On the Canadian experience of war

Tim Cook, various titles and publishers (see list below)

An historian at the Canadian War Museum, Tim Cook has written eleven books that range over the tactics, operations, leaders and society of Canadians at war in the 20th century.

The broadcast in early 1992 on the CBC of The Valour and the Horror, a private production, marked the low point in this saga of self-flagellation, shame and denigration. Its three episodes focused on the disaster at Hong Kong, the bombing of Germany and the single worst day of the Normandy campaign. Cook devotes a chapter to the controversy the series engendered and then examines the campaign to restore nothing less than honour to an entire generation. It was led by a handful of politicians, historians, and concerned members of the veterans community.

the Canadian government failed its duty to remember but society has hardly done better

The coda is the story of a new Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, an impressive undertaking that married artifact and scholarship and prompted a new wave of research and publication. There were also other signs of hope, but not every hope was realized. The government of Canada still could not be convinced to build and operate a museum near Juno Beach – where thousands of Canadians had stormed ashore – so a group of activists and entrepreneurs took on the task of rectifying the Canadian absence from D-Day.

In the end a non-profit organization managed to secure funds and build a museum, with the government ultimately providing substantial funding. Cook is sparing in his judgments of this centre, but I won’t be. I was there in 2018, expecting something dignified, educative and as sobering as the American museum at Omaha Beach. What I found was a museum “celebrating” Canadian multi-culturalism, a notion hardly present in the minds of the kids who fought their way ashore on June 6, 1944.

Canadian veterans, in Cook’s work, are shown as constantly having to argue in favour of a suitable recognition of the sacrifices of the 1939-1945 war. The Juno Beach Centre tells me that their campaign must not end. Canadians everywhere need to take up this fight for history.

The Canadian government failed its duty to remember but society has hardly done better. It is striking to recognize how the Canadian effort of the Second World War has not penetrated the Canadian psyche, as did the Great War so deeply. In English Canada, there are no great novels, plays or movies of the second war with Germany.

A few very good, privately produced documentaries have been shown, and also there are some excellent memoirs.

Ironically, there is nothing of the cultural importance of René Delacroix and Gratien Gélinas’s film Tit-Coq, Marcel Dubé’s play Un Simple Soldat or Roch Carrier’s novel La guerre, Yes Sir!, all products of Quebec artists. Their works are hardly supportive of war, but their treatments of soldiers are sympathetic and tender. At least they have not forgotten what happened between 1939 and 1945, and their works have been taught in schools for generations.

The Second World War appears only in some secondary-school history curricula, and most provinces do not even require a Canadian History credit. A Canadian must travel to France and especially the Netherlands to be reminded of what the “greatest generation” accomplished – liberating literally millions of people from Nazi rule – and what it cost.

The Fight for History, making creative use of a broad range of literary and popular accounts, adds a stellar volume to the growing literature on how Canadians have remembered war. It’s one that surely ranks as a stinging critique of a nation hopelessly gripped by amnesia. There might be some solace in the fact that even in the United States, a country that routinely celebrates the effort and impact of the Second World War, a national memorial was built on Washington’s Mall only in 2004. Can Canada be that far behind?

Dr. Patric Dutil is a Professor in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at Ryerson University, a prolific author in Canadian political history, and co-host of the Champlain Society’s lively podcast Witness to Yesterday.