Saint John’s Red Head Battery: A Forgotten Military Artifact of Confederation

In the early 1860s, driven by the threat of war with the United States, British army engineers and local contractors built a coast artillery battery on top of the red-coloured bluffs overlooking the eastern approach to Saint John harbour. It is broadly similar to earlier coastal batteries that still exist at Halifax and Quebec City, but on a more massive scale because artillery was rapidly increasing in size and power during the 1860s. Other heavy batteries were constructed at other Canadian ports during that decade, but all were subsequently rebuilt with more modern structures. Red Head Battery is the only surviving example in the country. It was also the last major defensive work built to guard the strategic overland road from Saint John to the Canadian interior, which was the only means of access from the Atlantic to the interior in winter

Sydney, Nova Scotia and the U-Boat War, 1918

During the summer of 1918. when German submarines thrust into North American coastal waters, Sydney. Nova Scotia suddenly became a major naval base and Canada’s foremost convoy assembly harbour.1 Nearly a hundred of the Royal Canadian Navy’s coastal patrol vessels came to the Cape Breton port, with at least 1,500 crewmen and shore personnel,2 but this was not enough. Britain was unable to help. Therefore the United States Navy pitched in for what was the first instance of joint operations by the armed forces of the two North American nations. Some 350 American sailors came to establish base facilities and operate patrol vessels and aircraft assigned to Sydney. Thousands more passed through on ships assembling for convoy. Just as the naval authorities at Sydney had to cope with rapidly changing and increasing operational demands, so too the citizens had to deal with a veritable naval invasion of their town