Clio's Warriors: Canadian Historians and the Writing of the World Wars

Sidney Allinson is Canadian news correspondent for Britain’s The Army
Quarterly and Defence. He is the author of The Bantams: The Untold Story
of World War I, Jeremy Kane, and Kruger’s Gold: A Novel of the
Anglo-Boer War.

Tim Cook is a staff historian at the Canadian War Museum, which probably
gave him unusually deep access to sources of information for this
summary of the official writing of Canada’s role in wars of the 20th
century.

Cook sets the act of writing military history in context, explaining
its importance to understanding our nation’s past, the difficulty of
selecting from among the sheer volume of information available, and some
of the prickly personalities at the Department of National Defence who
administered its publication.

First was the flamboyant Lord Beaverbrook, who took charge soon after
the end of World War I, and spotted the propaganda potential of military
history as well as its intrinsic value. He initiated the gathering of
records and sponsored the collection of Canadian war art that remains a
national treasure to this day. His successor, Colonel A. Fortescue
Duguid, preferred a somewhat dryer—and slower—approach when he began
supervision of the official history of the Canadian Corps. Duguid’s
leisurely supervision of two volumes on the raising of the First
Contingent delayed its appearance until 1938.

The process picked up speed after Col. Charles Stacey was sent overseas
early in World War II as the army historian. He developed the Army
Historical Section and later organized the integrated Directorate of
History in the Department of National Defence. He was a fine writer
himself, author of several popular books on military history in the
immediate postwar years and of five official volumes that are now
classic references. C.P. Stacey also initiated a series of official air
force histories, which unfortunately took some 30 years to complete. One
wonders why the DND seems to pace itself at such a slow march to produce
histories.

Cook has written a fine, comprehensive book, though he could have
provided more information about how official histories are compiled, and
named some of the uncredited individual authors who actually wrote them.
Still, Clio’s Warriors is sure to remain the definitive reference on
this subject for years to come.