TORONTO - Despite the decades that have passed since the first and second world wars, there's a remarkable amount of evidence -- and mystery -- still waiting to be explored about Canada's involvement, historians say as several investigative war-themed shows mark Remembrance Day this week.
The new series "Battlefield Mysteries" debuts on History Television with a surprising discovery by a team of military experts examining the death of Michael Wittmann, considered to be one of the Nazis' greatest tank aces.
Over the last 60 years, the British were widely considered to have been responsible for Wittmann's death, but close inspection suggests the Canadian Sherbrooke Fusiliers Regiment deserves more credit than it has been given.
It's just one example of how much more there is still to learn about Canada's contribution to some of history's greatest battles, says the show's producer/director Paul Kilback.
"No one's really interested in Canadian history except Canadians, and even then, it's hard-pressed," says Kilback, whose series kicks off Thursday.
"Part of the goal of `Battlefield Mysteries' was kind of to reclaim some of Canada's history."
For the sprawling team of investigators with "Finding the Fallen," a four-part History Television series in which archeologists, forensic experts and historians uncover lost details from the First World War, just finding Canadian battlefields to investigate was a chore.
The program excavates old war sites in Germany, Belgium, France and Britain to examine forgotten stories of Canadian heroism.
"The problem with the Canadian soldiers is they were successful," Andy Robertshaw, the show's lead historian, says from Surrey, England, where he runs the Royal Logistic Corps Museum.
"And because they were successful, they (didn't) stay very long in the same location, which means that their evidence is quite difficult to find. If we'd been looking at long battles of attrition they would have been easier."
What investigators did find was the Dickensian story of a soldier who, as a boy, had been rescued from the slums of northern Britain and shipped to Canada. Another episode examines the last great cavalry charge of the First World War, launched by Canadian soldiers who -- in the face of relentless machine-gun fire -- stopped the German advance in northern France in the spring of 1918.
"Finding the Fallen" begins its second season on Tuesday, Remembrance Day.
Also airing this week on History Television is "Passchendaele: The Underground War," in which investigators use lasers, radar and submersibles to drain a dugout built in 1918 and uncover evidence of an underground battle. It airs Monday.
Robertshaw says he's amazed by the amount of wartime evidence preserved in farmers' fields and other lands, and by how much of what his team discovered was more than just detritus. The historian, who adds that his show does not dig for human remains, notes that areas of heavy shelling and poor weather offered the most material for examination by trapping fragile debris in mud and dirt for decades.
"On one occasion, there'd been I think a single soldier (that had) stood for a while smoking a pipe or cigarette and we found the individual matches. The ones he'd lit and the ones that had been too wet to light were still on the ground with the red phosphorus on them," said Robertshaw, evoking the image of a bored sentry cursing as he tried desperately to light a smoke.
For Kilback, stories from surviving veterans remain his focus in piecing together the past, but he admits those tales are becoming harder to come by.
"These guys are getting old and there's not a lot of opportunity left for these stories," says Kilback.
"We're really trying to capture as many of these as we can, because when that's gone, it's gone. ... We're kind of in a race against time in a lot of ways."
Kilback notes that plans were afoot to profile Charley Fox, a Second World War Spitfire pilot credited with wounding German commander Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. However, Fox died last month.
The second episode of "Battlefield Mysteries," also airing Thursday, looks at the Allied fighter pilots that defended Malta during the Second World War, including Canadian Spitfire pilot Ian Maclennan, now 89.
Later in the week, more dramatic war-themed fare includes the Oscar-winning D-Day film "The Longest Day" on Saturday, and a "Band of Brothers" marathon on Sunday, both on History Television.
On Tuesday, VisionTV offers the BBC documentary "The Trench," in which 24 volunteers are recruited to spend two weeks in a meticulously recreated trench system in northern France, reliving the harsh experiences of the First World War.
