Twelve days past his 21st birthday, a Winnipeg pilot named Harry V. Smith was shot down over occupied Siam with four secret agents aboard, on the last mission of his tour in May 1945.

What followed involves a jungle crash-landing borrowed from bush pilots, a resistance movement run by an entire government in secret, a getaway flown by the head of the Thai air force, and a hiding place no one would believe: the Regent's own palace.

This is the true story of my cousin Harry Smith, DFC — from his 388-page service file, his own memoir, and one unforgettable family telegram.

Features archival interview audio from two Canadian Burma veterans, Frederick Sproule and Dick Sharpe.

Four hundred and fifty rounds a minute. Seven and a half rounds every second. One London inventor built the Maxim machine gun in 1884 after a friend joked he should help Europeans "cut each other's throats with greater facility."

Thirty years later, that joke had built the Western Front.

This episode traces the machine gun from Hiram Maxim's workshop to the beaten zones of the Somme to the Canadian Corps' own mastery of the weapon by 1918, when the same gun that built the trenches helped tear them open again.

Featuring Raymond Brutinel, the Edmonton newspaperman who talked his way into commanding Canada's first mechanized fighting force, the war diary of the 49th Battalion (Edmonton Regiment) and five Canadian veterans in their own voices: Charles Skeates, Leonard Wood, Colin Bond, Allan "Spike" Smith, and James MacLeod.

On July 1st, 1916, the First Battalion of the Newfoundland Regiment went forward at Beaumont-Hamel. Of 801 men, there were 710 casualties in thirty minutes. Every officer down.

In this 110th anniversary episode, we follow two brothers — Harry and Alfred Hynes of F Company — from a railway town on the Gander River to the worst morning of the First World War.

One never came home. The other was wounded three times and carried a piece of German shrapnel for the rest of his life.

This is their story, and it's been a long time coming.