Canada's Glory: Battles That Forged a Nation

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

This collection of battle summaries, as the title suggests, is a proudly
patriotic overview of many of Canada’s most important military
encounters. Though it excludes air and naval actions, the selection of
land battles offers a representative cross-section of colonial,
pre-Confederation, and post-Confederation clashes, and presents them in
short, readable chapters. Professional historians will find no new
information here, and precious little argumentation, save for the
book’s overtly nationalist sympathies and its implicit faith in the
nation-building effects of armed human conflict. The book’s value lies
instead in its potted battle accounts, direct prose, and nationalist
verve.

There are individual chapters on Quebec, Vimy, Dieppe, Normandy, and a
handful of other equally famous campaigns. Each focuses more on combat
than on context (lessening its utility as a reference work); each
follows a strictly traditional narrative style replete with unit
numbers, troop movements, military jargon, and biographical highlights;
and each is accompanied by a clear, uncluttered map. There are a few
mistakes and more than a few odd inferences (e.g., that Antwerp was the
Canadian Army’s last major battle during World War II), but, all in
all, Canada’s Glory is a light and pleasurable popular history.