The Wikipedia article for Canadian Car and Foundry mentions unspecified tanks. I wonder if that was in addition to the planes or if it is an error.
To my knowledge they did not manufacture tanks. That reference may have been to railroad tank cars, which they did manufacture, pre-war.
And I believe the Valentines were also manufactured in Montreal. So it was probably just an error. Apparently the factory in Thunder Bay had sat disused for a while and only became operational again a few years before WW2, according to the blurb for a book about it. Canadian Car & Foundry Aircraft at Fort William – Thunder Bay Museum There are a few other digitized pictures of the airplanes under construction in the LAC archives.
I did not know until recently that Canadian WW1 fighter ace Raymond Collishaw had the rank of Air Commodore and commanded "Egypt Group" for Operation Compass and afterward and that he and O'Connor worked closely together. And that he had his one operational Hurricane ("Colly's Battleship") moved to and fro so as to give the impression that he had more Hurricanes!
I learned that Yogi Berra fought at D-Day. He was one of the best baseball players of all time and always a very humble guy. I was a NY Mets fan and always hated the NY Yankees but I liked him. He would swing at anything that he could reach and still had a great batting average. Yogi Berra Teams New York Yankees (1946-63), New York Mets ('65) Honors 18-time AL All-Star (1948-62*), three-time AL MVP ('51, '54-55), Hall of Fame ('72) *Played in two All-Star Games in '59, '60 and '61 Championships 10 -- New York Yankees ('47, '49-53, 56, '58, '61-62) Career stats .285/.348/.482, OPS -- .830, Hits -- 2,150, HRs -- 358, RBIs -- 1,430 The player Casey Stengel once explained the Yankees' success this way: "I never played a big game without my guy." He meant Berra. Yogi will live on with his quotes and quips, but above all he won, playing in 14 World Series and winning 10 of them. He finished in the top four of the MVP voting seven consecutive seasons, a testament to his durability, respect and, yes, good numbers at the plate. During those seven seasons he averaged .295/.364/.502 with 27 home runs and 108 RBIs -- and, despite being a notorious bad-ball hitter, just 24 strikeouts per season. -- Schoenfield So much could be said about Yogi; he's one of the game's most iconic historical characters. But I'm a stats guy, and this stat always amazed me: Berra homered 358 times but struck out only 414; he and Joe DiMaggio are the only players in history with at least 300 homers and fewer than 500 K's. -- Cockcroft The most fascinating thing about Yogi Berra is that there are very few highlights in which he is portrayed as the star. He's always the other guy-- he's the guy leaping into Don Larsen's arms, or the guy arguing with the ump when Jackie Robinson steals home, or the guy watching helplessly at the outfield fence as Bill Mazeroski's homer wins the World Series. But though Yogi was rarely the man of the moment, he was an amazing player. From 1949 to 1958, he hit 257 home runs and struck out 250 times. I thought only Joe Dimaggio was capable of numbers like that. -
When Yogi said, "The English boats fired a thousand rockets" he was talking about these: Landing Craft Tank (Rocket) - Wikipedia His own boat was a rocket firing LCVP.
Several Canadian soldiers who landed at Juno reported seeing an Allied fighter caught in one of the rocket barrages and simply disappearing.
Jim Wilkins of the Queens Own Rifles describes it as a Spitfire that "flew right into it and blew up".
Very clever! Any diagrams available as to how that worked? Lots of issues to resolve such as how the 'hook' engaged, was the tow rope 'elastic', what did it feel like in the Glider, how failsafe was it?....and the list goes on.
When my Dad was approaching Gold beach he said “ We were about two miles from the coastline, Rommel’s Atlantic Wall, when on our port side we saw something which we had never seen before. It was a rocket ship, about half-a-mile away from us, and it was firing a massive, continuous barrage of missiles, screeching simultaneously dead straight towards the coast. We could hear – almost feel – the heat generated by the displaced air. ‘Hell’, we said. ‘Fancy being on the end of that lot!’ It was fantastic and the bombardment was something the enemy could not have imagined it was possible to be on the receiving end of.”
That is almost a Monty Python skit waiting to be written. It's so mad! I feel so badly for the Poles and how they were sold out to the Russians Do you Brits know of Magda Szubanski who played the farmer's wife in BABE and Sharon in Kath and Kim? She had a Polish father who joined the Resistance as a teenager and ended up on an assassination squad that tracked down Poles who betrayed and/or exposed their members. Oh dear Thats a Dick Emery moment but you know what I mean...
My favourite quote from Yogi: “It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” Yogi Berra That one should receive more circulation among those who pretend to tell us what will happen in fifty years.
Really sad to find page for Grizedale Hall ?doesnt exist any more and cant understand why I had to edit this as I thought my comment would be attached to original post about it