The Veterans' Years: Coming Home from the War

Shaun R.G. Brown was a military historian in Kitchener, Ontario.

Barry Broadfoot has produced yet another book in the oral history tradition and, like the ones that preceded it, it is flawed by the problems surrounding oral history and, at the same time, it is successful in capturing the mood of a special time in Canadian history.

The impact of World War II veterans on society is a history yet to be written. We all are inclined to believe, as one veteran puts it, “the Canada you see today is the Canada those veterans built when they came out.” But of course it is not so simple as that, and inclination is no substitute for fact. Unfortunately, Broadfoot’s interviews leave the reader in a bittersweet mood, wanting to know more about this generation referred to as “veterans.” The reader feels that the story is not complete; these vignettes from sources that remain anonymous are titillating but not, on the whole, convincing.

Statistics, always difficult in any social analysis, present real problems for the historian. The fact that 750,000 or 1,000,000 Canadians spent some time in a uniform is not so surprising. What Broadfoot and the interviews fail to reveal is how so few actually saw action, given the relatively large statistic, and were actually placed in peril by wearing that uniform. By coming to terms with facts like these the author might have revealed for himself and the reader why his impression was that for most veterans (and civilians, as well), it was a very good war. The horrible truth of the matter is that it was indeed a very few Canadians who faced the fear and dread, the reality, of war at the “sharp end.” As a consequence, the whole picture of the returning veteran in the Canadian context is a distorted one. The elaborate social network awaiting the veterans’ return in 1945-46 was the manifestation of the collective guilt of a nation that had treated the returnees of previous wars so shabbily. The fact that in a statistical way, if not in a social and cultural one, World War I had cut much deeper into the nation’s fabric, and psyche, is lost in Broadfoot’s book. It is important because one cannot begin to understand the world of 1945 without reference to it.

The oral record, however, may serve an important function in the search for truth insofar as it tends to corroborate and validate the historical facts. The best one can offer in defence of oral history is the contribution to impression, feeling, and intensity. In this regard The Veterans Years’ is quite satisfactory. At the same time, one must never lose sight of the fact that the oral interview remains but a single building block in the search for a way to reconstruct a realistic picture of the human experience.