The Guns of Victory: A Soldier's Eye View, Belgium, Holland

Dean F. Oliver is a postdoctoral fellow at the Norman Paterson School of
International Affairs.

Like its award-winning predecessor, The Guns of Normandy (1995), this
second volume of Blackburn memoirs follows the author’s field
artillery regiment through the campaign in northwest Europe, describing
the action from the perspective of an artillery Forward Observation
Officer. Though occasionally long-winded, the book is extremely well
written, very well organized, handsomely bound, and, also like its
predecessor, a marvelous read. Blackburn is by turns passionate, witty,
and brutally frank (especially in relating his feelings toward German
civilians), and his narrative is richly textured with anecdote and
detail.

Blackburn devotes his considerable talents to describing his own
military life through some of the toughest campaigns in Canadian
military history. The frequency of close-quarters fighting will surprise
many readers, as will the number of occasions on which observers,
hunkered down in some overrun basement or slit trench, called friendly
fire onto their own positions to clear them of German troops. The
frightful human cost of recapturing Europe is evident on every page,
whether in the deaths or injuries to Blackburn’s friends and comrades,
or in the heartwrenching stories of brave, exhausted men finally
breaking under the incessant strain. By the war’s end, Blackburn
himself is near the end of his emotional tether. Recoiling at the
possibility of each new mission, he has taken to fortifying courage with
demon drink. His fear of death is at times debilitating—and yet, like
the rest of First Canadian Army, he trundles on.

Western students have evinced more than their fair share of adulation
for German combat prowess in the years since 1945; books like this one
remind us that the Nazis did not have it all their own way. Canadians
like George Blackburn may not have been Hitlerian “supermen,” but
they had more than a little to do with the war’s outcome nevertheless.