Our WW1 Comic Book

This last term in Humanities (history) has been an eye opener when it comes to war. Since we are focusing on how World War One impacted Canada’s identity, I was surprised by the amount of sacrifice that the Canadians had to endure.

When it came to the start of the war Canadians had no choice but to join with Britain, and send its young men to be brutally slaughtered on the Western Front. Even though nationalism was on a rise in both canada, and the US, many men had no choice but to join. With pressure coming from their workplace and even their home, they were forced to join or be thought of as lesser, or not a “real man”.

Many Canadian men escaped the conscription and went to the US, which eventually joined the war in April of 1917. When the war started there was a call for twenty thousand men to join, but before the call went out over on hundred thousand Canadians had already signed up. There was lots of resistance against conscription by French Canadians. They were brought in to the war like the British without the ties and loyalties to Britain. This unfairness sparked outrage and there were major protests in Quebec.

Montreal Protest

Let’s backtrack a little to when the war started. The simplest answer to how the war started, was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. His death at the hands of the Serbian nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, a man with ties to the secretive military group known as the Black Hand – propelled the major European military powers towards war.

Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand

Slowly but surely both sides readied to fight, and what was once a small Austrian-Serbian Dispute triggered a chain reaction that led the world into the first world war.

Now, our main project this year was a project that integrated World War One into a graphic novel format. We started the project by choosing a topic to research and present to an audience. The topic I chose was the War at Sea. When it comes to choosing topics I like to go off curriculum, which basically means I like to pick something to research that we don’t or haven’t already researched in class. This lets me expand my knowledge on the topic which makes the researching more interesting. When I first started researching the topic I stumbled upon something called the pre war British Naval Dispute with Germany. This brought fourth the Navel Service Bill of 1910, and also at the same time instigated hatred for the Germans that sparked so many to fight alongside the British and the French.

The British were the winners in the pre-war naval race with Germany. At the outbreak of war, in August 1914, the British Grand Fleet had 20 big gun dreadnought and super dreadnought battleships, and four fast battle cruisers. The German Navy had only 13 German dreadnoughts and three battle cruisers. Although the cautious Admiral Jellicoe, the commander of the Grand Fleet, worried about the relative strength of the two forces, in fact the Grand Fleet remained superior to the German High Sea Fleet throughout the war.

As the German navy increased and their naval presence expanded the British struggled to keep up. This struggle birthed The Naval Service Bill of 1910.The Naval Service Bill of 1910 was a piece of Canadian government legislation, which was put forward by Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier. Before the Bill passed, Canada did not have a navy of its own and relied fully on the British Royal Navy. This new defence plan was a direct response to the naval arms race between Britain and Germany in the years before the First World War and the 1909 panic in Britain over expansion of the German navy.

The Act was built on earlier Canadian approaches to defence and it remained in force until 1950. The Naval Service Act was opposed by French Canadian nationalists, led by Henri Bourassa, who feared deeper involvement in British affairs. And after the change in power, to Robert Borden, the Canadian navy was thought of as a lesser power, and unreliable.

The main reason for this bill was that canada wanted its own independence from Britain. With their own navy and army they would be more powerful, and noticed by other countries as a separate colony. There were some long lasting effects of the war some good and some bad. Even though, Canada’s army was henceforth thought of as an elite fighting force, the divide of English and French Canadians has only increased throughout the years. I want to end this blog of with a quote that I found from a man named Saul David who said “Ever since World War I, superior force is no longer measured in terms of men or horses, but in the means to wreak, destruction”.

This project was quite an interesting rendition of your normal Comic Life project. The unique way the launch Cycle was integrated in to the project I think was very creative. Like most PLP projects we had three steps of critique and revision. This project was different in the context of the amount of critique and revision we were required to do. The inquiry questions on our research planing sheet where fairly specific, and if the answer was not clear we would have to revise and the critique that our teacher Miss Maxwell had given us. The other two critique and revision opportunities, Miss Maxwell gave us were on our two drafts of the actual World War One comic. The First draft was critiqued in class by our peers, using a specific/helpful sticky note method. Once we had completed our final draft we presented our comic to an audience. The audience that we presented ours to was the grade 6/7 class at Cove Cliff Elementary. I thought they were a wonderful set of ears, for not knowing any facts about the First World War I think they actually were interested in my topic the War on Sea. Overall i think it was a great opportunity to not only greater my knowledge on the First World War, but also increase my confidence with public speaking.