A Brief Note on the Photos Above
by Chris on May 21, 2009
Calgary Highlanders in the Netherlands, October 1944, during the battle to clear the German's out of the Scheldt Estuary and open the ports at Antwerp to Allied shipping. Photograph by Canadian CFPU photographer Ken Bell.
The photos in the sliding menu bar above were collected from a few different places around the web, but primarily from the Canadian War Museum website and Library and Archives Canada. These photos are technically in the “public domain,” since copyrights generally expire after 50 years.
Library and Archives Canada hosts a wealth of interesting information and digitized documents, and is well worth a visit. The images from the Scheldt Estuary, Normandy, Passchendaele and Dieppe came from their collections. Their “Faces of War” virtual exhibition is particularly good. It contains several photographs from Canada’s official war photographers taken during the Second World War, including Ken Bell‘s shot (inset). Incidentally, we recently saw an interesting documentary on the the Canadian Army Film and Photo Unit (The CFPU was established in September 1941), called Shooters . According to the film, Canadian cameramen like Bell captured a number of scoops during the war, including the first iconic footage of Allied soldiers going ashore on D-Day (Canadian soldiers, no less) shot by Sgt. Bill Grant of the CFPU.
This was the first footage of the landings to be shown around the world, thanks in part to Brian O’Regan, the father of Shooters director James O’Regan. James recalled the story in an interview with CanadianFilm.com’s Peter Dudley:
“My Dad (who was 19 years old on D-Day) was pushing his motorcycle off the landing craft and up on the beach. … As he approached the seawall, he noticed this can of film in the sand. He knew what it was because he was trained. It was exposed film because it had tape around it and it had [Grant's] number one written on it. Not finding either Bill Grant or the press bag, he took the film back to the beach commander who put it on the next boat back to London and it was in the war office by 1 p.m. That was the first film back from Normandy. If you look at the war record at the Archives, the talk is there were “whoops and cheers” at the sight of that film.”
Shooters may be difficult to find, but the Military Museums in Calgary could possibly screen it for you, or you can order it directly from O’Regan’s website.
The other images above came from the Canadian War Museum’s First World War Teacher Resources. The two pieces of war art depicted are The Battle of Ypres by British artist Richard Jack, and Australian artist William Longstaff’s 1931 Ghosts of Vimy Ridge . Longstaff painted another famous painting, at least Down Under, depicting a similar scene of spirits flooding toward the Menin Gate. We will be visiting both of these memorials on our trip.
Tags: Canadian Film and Broadcast Unit, Canadian War Museum, CFBU, film, Juno Beach, Library and Archives Canada, Normandy, O'Regan, paintings, photography, Shooters, The Military Museums, war art
