Aviation was still in its infancy at the outbreak of the First World War. The Wright brothers had made their first successful flight only a decade earlier in 1903, and few people had ever seen, let alone flown in, an airplane. But that did not stop hundreds of New Brunswick men from enlisting with the British air services during the war.
When Molly Lamb Bobak enlisted in the Canadian Women’s Army Corps (CWAC), in November of 1942, she had become part of the nascent women’s divisions in the Canadian military. In WWI and at the beginning of WWII, women serving in the military were limited to positions as nurses, but in the summer of 1941 that all changed; the three branches of the Canadian military each created a women’s division in which women were trained for non-combatant roles, including clerical and administrative services, food services, and trades work. Molly joined more than 50,000 Canadian women, serving at home and abroad in order to help turn the tide of war.
I recently had the pleasure of interviewing author John MacLachlan Gray about his most recent book, Mr. Good-Evening, the third book in his Raincoast Noir series.
A trickle that began in 1915
turned to a flood of soldiers returning to Canada needing care for their often-devastating injuries:
missing limbs, ravaged lungs, faces and minds destroyed. Many of them ended up at Toronto’s
newly opened Christie Street hospital, also known as the Dominion Orthopedic Hospital (DOH).
In Perpetuity brings together the biographies of 110 soldiers from the Fredericton area who died from service during the First World War.
John Bemrose draws readers in and won’t let them go until the last page of this astonishingly lyrical and deeply humane novel.
Set against the little-known history of the 140,000 Chinese workers who were brought to Europe as non-combatant labour during WWI, The Porcelain Moon is a tale of forbidden love, identity and belonging, and what we are willing to risk for freedom.
From Tim Cook, Canada’s top war historian, comes a definitive medical history of the Great War.
In Our Youth explores the lives of thirty-two young Canadian military and civilian flyers, viewed through the medium of archival photography.
n 1917, a small fleet of six schooners sailed from Nova Scotia and Newfoundland ports as live bait for German U-boats.
The unusual and moving tale of Muggins, a famed fundraising dog who became a mascot of the Canadian Red Cross during the First World War.
A sweeping novel of the Canadian experience in the First World War, Amid the Splintered Trees is loosely based on author Heather McBriarty’s own family history.
A Canadian Nurse in the Great War grants a peek, through the diary of Ruth Loggie, into a little-known moment of our history. It also offers a glimpse into forbidden territory-women at war.
Literary historical fiction set in a war-torn Europe and glamourous Old Hollywood, following a lonely landscape gardener, from author of Big Town and I Still Have a Suitcase in Berlin.
Post-World War I, the small town of Newcombe, Ontario, is in danger of dying. Remote and with fewer than 200 inhabitants, its future is spelled out: slow, drawn-out, painful death as a community. A chance meeting between Francis Barrett, an employee of the Canadian National Railway (CNR), and Cal Bannatyne, a major on his way home from the front, leads to an opportunity: getting a railway station to Newcombe, linking it to the rest of Canada, and perhaps keeping it from dying.
© 2024 | THE Miramichi Reader
Nicholas Selig, Editor-in-Chief
