We benefit from having a few places that are far enough south or are in weird valley climates. I don’t entirely see how it works- Prince Edward County and Niagara in Ontario get lovely hot summers but nasty winters, so I’ve never quite understood that. Okanagan valley in BC is probably sheltered the same way some of the Washington state wine regions are, by the mountains. I didn’t know Washington was a huge wine producer, either, until a few years ago.

I have tried all three of our major regions. Pretty good, albeit I’m no wine expert.

There’s a more widely Canada-associated tradition in “ice wine”. Sweet dessert wine made from frosted grapes, or something like that.

Apart from the obvious European dominance and Californian presence, I remember Oddbins being mostly stocked with Australian. I can’t remember if South African wines had already started showing up. It was 1995-6, so I assume sanctions were off by then. Those places make a lot more climatic sense. Can’t recall if Chilean or Argentinean wines were then available. I assume these days one can get anything in London.

…Canada does WINE?

Availability bias, as you put it, is a big factor to be sure. The Aussies probably do remember all the UK troops and others who were at Gallipoli, but you’d never get that from their pop culture takes. So it goes. In Newfoundland the Great War is all about the annihilation of the Royal Newfoundlands on the first day at the Somme. The Newfoundlanders lost a whole battalion, more or less, pretty much the whole army of their tiny colony. The same day the Ulstermen saw most of their entire Division wiped out, a grander scale loss by a huge margin, and England alone lost I don’t know how many, but the lion’s share of the 20,000 killed and 60,000 wounded.

Geographic distance, already emerging separate identities in the Dominions to some degree, the relatively small populations they had would have played roles. They had variously outsized losses, with no previous historical referents for such things, at times when they were starting to look for national ideas for themselves.

My original comment’s final sentence was not intended as more than an observation that the Dieppe experience generated ‘some’ such lingering bitterness. It has hardly been a major feature of Canadian life in my lifetime [1970 on] and probably not before. And the vets and military professionals probably never failed to grasp its educational importance. In that sense it was not like Gallipoli sometimes was in Aus memory. Even Honk Kong was not. We also had no tradition of making our own war movies, more’s the pity, so didn’t develop a tradition of overdone anti-British war movies, either.

Just looking up some stats-

The UK seems to have had about 43 million people in 1914 and 47.5 million in 1939. Canada’s figures were 8 million and 11 million, respectively. Less distance than one might think, with Canada already at about 1/5 of Britain’s size in 1914 and closing in on 1/4 in 1939. Aus smaller in both cases.

According to this site: https://www.longlongtrail.co.uk/army/some-british-army-statistics-of-the-great-war/

The UK had about 5.7 million men in the army alone at some point in the first war, from the home islands, and of the additional 3 million men from the empire who served outside their home territories, the white Dominions in all supplied roughly half. Most of the rest appears to have been the Indian Army’s 1.5 million who served overseas.

Canada had 629k in arms and bout 418k served overseas. Aus had 417k and 330k overseas. So each under a tenth, more or less, of what the UK put in the field by itself. So a bit under what our contributions would be if based purely on population size.

Plus I didn’t bother to look up how many additional men from the UK served in the Royal Navy, which was almost all the empire’s maritime power.

Doubtless some similar figures could be put up for the second war, as well.

I generally take the view that Canada’s contribution was significant, albeit in the second war initially reluctant at the government level, but we can overdo claims for both wars. Many may not realize our army in the second war was not much in action until 1944, with the two noted exceptions. On the other hand we were making larger, earlier contributions in the air and at sea from 1940 or 41. Some early teething problems, of course.

I have a complicated relationship with the idea of British [UK] recognition of Canada’s war efforts. A memorial to Canada’s fallen was dedicated in London’s Green Park in [IIRC] 1995. I saw it many times when I lived in the city 1995-6. I ran into many older Brits who had stories about serving with Canadians, or relatives who went to Canada, and so on. But I was interested that, probably for many reasons, Australians and New Zealanders were not only far more numerous in the London of that time, but their role in the wars was better recalled by any Brits who knew anything about history. And many more Brits had stories about visiting Australia or relatives who had gone there. That might still be true.

I was more bothered by lack of access to Canadian wine in London in that time, but the historical neglect seemed to trouble at least one Canadian fellow-student in my programme. I can’t imagine his people were in Canada at the time of the wars either, so not sure why he was so gung ho about it.

Anecdote- in that era, the Maple Leaf pub in Covent Garden was staffed entirely by Australians. I found that significant, then.

I recently read this BBC piece on myths of WW1 “you still believe”. I assumed it would be another one of those articles debunking things no one who even heard of the given subject believes, or one of those articles arguing you believe “myths” just because you are not focused on the trifling cause celebre of the day [the African theatres were world-historically significant for WW1... for something other than the Germans' virtuoso but ultimately meaningless performance in East Africa]. Actually it is a bit better than that and calls out a couple of myths that had too much power in British post-1945 memory, and clarifies the record on Gallipoli a bit. Not bad.

I shall end now. Cheers.
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25776836

Your reference to Singapore also reminded me.

When Dieppe gets remembered here, its importance as a teaching experience for Overlord is well remembered and widely noted in the coverage. That reality is not ignored. It’s almost a trope. CBC media coverage of such commemorations really geared up in the 90s with the renewed attention to D-Day and VE-Day, and Canada sort of started remembering things again in the 2000s too. It struck me as odd as the events became more distant from modern Canada’s vision of itself, but there you go. Anyway, I always find it a little funny when CBC or CTV reporters dutifully remind us of things like the role Dieppe played in thinking through Overlord. They read their scripts with care. It’s still true, they’re just unconvincing presenters.

When Hong Kong got, less frequently, official notice [though it does have a separate war memorial on Sussex Drive in Ottawa since a few years ago] one used to hear a little more lingering bitterness. Although less so now that so many decades have passed. Sending green Dominion troops to bolster the defenders of a hopeless position in a poorly prepared territory on the fringes of empire was less popular than invading Fortress Europe. Someone had to go, all the same.

Compared to a real disaster like Singapore, where you scrub 80,000 troops from the order of battle and have NOTHING to show for it, Dieppe seems an entirely reasonable trade.

I appreciate that commonwealth allies may feel a bit ropey about this thing. But this is availability bias. They ignore the many, many operations when lots of Brits get killed and they’re not involved at all. I’ll see your Gallipoli and raise you Passendale and the Somme.

That plus not naturally wanting to plug into British class stereotypes from which one had escaped, and the odd mix of paternalism and neglect the British applied to the major Dominions.

For a time, Canada was probably in front of Australia in this field. Proximity to the US was a possible driver — our elites resented it and sometimes really pushed imperialism hard as a countermeasure, but they were drawn to the US in some ways and conscious Britain could not defend them and would sacrifice Canadian interests to their own in dealings with the US. The Alaska Boundary Dispute was still taught when I was in school.

Lots more to it than that, of course. But I’m perennially interested. Something about intervening oceans seems to accelerate the process of differentiating identities.

Fair points. Those lessons had to be learned by someone, and they were learned, and necessary.

Also true that Canadian ground troops had not been in major combat up until that time. In England since late 39 or early 40, some briefly deployed to France in 1940 but not in time and then evacuated again. Unlike the Australians, New Zealanders, and South Africans among the Dominions, not to mention the Indians, who’d been in action in North Africa (and briefly Greece and Crete) for two years at that point.

Well, in this book every Canadian in the army hated the British general commanding them. And by extension, the British Empire commanding Canada. After WWI the writer, fellow veterans of 1885, and veterans of 1914-18 got Canada mostly independent. After WWII Canadians used the memory of Dieppe to finish the job.

I am sure Dieppe is not forgotten in Canada and rightly so, but it is worth bearing in mind the Canadians had no combat experience at that point (the Brits had the BEF, Dunkirk and Norway, among other things) and it was necessary to get them familiar with the sort of warfare that an invasion would produce. Yes, tragic indeed that so many lost their lives but the lessons from Dieppe were not wasted, as Overlord proved.