Buster: A Canadian Patriot and Imperialist--The Life and Times of Brigadier James Sutherland Brown (review)

Brigadier James Sutherland ("Buster") Brown, if he is known at all to historians, is recalled as the author of Canada's Defence Scheme No. 1 (DS 1). This was an audacious 1920s plan to protect Canada from U.S. invasion by aggressively seizing key terrain in the northern states and conducting delaying defensive operations until Canada and Great Britain could either mobilize or begin negotiations. An invasion of the U.S. by Canada sounds bizarre to us in the twenty-first century, but DS 1 was in the context of a much different world than we know today. The United States had similar plans involving the U.K. and Canada, called Red and Crimson. Even the British Royal Navy and the U.S. Navy eyed each other with some degree of suspicion prior to the Second World War.

This biography makes it clear that "Buster" was not a military crackpot. Brigadier Brown was a contender for the top soldier's job, the Chief of General Staff. He was beaten out, and his career subsequently torpedoed, by his rival, General A. G. L. McNaughton. The author traces how wariness between the two general officers deteriorated into personal hostility in the decade before the war, eventually resulting in Brown's retirement in 1933.

The author, a former Burma theatre Second World War fighter pilot, is the brigadier's son and at the outset acknowledges the difficulty in writing a biography about a family member. Despite the author's access to family life, regrettably Brown's personal diaries no longer exist. However, a collection of his official and semiofficial papers and contemporary military documents make up a large part of the primary source material.

Far from being anti-American, Brown came from a family that had had close American ties in the nineteenth century. The brigadier saw Canada as a staunch supporter of the British Empire, ready to fight at the side of the Mother Country but as an equal ally, not as a colony. His nationalist and Imperialist thinking mirrored that found generally in Canada at the time. Charles Taylor in his 1977 book, Six Journeys: A Canadian Pattern, first conferred the mantle of "hero" upon the brigadier. Perhaps not surprisingly, his son has taken up the torch and set out to elucidate this claim. He succeeds in great measure in correcting the Colonel Blimp image resulting from some previous historical work, satirical literature, and popular press reports about DS 1.

The reader may have more difficulty accepting the assertion that Brown was truly a Canadian hero. Certainly, Brigadier Brown was a professional, competent officer, successful in everything he did. He mastered his profession and performed well in administrative positions up to the divisional level in peace and war. In fact, he did so well that he missed field command, to his own regret and probably to his eventual detriment. Brown was in the top strata of officers in the small, peacetime, interwar Canadian Army, no mean feat at the time. But in the end, it is hard to see Brown as more than a capable senior military officer who had a full if not illustrious career.

The book could have used the services of a good editor. Typographic errors and misspellings are annoying and detract from the whole. More detailed information on the actual work carried out by the administrative staff at divisional and corps level during the major battles of the Canadian Corps in the First World War would have been illuminating for the informed military reader.

This biography is still a valuable addition to the historical record. There is a paucity of biographical studies about senior Canadian military figures, and none on wartime staff officers, and this book fills a gap.