Here is a good overview of the underground battles on the Western Front during WWI.
March 31, 1917-WW1-British soldiers eating while the sentrey keeps lookout.
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An iPhone app for the Western Front: Bugger, that was my idea…
The difference is whomever is behind the Great War iPhone App actually got it done.
@spotonlocations followed me on twitter on Sunday. They create battlefield apps for WWI and WWII.
Check details of the Western Front app here.
They promise more apps. I will post a review soon.
Would still like to create an app for a Canadian visiting the Western Front.
Tweeting Vimy Ridge: Not much traction for so much action
On Tuesday, April 9, I tweeted around #vimy and #WWI.
My idea was to present the first day of the Battle of Vimy Ridge as a current event.
I figure most Canadians are aware of the battle.
However, beyond the knowledge of its Easter Monday launch, that it was an all-Canadian assault and that it worked, most know little around the details of the attack.
I thought twitter would be a good chance to break things down – humanize it. Show where British Columbians were at Vimy Ridge. Name the dead, their address, their family.
I tweeted about 50 times. Check them out here.
The key resources were this book, and these Canadian Government websites. Library and Archives here and Canadian Veterans Affairs here.
Veterans Affairs site was the best. Gives a brief on all servicemen who died on a certain day and you can use the archive to learn more about them.
@mferg1917 asked his couple hundred followers to see what I was doing, as did another, but that was it. No other reaction or response. My own paper’s social media didn’t retweet my work.
So, was it a waste of time? I have 1,600 or so followers, but how many of those noticed the tweets? Not many.
What was my message? It was about detailed remembrance. A new way to report old events.
Next time I will plan better.
Tweeting Vimy Ridge: New technology, old conflict #vimy #WWI
I’ve come up with an idea I’d like to implement on Tuesday April, 9, the anniversary of day one of the Battle of Vimy Ridge.
As a journalist, I am trying to show the impact something like a day on the battlefield had on a country with eight million people at the time.
After three days at Vimy Ridge, there were about 3,700 dead Canadians. The whole war claimed about 66,000 Canadians. And there were tens of thousands of broken men who returned home on top of that.
Now, roughly 600 people die a day in Canada, mostly from disease.
Between May, 1915, and Nov. 11, 1918, there were as many as a thousand Canadians a day dying. Almost all young men, many with families and children. All with mothers, many at home alive in fear.
So, sadly without enough time to really do it justice, I will present via twitter a recount of events from launch time to the end of the day on April 9 with a focus on B.C. soldiers.
Try and humanize the action and help followers realize what can happen in a short period of time, in terms of loss of life and military success.
Ancestry.ca Offering Free Access to WWI Records between April 9 and 12
Here’s one for Canadian WWI buffs.
A lady called Ginger Shewell, who is a public relations person for ancestry.ca, emailed me at work to pitch a story related to the April 9 anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge in 1917.
Her pitch centres around a Montreal-born veteran Joseph Henry Mees, who was a gunner (supplying ammunition to the front line) and lived through the war.
Of particular note is that for the days April 9-12, ancestry.ca is offering free access to its WWI historical records.
Below are the details of Mees, courtesy of ancestry.ca.
Ninety six years ago Canada came of age. Our valour at the battle Vimy Ridge proved we were more than just a partner to British troops. In April of 1917, we became a nation, ready and willing to take the enemy head-on.
The battle gave our country four Victoria Cross medals – the highest military honour awarded to members of the commonwealth – but not always do our decorated war heroes act alone. In war victory is achieved by the determination and sacrifice of many everyday heroes. One of these everyday heroes was Joseph Henry Mees.
Joseph was born on Feb. 2, 1889, and just weeks after his 27th birthday he signed up to serve in the Canadian Over-Seas Expeditionary Force in February 1916. He would leave behind his wife Mary Julian Mees and two small daughters in Montreal.
Joseph was enlisted as a gunner. Equivalent to a private in Commonwealth armies, a gunner is affectionately referred to as “the ammunition carrier”. During the First World War gunners provided close support to other men in combat or attacked targets and were often in close proximity to or participating in direct combat. Courage was incredibly important to these highly engaged artillery positions.
One year after enlistment, Joseph found himself at the battle of Vimy Ridge. Joseph wrote home as much as possible and in one letter he mentions his Vimy Ridge experience. He writes that prior to the battle there was considerable shelling by the Germans, but until all their artillery was in place his crew could not fire back. However, the taking of Vimy Ridge went perfectly. He boasts that his infantry was tickled with his crew’s work.
Soon after the battle, while he was resting in what was left of the village of Vimy, Joseph and three other crew members were injured by German shelling. Thankfully, his wounds were described as slight.
He returned home to Canada in 1919, and quickly settled into the life of an ordinary man, like so many other returning heroes before and after him. He had two more children, worked as a tile settler and passed away at the age of 63 in 1952.
Posted in Canadian Forces, Remembrance, WWI Military History
Tagged Military History, vimy ridge
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A play in Ypres remembering the Christmas truce: What a great idea
The author of War Horse, Michael Morpurgo, has written another WWI story.
This time a play about the Christmas truce of December 25, 1914.
The trustworthy Independent says a short version of the play will be performed some time soon at the site of the truce out front of Ypres.
Posted in General, WWI Military History
Tagged Christmas truce, Military History, WWI
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The curious case of Matthew Keys
I met Matthew Keys on the night of March 11, two years ago, through Twitter while covering Japan’s nuclear tsunami from the web desk at theprovince.com.
Matt, a freelancer at the time, provided a link to Al Jazeera which had for unknown reasons the best live footage at the time. He racked up a lot of followers on Twitter that night.
I sent Matt a note afterwards thanking him and we exchanged a few messages via Twitter as he moved from freelancer to TV in San Francisco then to New York at the start of last year to work a prestigious online job at Reuters.
It seemed just deserts for a hard-working journalist.
Anyway, on Thursday afternoon buzzfeed gave me a shock.
A breaking story that “Reuters deputy social media editor Matthew Keys” was in big shit for allegedly giving Anonomous – the legendary hacking group with social aims – access to the LA Times website in December, 2010.
The Department of Justice says Keys, 26, told the hackers to “go fuck some shit up”. I assume they have a digital record of that. And yikes.
The government say Keys was “terminated” from a Sacramento TV station in October, 2010, and later in an online chat gave login credentials to an Anonymous member that allowed brief and eventually thwarted access to the LA Times website (part of the same chain that owned KTXL Fox 40 in Sacramento). A headline was changed to read “Pressure builds in House to elect CHIPPY 1337″.
Keys is charged with transmitting information to damage a “protected computer” and if found guilty (there are three charges in all) faces hard time and a massive fine under new anti-hacking laws.
He could say he got drunk, gave away log-in details to spite a former employer, did something he deeply regrets and has moved on to better things – a seat in the Reuters newsroom in New York: very credible.
But his dealings with Anonymous seem deep and acrimonious. And know that Anonymous (which did great work in British Columbia outing the online predators that circled suicide teen Amanda Todd) is no friend of the US Government.
So, two things have emerged.
One. The indictment claims Matt somehow got into a secretive chat-room used by key Anonymous members – including And Suba (aka. Hector Xavier Monsegur) – in late 2010. He gave them the login info gained to gain their trust then took screen captures of the chat discussing planned hacks.
Monsegur turned FBI agent in late 2011 and subsequently blew the whistle on Keys.
The second is the dangerous yet valuable relationship Keys has with his beloved social media.
Supposedly, he lost his first job for a controversial tweet that led to a newsroom blowout with the manager. He then wouldn’t hand over the passwords for the station’s Facebook and Twitter accounts.
At Reuters last year he created a mocking Twitter page that led to a rebuke of some sort.
He tweeted on Thursday afternoon that he learned of the indictment via Twitter and Monsegur ratted Keys on Twitter.
Was Matt infiltrating Anonymous for a Reuters story?, is he colateral damage in the government’s fight against Anonymous?, or a young ambitious guy who tried to play both sides and got burned?
I don’t know, but Matt, if you read this. Good luck and stay strong. There’s a New York Times bestseller in this for you.
Interest in WWI history and stories is growing in lead-up to 100th Anniversaries
It’s tough sometimes drawing attention to WWI and the seemingly infinite myriad of stories that can be told around the war and the era.
Personally, I am focusing only on Canadian and Australian forces on the Western Front and am just able to scrape the surface. Each man and woman a story. Their interactions a story, their death or survival a story, the battleground a story, the politics behind the battle decision a story, the repercussions of their death, survival or injury a story and so on.
What I am noticing though is an increase in the mainstream media coverage of WWI (there’re examples here, here and here) and a jump in the amount of social media touching on the Great War.
Several months ago, when I searched WWI on twitter , there would be maybe one or two posts a day. That has now grown to many a day – check below.
It’s interesting also to see what the Western Front Association is up to. Their latest newsletter has a good article on a website that is gathering data on upcoming anniversaries. It’s a massive resource funded by the European Union and can be accessed here.
Finally, if you’re in Victoria, B.C., this weekend the Western Front Association’s Pacific Coast Branch is holding its AGM at the Bay Street Armoury. Details are here.
Posted in Canadian Forces, Remembrance, WWI Military History
Tagged Canada, European Union, facial, History, Victoria, Western Front Association, WWI
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British Army decision to ensure all medals engraved with name of recipient paying off in spades as 100th WWI anniversaries’ loom
As the 100th anniversary of the start of WWI looms (true WWI buffs are already in anniversary mode, analysing things that happened in 1912, 1913 etc. that led up to the war) there are more stories surfacing around people trying to learn about the recipients of medals they have in their possession.
The Province newspaper in Vancouver alone has two of those stories in the past couple of months. There is one here, and another of my posts related to such here.
So, here’s the thing. Unlike the Germans, Belgians and French, the British Army tradition is to engrave the name of the recipient on the edge of every medal.
This has turned out to be a great thing. If you buy, say a Belgian Victory Medal (which is similar to the Commonwealth one), it’s interesting to look at but you will never know who owned it. Did they survive?, where were they from?, did they have family? and where did they serve?
With a Commonwealth service medal you see the name, it comes with a number, a rank and who they served with. In some cases it is a broad stroke – Army Service Corps – or will detail the battalion number so you can really narrow it down.
This opens up an avenue for research and helps ensure the recipient’s memory is not lost.
I have a bunch of medals and await one day to have to time to do my research and learn more about the recipients. Read here and here to learn more.
Because the WWI experience was not so great for my grand-dad, he chose not to collect his medals and I assume they were destroyed at some point by the government.
Anyway, kudos to someone who decided some time to make sure the veteran’s name was enscribed on their medals. It certainly enriches the experience of holding one of these medals.
To think, how did it get from the recipient to me?
As an aside, I am monitoring the value of WWI medals. They do seem to be trending up.
All The Kings Men: Sourcing the beautiful words at the end of what I consider one the finest WWI movies ever made
I have written about All The Kings Men before.
I watched the movie again the other night. Such a good film.
Anyway, this time around I was taken by the words recited at the end as the boys walked forward into the mist that become part of their myth.
It is as follows.
“The warrior sank in the dust and his armour fell around him. Blood stained the gold of his hair.
He is as a handsome tree that stands against each blast of wind and blossoms thickly with white flowers until there comes, suddenly, a wind so fierce that the tree is torn up from its roots and is laid out, its whole length, upon the earth.”
Loved those words. So powerful, but what do they mean?
Obviously it speaks of a fallen soldier who was once so strong but is now down.
The words were written by Homer and are from The Iliad. Heavy reading and online forums I perused don’t really give much insight. Just that perhaps it refers to a fellow named Euphorbus.
So, I will have to read the Iliad and will post here again when it is complete – in around 2025. Apparently it’s a tough read.
Posted in Books and movies, WWI Military History
Tagged All The Kings Men, Canada, History, WWI
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