North Vancouver received 2 guns and 4 Machine Guns as its share of war trophies from World War One.
After the First World War the government of Canada established a “Commission on War Records and Trophies” with B. E. Walker as Chairman and A. D, Doughty and E. A. Cruickshank as Members. One mandate of the Commission was to recommend “the proper policy to be pursued for the distribution of such trophies and it submitted its report on 18 May 1920.
The Commissioners noted that
• Only trophies which were of a durable nature should be distributed to municipalities, public institutions, and military units;
• Before any distribution, special provision should be made for a National War Museum and for Provincial War Museums; and that
• War trophies were the exclusive property of the Crown, and the receiving institution was responsible for keeping them in good repair and had no authority to dispose of them.
At the time of the report there were 516 captured German guns and howitzers available for distribution, 304 trench mortars, 2500 heavy and light machine guns and 3000 rifles. From these totals it was proposed that rare specimens such as two 37 mm and 75mm mountain guns, 77mm and 80mm anti-aircraft guns, three 88mm field guns, a 90 mm filed gun, a 99mm howitzer, a 120mm gun, a 126mm gun, four 150mm naval guns, a 150mm Russian howitzer and four specimens of the other calibers, four specimens of each caliber of trench mortars, 100 machine guns and 1,000 rifles be reserved for National and Provincial War Museums.
It was recommended that guns of each caliber available, four trench mortars, twelve machine guns and 100 rifles should be allocated to each Provincial capital city,. In addition eleven guns awarded by competition in raising the Victory Loan of 1919 were to be distributed to each province with Ontario receiving two.
It was then proposed that the remaining trophies available were to be distributed by province based on wartime enlistments in the CEF, and the Department of Militia and Defence provided the following breakdown:
NUMBER OF ENLISTMENTS IN EACH PROVINCE
PROVINCE TOTAL PER CENT
Ontario 245,677 41.6 nearly
Quebec 82,793 14.0
Manitoba 66,319 12.2
British Columbia 61,438 10.4
Alberta 45,145 7.6
Saskatchewan 37,666 6.4 nearly
Nova Scotia and PEI 33,342 5.6
New Brunswick 25,864 4.4 nearly
Yukon 2,327 .4 nearly
The provincial share according to enlistment was then broken down to municipalities , organizations and institutions, and military units. For example, in Alberta, the City of Calgary received 6 guns, 2 trench mortars and 10 machine guns.
The Public Archives of Canada was assigned the responsibility of distributing the war trophies, and it kept detailed records of its work, for example: the City of St Catharines received a 77 mm gun captured by the 4th Battalion on 27 September 1918, on the Arras-Cambrai Road, south-east of Marquion. The records also record the weapons destroyed in Europe.
The records of the commission are held by the Libarary and Archives Canada, RG 24-C-1-a
