Canada's Army: Waging War and Keeping the Peace

Graeme S. Mount is a professor of history at Laurentian University. He
is the author of Canada’s Enemies: Spies and Spying in the Peaceable
Kingdom, and Chile and the Nazis, and the coauthor of Invisible and
Inaudible in Washington: American Policies To

Professor Granatstein has written a formidable book, the most up-to-date
single volume of Canadian military history. The author’s credentials
include 10 years of service with the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF), a
career as a writer of Canadian military history, and two years as
director of the Canadian War Museum.

Canada’s Army incorporates information from an exhaustive list of
books and articles, as well as documents (mostly from the National
Archives of Canada), plus letters from and interviews with veterans of
the CAF. There is an excellent collection of maps of battlefields from
the two world wars and Korea, when the CAF engaged in the largest
numbers and suffered the worst casualties. The thesis is that the CAF
constitute an insurance policy, for which successive generations of
Canadians have not wanted to pay. Unfortunately, “we pay now in
dollars for competent soldiers or we pay later in dollars and our sons
and daughters.”

The text begins with the Canadian militias of New France and British
North America, which Granatstein thinks have enjoyed a better reputation
than their records warrant. After Confederation, the militia stood on
guard against Fenians and Louis Riel. The nucleus of a Canadian army
followed, and Granatstein leads readers through the Boer War, World War
I, World War II, Vietnam, NATO commitments, and successive peacekeeping
operations. Such celebrities (good and bad) as Sam Hughes, Sir Arthur
Currie, Admiral Mountbatten, Generals E.L.M. Burns, Lewis MacKenzie,
Maurice Baril, and Romeo Dallaire share pages with lesser-known but
truly heroic people.

Granatstein examines the politics of Canadian defence policymaking and
the role of French Canadians, and he offers thoughtful, informed
insights into such controversies as the Hong Kong tragedy, the Dieppe
raid, and the Somalia fiasco. He thinks poorly of the ability of the
United Nations to organize meaningful support, and he notes both the
Trudeau government’s decision to withdraw soldiers from Europe
(despite the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia) and the futility of
Canada’s subsequent CAST commitment to Norway.