Strangers in Arms: Combat Motivation in the Canadian Army by Robert Engen (review)

"There are few more unreliable sources of evidence than the eye-witness," wrote Major W. E. C. Harrison, an army historical officer during World War II. Harrison and other historians in uniform were trying to capture the history of the war as it was unfolding, including the nature of combat. While they were largely interested in the work of generals and staff officers, along with the broad contours of fighting at the front, they also understood why the Canadian soldier continued to fight despite the carnage of battle and the unending losses from mortars, shells, and bullets. Several generations of historians have continued this work, many realizing that the eye witnesses to battle have limited visions but that they are the only ones that can tell us about the strange world of killing and survival.

Robert Engen's Strangers in Arms is an important scholarly offering on the challenging subject of morale and combat motivation. Engen's book, based on his doctoral work at Queen's University, is anchored around newly uncovered battle experience questionnaires that were issued by the Canadian Military Headquarters to Canadian officers. Those who had seen combat filled them in, and they provide unusual insight into weapons, tactics, fear, and even seemingly mundane issues like the role of cigarettes, letters, and a hot meal. Engen is the first historian to delve deeply into these valuable contemporary accounts, and they are augmented with a deep mining of the official archives, especially censor reports that reveal what the soldiers were grumbling about. He also draws out statistics on punishment, discipline, crime, and other factors that shed light on the willingness of soldiers to keep fighting.

During the most intense periods in Normandy or Italy, almost one-third of Canadian infantrymen in a combat battalion were being killed, wounded, or captured each month. The Canadians fighting in Normandy spent years training for battle, coming together as a band of brothers, to use that well-used phrase, but within a few months of the D-Day landings, most of the battalions had been torn apart. Engen's research pieces together the way that the survivors and the reinforcements banded together. He introduces the concept of "swift trust" to capture the rapid bonds made between men under fire on the battlefield. These social bonds helped soldiers endure the strain of combat, and they were strengthened by a range of motivators, including good leaders who led from the front, and often died there, and a belief in the justness of the cause.

This is an important book, and Engen's work challenges many old narratives. Soldiers and scholars have long been impressed by the ability of German units during the war to sustain crippling casualties and to reform into small, ad hoc combat units, but Engen shows how the Canadians did the same thing as they integrated new men into the destroyed battalions. With such high casualties in Italy and northwest Europe, Engen's title is particularly apt, his research going some way to show how these "strangers in arms" were able to deal with the losses of friends and comrades and then continue to fight and drive back the enemy, ultimately playing a part in delivering victory.