LEST WE FORGET: The Cenotaph ceremonies will be carried this Saturday on CBC and CBC Newsworld across the country, and local stations are sure to offer their versions, but there isn’t an awful lot of special Remembrance Week programming on offer this year, it seems. The exception, as always, has been History Television, which has put together a selection of shows, new and old.
During the day, they’ve been running shows like From A Place Called War and For King And Country, older programs from History’s vaults. The evenings have kicked off with Finding The Fallen and Digging Up The Trenches, similar documentary series about the excavation of World War I battlefields. The last two nights have also featured Devil’s Brigade, a new reality program that brings together a cast of young soldiers from Canada and the U.S. to endure the training undertaken by a similar outfit more than 60 years ago, when the first special forces unit was formed, on the same location in Montana’s back of beyond.
You know a lot has changed when the first “casualty” of the show is a young man freaked out by the close quarters fighting taught by a 60-year-old veteran trained by the man who taught the original unit. It was too angry, too ugly, too intense, as far as he was concerned, and he needed to go home; something in that says a lot about how the world’s changed since World War II.
Tonight is devoted to In Korea With Norm Christie, another new program that carries on a History tradition. Christie, a writer and historian, has filmed three previous series that debuted on History, devoted to tours of battlefields from the two World Wars; they were vivid, but sombre affairs that usually concluded in some battlefield cemetery among rows of crosses or headstones.
In Korea starts out a lot more urgently, with Christie in a Republic Of Korea army vehicle driving through the demilitarized zone between South and North Korea. He points out over the barbed wire into the hills where no one can venture for fear of setting off a geopolitical incident, and says that this is where Canadian soldiers fought, more than 50 years ago.
With the DMZ obviously off limits, Christie, if forced to look elsewhere for old battlefields, and with the help of a veteran of the conflict, hikes up hills to find overgrown slit trenches and gun emplacements. Using fairly basic computer animation, the series tries to recreate what those hills looked like when hundreds, even thousands of North Korean and Chinese troops were assaulting outnumbered Canadian troops in the middle of the night. Christie’s earlier series’ felt like history, but In Korea has an anxious relevance, renewed every year, it seems, by the regime in Pyongyang, who’ve never considered that war over.
