It has been inspiring to see Canada standing with the people of Greenland and Denmark. In a world that seems increasingly cynical and dark, it was genuinely moving to witness the warmth, joy and friendship on display at the recent opening of Canada’s consulate in Greenland.
But it wasn’t so long ago that Canada and Denmark were locked into a longstanding feud about sovereignty over a northern island. If Donald Trump had any class, he might learn something from how Canada settles disputes with an allied nation.
Okay, so the fight over Hans Island wasn’t nearly as high-stakes as Trump’s attempt to take over Greenland, but it does offer an important lesson in how allies resolve disputes.
For nearly 50 years, Canada and Denmark had been squabbling over control of Hans Island, a barren piece of rock in the Arctic, used by both the Hudson’s Bay Company in the 19th century and Greenlandic whalers.
In 1984, Canadian soldiers landed on the island, planted the Canadian flag, and cheekily, they left a bottle of Canadian whiskey for the Danes. The Danes responded with their own flag planting and a gift of a bottle of schnapps.
This was the beginning of the “Whiskey War”.
In the years that followed, both sides made numerous trips to Hans Island to plant the flag, erect cairns, and leave domestic alcohol for their adversary. In 2005, Canada’s defence minister, Bill Graham, even flew to the island to show Canada’s determination to advance its claim.
But in 2022, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the two NATO allies decided it was time to settle the dispute. They drew a line down the middle and called it even.
No threats. No tantrums.
But there is another story about Canada and its relationship with Denmark that few Canadians know.
In May 1945, a small group of Canadian paratroopers with Sten guns stopped the Soviet takeover of Denmark.
The 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion (1CanPara) had been fighting almost nonstop since June 6th, 1944. They were called in for many tough jobs, including helping the Americans during the Battle of the Bulge.
1CanPara were part of the largest airborne drop in history in March 1945 as Allied troops pushed across the Rhine. Over 16,000 paratroopers were dropped by 1500 troop planes.
In the war’s final days, Prime Minister Winston Churchill was growing increasingly concerned about the Soviet push for the German city of Wismar on the Baltic coast. It sits at a key link to Denmark. If the Soviets reached Wismar, they would move straight into Denmark.
Churchill needed soldiers who could move fast and fearlessly. He didn’t think twice about his choice. He sent the men of 1CanPara.
The Canadians advanced so quickly that they actually passed entire German convoys on the road. No shots were fired.
Sergeant Andy Anderson later described one such event:
“The strangeness of the situation is that we are passing complete units of the German Army, lying by the roadside, some with vehicles, even horse-drawn artillery, but no shots are exchanged, no white flags were shown, and we cannot stop to disarm them.”
The Canadians took control of Wismar as Russian armour moved on the city. The vastly outgunned Canadians were protecting both the Danish border and German civilians who feared heavy reprisals and mass rapes.
When the Russian forces encountered the small Canadian unit, they were shocked. Things were friendly at first, and then the Russian commander told them to step aside so that his tanks could continue moving forward.
Lt.-Colonel George Eadie refused.
Edie, from Winnipeg, had turned down a chance to play for the Chicago Blackhawks to serve his country, and ordered his paratroopers to hold their ground in the face of the Russian tanks. The Russians were shocked that Eadie and the outgunned Canadians were ready to fight.
They backed off.
In the peace agreement that followed, the allies gave Wismar to the Russians, but Denmark remained free.
This is not a story I ever read in any Canadian history book, but the people of Denmark remember. During the recent struggle for Greenland, a number of Danes reached out to me to tell me the story of how their freedom was won by a small, gutsy group of Canadians.
We have been allies ever since.
Despite the Whiskey War.
Thank you for reading Charlie Angus / The Resistance. If you’d like to upgrade to a paid subscription your support will help keep this project independent and sustainable. I’m grateful to have you here - thank you for your support.
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10 comments:
Ever thought of writing a book: a sort of memoir of an anti-American activist?
Thanks for the suggestion. I'm finding writing this blog is serving the purpose of creating an ongoing memoir while filling in the gaps in my lifelong activism.. My online 1990 memoir, "Eel Pie Dharma", tells the story of the months before I left the U.S. to avoid participating in the Vietnam War, and the subsequent three years I lived on the streets of the UK.
It's not that I'm anti-American, I'm anti-imperialist, and I've also demonstrated against apartheid in South Africa, British troops in Northern Ireland etc. . But I was raised in the U.S., and so feel thoroughly inoculated against all the hype and overwhelming cultural propaganda that empire churns out by the bucketload.
As Canadians we are completely susceptible to all this 'imperialist' propaganda, and I've always felt it's my duty as a writer and a poet to inform people about the dangers of misunderstanding and underestimating the intentions and abuse of power the American empire manifests around the world.
This part of why I so much respect the legacy of Milton Acorn. While other poets of his generation were avoiding the issue of Canadian complicity in the VN War, or the general apathy and neo-colonial mentality of most Canadians, Milt joined our wacky Canadian Liberation Movement and wrote poems opposing the American empire. I remember Irving Layton was the writer-in-res at UniGoo when I was a student there circa 1973, and Layton supported the VN War!
Next year will be the anniversary of the War of 1812. Surely a proud moment in Canadian history - our forces repelled the American invasion and then marched on Washington and burned the White House - creating its now-famous colour!
We were the first country to successfully resist the yankee imperialists, and it took over 150 years for another country to do so - Castro and Che and the Cuban Revolution. Then the Vietnamese under Uncle Ho's guidance bloodied them again. The Afghanis are in the process of doing this once more.
When I ask friends who were schooled in Canada "Who won the War of 1812?", they reply, "It's the war nobody won." Bullshit! They invaded, we repelled them, and then we marched onto their turf. We won!!!! We are teaching our schoolkids a neo-colonial history - a false history imposed on us by the 'big elephant in the room' ... oops, big elephant on the shared continent.
Canadians have a far more progressive history and legacy than the Americans. They are still working out universal health care, pensions, civil liberties - and their legacy of treatment to First Nations was one of a far more brutal conquest, altho we're certainly no angels in this national regard. And of course the Americans persist in imperialist wars around our hillbilly planet, under various guises, but always for THEIR benefit.
peace & poetry power!
Chris
Right on, Chris!
Terry discussed this very issue you've raised about the Tish movement, in fact I received an incredibly informative half hour tutorial on the role Raymond Souster played in the introduction of these modernist American poets to Canada.
Terry contends that Souster first read, and then brought these poets to Canada as an antithesis to the velly velly British poetic tradition we had been saddled with as their colony. Terry says the war-weariness of the Brit poets was primarily negative. The Brit empire was weakened and destroyed by the two world wars, while the American empire came out of WW2 somewhat rejuvenated. The American poetic was more robust and positive than the ennui ridden and devastated poetic Europeans manifested.
Anyway, I'm prob not doing Terry's explication justice. He visits Raymond Souster on a regular basis, along with his best friend, poet James Deahl. Several other PurdyFesters,including Allan Briesmaster, Kent Bowman and Mick Burrs, also visit Ray regularly.
So when Terry presents his paper. "Moderate Modern: Raymond Souster, the Troubador of Toronto" at this summer's PurdyFest Symposium,
we'll be getting some accurate insight into this critical juncture in Canadian poetics.
It's a fine line for Canadian poets, finding and keeping our unique voice, while sometimes learning from, and often forcefully opposing, the poetics of imperialist powers which seek to dominate us culturally.
There were those who vociferously challenged and denounced Souster for giving entree to the Black Mountain school, and according to Terry, Souster himself is not particularly keen on them. But he did what he felt was the necessary thing at the time.
It is best to 'know your enemy', or a 'wrong' position in any discipline so it can be countered and dealt with accurately, be it poetry or whatever. So it was inevitable that Canadian poets would have to deal with this movement. The strength of the 'great generation' of Canadian poets, Acorn, Purdy, MacEwen, Layton, etc. etc., shows that our poets were able to effectively deal with and overcome the downside of the Tishites.
I'm looking forward to hearing Terry present this and much more on Souster's legacy in person at PurdyFest #5 (now proclaimed SousterFest).
peace & poetry power!
Chris
Thank you for Barker's insights into Tish, and yours
Yeah, apparently Souster was incredibly pivotal and crucial to the develpment of CanLit, esp. poetry. He was a founder of the League of CanPoets (as much as I've hated and fought them in the past, still a crucial step forward in the development of CanPo). . Terry Barker gave me a long dissertation on this part of CanPo the other nite. You should connect with Terry - I've been telling him about you, how you've been a major supporter and participant on my blog, and a very active poet re Can. People's Poetry.
I hope you can make it to Marmora for PurdyFest #5, esp the symposium on Souster. I think you'd thoroughly enjoy it, and you'll also get the chance to meet some other very interesting 'influential' people in the CanPo 'movement'.
I'll copy this to Terry, & if you're both OK with this, I'll help exchange phone numbers for you.
Ray Souster's legacy is incredible ... personally, I have no pretences whatsoever towards scholarship - I've always considered myself a poet first - altho in recent years I've come to consider myself a Buddhist first (in the broadest terms possible), and a poet second, and a politikally engaged Buddhist thirdly, historian and scholar of CanPo unfortunately doesn't even rate a ranking for me ... and sometimes Terry surprises the heck out of me with just HOW knowledgeable he is about the history of Canadian poetry.
I'll copy Terry and his close friend, Anna Yin, on this email, so hopefully you two can connect.
peace & poetry power!
Chris
p.s. a thought is coalescing in my brain pan - perhaps a further presentation on Ray Souster could be given in TO after the PurdyFest Symposium. Both Terry and Anna will have presented their pieces at PF and be well rehearsed, and perhaps we could entice Greg Gatenby & others to participate in a TO based symposium on Ray.
just a crazy thought, but the guy's still alive and kicking, and it's better to honour our major poets while alive than the alternative ...
Connecting with Souster readers/scholars would be awesome! Thanks. I think a CanPo movement is still one in the making, and regionalizing it in the way we're doing (let's face it: Purdyfest is iconic) could be a significant way to bring back the Souster days of significant Cdn poetry. I think poetry is being assailed from the 'experimentalists'.
Interesting that your buddhism comes before your poetry. Or perhaps I oughtn't put it that way, as if you're prioritizing.
Terry Barker and I had another long chat early this aft - one of the benefits of being 'retired' from the daily grind. We're going to give TO Star columnist Joe Fiorito a tour of the Toronto Necropolis on Tues. evening. We'll show him George Brown's grave & marker, the unfinished monument grave & marker, W.L. Mackenzie's large monument with the celtic cross, etc.
Also Allan Briesmaster (he co-edited the Crossing Lines antho) & his wife, Holly, who is a visual artist, as well as poet Anna Yin will accompany our visit with People's Poetry ancestors.
During our chat I asked Terry if he minded me giving you his phone number. He was pleased to be asked:
xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I've mentioned you several times to Terry, and he's always keen to discuss CanPo with another interested practitioner. So go ahead and call him if you feel so inclined. He's not a nite hawk like me, so early evenings are prob. best at a guess.
Yeah, Buddhism & poetry go hand in hand with me - kinda back and forth or more accurately, interconnecting - they're very compatible interests - at some level, they're really the same thing I believe - the whole striving for and sharing higher levels of consciousness.
It's interesting that you mention 'experimentalists'. Back in the late 1970s, when I was first writing poetry again and involving myself with founding Unfinished Monument Press and the Main Street Library Poetry Series, politikal poetry was far less mainstream than experimentalism. These poets are basically nice, but the whole surrealist/experimentalist/post modernist/deconstructionalist thing always left me a bit cold. It's interesting that most of the poets who once ignored or even denounced politikal (People's Poetry) now write it, while I've continued to ignore most experimentalism as a dead end.
However, I was (and continue to be) a leading practitioner of English language haiku/haibun, which some might consider avante garde or experimental or whatever (at its worst, even pseudo-Orientalism).
I hope that after PurdyFest and the Souster symposium, Terry and Anna Yin and other fans of Ray Souster will hold a second symposium in Toronto - after all, most of those interested already live there. Terry and I also briefly discussed this possibility this aft.
peace & poetry power!
Chris/cricket
Yeah, the experimentalist 'digital', flarf, conceptualist, etc poetries (a lot of it coming out of Calgary) leave a lot of us cold. There's probably a good reason for it.
Please email me Terry's number if you have it. It doesn't appear here.
Again, thanks and have a great Marmora day!
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