1944: The Canadians in Normandy

David Charters was Deputy Director, Centre for Conflict Studies, University of New Brunswick.

Reginald Roy is professor of military history and strategic studies at the University of Victoria. He assisted in the preparation of the official history of the Canadian Army in World War II, and he is author of six books and numerous articles on military subjects. He is currently chairman of the Canadian Military History Association.

Canadian military history of World War II is currently undergoing something of a publishing renaissance, so it is fitting that the significant Canadian contribution to one of the major campaigns for the liberation of Europe should be recalled in a scholarly popular history forty years after the event. 1944: The Canadians in Normandy is an account of the Canadian Army’s baptism of fire in northwest Europe. In ten weighty chapters it covers the first 75 days of combat in Normandy, from the D-Day landings, June 6, to the closing of the Falaise Gap, August 21.

Using war diaries, logs, official and unofficial unit, formation, and campaign histories, personal memoirs, and correspondence with those who participated, Dr. Roy has been able to combine an authoritative chronology of events with collective and individual recollection, in order to reconstruct large, complex battles in rich, authentic detail, right down to platoon and section level. As such, this is a narrative, rather than an analysis. It is, moreover, a study in tactics, not in grand strategy. The larger allied campaign in Normandy is discussed only in the barest essential, thereby freeing the author, and the reader, to concentrate solely on the Canadian dimension.

This account shows the Canadian commanders to have been largely competent planners and leaders and capable improvisers. The “other ranks” showed themselves to be as determined and as resourceful in the offense as their enemy was in the defense. Yet it should be remembered — and perhaps the author could have emphasized this more — that from top to bottom this was a citizens’ army virtually untested in combat prior to D-Day. Commanders and soldiers alike learned to master their craft “on the job” against a formidable, experienced enemy who invariably was defending terrain that placed the Canadians at a disadvantage. It is hardly surprising, then, that in the “fog of battle” mistakes were made and lives lost tragically. It is to the author’s credit that he tells the story “warts and all”; he does not dwell upon the genuine acts of heroism at the expense of less fortunate circumstances. If the book has one notable flaw, it is that the raising, training, and preparation of this army for just these eventualities before D-Day could have been accorded more prominence. It was a remarkable feat for a small nation with such a tiny peacetime army.

Although the book is clearly intended for the general reader as much as for the academic, even the military history buff will want to take his time with this work. The sheer volume and density of the information conveyed makes for close, if rewarding, reading. It is not a book to be attempted at one sitting.