The Generals: The Canadian Army's Senior Commanders in the Second World War

Sidney Allinson is a Victoria-based communications consultant, Canadian
news correspondent for Britain’s The Army Quarterly and Defence, and
author of The Bantams: The Untold Story of World War I.

Jack Granatstein, author of 25 other books on military affairs, notes
that present-day textbooks offer scant information on how Canada
mobilized and armed a million men and women in 1945: “Television
programs such as ‘The Valour and the Horror,’” he observes,
“provide large dollops of misinformation, sometimes twisting the
efforts and sacrifices of those who fought the war to suit the
producers’ post-Vietnam sensibilities.”

This book provides an unblinking look at some extraordinary military
leaders. It must have been a daunting task, in 1939, to build and lead a
major army after 20 years of military underfunding. Granatstein avoids
descriptions of great campaigns, concentrating instead on the
generals’ personalities, backgrounds, and styles of command; how they
were trained; and why some did so well while others failed.

As Granatstein reveals, behind their dry demeanor and clipped
moustaches, Canada’s top soldiers were not without their vanity,
ambitions, and passions. We learn of the other war they fought:
political infighting, much of it between the old-boy network of the
prewar Permanent Force and the upstart staff officers who rose from the
Militia’s “Saturday night soldiers.”

The Generals takes us back half a century, to a country with outlooks
and institutions that seem hopelessly outmoded now, but that produced
leaders when we desperately needed them.