Military

HUMANITIES Iq 50! pretations of animal action. Adorning the book and enhancing the writer's impressions are the black-and-white drawings of Thoreau MacDonald, an artist who is always adept at seizing and portraying the familiar and not so familiar aspects of the countryside and its human and animal dwellers. (R. M. SAUNDERS) MILITARY Two volumes have appeared in I959 to mark the year's significance as an anniversary. Colonel C. P. Stacey's Quebec, J 759 (Macmillan, pp. xiv, 2IO, maps, $5.00) is the only Canadian work ofseveral that commemorate the rwo-hundredth anniversary of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham (the others were all published in England). Leslie Roberts' history of the R.C.A.F., There Shall be Wings (Clarke, Irwin, pp. xiv, 290, illus., $5.00), is timed to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the first Bight in Canada on February 23, I909. Apart from their both being commemorative volumes, these works are as different in kind as the events they honour. Quebec, J 759 is a scholarly investigation of the evidence in an attempt to provide a definitive interpretation ofproblems and details that have vexed historical writing about the capture of Quebec for two centuries; but it is, at the same time, so well written that it will hold anyone's attention. There Shall be Wings, on the contrary, designed as a popular account ofthe R.C.A.F., and aiming at glamour rather than deep academic study, will fail to interest readers who have no previous connection with or concern in the events it records; but it is valuable because it contains a mass of factual detail that has not previously been collected between two covers. Leslie Roberts is a prolific author of books and articles who shows a strong Canadian nationalism or patriotism. He was a Bier in World War I and among his earlier books are some about the Canadian war in the air and at sea, "Buzz" Beurling, and C. D. Howe. The idea of telling the story of the R.C.A.F. fifty years after McCurdy's first Bight at Baddeck Bay, Cape Breton Island, was a natural development of his previous interests. Air force history is, however, still in the heroic tradition and few writers have made it meaningful. Individuals figure so prominently that the air force historian fmds it difficult to see the wood for trees; and Mr. Roberts is no exception. His accounts of the air battles of the R.C.A.F. give no idea of the progress of the conflict as a whole, of the precise contribution of the airmen, or of the development of the arts and techniques 502 tq LEITERS IN CANADA: 1959 of aerial warfare. Nor is his account of the R.C.A.F. in peacetime much more satisfactory. True, he shows the importance of its peculiar role in rescue, surveying, and other non-military activities; but, although in one place he calls these activities "areas of vital national importance," the general tenor of his approach is that the politicians obstructed the natural desire of young Canadians to fly and also diverted the R.C.A.F. from its true purpose. Mr. Roberts is a Don Quixote, tilting at any windmill that antagonizes him, without apparently knowing why. Most of all he is baffled by Mackenzie King and does not know whether to blame him for destroying the C.A.F. or to praise him for providing a practicable basis on which the R.C.A.F. could be built. Part of the trouble seems to be that this book was written in haste. How otherwise could an experienced writer, when uncritically extolling the exploits of heroic airmen, speak of "the Canadian fighting legend" and "fabled exploits" (p. ro)? "Legend" and "fable" are defmed in the dictionary as "traditional stories," "myths," "not based on fact," and "only supposed to exist." How else could a retort to those who argued that the bombing of industrial countries could have little effect on the outcome of the first war be based on the statement that "allied bombing struck terror into the civilian population of Germany and . . . severely hampered production," when...