Posted on 10/03/2006 6:05:35 PM PDT by NorthOf45
'My body’s kind of rickety'
One of three Great War vets left says he’ll miss Vimy ceremony
By Chris Lambie
The Chronicle Herald
October 3, 2006
Veterans Affairs Canada is sending 300 people to Europe next year for a ceremony marking the 90th anniversary of the pivotal Battle of Vimy Ridge in 1917.
But none of Canada’s three surviving First World War veterans plans to attend.
"My mind is OK, but my body’s kind of rickety," said John Babcock, 106, who lives at home in Spokane, Wash., with his wife Dorothy.
Mr. Babcock lied about his age to join the military and board a troop ship in Halifax bound for England.
"I enlisted when I was 15½ years old," he said.
But the Ontario native’s papers caught up with him by the time the ship arrived in England and he spent the war near Brighton in a young soldiers brigade.
"The only action I saw was drilling," he said with a chuckle.
Canada’s other two surviving vets from the Great War, Lloyd Clemett, 106, and Percy Dwight Wilson, 105, don’t plan to attend the ceremony next April, where the results of a two-year cleaning and restoration of the towering stone monument will be unveiled.
"They wouldn’t be able to travel with us," Veterans Affairs spokeswoman Pamela Price said of the centenarians.
Instead, Second World War veterans, young people, politicians, bureaucrats and journalists will be part of the government-sponsored trip to France, Belgium and possibly the Netherlands.
"It’s really important to mark this achievement and to pass along the torch of remembrance to the youth of Canada," Ms. Price said.
Germans killed 3,598 Canadian soldiers at Vimy, in northern France. The battle, which began on April 9, 1917, was a rare victory in the stalemate that had grown out of years of trench warfare along the Western Front. Canadian troops captured more ground in three days of fighting than British and French soldiers had in the previous three years.
"It was the first time that the Canadian military fought together as the Canadian military," said Bob Butt of the Royal Canadian Legion.
"Many people have described it as the moment where the country actually became a country."
Canadian Military Ping
Beautiful story.
Is the pockmarked terrain from shell craters?
What an incredible waste WWI was. The war should have been all the European powers vs. the Ottoman Turks. Instead the men of Europe were slaughtered for no reason, and Germany was cruelly treated after the war creating circumstances that led to the slaughter of tens of millions more. Stupid.....
God bless all those Canadian heroes.
FWIW, Canada had 66,655 military deaths and 172,500 wounded in WW1.
I'm sorry, but that's nonsense. You've bought into the Nazi propaganda that the Second World War was an inevitable consequance of the First. It wasn't. All the blame for the "tens of millions more" goes to Herr Hitler.
I don't think that you and Tailback are really that far apart on this matter. While you have interpreted Tailback's post to say WW2 was an inevitable consequence of WWI, it seems to me the point was the Armistice and Versailles agreements resulted in a "perfect storm", the rise of Hitler. I firmly agree with you that full blame rests with Hitler.
It certainly does not rise to the level of Nazi apologetics or propaganda to recognize that there were unforseeable results of decisions taken to end the slaughter of the first "modern" war. Just to remain on topic, that is what the memorial is about -- horrible losses of brave men in an effort that was not to be realized as envisioned by the starry-eyed: the "war to end all wars."
Only the dead have seen the end of war. -- George Santayana, "Tipperary", 1924. (Not Plato???)
HTML skills failed...link about Plato:
http://plato-dialogues.org/faq/faq008.htm
"Only about 12 U.S. WWI veterans are still alive."
http://www.military.com/features/0,15240,115021,00.html
NorthOf45: "Yes, I agree. If I changed anything about it, I'd switch the Canadian maple leaf flag with the Red Ensign ... the flag that the Canadian vets on Vimy Ridge died under."
Agreed.
But I have to admit that the Beer Can Label is beginning to grow on me. Our soldiers are giving it its own lustre.
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