Crerar and the Decision to Garrison Hong Kong

Acrimonious and often virulent debate surrounds examinations of the Canadian expeditionary force dispatched to Hong Kong in the fall of 1941. The tragic fate of the Royal Rifles of Canada and the Winnipeg Grenadiers in the battle for Hong Kong and their horrendous treeatment at the hands of the Japanese following the surrender of the garrison has polarized opinion. Generally, historical treatment has ranged from C.P. Stacey’s and J.L. Granatstein’s considered assessments of the contemporary difficulties facing the political and military leaders to the Valour and the Horror’s and Carl Vincent\u27s accusations of negilgence among Canada’s political and military leadership. Major-General H.D.G. “Harry” Crerar was the Chief of the General Staff, the government’s chief military advisor and senior army officer, when the British telegram requesting “one or two” Canadian battalions for Hong Kong was received. “[The] Canadian Army,” advised Crerar after several days of deliberation with his political masters, “should definitely take this on.” The accepted historical perception has been that his strategic counsel was made in ignorance of the conditions of the situation in the Far East. Questions subsequently raised on the state of training of the two battalions chosen for the expedition further enhanced the belief that Crerar’s actions were hasty and ill-considered. Despite criticisms based on the unforgiving perspective provided by hindsight, Harry Crerar’s role in these decisions has been subject to only limited scrutiny. A closer examination of Crerar’s background and training reveals a carefully constructed logic in his approach. Placing the decision within the framework of Crerar’s training and education suggests that the three most important elements in his evaluation were a reasoned analysis of the contemporary strategic situation in the Far East, his long-term objectives for the army, and the reality of the state of the army’s training

The Rangatahi court

It has become popular to use the marae setting as an alternative to the mainstream courts in dealing with young Māori offenders. The rationale is that taking young Māori offenders back to the marae to be dealt with in the youth justice system, encourages them to face up to their responsibilities and aids their rehabilitation back into the community. The expectation is that whānau will be present to support the young person and to help resolve his or her offending and bad behaviour. I supported this innovation when it was introduced but now I have second thoughts having seen that a marae that piloted this scheme was vandalised with graffiti painted on the marae buildings. In my view, when this happened the scheme to use marae should have ceased and an opportunity taken to rethink their use in this way. For a Māori the vandalism of their marae is like a physical assault on the person of their tupuna. This paper looks at the traditional role of marae in the Māori community and questions the use of marae as judicial settings. It suggests what needs to be done first to make this setting tika or appropriate

Harry Crerar and an Army for Strategic Effect

Few people did as much to shape Canada’s Second World War effort, and no single person did as much to shape the Canadian army, as did General H.D.G. “Harry” Crerar. As chief of the general staff during the critical year and a half following the fall of France in June 1940, he was the primary architect of First Canadian Army, established the conditions for the army’s training and expansion, and advised the government to dispatch troops to Hong Kong. As a corps commander, he campaigned for Canadian involvement in the Dieppe raid. And, by 1944, he had assumed command of the army, eventually leading a combined Commonwealth army—the largest ever commanded by a Canadian—during the Rhineland offensive. His views on the form Canada’s military contribution should take became policy, even though many opposed them, including Prime Minister Mackenzie King. Crerar’s achievements (and failures) are explainable, in part, by the nature of the crisis facing Canada and the Commonwealth during the Second World War. Nazi Germany was on the verge of victory in the summer of 1940 and the logic of that situation seemed to dictate, at least in hindsight, that Canada, united in the face of this clear threat to national survival, indeed to western civilization, commit itself to an all-out war effort. From that starting point, Canada’s military effort—a full field army (First Canadian Army) and at war’s end, the third largest navy and the fourth largest air force—seemed logical. But there was nothing predetermined about Canada’s war effort. In the words of a recent critical review of a book on the “fateful choices” made that summer, “more than most periods in history, the summer of 1940 was pregnant with a veritable brood of…plausible futures.”

A Kadison Kastler row metric and intermediate subalgebras

In this paper, we introduce a row version of Kadison and Kastler's metric on the set of C*-subalgebras of B(H). By showing C*-algebras have row length (in the sense of Pisier) of at most 2 we show that the row metric is equivalent to the original Kadison–Kastler metric. Ino and Watatani have recently proved that in certain circumstances sufficiently close intermediate C*-algebras occur as small unitary perturbations. By adjusting their arguments to work with the row metric we are able to obtain universal constants independent of inclusions

The effects of entry in thin markets

We consider entry of additional firms into the market for a single commodity in which both sellers and buyers are permitted to interact strategically. We show that the market is quasi-competitive, in that the inclusion of an additional seller lowers the price and increases the volume of trade, as expected. However, whilst buyers benefit from this change under reasonable conditions on preferences, we cannot conclude that sellers are always made worse off in the face of more intense competition, contrary to the conventional wisdom. We characterize the conditions under which entry by new sellers may raise the equilibrium profit of existing sellers, which will depend in an intuitive way on the elasticity of a strategic analog of demand and the market share of existing sellers, and encompass completely standard economic environments

Extractive Strategies at Peoria Quarry, Ottowa County, Oklahoma

The Peoria Quarry complex was first recognized as representing prehistoric activities by geologist Walter P Jenny in 1891. Jenny, who was studying the zinc and lead mines in southwestern Missouri and adjacent areas, made collections from the Peoria extractive area and submitted these specimens along with an introductory letter to Mr. G. K Gilbert of the United States Geological Survey. The latter contacted William H. Holmes, who visited the location in late October of that year (Holmes 1894:7-8). Prior to the evaluation of Jenny, the site was referred to as old Spanish mines because the local populace could not attribute such extensive digging to prehistoric peoples. Some early accounts of the Peoria Quarry area greatly exaggerated the vertical and horizontal extent of excavations. For example, Nieberding mentions that John P. McNaughton visited these mines in 1877 and concluded that at least 500 to 1000 men must have been engaged in digging pits over an extended period of time in a 40 acre area. According to McNaughton, some of the shafts were 250 to 300 feet in depth, and it amazed him that the pits apparently had been excavated using stone tools. He did not mention the great quantities of lithic debitage which surrounded each pit Holmes, while admitting that digging at the site had been extensive, estimated that chert had been extracted from an area of no more than four or five acres and stated that the greatest depth of pits in 1891 was about five feet. He did mention that a few trenches of 100 feet or more in length could be found along the margins of the site, but stated that most evidence of digging consisted of round pits up to 40 feet in diameter. His sketch map depicts the approximate extent of quarry pits and associated workshop areas

Regimental History: The State of the Art

Review of David Bercuson, Battalion of Heroes: The Calgary Highlanders in World War II. Calgary: The Calgary Highlanders Regimental Fund Association, 1994 and Alex Morrison and Ted Slaney, The Breed of Manly Men: The History of the Cape Breton Highlanders. Sydney, Cape Breton: The Cape Breton Highlanders Association and the Canadian Institute of Strategic Studies, 1994

Synthesis and characterization of novel low band gap semiconducting polymers for organic photovoltaic and organic field effect transistor applications

PhDThis thesis describes the synthesis, characterization and device properties of a range of conjugated polymers incorporating 3,6-dilakylthieno[3,2-b]thiophene. We report a new and facile synthesis for the preparation of 3,6-dialkylthieno[3,2-b]thiophene, which is readily scaled up to the multi-gram scale. With this synthesis in hand, we initially investigated the properties of poly(thienothiophene-alt-vinylene) polymers incorporating both straight and branched side-chains. Two different polymerization methods were investigated to synthesise the conjugated polymers, namely Stille and Gilch polymerization. The Gilch route was found to lead to high molecular-weight polymers with less cis-defects in the backbone. The polymers were found to be largely amorphous by X-ray diffraction measurements, although there were clear signs of aggregation by optical investigations. Field-effect transistors fabricated with these polymers exhibited charge carrier mobilities up to 0.02 cm2 V-1 s-1 for the straight chain analogue, with the branched polymer displaying lower mobilities. Blends with PC71BM were found to exhibit solar cell device efficiencies up to 2.5 %, with significant differences observed for polymers containing two different side-chains. In the third chapter we investigated the properties of ethynylene-linked 3,6-dialkylthieno[3,2-b]thiophene polymers. The simple homo-polymers were found to exhibit much worse device performance than the analogous vinylene-containing polymers in transistor devices. Co-polymers with a range of electron accepting monomers were also synthesized. These displayed low optical energy gaps and signs of aggregation in the solid state. Transistors were fabricated and their performance examined. In the final part of this thesis, co-polymers bearing 3,6-dialkylthieno[3,2-b]thiophene donor and squaraine acceptor units were synthesized. These zwitterionic conjugated polymers displayed band gaps as low as 1.0 eV. The influence of the nature of the side-chains and co-monomer was investigated with regard to their optoelectronic properties

\u3cem\u3eThe Battle of the Generals: The Untold Story of the Falaise Pocket\u3c/em\u3e by Martin Blumenson [Review]

Review of Martin Blumenson, The Battle of the Generals: The Untold Story of the Falaise Pocket: The Campaign that Should have won World War II. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1993