The Admirals: Canada's Senior Naval Leadership in the Twentieth Century (review)

This collection of articles by a variety of authors is the proceedings of the Sixth Maritime Command Historical Conference, held in Halifax during September 2002. It is part of the important series of historical conferences that Canadian Forces Maritime Command has sponsored and that have produced several distinguished contributions to the history of the Canadian Navy, including The RCN in Retrospect (1982); The RCN in Transition (1988), and A Nation's Navy (1996). Like its predecessors, this volume opens up a previously overlooked aspect of Canadian naval history by creating a volume of comparative biography of Canada's senior naval leaders from the time of the founding of the Canadian Navy in 1910 up through 1992.

The volume consists of sixteen chapters of which the first part consists of ten historical sketches by Canada's leading naval scholars. The second part consists of memoirs by six living officers who served as Commander, Maritime Command, between the 1970s and early 1990s. All but one of the officers included in the volume served as the nominal head of service, except for Rear Admiral Leonard Murray, who was the principal commander at sea during World War Two, while Admiral Percy Nelles and Vice-Admiral George Jones were the successive heads of the naval service in Ottawa.

Each of the chapters on a particular flag officer is paralleled by a section in Appendix II that gives a complementary detailed career summary in a standardized format with the officers' exact dates of promotions, decorations, medals, courses and qualifications, ships and appointments.

This important volume fills a perceived need to devote attention to the lives and careers of the leading officers of the Canadian Navy. In this, the volume's two separate parts both complement and contrast with the works of historians, on the one hand, and the short, first-person memoirs of leading officers on the other. In this, it is interesting, but perhaps not surprising, that the historians have often chosen to emphasize the personalities of their subjects, while the participants have naturally tended to down- play this aspect and to emphasis the policy issues of their time in office and the key decisions they were faced with making. Of course, the first-person accounts are, in their way, an expression of personality, but they are quite different from the first part.

Overall, the volume succeeds in its stated purpose, but it could have made a much larger contribution, along the lines of Malcolm Murfett, ed., The First Sea Lords (1995), Robert Love, ed., The Chiefs of Naval Operations (1980), or Paolo Colleta, ed., The Secretaries of the Navy (1980), by using a series of sustained and focused biographies to show the interaction of personalities with the development of administrative policy in the history of a navy. The emphasis in this volume is largely toward personality for the period up to 1964 and is limited by the significant gaps in coverage between 1966-1970, 1973-1980, 1983-1987, and 1992 to the present. Nevertheless, this is a volume that anyone with a serious interest in Canadian naval history and the naval history of the Atlantic will want to have.