Strong Spirits: A 1941 Court Martial Case of Canadian Sappers in England Who Decided to Shoot Up the Town

Abstract

This paper presents the story of two Canadian sappers Lorne Long and Maurice Francis Flynn, who were stationed in England in February of 1941. In the true spirit of a hard days’ night, these sappers went pub crawling, got drunk, and decided to grab a rifle and shoot up the nearby town. When their bunkmate overheard the conversation, he reported it to their Lance Corporal, also drunk at the time, who in turn tried to apprehend them in the dark English countryside. Sapper Long did not like that and shot at him five times, missing every shot. Armed with a flashlight, the intoxicated Lance Corporal returned to the garrison garage and attempted to commandeer a truck for the manhunt. A sober captain stepped in and stopped him. The next morning, the hungover Long woke up in the woods as a stray dog was licking his face. He walked back, passed the guards without a problem, missed the formation while cleaning his rifle, and was promptly arrested. Looking at this incident through courts martial files and related documents, we will reconstruct the events and characters involved and try to understand why these men could behave like this only twenty years after prohibition.