To: letters@ottawacitizen.com
Sent: Sunday, March 11, 2012 8:06 AM
Subject: Canadian NATO Vets
I note with satisfaction that there is finally an organization in Canada that recognizes the fact that thousands of Canadians served overseas and in Canada during the Cold War: The NATO Veterans of Canada. These men and women placed themselves at the ultimate risk by volunteering to serve during a historical period of maximum danger to the human race and agreed to serve in the face of a unique form of obliteration: possible thermonuclear weapons use. This fact is receding in the current cultural milieu of the country and, as time marches on, the context of what these people did will be lost unless we fully explain why the Cold War was a ‘war without battles.’
In the weeks before I departed a reunified Germany in 1993, I traveled, as a member of 4 Canadian Mechanized Brigade, to Soest for a final freedom of the city parade. The hundred-man guard was mostly drawn from 8th Canadian Hussars (Princess Louise’s). On the way we stopped at a Canadian military cemetery at Werl. This was not a Second World War-era cemetery. These were 120+ Canadian soldiers who had been killed on exercise or succumbed to medical complications. Some probably died by misadventure. But all died in West Germany as part of a force designed to deter the Soviet Union and its allies from invading western Europe. Those large-scale annual exercises had a deterrent function in the larger scheme of things. The combination of presence and readiness contributed to averting a war of that would have escalated to global nuclear weapons use quite rapidly.
Similarly, in my travels, I have seen many ‘gate guardians’ at current and former RCAF bases in Canada. Usually there is a CF-101 Voo Doo and a CF-100 Canuck. In no case are there detailed explanations as to why those aircraft existed and what they did, beyond technical data depicted on brass plates. How may pilots, or pilots-in-training lost their lives on operational or training flights related to NORAD operations doing exactly the same things that their comrades in arms in West Germany were doing: providing a presence and a deterrent function? In many cases that I am aware of, our interceptor forces did everything except fire live against Soviet bombers and recce aircraft on the edges of our airspace. And I could say similar things about anti-submarine operations conducted by the RCN and its successor organization.
We knew it was ‘peacetime’ but we also knew in those days that international crises could escalate: and they nearly did in 1948, 1949, 1950, 1956, 1958, 1961, 1962, 1968, 1983 and so on. People joining the Canadian Forces in those days understood that they really weren’t joining a ‘peacetime’ armed forces and that a certain higher level of readiness was demanded in Europe and in North America. There is a UN peacekeeping monument in Ottawa, but there is no monument to the Canadians who served in the long Cold War. Arguably they contributed more to ‘world peace’ than thin-blue line UN peacekeeping did and there were a lot more of them.
The educational system writes Cold War veterans out of history and I defy you to find any serious discussion of Canada’s NATO and NORAD forces for the period 1951-1993 in any Canadian history textbook at the high school level. The products of that system will be the people passing bureaucratic judgment on VAC pensions, funding for memorials, and what constitutes Canadian history. NATO Veterans of Canada now gives a voice to those who served in a unique arena which had nuclear Armageddon as a possible end-game.
Sincerely,
Sean M. Maloney, PhD
Associate Professor,
Royal Military College of Canada
