Dragons of Steel: Canadian Armour in Two World Wars

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

This history of Canadian armour from 1914 to 1945 attempts to cover all
battles and campaigns in which Canadian armour was employed, as well as
tactics, strategy, logistics, and industrial production. While less
attention is given to the interwar period, the fighting in both world
wars is treated in great detail, including the changing organizational
structure of armoured units throughout the two conflicts.

Some new material is incorporated here. Wallace’s discussion of the
Canadian tank battalion during World War I is original and refreshing,
for example, but most of the book is not. Like many regimental
histories, Dragons of Steel attempts to locate every squadron and troop
on every day of every campaign. The result is a confusing mélange of
acronyms and place names, a verbal fog made worse by the author’s
refusal to stick to one standard for the naming of military units and by
the hand-drawn maps that proliferate throughout the text. Aside from the
fact that armoured units are moving hither and yon, the reader is left
with no real sense of what they are doing, or how they are doing it.

Despite the promise inherent in an analysis of Canadian armoured
operations, there is little assessment of tactics, operations, or
leadership, and equally little effort either to identify a peculiarly
“Canadian” approach to armoured warfare or to examine the Allied
doctrines on which Canadian practice was based. The early sections on
Raymond Brutinel and motor machine-gun operations come closest to
succeeding in this regard, but the chapters on World War II are weak,
and the Brutinel material, while interesting, is not entirely new.
Wallace has strong opinions on such matters, as his comments on
Operations Atlantic and Totalize and his criticism of H.D.G. Crerar
indicate, but he tends not to elaborate on them. Those comments he does
offer—that Canadian wheeled armour fighting vehicles were
“second-class” or that Normandy displayed the flaws in Canadian
armoured tactics—are tantalizingly brief, but nonetheless constitute
the best portions of his book. The failure to assess Canadian training
critically prior to 1944 is a major oversight.

Dragons of Steel is also unindexed and is documented in an appallingly
unhelpful style, considerably limiting its utility to the scholarly
audience. It does, however, contain several wonderful photographs of
early Canadian armoured vehicles and presents for the first time in a
single volume a detailed narrative of Canadian armour at war.