Russia's Old Empire and the Last CBC Correspondent from the Second World War.
June 13, 2022 Volume 3 # 2
Russia Then and Now
The Tsarist Russian Empire in 1914 stretched father into Europe than Stalin’s Soviet Union. That little red bit just under Lithuania is the part of Prussia that the Soviet Union kept in 1945. This past week Vladimir Putin mused about the wars of conquest by the Tsars.
The Guardian had this quote from Putin:
“Peter the Great waged the great northern war for 21 years. It would seem that he was at war with Sweden, he took something from them. He did not take anything from them, he returned [what was Russia’s],” the Russian president said on Thursday after a visiting an exhibition dedicated to the tsar.
Does he see himself as Vladimir the Great? Maybe Vlad the Impaler. (I know he wasn’t Russian.) Vlad was a Romanian and impaled his enemies on a stake in the ground leaving them to die a miserable death. Pour encourager les autres.
Elasticity of Demand 101
Record high gasoline and diesel prices have not stopped people in the United States from driving according to something I heard on Bloomberg this week.
Ventura Highway in the sunshine
Where the days are longer
The nights are stronger
Than moonshine America, 1972
One thing that amazes me about high gasoline and diesel prices is that many of the same news programs that are gung-ho on climate change are also the first to complain about how much it costs people to fill up. Carbon taxes and restrictions on pipelines and oil fields, like the oilseeds, will push prices even higher.
There are other people who think `Demand Destruction’ is already underway. In plain English people are driving less and buying less with prices at $5 a gallon in the US.
"One could argue that demand destruction for gasoline has already started," Peter McNally, global sector lead for industrials, materials, and energy at Third Bridge, told Yahoo Finance."Since the start of March, U.S. gasoline consumption is 6% lower than the corresponding period in 2019," pre-pandemic.”
Demand for Electric Cars
As I mentioned, I put a down payment on an electric car but cancelled it when I was told it would take a year and a half for delivery. A lot can happen to battery technology in a year and half.
This is anecdotal, but a friend of mine went into a Hyundai dealer the other day and was told if you ordered an Ionic 5 now you would get it in 2025. That one dealer has an order backlog of 300 cars.
Old Fashioned Horsepower
Draft horses grazing in Knowlton, Quebec, on Saturday afternoon.
Russians Hate Teslas
And the Brits, the Irish and the Dutch hate Ferraris. The oddest chart. But interesting.
Energy Alternatives
Geothermal is, to my mind, the most interesting, though it is expensive and not many people use it. You can’t see geothermal because it is undergrounds. Windmills are sometimes unsightly. Hydroelectricity is the widest used form of alternative energy and why electricity is so chap in part of Canada and the United States.
I would add nuclear. And the European Union now classifies nuclear as renewable. It is the only way to wean Europeans off the Russian oil and gas addiction.
Reaching for the Sun
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Essay of the Week
This is another in the series war related stories, a correspondent who followed the Canadian troops as they prepared to land in Normandy, and then followed them until the end of the war.
Peter Stursberg, who has died at the age of 101, was the last living Canadian war correspondent from the Second World War, and probably the last correspondent anywhere in the world who covered that war. He was one a handful of Canadian radio reporters who covered the Second World War in the field and his experiences in North Africa, Italy and northwestern Europe were so astounding that if written as fiction they would seem a stretch.The equipment needed to broadcast from the field was cumbersome. It could weigh several hundred pounds and required technicians to operate. Reports with interviews and actuality could be recoded on a disc in the field and then shipped to a safe radio station to be sent out over the air. The Canadian reports were heard not just back home, but in Britain and the United States as well.
“We were the only North American network using recording equipment, so we were making the most of our opportunity,” Mr. Stursberg said in a speech to a Canadian Club during a home leave during the war. “We were bringing sounds of artillery, low-flying planes, rifle, mortar and machine gun fire right into the living rooms of people here (Canada) and in Britain. They (the recorded actuality sounds) are so real that they are now used frequently by Hollywood.”
Recording and reporting the war could be as dangerous as the fighting. On a beach in Sicily he stood with Canadian troops as they were fired on. Since the rounds were coming straight down, the men made a smaller target standing up with only steel helmets to protect them. The shelling lasted an hour. At one stage a piece of metal tore into the shoulder of the officer standing beside Mr. Stursberg.
The only time he was injured in his years of war reporting was in England in a war exercise.
“It was ironic that I should be wounded during a demonstration of a river crossing in England and come through the real war with its real battles without so much as a scratch,” wrote Mr. Stursberg about an incident when he was hit a dud mortar during a military exercise in England. It almost killed him. The Canadian general standing beside him was alarmed at the incident. Not so much that a CBC reporter had been knocked to the ground, but that the projectile had just missed the Duke of Gloucester, a member of the Royal Family, standing a few yards away.
After the Rome fell to the Allied armies, Mr. Stursberg arranged for a special broadcast to Canada by the Pope. It was said to be the only time Pius XII made a radio broadcast to a specific country.
“The CBC man and his engineer drove their radio truck right into Vatican City, set up their microphone in the Pope’s private study, and ran the wires through the windows,” recalled Mr. Stursberg.
If his adult life was filled with adventure, so was his childhood. Peter Stursberg was born in Cheefoo, China where his father was working with the Chinese Postal Service. When he was 7 years old, Peter was taken on a world cruise with his parents. He came back to China and spent the next four years there. When he was 11 he went to boarding school in England.
Several years later his parents moved back to Canada and Peter graduated from West Hill High School in Montreal. He then returned to England to take his British matriculation at the Bedford School. He entered McGill University in 1930 and studied science and worked for the McGill Daily. He rowed for McGill in the 1932 Canadian Olympic trials, but the team failed to qualify. He rowed at Henley for McGill that same year.
His family’s fortunes were hurt by the depression and his parents moved to a farm on Vancouver Island. He left university and followed them to the west coast. For the next couple of years he worked in logging camps, farms and many odd jobs. He landed his first newspaper work with the Victoria Daily Times in 1934, as agricultural editor.
By 1938 he curious about the turmoil in Europe, and he traveled to France, Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and the Soviet Union. It was in Russia that he was held by the police on a visa charge. In Moscow he watched a youth parade in Red Square march past the Soviet dictator Jospeh Stalin.
During his European tour he filed freelance pieces along the way, and these were what later landed him the much sought after job of war correspondent.
After settling with the Soviet secret police, he took a Russian boat via the Baltic back to Britain. There he landed a job on the London Daily Herald. One of his jobs was to write three `leaders’ or editorials on the importance of the 1939 Royal Visit to Canada.
When the war broke out when he returned to Canada. Almost right away he was hired by the CBC in Vancouver.
“These war correspondents really started CBC News. The CBC was publicly shamed in the newspapers for the way it announced the start of war. There was a broadcast from ABC going out over the network and they interrupted Jimmy Durante singing Inka Dinka Doo to make a 20 second announcement. The newspapers shamed them,” said David Halton whose father, Matthew was also a CBC war Correspondent. Mr. Halton has written a book on Canadian war correspondents, Dispatches From the Front, which will be published in November of this year.
Mr. Stursberg’s first war related story was covering the building of the Alaska Highway from the United States across British Columbia and the Yukon. The road connected Alaska to the continental United States and was known as the Alcan Highway, named for Alaska-Canada, not the aluminum company.
Peter Stursberg recalled in one of his early books, Journey into Victory, that the four man CBC crew was unprepared for sub-zero weather and didn’t bring sleeping bags. An American officer supplied them. In his book he noted the discrimination in the US Army work crews. The hard work of building the road was done mostly by black soldiers, though all the officers were white.
A short while afterwards, Mr. Stursberg was named one of six reporters, three form the English network, three from the French, to go overseas to cover the war in North Africa and later, Italy and northwestern Europe. The others in the English-language crew were Matthew Halton and Andrew Cowan. The French language team was Marcel Ouimet, Benoit Lafleur and Paul Barette. Peter Stursberg outlived them all.
After the war was the CBC’s correspondent at the United Nations and then the Ottawa editor of the Toronto Star. He was entrepreneurial journalist/ He and a friend founded a syndication service that provided radio and print reports from Ottawa. Later he was one of the founders and investors of CJOH, the second private television station in Canada. That investment left him comfortable for life.
“I think one of his most impressive accomplishments was his invention of Oral History in Canada,” said his son, Richard Stursberg. “His first book was on Prime Minister john Diefenbaker. He would interview all the people involved with Diefenbaker, cabinet ministers generals and so on and then work that into a narrative. He did the same thing with Pearson.”
Peter Stursberg wrote 14 books in all. He was a member of the Order of Canada.
Arthur Lewis Peter Stursberg was born in Cheefoo, China, on August 31, 1913. He died in Vancouver on August 31, 2014, his 101st birthday. He is survived by his son, Richard, his daughter Judy Lawrie, four grandchildren and three great grandchildren.