Our Bravest and Our Best: The Stories of Canada's Victoria Cross Winners

J.L. Granatstein is a professor of history at York University, the
co-author of the Dictionary of Canadian Military History and Empire to
Umpire: Canada and the World to the 1990s, and the author of The Good
Fight.

Heroism in wartime is not rare, but the kind of valor that wins the
Victoria Cross is. This account of Canadian VC winners is yet another
book on heroes by Arthur Bishop, the son of the World War I air ace
Billy Bishop, VC. This is not the first book on Canadian VCs, and it
will likely not be the last. But Bishop’s is engagingly written, cool
in assessment, and full of detail. Here, for example, one can find
Mickey O’Rourke, whose acts of courage in France could not save him
from ending up in a Vancouver flophouse, as well as the seven winners of
the award on a single day in action—September 2, 1918, when the
Canadian Corps cracked the Germans’ Drocourt-Quéant Line.

Regrettably, one can also find a rather obsessive interest in just
where the VC medals ended up, so much so that this seems to detract from
the story. Bishop is also, perhaps, too ready to call a Canadian almost
anyone who passed through the country on the way to glory. Some of those
he studied have only the most marginal connections with the country.

But these are minor cavils about a good book. The VC winners, so many
of whom died in action, were our bravest and our best, and Bishop’s
volume is the best account we have yet had of their courage.