Canada's Army: Waging War and Keeping the Peace (review)

In the last twenty years, few fields of Canadian history have been as dramatically transformed by new scholarship as military history. So much has been written in the field, both revising earlier interpretations and introducing whole new topics, that the old standard survey texts by the first generation of academic military historians – most notably George Stanley's Canada's Soldiers, 1604–1954 – are no longer very useful. Even more recent surveys, such as Desmond Morton's A Military History of Canada, which appeared in 1986, are already obsolete. In 1999 Marc Milner published his long-awaited synthesis of the new writings in Canadian naval history. Milner wove most of the recent scholarship on naval history into an important new history, which demonstrated what could be accomplished using recent scholarship. Now Jack Granatstein, one of Canada's most influential military historians, has done the same for the Canadian army.

Granatstein has made excellent use of the works of historians like Carman Miller, Bill Rawlings, Terry Copp, Stephen Harris, Bill McAndrew, and John English, to name but a few. He has added his own indefatigable and indomitable voice, which challenges the reader to reconsider some of the long-cherished views of Canada's military heritage. For instance, Granatstein, in assessing the significance of Battle of Vimy Ridge, bluntly asserts that it 'mattered little in terms of the overall conduct of the war,' and that 'its military importance, regrettably, was slight (112).'

The book begins with a brief overview of pre-Confederation military history. Granatstein uses the period before 1867 primarily to introduce the major theme of the first two-thirds of his book: the conflict and competition between amateur and professional soldiers. The creation of the militia myth during the War of 1812 remained an enduring one, reinforced by the emergence of the brilliant militia officers like Arthur Currie during the First World War. Only during the Second World War did the professional officer corps show its true worth. The majority of senior generals like Harry Crerar and Guy Simonds, the latter of whom Granatstein views as the best Canadian field commander of the war, were members of the prewar regular army. Most senior officers received their university education at the Royal Military College of Canada, and later attended Imperial staff colleges in Great Britain and India. By 1945, no one doubted that soldiering was best done by the professionals.

The narrative touches on most of the major themes of the history of the Canadian Army prior to 1945. There is a good analysis of defence policy-making in the age of imperialism, which is combined with gripping narratives of campaigns from the Fenian raids to the liberation of Holland. One of the real skills of any author undertaking such a synthesis is not to oversimplify events and miss important details. On the whole, in this part of the book, Granatstein succeeds admirably. There are a few minor technical errors, such as misstating the size of magazine of the infamous Ross rifle and inaccurately indicating that the Fenians possessed superior small-arms. Perhaps inevitably, Granatstein sacrifices some important aspects of battles. For example, in his account of Vimy Ridge no mention is made of the tunnelling under the German trenches, which allowed the Canadian Corps to destroy some of the strongest parts of the enemy trenches before attacking. Still, these criticisms are mere quibbles.

More seriously flawed is the account of the period after 1945. It is interesting that Milner's history of the navy is also at its weakest in the post-Second World War period. In part, both authors were forced to deal with an absence of good secondary literature. Granatstein did not have an opportunity to consult David Bercuson, Brent Watson, or Bill Johnson's recent accounts of the Korean War. This is always the risk in writing a synthesis in a field as dynamic as Canadian military history. No doubt Granatstein will significantly revise this...