Remembrance Day 2019

Good Morning.  I am very honoured that you are going to put up with me for the next few minutes.  My name is Gordon Forbes and I am a veteran who served almost 28 Years as an officer in the Royal Canadian Navy.

To quote a man named Arthur Koestler “The most persistent sound throughout man’s history has been the beating of war drums.”

How many of you play video games?  How many of you play video war games like Call of Duty or Battle Warships?  Do you think this is a real depiction of war?  Of course, it’s NOT.  In war you don’t hit reboot and resurrect yourself.  In real war, the threats are multidimensional.  Information is sporadic and unpredictable.  Real people get killed.

War represents failure – a failure of foreign policy – a failure of diplomacy – a failure of tolerance – a failure to understand each other.

We remember on this day, 11 November, because that was the day that World War 1 ended in a cease fire.  World War 1 was the worst war in history . . . up until that time.

How would you feel if, tomorrow morning you came to a class of 30 and found only 2 other members of your class were there?  That is Kind of like what happened to the Royal Newfoundland Regiment on the 1^st of July 1916 on the opening day of the Battle of the Somme at a village called Beaumont Hamel. The losses sustained by the regiment that morning were staggering. Of 800 Newfoundlanders who went into battle that morning, only 68 were able to answer the roll call the next day, with more than 700 killed, wounded or missing.  On that same day, over 150,000 men of the British Army were killed, wounded or missing.  That battle ended in a whimper in the middle of November 1916. At that same time, the French Army had been fighting another, equally devastating battle, at Verdun. These were two of many such battles throughout that four year war.

War is hell.

In World War 2, it is estimated that 2 million Russian soldiers were killed in the first six few months after the attack by Germany in 1941.  It is also estimated that 20 million Russians, military and civilian, were killed in the entire war.  Horrifying numbers!

War is hell.

Even today, people, men, women and children, die every day in one war or another.  For modern war is not restricted to neat battle fields.  They are fought over entire countries.  I can give one personnel example.  I was born in England in 1943, the middle of the Second World War.  After the war we lived in an area where V1 flying bombs had passed over on their way to London.  Some fell short.  As a four and five year old I played with two other boys my age.  Between the three of us we had three good eyes . . . and I had two of them.  The other boys had been blinded by flying glass from a V1 bomb explosion across the street from their houses.

I, myself, suffer from post traumatic stress that induced clinical depression and was caused by a tragedy at sea that killed nine of my shipmates. 

So much for horror stories.

Is war ever necessary?  Aggressive war should never be justified.  Whether it is an attack on another nation, ethnic or religious group, or tribe it should never happen.  But defending oneself against such an attack is probably, unfortunately, necessary.  Whether the aggressor is another country or a terrorist organization, defence is justified. 

Wars tend to be started by governments of older men, and now women.  They are then fought by young men and women. 

One of the forms of warfare that we are seeing vividly today is civil war.  Civil war is never civil and as we see in Syria, it can be very violent and cruel. In the past 30 years there have been several civil wars in Africa alone – Somalia (Black Hawk Down), Sudan, Rwanda, the Congo and Nigeria and several of these civil wars are still ongoing.   The American Civil War in 1861 to 1865 had the largest number of American battle deaths of any war ever fought by the United States.  Over 600,000 killed.

Whether aggressive or defensive, war is hell.

If wars have to be fought, how should they be carried out.  It is nice to think that we have the Geneva Conventions to keep war “civilized”.  They indicate the way war is supposed to be fought.  But once battle has been joined, war becomes armed chaos.  The Conventions are broken all the time, even by countries that we think are civilized and our allies.  Survival becomes the one measure of success.  In many cases, the original aim of a conflict is forgotten and fighting rages on regardless, as stated by General Colin Powell, “fighting often continues long past the point where a ‘rational’ calculation would indicate that the war should be ended.” The objective of the Iraq War was to change the regime of Saddam Hussein.  This was achieved within days of the initial attack.  The Iraq war went on for months, and in one form or another goes on today.

War is, indeed, Hell.

But there is one war that we should probably all fight.  It may be the war that will, finally, save civilization as no other war has ever done.  You don’t have to sign up for this war.  There is no army to join.  No drills to carry out. All you have to do is carry on with your life in a way that will sustain our planet. I speak, of course of the war on climate change.  This is a challenge you should all accept.

Thank you for your time and indulgence.  It has been my pleasure to be here today.