History

The Canadian Encyclopedia online says peacekeeping is "Canada's special métier" - which it surely is - but that is only one of our military's specialities. In all, in our 141 years of nationhood, more than 116,000 Canadians have laid down their lives to protect our sovereignty and freedom. [...]

After the Germans and Japanese surrendered in 1945, we had the fourth-largest army in the world. Between 1939 to 1945, when our population was just over 12 million, nearly one million Canadians served in uniform. (To put that number in per-capita context, it was the equivalent of today's Canada fielding a military of almost three million - equivalent to the population of Montreal.)

We are not a country that seeks out war. Indeed, we have always let our military deteriorate between conflicts, focusing our public spending instead on domestic priorities. There was almost as much expert and media hand-wringing over the sad state of our Armed Forces between the First and Second World Wars as there was immediately before the recent round of spending by the Conservative government. Yet when called upon, we are always equal to the challenge with our combination of full-time soldiers, reservists and volunteers. Whether ensuring the first election in a nascent democracy goes off fairly, rushing aid and medical personnel into a disaster zone or engaging in old-fashioned combat, Canadian soldiers, sailors and airmen have long established that they are even-handed in policing trouble spots and tenacious fighters where someone else has started the battle.

For too long, our politicians, academics and educators have tried to bury or even deny our true military history, insisting we have never been a warrior nation. And while it is true that we have never as a culture glorified war, neither have we backed away.

Yes, Canada has been instrumental in developing the modern concept of peacekeeping, something of which we should be extremely proud. In Kashmir, Suez, Congo, Cyprus, Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda, Bosnia, Lebanon, Cambodia, Angola, Mozambique and dozens of other conflicts around the globe, we have over and over again proven ourselves equal to the complex and dangerous task of standing between two warring factions (or more) and keeping them from killing one another. And we have lost over 100 brave young men and women in 50 years of this service to mankind.

Still, we risk dishonouring those Canadians who have gone to war to defend our nation and its values when we seek to revise our history and downplay our contributions to wars fought in the name of freedom. This is especially true at a time when more than 2,500 of our soldiers are battling the Taliban and al-Qaeda on the plains and in the mountains of Afghanistan. Nearly 100 have lost their lives there in the past six years trying to bring stability to the people of that nation and deny terrorists a staging base from which to plot their attacks on the West.

Stalin acted ‘entirely rationally’ in executing and imprisoning millions of people in the Gulags, a controversial new Russian teaching manual claims.

Fifty-five years after the Soviet dictator died, the latest guide for teachers to promote patriotism among the Russian young said he did what he did to ensure the country’s modernisation.

The manual, titled A History of Russia, 1900-1945, will form the basis of a new state-approved text book for use in schools next year.

It seems to follow an attempt backed by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to re-evaluate Stalin’s record in a more positive light.

Critics have taken exception, however, to numerous excerpts, which they say are essentially attempts to whitewash Stalin’s crimes.

In the West, it has been widely accepted that in the 1920s millions were shot, exiled to Siberia, or died of starvation after their land, homes and meagre possessions, were taken to fulfil Stalin’s vision of massive ‘factory farms.’

In the 1930s millions more whom he considered or suspected a threat to the USSR were executed or exiled to Gulag labour camps in remote areas of Siberia or Central Asia, where many also died of disease, malnutrition and exposure.

Historians believe up to 20 million people perished as a result of his actions - more than the six million killed during Hitler’s genocide of the Jews. [...]

The manual informs teachers that the Great Terror of the 1930s came about because Stalin ‘did not know who would deal the next blow, and for that reason he attacked every known group and movement, as well as those who were not his allies or of his mindset.’

It stresses to teachers that ‘it is important to show that Stalin acted in a concrete historical situation’ and that he acted ‘entirely rationally - as the guardian of a system, as a consistent supporter of reshaping the country into an industrialised state.’

During World War II the Army Corps of Engineers needed to hide the Lockheed Burbank Aircraft Plant to protect it from a Japanese air attack. They covered it with camouflage netting and to make it look like a rural subdivision from the air.

Operation Fortitude was the codename for the deception operations used by the Allied forces during World War II in connection with the Normandy landings (Operation Overlord). It was divided into Fortitude North, a threat to invade Norway, and Fortitude South, designed to induce the Germans to believe that the main invasion of France would occur in the Pas de Calais rather than Normandy. Fortitude was one of the most successful deception operations of the war and arguably the most important. Both Fortitude North and Fortitude South were related to a wider deception plan called Operation Bodyguard.

[...]

It was initially envisioned that deception would occur through five main channels:

1. Physical deception: the creation in the mind of the enemy of non-existent units through fake infrastructure and equipment, such as inflatable rubber tanks and plywood artillery.
2. Controlled leaks of information through diplomatic channels, which might be passed on via neutral countries to the Germans.
3. Wireless traffic: the creation of non-existent units through simulation of the wireless traffic that such units would generate, which would be detected by the enemy
4. Use of German agents controlled by the Allies through the Double Cross System to send false information to the German intelligence services
5. Public presence of notable staff associated with phantom groups, such as FUSAG (First U.S. Army Group), most notably George S. Patton, the best known senior Allied combat commander.

During the course of Fortitude the almost complete lack of German aerial reconnaissance, together with the absence of uncontrolled German agents in Britain, came to make physical deception almost irrelevant. The unreliability of the "diplomatic leaks" resulted in their discontinuance. The majority of deception was carried out by means of false wireless traffic and through German double agents. The latter proved to be by far the most significant.

In fact, Fortitude was so successful that Hitler regarded the Normandy invasion as a feint: he kept his Panzer units where he expected an attack and away from Normandy, until the battle was decided—in Normandy.[1] Although Fortitude was controlled from SHAEF, London Controlling Section retained responsibility for what was called "Special Means": the use of diplomatic channels and double-agents.