Canada at War

Graeme S. Mount is a professor of history at Laurentian University, the
author of Canada’s Enemies: Spies and Spying in the Peaceable Kingdom,
and the co-author of The Border at Sault Ste. Marie.

This excellent book features contemporary accounts from service
personnel and some of Canada’s most famous war correspondents—Ralph
Allen, Pierre Berton, Blair Fraser, Lionel Shapiro, Gordon Sinclair, and
Peter Stursberg. The conflicts include World War I, World War II (both
European and Asian fronts), Korea, Cyprus, the Gulf War, Somalia, and
the former Yugoslavia. They do not include Vietnam (where Canadians
served almost two decades on the International Control Commission and
its successor) or Egypt in the time of Colonel Nasser.

The accounts, all of which originally appeared in Maclean’s, provide
insight into the respective periods in which they were written. Most
drip with emotion, especially those told by bomber pilots, soldiers, and
escaped prisoners of war. Some are fascinating because of their
naiveté. In March 1918, William Byron predicted that one “decade of
progressive rule, British rule, [in Iraq] will suffice to establish
again a tropical Eden all the way from Baghdad to the sea.” Captain
W.E. Dunham thought that the 1918–1919 expedition to Vladivostok, in
which he participated, was doing something useful. Two months after the
Dieppe disaster, Wallace Reyburn wrote a cheerful article about the
valuable lessons Allied strategists had learned there. Other episodes
turned out better than anticipated: in 1951, Blair Fraser wrote a
pessimistic article from Korea (“Win or Lose, the Russians May Get
Korea”).

The book is as easy to read as an issue of Maclean’s magazine.
Recommended both for scholars who seek contemporary accounts and casual
historians.