A Narrative of War

J.L. Granatstein is a professor of history at York University, the
co-author of the Dictionary of Canadian Military History and Empire to
Umpire: Canada and the World to the 1990s, and the author of The Good
Fight.

Now half a century behind us, World War II is beginning to fade from the
public memory. The surviving veterans—fewer every year—still
remember, but their compatriots, sadly, do not. The result has been a
compulsion to set down the story, to preserve the memory of great events
for future generations, and this book is a good example of the genre.

Robert McDougall, later a distinguished specialist in Canadian
literature, was in his youth a junior officer with the Seaforth
Highlanders, a fine British Columbia regiment, until he was wounded in
Sicily. After the war he agreed to write his regiment’s history, but
the illness and death of his wife forced him to drop that task. More
than three decades later, he has told the story of the Seaforths’
first year in action, tracing the regiment’s route from Sicily to the
Canadians’ cracking of the Hitler line in the spring of 1944. The
book, with an introduction setting out McDougall’s own war, is a
compendium of wartime letters, war diaries, and postwar interviews with
regimental officers and men. This approach ought not to work, but it
does, and the text has a sense of immediacy that more ponderous official
documents and glorified regimental histories do not. The sense of a
regiment as a living, breathing entity, as a family, is powerfully
conveyed; so, too, is a feeling of wonderment that ordinary men can rise
to greatness in overcoming both an enemy and their own fear. There were
no giants in the land during the war, but the acts of ordinary Canadians
made them appear so.

McDougall’s fine account is a worthy addition to the literature of
Canada’s war.