Goodbye Ottawa and Lest We Forget

Ottawa was one of the places I was truly not ready to leave for a number of reasons. The most obvious being that I had simply run out of time to do and see all the things I wanted to there. I had an afternoon flight to Winnipeg on Friday last week and was determined not to miss the National War Museum in Ottawa. It had a great reputation. It had been moved to a new building in 2005 and opened with much pomp and ceremony. I am a great lover of modern history. I wanted to see it.

So after Phil and Tris dropped me off on Thursday night I packed my bags, locked them up at the hostel and got up early the next morning. I walked the 40 minutes to the war museum, arriving at 9.15am. It was very cold and I had taken the chance that it might not open until 9.30am or 10.00am because the information centre was always closed when I was in the area in the days before and had wanted to ask about opening times. It was the first time I was concerned about exposure because the museum is on its own city block about a 10 minute walk from the nearest business buildings and didn't know if I could wait there another 45 minutes to thaw out properly. http://www.warmuseum.ca/cwm/cwme.asp

It had opened at 9am (hurrah!) and I stayed until 12 pm wandering through a chronological history of Canada's wars, both internal conflicts (First Nations) to the Boer (Sth African) War, WWI, WWII up to and including the Korean War. There was a particular battle of the Korean war in 1951 which captured my imagination on display, which I thought best summed up the courage of all our Commonwealth brothers in the front lines. In this battle, the Australians were on one side, and they didn't withdraw until they had completely run out of ammunition. The Canadian forces, which were the biggest in the area, continued the battle from another front and sent a request the Kiwis, who were on another side, to fire on their own position because they were hard pressed by the North Koreans, even knowing that some of the Canadian solidiers might be injured or killed. And they trusted that the New Zealanders would do it as accurately as they could without flinching. They did.

The National War Museum in Ottawa is a credit to the present federal government and a must-see for any visitor to Ottawa. It surpasses our National War Museum in size and I think that is one of the narrow factors which gives it the edge if the two had to be compared. There was a complete reconstruction of a WWI trench, one of Hitler's Mercedes Benz armoured open-top limosines (chilling- complete with broken windows). There are audio-visual aids and video recreations and footage everywhere which I had to miss in favour of reading and observing the exhibits.

Next time I will spend at least a day instead of 2 1/2 hrs and look more carefully at the Cold War- to- present day exhibits which I had to skip. There were carefully exhibited uniforms from nearly all periods, including nurse's uniforms and a thematic approach was taken, with an entire gallery dedicated to war work, particularly the home front WWII. Most touching, a small section on WWII war brides, with a simple display case empty except for a husband's and wife's wedding bands cunningly suspended on red velvet, their owners long dead but their love remembered.