Harry Crerar (1888–1965) was a Canadian Army officer who was the

country's senior field commander in the Second World War as the

commander of the First Canadian Army in the campaign in North West

Europe in 1944–1945. A graduate of the Royal Military College of

Canada in Kingston, Ontario, he was commissioned in the Non-Permanent

Active Militia in 1909. He saw action in the First World War, for which

he was mentioned in despatches and made a companion of the Distinguished

Service Order. After the war, he attended the Staff College, Camberley,

and the Imperial Defence College. In March 1944, he assumed command of

the First Canadian Army, which also contained British, Polish and Czech

troops. Under his command, it fought in the Battle of Normandy, cleared

the Channel Coast, and liberated the western Netherlands in April 1945.

He was promoted to full general on 16 November 1944, becoming the first

Canadian officer to hold that rank in the field.

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Today's selected anniversaries:

1830:

Tom Thumb (replica pictured), the first American-built steam

locomotive, took part in an impromptu race against a horse-drawn car in

Maryland.

1950:

American tennis player Althea Gibson became the first African-

American woman to compete at the U.S. National Championships.

1955:

African-American teenager Emmett Till was lynched near Money,

Mississippi, for allegedly flirting with a white woman, energizing the

nascent American civil rights movement.

1973:

Swedish police used gas bombs to end a seven-day hostage

situation in Stockholm; the hostages had bonded with their captors

during the incident, leading to the term Stockholm syndrome.

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Wiktionary's word of the day:

be one's own worst enemy:

(intransitive, idiomatic) To act contrary to one's own interests; to

cause problems for oneself; to self-sabotage.

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Wikiquote quote of the day:

  This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take

the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the

promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and

desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now

is the time to open the doors of opportunity to all of God's children.

Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial

injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make

justice a reality for all of God's children.  

--Martin Luther King, Jr.

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