Cross-Border Warriors: Canadians in American Forces, Americans in Canadian Forces

Dean F. Oliver is the assistant director of the Centre for International
and Security Studies at York University in Toronto.

Cross-Border Warriors is a mix of popular and oral history, the bulk of
it (more than half, in fact) dealing with World War II. Gaffen’s
method of presentation is to provide a brief introduction in each
chronological section and then to let his subjects tell the story in
their own words through several, often extended, first-hand narratives.
The volume is well illustrated with several interesting appendixes,
including a list of Canadian nationals killed in Vietnam while serving
with American units. The index, however, is next to useless and the
bibliography is sketchy; the peculiar style followed in listing primary
sources is particularly unhelpful.

Several of Gaffen’s subjects are compelling—like Sarah Emma
Edmonds, who fought for the Union in the American Civil War disguised as
a man, or Peter Chance, who served with F.W. Demara, Jr. (alias Joseph
C. Cyr, the “Great Imposter”) during the Korean War—but many
others are not. For an oral historian, he also relies excessively on one
or two individual accounts in some sections, most notably George V.
Bell, whose story occupies 10 of 23 pages in the chapter covering World
War I.

More substantively, Gaffen does not attempt to establish any patterns
in the actions of these cross-border warriors, or in the responses of
successive Canadian and American governments to their activities. The
causes and consequences of cross-border military migration are ignored.
Statistics are also used sparingly, while some groups, like merchant
seamen, are not represented. He also attempts in places to broaden his
narrative to include the effects of American forces on Canada and the
nature of Canadian-American military cooperation on an institutional
basis, but neither promising theme is pursued consistently. America’s
massive military involvement in Newfoundland during and after World War
II receives only a single mention, for example, and the American
presence in Canada’s north gets little more. Gaffen’s promise in the
opening pages to discuss the binational nature of the North American
veterans’ movement likewise goes unfulfilled. Finally, it is never
clear why he has such unbridled admiration for the “courage” and
“loyalty” of those Canadians and Americans who chose to fight in a
foreign army. He is certainly correct to highlight the patriotic,
anti-fascist motives of many of those who fought Nazism, for example,
but should all those Canadians who left home to fight in Vietnam be
treated uncritically as well? Cross-Border Warriors is not a
tremendously useful collection.