Royal Canadian School of Artillery

[r.morrison]

Good evening all: I have been in touch withe one of my former high school teachers, who, many years ago, was involved with the Royal Canadian School of Artillery. I was located in south west Ontario and disbanded in 1960. According to his knowledge, everything was shipped off to Shilo, including all the War Trophies, One of them was the famous German 88,

I conversed with Rob Love and to his knowledge, the Shilo Museum has never owned an "88". The fellow who kept the records has retired, so I thought I would "shake the coconut trees" and see if anyone down Ontario way could shed any light on the history of the school and where everything got moved to.
Any light shed on this is, as always, greatly appreciated!

Cheers ....Robert

[Ed Storey]

Garrison Petawawa had a Flak 36/37 88 which could be a candidate. The CWM also has one.

[maple_leaf_eh]

I won't do your research, but here is a site I've used in the past to answer questions like yours.

https://militarybruce.com/abandoned-...andoned-bases/

As for the artifacts, without a name and dates, you're going to have a hard time. In 1960, the war had only been over for 15 years. It was current memory for many people. As much as certain trophies are highly valued today, at the time, a lot of them were 'just old Nazi junk', with the attitude of 'we won that one you know'. It is entirely possible truck loads were sent off to Shilo, but things get traded and deaccessioned from collections continuously. The Germans coveted several pieces that the base had on display, and traded some of their more modern equipment to go on the pads when they left.

[rob love]

Rob: I never said we never had one, just that we never had one that I know of.
One thing with artifacts and monuments like these, is they do get loaned to other museums, bases, and in the past small towns. Sometimes they get recalled back to the proper owners, other times so much time passes that they get traded or moved to other units by the unit that borrowed it. A museum must constantly refresh the borrower about whom the gun belongs to, and where it is now.
All this to say that the monuments that may have come here from the school may not have belonged to the school in the first place, or we may have loaned them on to other places like the CWM or Petawawa.

Harold Skaruup has a website that shows the majority of the artillery monuments in Canada. I don't have the link right now and am having trouble finding it. It may be that he has taken it down and is instead selling books with the content as I see those listed province by province.

[maple_leaf_eh]

Originally Posted by rob love

...

Harold Skaruup has a website that shows the majority of the artillery monuments in Canada. I don't have the link right now and am having trouble finding it. ...

https://www.silverhawkauthor.com/

The articles are longwinded and need to be searched with a keen CTRL-F set of fingers. But, I've corresponded with him several times on other matters and he is very easy to reach.

[rob love]

It used to be, not that long ago, that you could view the content and see each monument including a photo, province by province, and with some specific pages covering certain museums. When I try that now (say for Manitoba or any other province) it leads to a link to buy the book from amazon or others:
https://www.silverhawkauthor.com/pos...ume-8-manitoba

The online version was valuable to make corrections, or to look for wayward guns.

[Dan Martel]

Originally Posted by r.morrison

Good evening all: I have been in touch withe one of my former high school teachers, who, many years ago, was involved with the Royal Canadian School of Artillery. I was located in south west Ontario and disbanded in 1960. According to his knowledge, everything was shipped off to Shilo, including all the War Trophies, One of them was the famous German 88,

The Royal Canadian School of Artillery (Anti-Aircraft) was located at Point Petre in Ontario. It was stationed there with the 1st Light Anti-Aircraft Regiment, both equipped with the US 90mm anti-aircraft gun. Both were disbanded in 1960 when the Canadian Army got out of the anti-aircraft business with the manpower positions used to create the Honest John batteries.

Point Petre had gunnery ranges for firing the 90mm gun over Lake Ontario (in the general direction of the US). This would seem to be an appropriate place to have had a war-recovered 88mm flak gun as a trophy.

Alas, I can't confirm such a gun was there and, if it was, where it might have ended up. Wasn't there one in the Borden Museum?

[maple_leaf_eh]

Originally Posted by rob love

It used to be, not that long ago, that you could view the content and see each monument including a photo, province by province, and with some specific pages covering certain museums. When I try that now (say for Manitoba or any other province) it leads to a link to buy the book from amazon or others:
https://www.silverhawkauthor.com/pos...ume-8-manitoba

The online version was valuable to make corrections, or to look for wayward guns.

One of the least known and incredibly valuable internet tools is the Internet Wayback Machine at, https://archive.org/web/ Type the URL of the site you want to search, and their scrapers and 'bots post the texts off the site going back years. If Hal has closed pages to monetize his research, that is actually his business. But the interwebs never forget, and earlier versions of any visible website will show up on the Wayback Machine.

[Colin Alford]

Gents,

Try these links:

8.8 cm Pak 43 and 8.8 cm Flak at RMC:
https://www.silverhawkauthor.com/pos...ollege-grounds

Restoration of 8.8 cm Flak at CWM:
https://scholars.wlu.ca/cgi/viewcont...73&context=cmh

At the first link, Mr Skaarup believes that the RCEME School image from 1946 in Camp Barriefield (now CFB Kingston) shows the same Flak that is currently on display at RMC. While I previously assumed this assessment to be correct, I have had a closer look at the images, and I believe they are different guns. While I am certainly not an expert on Flak 18/36/37, and haven’t done enough research to be able to identify the differences, I note round vs square feet on the mount stabilizing legs, a different nose on the upper cylinder of the recoil mech, different bolt pattern on the shield, and different position for the rotating shield (on right side of main shield) for the direct fire sight unit.

The second link includes an image which is captioned as a Flak 18 in Petawawa circa 1945-46. I believe the dating to be incorrect given the vehicles shown in the background. This gun appears to me to be different to the surviving examples in either Kingston, or Ottawa.

It appears that there were multiple examples of 8.8 cm Flak that came to Canada. I have not conducted enough research to determine how many arrived, and how many are currently accounted for.

There is a Pak 43/41 in Borden that has been there since the disbandment of the Foreign Material Section in approx 1950. I have not seen any reference to an 8.8 cm Flak ever being present in Borden.

[Ed Storey]

Originally Posted by Colin Alford

The second link includes an image which is captioned as a Flak 18 in Petawawa circa 1945-46. I believe the dating to be incorrect given the vehicles shown in the background. This gun appears to me to be different to the surviving examples in either Kingston, or Ottawa.

As Colin correctly points out, the image of the Flak 18 published in the CMH Magazine was not taken in 1945-46. It was taken after 1952 as there are a pair of post-war SMP vehicles in the background, a M135CDN 2½ ton truck and M62 5 ton wrecker.

The gun itself in the photograph appears to be similar to the one that has been on outdoor display on the base for some 60+ years although it lacks the shield. The carriage for the Petawawa gun ended up being used as targets on the Mattawa Plain as I remember, as a young infantry reservist in the late 1970s, seeing them all shot-up when in the training area. I believe the carriage along with several Valentine hulls were all cleared as scrap decades ago.

Attached is the Garrison Petawawa gun as it appeared in 1982. It has been repainted many times and is now in some garish camouflage.

[r.morrison]

Gentlemen: Apologies for being tardy in getting back to you all. Damn Covid knocked me on my ass. First, let me thank you all for your help in this inquiry matter. Secondly, my apologies to Rob Love for my screw up with the "interpetation" of our discussion. Sorry Rob.

I'll copy and send this off to my friend and as quoted here, "he can do the homework".
Once again cheers and a Happy Holiday to all!

Robert

[rob love]

No need to apologize Robert. Hopefully you find the information the fellow was looking for.

[r.morrison]

Hey Rob...no problem. Your help is always appeciated!! Odd thing about this "inquiry" is my high school teacher's surname is also Love. He also served in my father's regiment, The Hasty Pees.
And there was always a good story to have in his class. At one point (Grade 12), Mr Love asked us to bring is any "war souveniers" of our families, as the "wars" were the topic of the month. Various bits of ordinance and apparel appeared. However, yours truly brought in a WW1 DMW Luger, much to the delight of everyone, especially Mr Love. I bought it off a classmate of mine in Grade 10 for $20.00 CDN, which to him was a $1000.00. To this day, he often reminds me of that day.
One of the other items to appear was a (correct me if I'm wrong) was a 25 pound aerial practice bomb (white) which I've seen occassionally here and there. At that point we didn't know about the term "practice", so in order to find out what was the status of the bomb, we smuggled it aboard a twin engine Cessna during a Geography outing over the Niagara Falls and Lake Ontario. The bomb was launched into Lake Ontario without any explosion...much to the dismay of the occupants of the aircraft.
So endith our history lesson for today!

Hopefully I'll be able to add something to this once I get the info out.

Cheers and again thanks.

Robert

[rob love]

I do have a list somewhere of the wherabouts and status of a lot of Farley Mowatts bringbacks. If I come accross the list I'll check it. Last I saw it was in the glovebox of my M38A1, but I cleaned the glovebox out last summer so now I will have to look for it.

The list did prove handy previously. I retrieved a Flakveirling form the local scrapyard, and was preparing the receivers (cutting them) so the unit could be exported. I saw some serial numbers that I had not seen before, walked over to the Jeep and got the list. Sure enough, it was a Mowatt bring back. It had been scrapped at some time in the early 70s along with a Flak36 and languished in the scrapyard for some 40 years.