Because We Are Canadians

Paul Dickson is a strategic analyst at the Directorate of Air Strategic
Plans, National Defence Headquarters, Ottawa.

Charles Kipp, an Ontarian who enlisted in the army in 1940, was sent
overseas in 1943 to join the Lincoln and Welland Regiment. He saw action
during some of the hardest fighting in Normandy and the Scheldt. The
primary focus of his detailed and evocative memoir is the fighting
during the autumn of 1944. He recounts his combat experiences with a
startling clarity.

This is the story of a rifleman and his front-line combat
experiences—raw and, as others have noted, unsentimental. There is an
undercurrent of frustration with an army, and a country, that did not
fully appreciate what was being asked of those who fought at the
“sharp end.” Kipp relates his experiences in a roughly chronological
order; this minimal framework creates a series of seemingly disconnected
events, patrols, life-and-death encounters, and near misses—probably
as close to the reality of combat for the average World War II rifleman
as we are likely to get.

Kipp’s view from the sharp end, while sometimes lacking perspective,
rarely lacks insight; for example, his pride in his regiment is such
that it blinds him to the flaws in the regimental system that, according
to his own account, marginalized him as an outsider from the moment he
joined and prevented him from being awarded medals. He blames the army,
or presumably the senior officer corps, despite the fact that they tried
to break down a system where regimental officers of dubious capability
were promoted based on their ties to a regiment. This is really my only
concern with the book. The provision of some annotations to correct his
perceptions, or to inform the reader of the vagaries of memory, would
have strengthened this moving account of war.