Fortune Favours the Brave: Tales of Courage and Tenacity in Canadian Military History.

J.L. Granatstein is a history professor at York University and author of
War and Peacekeeping and For Better or For Worse.

Colonel Bernd Horn is the leading published scholar in the Canadian Forces, and he has produced a seemingly endless array of edited volumes on aspects of Canadian military history. This collection of a dozen essays by different authors ranges from the Seven Years War to the Afghanistan conflict and focuses, as the subtitle says, on “Tales of Courage and Tenacity….”

Many of the essays are first-rate. Naval historian Michael Whitby’s account of Canadian submarines shadowing Soviet missile boats during the Cold War is the first of its kind, a paper that makes clear that the Canadian subs did much more than serve as targets for Allied naval training exercises. Horn’s two articles—the first on the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion’s jump over the Rhine in March 1945 and the second on the Battle at Kap’yong, Korea in 1952—are very well researched and well written. Two articles on Great War battles are similarly well-done (though oddly placed out of chronological order). The first by Ken Reynolds examines a huge Canadian trench raid in June 1917; the other by Andrew Godefroy, one of the best of Canadian Great War historians, looks at the struggle for Mount Sorrel, near Ypres, where the Canadian division commander, M.S. Mercer, was killed and a brigade commander captured.

This is a good book that can be read and enjoyed by civilians and soldiers alike.