Just in time for Remembrance Day, the Greater Vernon Museum and Archives will host a presentation by Professor Howard Hisdal entitled Defeating the German Army in 1918: The 2nd Canadian Mounted Rifles and the Hundred Days Campaign from Amiens to Mons as part of the museum’s Speaker Series.
The Nov. 7 talk will also complement the museum’s latest exhibition, Finish the Fight! Vernon in the Great War.
The presentation by Hisdal looks at the last hundred days of the First World War which ended on Nov. 11, 1918. The viewpoint is that of the 2nd Canadian Mounted Rifles, a regiment recruited in the Okanagan and Victoria, and led by Lieutenant Colonel Chalmers Johnston, a militia officer from Vernon. Hisdal will look at the tactics and leadership that made the 2nd CMR and the entire Canadian Corps into a highly efficient fighting machine that drove back the German Army and helped win the war.
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Hisdal, CD (Canadian Forces Decoration for honourable service), MA, graduated from Royal Roads Military College, Victoria, and Royal Military College, Kingston. He earned his master’s of arts degree at Carleton University. He has 25 years of military service, 18 of those years as an officer in the British Columbia Dragoons, the descendant of the 2nd Canadian Mounted Rifles. He retired as a captain in 2014.
Hisdal has taught history at Okanagan College since 2005 and is the chair of the history department. He is also the vice-president of the Okanagan Military Museum Society in Kelowna and on the board of directors for the Kelowna Museums Society.
As space is limited in the museum, please call 250-542-3142 to pre-register for the Nov. 7 presentation from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. Admission is $5 per person, at the door. For more information visit www.vernonmuseum.ca or find the museum on Facebook.
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