Book Notes: Milner on credit for the Normandy campaign

I know of Marc Milner for North Atlantic Run and U-Boat Hunters, which in the 1980s and 1990s pretty much set the standard for serious Canadian naval history. Apparently, while I wasn't looking he has expanded to international histories of Second World War history.  

Recently the Times Literary Supplement of June 13, 2025 took notice of Milner's new history, Second Front, published by Yale University Press. The reviewer, British military historian Gary Sheffield, salutes the distinguished Canadian historian who has been "putting Canada's scandalously underplayed role in the Normandy story front and centre." 

Milner's title for this new book is clever and ironic, for his subject is the battles between the United States and Britain over control of the conduct of the war and particularly over who would claim postwar credit for having won it. As Sheffield tells it, the Brits were eager to subsume Canadian contributions into their own claim to remain a world power, while the Americans' mighty PR machine liked to imply the British were barely contributing at all.

Who would have thought Normandy would remain a battlefield in 2025? Historians, of course.

New histories of the mid-eighteenth and mid-twenty-first centuries

I continue to dabble in Bluesky to see what comes up. Notably, two remarkable essays.

First, there's a link to the London Review of Books essay "A Man of Parts and Learning"  It's about a man called Francis Williams, slavery, black culture, art history, global intellectual currents of the mid-eighteenth century, and Halley's Comet, among other things -- and it's a beautiful composition to boot.

Second, a link to an online periodical hitherto unknown to me, BylineTimes, and in it a statement entitled: ‘Europe and Canada Must Forget Trump and Form a Coalition of the Willing to Defend Ukraine’

Most Canadian discourse since the American election seems to have been about how Canada can most effectively surrender to Trumpism in order to avoid some of what the new regime in the United States seems likely to threaten us with. 

"Europe and Canada Must Forget Trump" is not that kind of statement.

It is a declaration by a large number of mostly European politicians and military and foreign policy mavens, plus some Canadians:  Chris Alexander, Margaret Atwood, Ratna Omidvar, Roman Waschuk, Roland Paris, Belkan Devlin, Alexander Lenoska. It accepts that the United States is not going to be the West's partner in world and European affairs in the foreseeable future. It argues that Europe and Canada need to make an independent military and foreign policy independent of what the United States is likely to do. It includes a substantial military buildup by all the participating countries.

June 6 +79 Years

 

Juno Beach Centre, Courseulles-sur-Mer, Normandy, France, on its twentieth anniversary.

U New Brunswick history PhD becomes American electoral sensation

 American newsource ABC.com has published an AP story about strange doings involving the doctoral dissertation of the far-right, Christian Nationalist/Republican candidate for governor of Pennsylvania.  Doug Mastriano, a retired US Army officer, received a doctorate in history from the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, New Brunswick, for a dissertation that has been criticized by other scholars for alleged weaknesses in its research into American military hero Alvin York. 

A January 6th marcher, Mastriano secured the Republican nomination for governor of Pennsylvania with support from Donald Trump. His online biography credit him as the author of two books on American participation in the First World War, one based on the doctoral dissertation

The military history dissertation, oddly, has been embargoed from public circulation almost since it was written, but a member of the UNB faculty -- who says he was removed from Mastriano's doctoral committee after he identified weaknesses in it  -- has now released the text to American media, according to the AP story. 

The AP story reports that the University of New Brunswick declares Mastriano's credentials have not been impacted by a review undertaken after criticism of the dissertation arose. Most online news and commentary so far seems to be from American sources.  

A word of praise for official history

Do the official military historians do the best Canadian histories?  

I've been doing a Dictionary of Canadian Biography entry of a British Columbia judge, Archer Martin (d.1941), who among his other duties was a judge of Admiralty. I needed to sort out a little point of admiralty law and jurisdiction (not, shall we say, my specialty), and that led me by winding paths to Johnston, Rawlings, Gimblett, and MacFarlane, The Seabound Coast: the Official History of the Royal Canadian Navy Volume I, 1867-1939, published in 2010 by Dundurn Press.  

It's 1014 pages long, and for my purposes I really only needed about five paragraphs. But I ended up reading quite a lot of it. It's not exactly an easy read, and it's a thousand pages on a period when there barely was a Canadian navy.  But it is just very satisfying sometimes to be reading in a history that seems absolutely authoritative and knows a very great deal in fields where hardly anyone knew anything previously. Who else works on this scale, with such authority? I recall having a similar reaction to The Crucible of War, 1939-1945: The Official History of the Royal Canadian Air Force (1994), when I looked into it for a completely different reason years ago.

It occurs to me that the official historians have a great advantage in working in scholarly teams with long term, defined purposes and goals. There are four listed authors here (one of whom was also an author of the air force history), and research reports by several other stalwarts of the Defence Department Directorate of History turn up frequently in the notes. A history of this scale -- presumably several volumes are contemplated -- would be beyond the ability of almost any single historian. Individual scholars, by and large, simply cannot live long enough to produce works on this scale with this depth of research and this degree of slowly acquired authority.  Most academic historians, even working in large departments, tend to work alone on what interests them. Non-academic historians, even more so. 

I wonder why academic historical research remains so individual and piecemeal. One can think of some notable collaborative efforts: the Maritime History Group and the unofficial collective of New Labour historians some decades ago, the demographers of Universite de Montreal even earlier.  (Update, 21 October: and some women's history projects more recently, including one on suffrage.)  But they tend to be scarce, small, and a bit haphazard. The academic freedom of scholars to pursue whatever they please is a precious thing, I don't doubt, but I wonder what we lose by seeming to avoid resolutely all, ah, collective organization in most professional historical work. 

Working collectively, the official historians don't seem to fall prey to groupthink or officialese. The Seabound Coast advances a lot of confident opinions about some substantial matters in Canadian history, not least on the old saw that in Canada "imperialism was a form of nationalism." Well, in naval history of the early 20th century, this book, without making a big thing about it, persuades me again that imperialism was very much a form of imperialism.

History of military intelligence: evidence, and who gets to spin it

CBC reports on a study out of Carleton University documenting how, in the approaches to the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the western allies all had pretty much the same intelligence about Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction potential.  

The extensive sharing of intelligence meant that analysts in the Five Eyes alliance — the U.S., Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand — were largely working with the same body of information in trying to make sense of things.

But the Canadian government got unfiltered assessments -- mostly sceptical about the Iraqi threat -- while the other governments' leaders mostly got reports spun to tell them what they wanted to hear.:

Analysts in Ottawa were well aware of the disagreements taking place in the other Five Eyes countries over Iraq's purported WMDs, as well as the pressure put on analysts in those countries by senior officials to come up with specific conclusions to support the policy line, Barnes says.

In the aftermath, Canada kept its mouth shut, aware the other countries did not want to be told how their policy advisors had cooked the books. 

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History of history in danger

The Champlain Society's Witness to Yesterday podcast continues to produce a flood of long-form conversations about Canadian history with many leading practitioners, and one guesses its listener figures continue to grow.  It's an admirable project.

But I confess I cast a jaundiced ear upon the most recent addition, a conversation between Patrice Dutil and military historian Tim Cook  on "How Canada nearly forgot the Second World War."

Well, no, it did not, I said even before clicking on it. Listening did not convince me otherwise. Cook, a fine and productive scholar and author of many well-received books about Canada's twentieth-century wars, has a new book, The Fight for History, which seems to posit a great consensus to dismiss the Second World War and to disrespect those who fought it. But his discussion with Dutil relies on that tired old trope about how we contemptible Canadians forget and dismiss their history, while other nations -- the Americans and British always prominently cited -- cherish and promote and salute their own histories. 

In fact, any cursory search in American discourse finds many Americans believe their fellow Americans to be uniquely present-minded and oblivious to all but the crudest myths of the American past. The current leaders of Britain's Brexit made their names for their crusade to reverse and overcome Britons' supposed ignorance and disdain for British history. And in France neglect of the glories of French history is always a crise nationale for some politicians and commentators.

I recall reading in the memoirs of Charles Stacey, the official historian of Canada's Second World War army, how he was told he'd better get that work out fast, because after about 1948 no one would care and more. And how he spent the rest of his long life watching in amazement the endless flood of books and memoirs and documentaries on his subject.  Surely military history has always been one of our less forgotten subjects

There is no field in Canadian history, I suppose, of which one cannot say "Too little is known." There is always more to know, and we are, after all, a relatively small country with relatively limited means to produce, market, and distribute our culture, including our historical culture. But I've been a freelance writer about Canadian history most of my life, with precious little support or encouragement from either the academic or the public history establishment. If Canadians did not support their own history, I among others would have had to have found a different line of work a long time ago.

Cook and Dutil's podcast seem to have its own conspiracy going, to neglect the vast libraries of Canadian trade-market and local-history accounts of World War II (and other wars) that have been flowing from presses since about 1946. Surely military history has been one of the most generously supported branches of Canadian history pretty much forever. Every time my friend Patrice says on the podcast, "I've never heard of that," I found myself thinking it was hardly history's fault if he has not read it. Concerning the example given in the podcast of one subject alleged to have been criminally neglected study -- S.S. commander Kurt Meyer's war crimes against Canadian soldiers --  -- here's one notable book on the subject, solid scholarship by a non-academic author, as it happens.)

Tim Cook has made valuable contributions to the immense library of Canada's military history, but he does not convince me that special pleading by veterans' organizations for more attention ever constituted "a fight for history."

Book Notes: Wentzell on the MacPaps

Edward Cecil-Smith was "an educated, thoughtful, employed, bookish married man who described himself as a pacifist." The son of missionaries in China, he was a Communist party activist in 1930s Toronto and an agit-prop playwright. 

Then, on the basis of some early militia experience, he became the commander of the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion and led the Canadian unit into combat as part of the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War 1936-39. 

Not For King or Country:Edward Cecil-Smith, the Communist Party of Canada, and the Spanish Civil War is Tyler Wentzell's biography of Cecil-Smith, newly published by University of Toronto Press.  It's a study of Communist activity in Toronto, followed by a penetrating military history of the Canadians' combat experience in Spain, all held together by the curious figure of Cecil-Smith, who, as Wentzell puts it, was "not a drifter, not unemployed, not unattached, not an adventurer" -- the standard profile (or image) of the typical MacPap.

Since I gave Tyler Wentzell some advice and get a credit (along with many others) in the book, I'll say no more, except that it seems to me a vivid and unfamiliar story.  

Update, March 6:  Wentzell and Patrice Dutil discuss the book on the Champlain Society podcast here.  

Military history for Remembrance Day

Every Remembrance Day, volunteers plant tens of thousands
of flags at Sunnybrook Veterans Centre in Toronto

The complaint that Canadian military history is neglected seems to have faded in recent years. (The complaint that "Canadians don't know their history" is eternal.) 

A couple of trade market military histories  have been getting attention recently. Mark Zuehlke's The River Battles: Canada's Final Campaign in World War II Italy is just out, as is Ted Barris's Rush to Danger: Medics in the Line of Fire. Both Zuehlke and Barris are veteran military history authors and have been touring their books extensively.

Military history agencies and institutes around the country and publication projects like UBC Press's Studies in Canadian Military History ensure that academic military history also thrives.

Histories of the history of Vimy Ridge

"No matter what the constitutional historians may say, it was on Easter Monday, April 9, 1917, and not on any other date, that Canada became a nation"
         ---  D.J. Goodspeed, military historian, 1969

"Victory at Vimy only happened because, in 1917, Canada was already a nation  -- one that could raise, equip, and send overseas a fighting force with the leadership and esprit de corps of a national army capable of fighting the Vimy battle."
          --- Christopher Moore, occasional constitutional historian, 2017

"The year 2017 is the 150th anniversary of Canada’s Confederation. It is also the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge during the First World War.  ... The two events are in curious competition as founding myths."

         ---  Amy Shaw, reviewer and historian, 2017

The centenary of the Vimy battle is just over a week away, and for once it seems there actually is one of those edifying historical discussions the country is so thinly provided with most of the time.

In the Literary Review of Canada, just out, Amy Shaw reviews Tim Cook's Vimy: The Battle and the Legend which covers both the events of the battle and the "legend" that grew up around it. Shaw is troubled by the claims made for Vimy, but finds that Cook "plays down the role of officialdom in shaping the collective memory. His argument hinges on the grassroots nature of myth making" and indeed on the role of art, from Walter Allward's monument to recent novels like Jane Urquhart's Stone Carvers.

It's too bad Shaw and the LRC did not also include in the review essay The Vimy Myth by Ian McKay and Jamie Swift, which I have been reading recently. It's an exhaustive accounting of ideas about war-making and nation-making in Canada, and a sustained frontal assault on "Vimyism."

By Vimyism we mean a network of ideas and symbols that centre on how Canada's Great War experience somehow represents the country's supreme triumph ... and affirm that the war itself and anyone who fought and died in it should be unconditionally revered and commemorated -- and not least because it marked the country's birth.

Friday night in Toronto, historian Eric McGeer speaks at Yorkminster Park Church on the topic “On Vimy’s Storied Hill” and the theme “Vimy Ridge made Canada – but what have Canadians made of Vimy Ridge?” (Facebook details here.) Referring to McKay and Swift, the friend of this blog who is one of the organizers of the talk suspects "Eric will want to challenge some of their positions in his talk."
  

Prize Watch: Charles Stacey Prize to Cook and Reid

The 2014-15 Charles P. Stacey Prize for distinguished Canadian contributions on conflict and society, awarded every second year by The Canadian Commission for Military History and the Canadian Committee for the History of the Second World War, has been awarded:

• to Tim Cook of the Canadian War Museum (his second Stacey Prize) for The Necessary War: Volume One of Canadians Fighting the Second World War, 
• and to Richard M. Reid of the University of Guelph for African Canadians in Union Blue: Volunteering for the Cause in the Civil War.

Capturing Hill 70 and the state of Canadian military history

UBC Press has just released Capturing Hill 70: Canada's Forgotten Battle of the First World War, edited by Douglas Delaney and Serge Durflinger, and with contributions by seven other Canadian military historians.

I know because I just received a copy, and I received a copy because I read it in page proof and supplied a backcover comment. I called it "a meticulous work of battle history" and said it "showcases all the strengths of Canadian military history today."

Still sounds about right to me.  By August 1917, a competently led battle on the Western Front was a weird mix of complicated, mathematical engineering and insensate horror.  Capturing Hill 70 does not neglect the latter, but the 'meticulous' part is how its authors analyse the former: how staffs organized "battle procedure," the slide-rule calculation of artillery fire plans, the logistics of ammunition supply, even the application of railroad and tramway technology to casualty evacuation.  It ain't trumpets-and-drum history, but it casts a powerful spotlight on modern warfare a century ago, and it is well done.

The only part of Capturing Hill 70 I didn't much admire was the "Forgotten" in the subtitle, and the undertone grumbling here and there that suggests that military history in Canada 1) is neglected, 2) has not had enough written about it, 3) is insufficiently memorialized, and generally 4) doesn't get the respect it deserves.

This has been a theme of military historians at least since Jack Granatstein wrote Who Killed Canadian History? And maybe they need to get over themselves.  (By the way, Granatstein contributes a superb article here on manpower issues and the conscription crisis behind Hill 70, with the vital data powerfully deployed in a short space.).

Let's be clear.  There is a substantial corps of good, well-trained, well-organized and productive military historians in Canada. They have lots of access to publication, and they are prolific. They have access to notable centres of military history, not only in universities but at the War Museum, the forces' Directorate of History, the military colleges, and various private foundations. The bookshelves are full of military history, and the documentary films pour forth unceasingly.  These complaints of neglected and forgotten military history have a poor little rich kid sound.

I'm talking here about military history, but the same applies to a lot of Canadian history fields and subfields.  Any historian can make a case that his or her particular specialty deserves more respect and attention and should have had more published about it.  Frankly, it's pretty much always a waste of time. If you think your subject is understudied, then do your work. And stop bitching.  You probably have it pretty good.      

History of military history

Who gets republished after fifty-three years?

Well, the late G.W.L (Gerald) Nicholson, for one.  McGill-Queen's is reprinting his 1962 work Canadian Expeditionary Force 1914-1919: The Official History of the Canadian Army in the First World War.  Nicholson (1902-80), a high school teacher turned WW2 soldier, became a Canadian Army official historian in 1943, and eventually the only one to whom Charles Stacey entrusted authorship of a volume in the Second War official history.

Then, since the First World War official history (planned in 8 volumes) had foundered, Nicholson sat down and whipped off his own one-volume version. That's the one being republished.  How will a survey from over fifty years ago stand up against the rivers of dissertations and monographs that have come along since?

Actually, the republication is a sign of the strength of Canadian military history. Jack Granatstein's 1998 call in Who Killed Canadian History? for much more work in Canadian military history has surely been amply answered. Canadian history in general is, well, still not quite dead yet, let's say, but military history surely thrives, with institutional support at the War Museum and the Forces' Directorate of History, strongholds in the universities, vigorous aid from agencies such as Historica, the Vimy Foundation, and the Juno Beach Foundation, and until last month, anyway, passionate encouragement from the government of Canada. And along with events and anniversaries, the books flow forth. Indeed, this fall McGill Queen's also offers The Embattled General: Sir Richard Turner and the First World War, a biography by William F. Stewart.

"What interests Canadians?" War Plan Red

Princeton University Press has a recent book, War Plan Red, about American plans for the invasion of Canada in the 1930s and -- sweet revenge -- Canadian plans for occupying the United States. But even the author, Kevin Lippert, has trouble taking it seriously. He describes how he got started:

I was having a conversation with one of [Princeton Architectural Press’s] Canadian distributors, a woman whose job is to sell our books in Canada, and she goes, “Are you working on anything that will be of interest to Canadians?’ I say, “I don’t know, what interests Canadians?” She says something like, “Canadians are very worried about what Americans are thinking of them.”

He has the story of the American plan of the 1930s, and also of James Sutherland "Buster" Brown, the mad genius Canadian soldier who worked out how Canada would prevail by a blitzkrieg invasion southward.

Not being a Canadian conspiracy theorist, Lippert seems not to mention Fort Drum, the large, not well known American military base about as close to Ottawa as American geography allows.  It is tasked with rapid deployment of up to 80,000 troops in an emergency.  Just in case.

H/t: Three Quarks Daily

How big is your navy?

That thing about the Canadian navy being the third largest in the world at the end of the Second World War?  This 2009 study by Rob Stuart argues it was not exactly so. The study is not exactly new, but it's new to me.  However:

It was quite possibly the only navy to end the war with more vessels than it had had officers when the war began. 

H/t: LGM.  (Tomorrow marks the seventieth anniversary of the surrender of Japan, ending major hostilities in World War Two.  Or today, depending on how the time differences are counted.)

Photo: Nova Scotia Archives,NSARM accession no. 2002-045/002 F12, HMS Barrie.

Book Notes: history of resistance to war

“Feeling some, ah, resistance about being part of Canada’s latest little war in some distant desert? Worth Fighting For will reassure you that Canadians have been resisting war and war fever for centuries. Prominent historians and younger scholars here explore everyone from Christian pacifists in the War of 1812 to today’s classroom school teachers seeking to interrogate war. Canada was forged by war resistance as well as by war.”
– Christopher Moore, writer and historian (christophermoore.ca)

That's one of the back-cover blurbs for Worth Fighting For, a new collection of essays on "Canada's Tradition of War Resistance from 1812 to the War on Terror"  edited by Lara Campbell, Michael Dawson, and Catherine Gidney, published by Between the Lines press.

Ernie Regehr calls it a "new kind of Canadian war story -- the anti-war story."

Starting to understand World War I -- and maybe III

The centenary of the First World War inspired several big histories of the origins of the war, of which the most acclaimed seems to have been Christopher Clark's 2013 The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, though Margaret Macmillan's more closely focused The War that Ended Peace also drew much attention.  More slowly, however, another book seems to be staking its claim as the really important new interpretation on the origins of the war.

Planning Armageddon by Nicolas Lambert, from Harvard University Press, was published in 2012, and the implications of its analysis have taken awhile to settle into the minds of readers, it would seem. As I understand it, Lambert argues that British did have a strategy in the years before 1914 for a quick victory in the event of a European war, and that the strategy focused neither on Dreadnaught battleships nor on sending an army to the continent. One reviewer declares that Lambert “essentially has rewritten our understanding of what produced the Great War.”

Lambert argues the master plan was economic, more specifically financial. Britain by the early 1900s was facing stiff competition in manufacturing and economic output generally, but it still overwhelmingly controlled the financial and fiscal underpinnings of world trade. Lambert demonstrates that Britain had a comprehensive plan to hit the financing of German trade and economic activity so hard and so fast that Germany would quickly become unwilling or unable to continue pursuing a continental war.  Furthermore, Britain engaged this plan in the first week of August 1914.

Okay, it doesn't seem to have worked.  Germany was not deterred or destroyed. The war continued. Indeed, Lambert argues that it was the rapid falling apart of the "weaponisation of trade" strategy that obliged Britain to send an expeditionary force into Belgium and northern France instead... with the results everyone knows.

The economic warfare project fell apart, argues Lambert, because as soon as Britain began to apply it, large sections of the financial community, in the United States, in Britain itself, and throughout the British-led world trading network, began to scream and kick about the damage they too were suffering from it. Britain's economic sabotage of German finances and trade was making life difficult for bankers, financiers, and debtors on the Allied side of the line. And they screamed so loudly that the British government capitulated. It agreed to rely instead on traditional military efforts, substituting a traditional naval blockage of Germany for its more sophisticated financial sabotage plan, and turning to the dreadnaughts and the expeditionary force instead. With world-historical results.

The Planning Armageddon thesis sounds profound in itself. A hundred years later, maybe historians are starting to understand what they were thinking ("What were they thinking!"). But -- contemporary relevance -- it sems it is current diplomats and strategists who are really thinking hard about the book's message.

What is the west's plan to deter President Putin from his military adventurism?  Targeted fiscal and economic sanctions.  What would be the west's plan in the event of a confrontation with China?  Same thing, you can readily guess. Much of global strategy today depends on deploying the (million times more elaborate) tools of financial and fiscal sabotage to deter rival powers from starting or continuing military action.  How's that going to work out this time?

Coincidentally (there are no coincidences), there's a column today about how the Harper government talks very tough about sanctions to deter Russia's invasion of Ukraine.  But Canadian sanctions on the Putin regime have mysteriously omitted key elements of the Russian energy sector, ones that have invested heavily in the Alberta energy sector. Apparently sanctions there might have uncomfortable repercussions in the Calgary oil patch. The Lambert thesis about the domestic obstacles to the effective weaponisation of international finance seems to be working out in real time.

Key readings, if you are not up for reading the whole of Planning Armageddon:  This David Warsh column at Economic Principals, particularly the second half, when he gets to the Lambert book. But even more, look at the comprehensive review essay and roundtable discussion at H-Diplo, which is impressively scary.

History of the battle of Lamalcha

With all the emphasis on war and the military history of Canada from the government of Canada, Daniel Francis gives us a glimpse of a corner of Canadian military history that maybe isn't much covered, the battle of Lamalcha on Kuper Island, BC, in 1863:

When the people would not (or could not because he wasn’t there) give up a suspect, Lascelles opened fire on the village. Villagers returned fire with their muskets from concealed positions on shore, killing a 16-year-old sailor named Charles Gliddon. He was the only British serviceman killed in action in BC. After a prolonged firefight, Lascelles withdrew the Forward to the mainland opposite Kuper Island. The best account of the incident claims that the “Battle of Lamalcha” was the only tactical defeat ever inflicted by a tribal people on the Royal Navy, though “defeat” might be a little strong given that the British returned the next day to find that the people had all fled and the village was ultimately destroyed.

New to me, and the whole thing is well worth reading.

Gone for soldiers? Dunno

Ancestry.ca, the commercial genealogical website, has been offering free access to a big collection of military/genealogical records -- but just to the end of tomorrow, Remembrance Day.

Ancestry promotes its Remembrance Day promotion by news of a survey that, it says, reveals "more than a third of Canadians unaware if they had ancestors who participated in either of the World Wars." Ancestry does not provide the survey itself, or data on its methodology and accuracy, so it is hard to know just what kind of question produced this "don't know" response.  

But it suggests a fresh twist on the old question "(What) did you do in the war, daddy?"

Historiography of the First World War

... nicely, it seems to me, summed up by Simon Heffer in the British magazine New Statesman.