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.

A thousand men in eight days. A parade square turned into a suburb with four little lakes. A bronze general on a horse that nobody who lives there can name.

His name was Griesbach. Edmonton's youngest-ever mayor, son of Canada's first Mountie, and the officer who raised the 49th Battalion in a single frozen week of 1915.

The north-Edmonton neighbourhood built on his old army base is now one of the city's most sought-after addresses, and almost nobody there knows what's buried beneath the front porches.

So we dig.

Down through bison country and Treaty 6 homeland; through the Forty-Niners who bled at the Somme and Passchendaele; among them Alex Decoteau, the Cree Olympic runner and Canada's first Indigenous police officer, killed carrying a message through the mud; through the Canadian Airborne Regiment, born on this very ground; the detention barracks nobody put in the brochure; and the village that now remembers its dead one street sign at a time.

Who was the man on the horse? And what does it mean to build your kitchen on a parade square?

Free self-guided walking tour + full sources: www.memoryandvalour.ca

In 1916, a German soldier watched the first tank loom out of the fog and ran for his life, screaming that a crocodile was crawling into the trenches.

This is the story of the tank on the Western Front, and it's a Canadian story from beginning to end. Canadians were there at the machine's terrifying combat debut at Courcelette in September 1916; the day before Chip Kerr of the 49th Battalion won his VC on the same ground, and Canadians were the spearhead at Amiens in August 1918, the "black day of the German Army," where the tank finally succeeded.

We climb inside the steel oven the crews actually fought in, sort the legend from the record, and hear from the men who were there, from the first British tank crews to a private of the 24th Battalion who rode the tanks forward at Amiens.

Memory and Valour — Where Memory Endures, Valour Lives On.

One wounded man. Sixty-two prisoners. A quarter-mile of enemy trench. Here's how an Edmonton farmer pulled it off, and why it was genius, not luck.

On 16 September 1916, on the Somme, Private John Chipman "Chip" Kerr of Edmonton's 49th Battalion was clearing a German trench with a bombing party that was running out of grenades.

So, with a finger freshly blown off, he climbed out onto the parados, ran along the open ground above the enemy, and opened fire from behind them. Believing themselves surrounded, sixty-two Germans surrendered. It earned him the Victoria Cross.

We rebuild the deed from the ground up: who Kerr really was, how the 49th was raised in Edmonton (and gutted at Mount Sorrel), how trench fighting actually worked and why Kerr's move wasn't just brave, it was brilliant.

Much of the research behind this episode lives in the building that carries the 49th Battalion's lineage: the Loyal Edmonton Regiment Military Museum, inside the historic Prince of Wales Armouries in Edmonton.

Walk through the Griesbach Gallery, stand in front of Cecil Kinross's miniature Victoria Cross, and see everything we talked about today in the cases and on the walls. I'm currently doing my university practicum there, so if you're in Edmonton, come and find me. Let's talk history.

Canada entered the First World War without an air force; not a small one, not a token one; none.

Yet, somehow produced some of the most extraordinary fighter pilots of the entire conflict.

This episode tells the stories of five of them: Billy Bishop, whose Victoria Cross action may have been embellished; Raymond Collishaw, who outscored almost everyone and came home almost unknown; William Barker, Canada's most decorated serviceman, now largely forgotten; Wop May, the rookie from Edmonton who accidentally outran the Red Baron; and Alan McLeod, who climbed onto the wing of a burning aircraft at five thousand feet to save his observer's life.

Featuring archival audio from actual veterans of the air war, recorded while they were still around to tell their stories.

On July 30th, 1915, at a ruined château called Hooge, the German Army turned flamethrowers on British troops for the first time. Within minutes, a battalion broke. Not from shells or gas: from fire.

In Episode 27, we trace the full arc of the flamethrower in the First World War — from Hooge to the mud of Passchendaele and the German Spring Offensive of 1918. At the centre of the story is the Canadian Corps, which faced German flamethrower teams in some of the most brutal engagements of the war, and had to learn fast how to fight back.

It's a story about a weapon. But more than that, it's a story about adaptation, primal fear, and how even the most terrifying technology eventually meets its ceiling.