Hosted by the Laurier Centre for the Study of Canada and in partnership with the Canadian Battlefields Foundation, the Juno Beach Centre Association welcomes you to Season 2 of the Maple Leaf Route Webinar Series!
In the first season, we took you to the beaches of Normandy in the spring of 1944 and followed the Canadians as they fought inland towards Caen and eventually closed the Falaise Gap in August. This season, we have decided to take a broader view of Canada’s involvement in the Second World War with six webinars focused on various topics. We hope you enjoy it!
Registration is required. Should you have any questions about the speaker series, please send Eric an e-mail at estory@wlu.ca.
If you would like to know more about the Maple Leaf Route Webinar Series, please be sure to check out the 2021 series focused on D-Day and the invasion of Normandy HERE.
Summer 2022 Programming
Canada and the Second World War at Sea with Jeff Noakes
Webinar Held May 18th, 2022
Active on many fronts during the Second World War, the Royal Canadian Navy played its best-known and arguably most crucial role in helping to keep Allied shipping lanes open in the Atlantic. Meanwhile, Canadian merchant ships and merchant sailors transported vital supplies to Allied forces and populations around the world. On Canada’s home front, maritime losses – including civilian passengers – were felt across the country, while naval imagery appeared in fundraising and propaganda materials. Canadians built ships, weapons, and equipment, or were encouraged to provide support through their volunteer war, its events, and its consequences on the waters.
Jeff Noakes has been the Second World War historian at the Canadian War Museum since 2006. He is the curator responsible for historical content and questions relating to the Second World War and the William James Roué Collection at the Canadian Museum of History. His areas of research include military service and identities, maritime history and the Arctic.
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Ne-kah-ne-tah: The Liberation of Welberg, Memory, Meaning and Experience
Webinar Held June 8th, 2022
Over five days in November 1944, the Algonquin Regiment played a pivotal role in the capture of the tiny Dutch town of Welberg. In 2018, twenty Canadian university students returned to the site as part of an experiential learning course focused on the Regiment’s warpath from Point 140 to the Kusten Canal. Throughout the program, students both ‘walked the ground’ and engaged with contemporary communities in order to better understand past events and consider the construction of historical meaning and memory.
This talk brings together three of the course’s facilitators: Anna Pearson (York University), Stephen Connor (Nipissing University) and Robert Catsburg (Welberg Liberation Memorial Foundation) to explore ways in which this hybrid of traditional and experiential learning introduced university students to a shared historical and cultural heritage.
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Per Ardua Ad Astra: The Royal Canadian Air Force in the Second World War with Mike Bechthold
Webinar Held June 29th, 2022
In a few short years, the Royal Canadian Air Force expanded from a small domestic force of 8 squadrons and 4,000 personnel to a globe-spanning air force with 80 operational squadrons and 250,000 personnel (including 17,000 women). The RCAF defended London, led the Normandy invasion, protected convoys in the North Atlantic, and took the fight to Hamburg and Berlin. RCAF pilots served in North Africa, Italy, Burma, and the Aleutians. And, the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan was one of Canada’s most important wartime activities. This talk will explore the RCAF’s many contributions to victory in the Second World War.
Mike Bechthold (PhD, University of New South Wales) is an historian of the Royal Canadian Air Force. He is the author/editor of eight books and numerous articles. His most recent monograph is Flying to Victory: Raymond Collishaw and the Western Desert Campaign (2017). He specializes in the fields of military air power in the First and Second World Wars, the Canadian army in Normandy and Northwest Europe, and the Canadian Corps in the Great War.
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Fighting a White Man’s War: Canada’s First Nations Peoples and the Second World War with R. Scott Sheffield
Webinar Held July 20th, 2022
The Second World War became a total war for Canada, drawing in virtually every person in virtually every region of the country in diverse ways, including Canada’s First Nations population. As wards of the state, this was not Status Indians’ war to fight, and yet more than 4,000 enlisted, and extensive patriotic gestures, voluntarism, and war employment on the Homefront suggest that First Nations people mostly did see this as their war. Why was this so? And what implications did this have for First Nations’ place and status in Canadian society?
R. Scott Sheffield is an Associate Professor of History at the University of the Fraser Valley, and spent more than 25 years researching Indigenous military service in Canada and transnationally. He has published The Red Man’s on the Warpath: The Image of the ‘Indian’ and the Second World War, and (with Noah Riseman) Indigenous Peoples and the Second World War: The Politics, Experiences and Legacies of War in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
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Dieppe 80 Years After: The Juno Beach Centre’s Exhibition From Dieppe to Juno with Marie Eve Vaillancourt
Webinar Held August 10th, 2022
The Dieppe Raid is shrouded in controversy and tragedy. For decades, it dominated Canadians’ collective memory of the war. Considered a tragic failure since 1942, its story is as complex as it is nuanced. The presentation will explore the challenges of putting together an exhibition on a subject of failure in a place of victory like Juno Beach. It will also explore our evolving understanding of the raid, its links to Juno Beach on D-Day and the liberation of Dieppe in September 1944 as well as its place in Canada’s collective memory of the Second World War.
Marie Eve is the Exhibitions Director of the Juno Beach Centre. She holds a History BA from Carleton University and a Master of Education from the University of Caen. She began her career working with the educational services of the Canadian War Museum. In 2001, she participated in the Canadian Battlefields Foundation Study Tour. She has led the Juno Beach Centre’s Summer Institute, a Battlefields Study Tour for Canadian Educators since 2011.
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To Help Win the Fight: Canadian Servicewomen of the Second World War with Stacey Barker
Webinar Held August 31st, 2022
The Second World War brought many crucial changes to the lives of Canadian women, including the opportunity for wider military service. Recruits who joined the Canadian Women’s Army Corps, the Royal Canadian Air Force Women’s Division, and the Women’s Royal Canadian Naval Service challenged conceptions, broke barriers, and helped win a war. This talk examines key aspects of their wartime experiences using biography and material culture.
Stacey Barker is Historian, Arts and Military History at the Canadian War Museum. She received her doctorate in history from the University of Ottawa in 2008 and has contributed to many exhibitions at both the CWM and the Canadian Museum of History. Her most recent publication is the co-authored book Material Traces of War: Stories of Canadian Women and Conflict, 1914-1945.
The Maple Leaf Route webinar series is a partnership between the Laurier Centre for the Study of Canada, the Canadian Battlefields Foundation and the Juno Beach Centre Association.
