary record. All narration draws on verified primary documents or established secondary scholarship. Outstanding items — including the verbatim text of the Colonial Secretary’s correspondence — are drawn directly from the brothers’ service files and read into the episode as archival inserts.
This isn’t just a pistol. It’s the sidearm Brigadier-General William Griesbach carried through the First World War, and it’s sitting right here at the Loyal Edmonton Regiment Military Museum. Some artifacts just stop you cold. 🎖️
Visit the Museum located within the Prince of Wales Armouries in Edmonton today!
A thousand men in eight days. A parade square turned into a suburb with four little lakes. A bronze general on a horse that most of the people living there can’t name.
He was Major-General William Griesbach, Edmonton’s youngest-ever mayor, son of Canada’s first Mountie, and the officer who raised the 49th Battalion in 1915. North Edmonton’s neighbourhood of Griesbach now sits on the army base that took his name.
This episode digs down through the layers beneath it: millennia of Indigenous homeland: bison country and river-valley trails that long predate the fort, the fur trade, and Treaty 6; the Forty-Niners who fought at the Somme and Passchendaele.
Among them Alex Decoteau, the Cree Olympic runner and Canada’s first Indigenous police officer; the Canadian Airborne Regiment born on-site; the base’s quieter institutional underside; and the village that remembers its dead one street sign at a time.
Who was the man on the horse? What’s buried under the streets? And what does it mean to build your kitchen on a parade square?
Sources, archives, and a free self-guided walking tour at memoryandvalour.ca.
SOURCES & FURTHER READING
The research behind the episode.
Books (research anchors)
G.W.L. Nicholson, Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914–1919: Official History of the Canadian Army in the First World War
Tim Cook, At the Sharp End (1914–1916) and Shock Troops (1917–1918)
Watch — “The Black Hole”: Inside the CFB Edmonton Detention Barracks (ITV Edmonton, 1989) Reporter Ray Rudowski tours No. 14 Service Prison and Detention Barracks — “the DB” — for a look at the harsher edge of base life: solitary confinement, bread-and-water rations, and the few reforms that followed a Canadian Human Rights Commission investigation. — https://youtu.be/LObWKxwKQGs Source: ITV Edmonton (now Global Edmonton / Corus Entertainment), 1989, via YouTube. Embedded; rights remain with the original broadcaster.
Watch — Airborne (National Film Board of Canada) A film showing the Canadian Airborne Regiment — the unit born at CFB Griesbach in 1968. Embeddable from the NFB. — https://collection.nfb.ca/film/airborne
Listen — Oral Histories of the First World War (Library and Archives Canada) Streamable audio of CEF veterans recalling Vimy, Passchendaele and trench life, from the CBC’s 1964 In Flanders Fields interviews. — bac-lac.gc.ca
Explore — Personnel Records of the First World War (Library and Archives Canada) Search digitized attestation papers and service files — including the Forty-Niners — free, by name, unit, or regimental number. — bac-lac.gc.ca
Explore — The 49th Battalion Memorial Project An online archive of the battalion’s people, sacrifice, and primary sources. — https://49thbattalion.com
Before dawn on 15 September 1916, on the churned ground outside a Picardy village called Courcelette, something crawled out of the fog that no soldier on earth had ever seen before.
A German infantryman, by one account, fled his trench screaming that a crocodile was coming. It was a tank. And the village it helped take that day was the same ground where, twenty-four hours later, Private Chip Kerr of Edmonton’s 49th Battalion won the Victoria Cross.
“Little Willie” Mark I 1915
This episode tells the full story of the tank on the Western Front: the desperate idea dreamed up to break the deadlock of the trenches; the clanking, breakdown-prone, half-blind steel ovens the first crews fought and suffered inside; the terror and the failure of that first day at Courcelette; and the long road to Amiens on 8 August 1918 — the “black day of the German Army” — where the tank finally came of age with the Canadian Corps at the point of the spear.
Lieutenant Stuart Hastie commanded Mark IV tank D17 during the attack at Fleurs-Courcelette on 15th September 1916
It’s a story that runs straight through Canada’s war. Canadians were there at the tank’s combat debut at Courcelette, the day before Private John Chipman “Chip” Kerr of the 49th Battalion won his Victoria Cross on the same ground. And Canadians were the spearhead at Amiens in August 1918, where the tank finally came of age. Along the way, we climb inside the steel oven the crews actually fought in, and we hear from the men themselves. British tankers from the very first machines, and a private of the 24th Battalion who rode the tanks forward at Amiens.
*Wikipedia
In 1999, a Mark IV Female, D51: Deborah, was excavated at the village of Flesquières in France. It had been knocked out by shell-fire at the Battle of Cambrai (1917) and subsequently buried when used to fill a crater. Work is underway on its restoration. But that’s a story for a future episode!
Above is a series of First World War era Canadian Official postcards depicting tanks. They were found in my late Grandfather’s personal items several years after his passing.
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Sources & further reading
Books (primary scholarly anchors)
Tim Cook, At the Sharp End: Canadians Fighting the Great War, 1914–1916 (Viking Canada, 2007).
Tim Cook, Shock Troops: Canadians Fighting the Great War, 1917–1918 (Viking Canada, 2008).
Tim Cook, The Secret History of Soldiers: How Canadians Survived the Great War (Allen Lane, 2018).
G.W.L. Nicholson, Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914–1919: Official History of the Canadian Army in the First World War (Queen’s Printer, 1962; reprinted McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015).
Stephen Pope, The First Tank Crews: The Lives of the Tankmen Who Fought at the Battle of Flers-Courcelette, 15 September 1916 (Helion & Company, 2016).
Memory and Valour is a Canadian First World War history podcast with a particular eye on Edmonton, the 49th (Edmonton) Battalion, and the Edmonton Regiment.
Chip Kerr, the 49th, and a Victoria Cross at Courcelette
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 one of his fingers freshly blown off, he climbed out of the trench onto the parados, the most exposed ground on the battlefield, ran along the top above the enemy, and opened fire from behind them. Believing themselves surrounded, sixty-two Germans surrendered. It earned him the Victoria Cross.
In this episode, we rebuild the deed from the ground up: who Kerr really was (and what his attestation papers actually say), how the 49th was raised in Edmonton and then gutted at Mount Sorrel, how trench fighting and the hand grenade truly worked and why Kerr’s move wasn’t just brave, it was brilliant. Along the way, you’ll hear the voices of men who were there, and Kerr’s own grandson recounting the family story and the famous note left on a homestead door: “War is Hell, but what is homesteading?”
Heavy on tactics, rooted in the local Edmonton story, and grounded in the records, including a few myths we set straight along the way.
Much of the research behind this episode lives in the building that carries the 49th Battalion’s lineage: the Loyal Edmonton Regiment Military Museum, inside the historic Prince of Wales Armouries at 10440 – 108 Avenue NW in Edmonton. Walk through the Griesbach Gallery, stand in front of Cecil Kinross’s miniature Victoria Cross, and see everything we talked about today in the cases and on the walls. I’m currently doing my university practicum there, so if you’re in Edmonton, come and find me. Let’s talk history.
The Forty-Niner (49th Battalion Association magazine), July 1933 — states Kerr “was drafted to the 49th in June 1916” on the breaking-up of the 66th Battalion.
49th Battalion operations account / war diary, 15–18 September 1916 — Library and Archives Canada (referenced in the LAC blog feature below).
Books & official histories
Tim Cook, At the Sharp End: Canadians Fighting the Great War, 1914–1916 (Vol. 1). — The Canadian Corps’ “learning curve,” the Somme, and the push toward initiative at the sharp end.
Col. G.W.L. Nicholson, Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914–1919 — the Official History of the Canadian Army in the First World War. (Freely available as a PDF from the Government of Canada / Canadian military history collections.)
Museums & archives
Loyal Edmonton Regiment Military Museum — regimental histories (“Birth of the 49th Battalion,” “Billy’s Own,” and the “Two VCs” feature on Kerr & Kinross). Home of Kinross’s miniature VC. https://www.lermuseum.org
Library and Archives Canada — The Discover Blog, “Honouring Canada’s Victoria Cross Recipients: John Chipman Kerr.” https://thediscoverblog.com
Veterans Affairs Canada — Victoria Cross recipient profiles (Kerr; Kinross) and Canadian Virtual War Memorial. https://www.veterans.gc.ca
Canadian War Museum — Battle of Courcelette / Flers–Courcelette; Kerr’s Victoria Cross is held in Ottawa. https://www.warmuseum.ca
Canada’s Historic Places / Alberta Register of Historic Places — Prince of Wales Armouries (former Edmonton Drill Hall, opened Nov 1915) and the Victoria Armoury (former Land Titles Building, home of the 19th Alberta Dragoons). https://www.historicplaces.ca
Wikipedia (entry points, then chase the citations): John Chipman Kerr; Cecil John Kinross; 49th (Edmonton) Battalion; 66th Battalion (Edmonton Guards); 51st Battalion, CEF; Battle of Flers–Courcelette; Mills bomb; Stielhandgranate.
Audio credits:
Graham Kerr (grandson of John Chipman Kerr) — interview by Craig Ketchum, “Recounting John Chipman Kerr, Victoria Cross recipient 1916,” YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DXViuxcoME
In August 1914, Canada went to war without an air force. Not a small one. Not a token one. None. The country that had pioneered powered flight in the British Empire sent its young men overseas to fly other people’s airplanes, in other people’s uniforms, for other people’s wars.
What happened next is one of the most extraordinary and least-told stories in Canadian military history.
This episode follows five Canadian airmen: Billy Bishop, the most decorated pilot in the British Empire whose most famous action may never have happened; Raymond Collishaw, who outscored almost everyone and came home almost unknown; William Barker, Canada’s most decorated serviceman of the entire war, now largely forgotten; Wop May, the rookie who accidentally became the last man the Red Baron ever chased; and Alan McLeod, eighteen years old, who climbed out onto the wing of a burning aircraft at five thousand feet and flew it home.
Along the way, you’ll hear the actual voices of men who were there: a 1969 CBC interview with Collishaw and two of his Black Flight pilots, and a 1989 oral history with Mack McGill, a workaday RFC pilot who flew the front at twenty thousand feet and remembered, seven decades later, that the engine was no good after a few hours.
SHOW NOTES / SOURCES
Primary recommended reading
Tim Cook, At the Sharp End: Canadians Fighting the Great War, 1914–1916, and Shock Troops: Canadians Fighting the Great War, 1917–1918 (Penguin Canada, 2007 and 2008). Cook’s two-volume Canadian Expeditionary Force history is essential for institutional and cultural context, including the place of airmen in the broader Canadian war effort.
G.W.L. Nicholson, Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914–1919: The Official History of the Canadian Army in the First World War (Queen’s Printer, 1962). The official institutional history.
S.F. Wise, Canadian Airmen and the First World War: The Official History of the Royal Canadian Air Force, Volume I (University of Toronto Press, 1980). The definitive scholarly account of Canadian aviators in the RFC, RNAS, and RAF.
Primary sources used in this episode
W.A. Bishop, Winged Warfare (1918) — Bishop’s autobiography. (Now public-domain; freely available via Internet Archive.)
Bishop’s letter to Margaret Burden, summer 1917 — quoted in the Globe and Mail, “Billy’s Battle,” April 20, 2002.
William Fry, Air of Battle — memoir of the deputy flight leader who declined to accompany Bishop on the June 2, 1917 raid.
Wop May’s combat report, April 21, 1918 — 209 Squadron records, reproduced at wopmay.com (Wop May family archives).
Wop May’s address to the 12th Calgary Scout Troop, February 19, 1952 — transcript reproduced at wopmay.com.
Alan McLeod’s letters home — preserved by the McLeod family; quoted in RCAF “Portrait of Courage” feature, 2017, and in Library and Archives Canada material.
Reverend Dr. David Christie’s tribute to Alan McLeod, Manitoba Free Press, November 7, 1918.
Raymond Collishaw, Alfred Williams “Nick” Carter, and William Melville “Mel” Alexander, CBC-TV interview, 1969 — Collishaw (the squadron and Black Flight commander), Carter (A Flight commander), and Alexander (Black Flight pilot, Black Prince) reminiscing about the 10 Naval Squadron and the Black Flight era. Source for Carter’s first-person account of shooting down a German aircraft into the Ypres canal and retrieving a piece of the wreckage; source for Alexander’s first-person account of his kill in the July 6th, 1917 dogfight (the day of Collishaw’s six victories), including his “you don’t stick around after that to see what happens” line and the period photograph he holds on camera. Available via CBC Archives (cbc.ca/player/play/video/1.3627782).
“Mack” McGill (likely William W. McGill, RFC), interviewed by James Pope, 1989 — late-life oral history with a non-ace Canadian RFC pilot who flew the Sopwith Dolphin on the Western Front in 1918. Source for McGill’s first-person account of flying at 20,000 feet, the cold in the open cockpit, and the unreliability of the Dolphin’s geared Hispano-Suiza V8. From Chris Charland’s “Classic Interviews,” a James Tallimar project for TimeKeepers Canada. (youtube.com/watch?v=W3ouuITIh84)
William W. McGill (RFC) oral history, 1978 — extensive interview recorded by the University of Victoria with a Guelph-born RFC pilot describing his training pipeline (Long Branch, School of Military Aeronautics, Camp Mohawk, Deseronto, Camp Borden, Texas) and overseas service from February 1918. Almost certainly the same man as “Mack” McGill in the Pope interview. Available via University of Victoria Library.
Raymond Collishaw with R.V. Dodds, Air Command: A Fighter Pilot’s Story (William Kimber, 1973) — Collishaw’s own memoir, the source for the “fiercest and most harmless” quote and the “sad moment when my squadron had to strike the Royal Navy ensign.”
Victoria Cross citations — London Gazette, August 11, 1917 (Bishop); May 1, 1918 (McLeod); November 30, 1918 (Barker).
Roy Brown’s Bar to Distinguished Service Cross citation — London Gazette, June 18, 1918.
Wop May’s Distinguished Flying Cross citation — London Gazette, September 1918.
Raymond Collishaw’s Distinguished Flying Cross citation — London Gazette, August 3, 1918.
Denny May tells the story of his father, Wilfred ‘Wop May, – who was chased by the Red Baron just before the legend was shot down. Video by Ed Kaiser, Edmonton Journal, Feb. 28 2018
On the Canadian Aviation Corps
History of the Royal Canadian Air Force (institutional history) — for the formation and dissolution of the CAC; the Burgess-Dunne biplane; the September 16, 1914 authorization, the October 1, 1914 delivery, and the May 1915 dissolution.
On Bishop
Brereton Greenhous, The Making of Billy Bishop (2002) — the skeptical case.
Peter Kilduff, Billy Bishop VC: Lone Wolf Hunter — the defensive case.
Philip Markham, “An Investigation of the Aerodrome Raid,” Over The Front, Fall 1995.
Paul Cowan, dir., The Kid Who Couldn’t Miss (NFB, 1982).
On Barker
Wayne Ralph, Barker VC: William Barker, Canada’s Most Decorated War Hero (1997).
Ted Barris, “The Making of Billy Barker,” Air Force Magazine, November–December 2017.
On May
Sheila Reid, Wings of a Hero: Canadian Pioneer Flying Ace Wilfrid Wop May (1997).
The Wop May Chronicles family archive (wopmay.com).
On Collishaw, Carter, and Alexander
Raymond Collishaw with R.V. Dodds, Air Command: A Fighter Pilot’s Story (William Kimber, 1973).
Mike Bechthold, “Raymond Collishaw,” The Canadian Encyclopedia (Historica Canada, 2008; revised 2019).
Legion Magazine, “The amazing aerial feats of ace Raymond Collishaw” (2025).
John Harris, Knights of the Air: Canadian Aces of World War I (1958) — source for the famous “giving” victories anecdote about Collishaw’s leadership of new pilots.
Calgary Aero Space Museum, Nick Carter file (PDF, archived).
Alfred Williams Carter Distinguished Service Cross citation — London Gazette, August 29, 1917 (for actions of 22 and 24 July 1917).
William Melville Alexander Distinguished Service Cross citation — London Gazette, September 14, 1917 (for actions of 16, 20, and 21 August 1917).
CBC-TV profile of Collishaw and the Black Flight, 1969 — featuring interviews with Collishaw, Carter, and Alexander.
On McLeod
Veterans Affairs Canada online biography.
RCAF, “Portrait of Courage: Alan Arnett McLeod, VC” (2017).
Memory and Valour is available wherever you listen to podcasts.
