Canadian soldiers killed in a German air attack along the English Channel coast during the Second World War are to be remembered as part of a unique artistic welcome being prepared for Olympic nations arriving in Britain later this month for London's 2012 Summer Games.
But the plan to erect circles of glowing tents at seven coastal "Peace Camps" throughout Britain — each encampment resounding with music and recorded poetry — has also highlighted a mystery about what really happened to the unnamed Canadians commemorated with a cairn at Cuckmere Haven, the picturesque shoreline in southeast England where the ill-fated soldiers' tents were said to have been strafed by German gunners during the Battle of Britain.
The problem, local historians say, is that when the monument was erected in November 2006 — apparently in the presence of a representative of the Canadian High Commission in London and various local dignitaries — it was done so on the basis of one local man's bitter memories of the wartime incident and the reckless disregard for the Canadians' safety that he claimed led to their deaths.
A plaque on the stone monument explains that it was built at the site where British war veteran Leslie Edwards, who died in 2004, had carried out an annual Remembrance Day pilgrimage for 60 years to place poppies where the Canadians' tents had been situated.
"I will never forget the day in 1940 when a Canadian company came to Cuckmere and pitched their tents in this field," reads a testimonial from Edwards that is also etched on the plaque. "I was stationed here and knew that bombers regularly used this valley for navigation purposes. I tried to tell the commanding officer but he was not interested in what I had to say.
"Two mornings later the Messerschmitts arrived," Edwards recalled. "Just as the sun was rising they came skimming over the water and up the valley . . . Bearing down on the tents they opened fire . . . All the young men in the marquees and bell tents were killed."
The cairn's disturbing account of lives senselessly lost inspired the acclaimed British theatre director and Peace Camp creator Deborah Warner, whose nation-wide network of illuminated tents — partly a tribute to Britain's scenic coastline and partly meant to celebrate the Olympic truce that prevailed when the games were held in Ancient Greece — also aims to evoke the layered and sometimes tragic history of the land.
Cuckmere Haven's "peaceful, picture-postcard perfection conceals a murkier history of smugglers and conflict," Warner has written of the site. "In an adjacent field a poignant WWII memorial quietly remembers the troop of Canadian soldiers who, having pitched their tents there against local advice, were annihilated by German bombers making their way to London using the huge river estuary as a navigational aid."
But Peter Hibbs, an East Sussex military history researcher who has probed Edwards' story of the Canadians deaths, told Postmedia News that the account of the incident inscribed on the cairn is "unsubstantiated."
The attack on the Canadians did not happen in 1940, he said, because there are no records of any such incident from that time.
And even if Edwards was really remembering an incident that took place in July 1942 — as another researcher has suggested in describing a German attack at Cuckmere Haven in which two Canadians were killed — the cairn's characterization of the event still doesn't appear to add up.
"Canadians had been there several weeks and were well aware of the threat from air attack," said Hibbs, who spearheads the The Defence of East Sussex Project, an online record of Second World War military activity in the seaside county located about 60 kilometres south of London.
He said "multiple documents" indicate that other Canadians survived that attack and refute the notion that "all the young men were killed."
And Hibbs said the plaque appears to malign the "commanding officer" — who also died in the 1942 attack — and "who was respected and greatly missed, according to documents. If the plaque is wrong about this, then a brave man who was killed automatically gets blamed for something that was not his fault."
Peter Longstaff-Tyrrell, another military history researcher who spent "endless hours" searching for verifiable information backing up the story told on the cairn, recently concluded in a report published in the newsletter of the Sussex Military History Society that "the cairn has no provenance, other than the eyewitness account."
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