Because We Are Canadians: A Battlefield Memoir, and: Through the Hitler Line: Memoirs of an Infantry Chaplain (review)

Despite their similarities as Second World War memoirs, these are very different books. Indeed, their differences extend well beyond those normally associated with the experiences of different ranks serving on separate fronts. At the same time, both are welcome additions to the already considerable number of Canadian Second World War memoirs.

Charles Kipp's Because We Are Canadians is a compelling account from a veteran of the Canadian army's bitterly fought 1944-5 campaigns in northwest Europe. Eager to join the war, Kipp enlisted in 1940 despite a hernia and his father's warnings, because 'A war without me was unthinkable.' After corrective surgery and a stint as a training instructor, Kipp joined the Lincoln and Welland Regiment ('Links and Winks') in England and landed in France in July 1944. A regimental legend by the war's end, Kipp had been wounded nine times and survived months of continuous combat in addition to suffering from severe battle fatigue and an undiagnosed cardiac arrest caused by stress.

The book's real strength lies in Kipp's fast-paced battlefield narratives and his intimate portrayal of life at the sharp end of a rifle company. This is not a top-down military history of officers and generals or an exploration of operations and tactics. The strategic designs of Eisenhower and Montgomery seem a world apart from Kipp's chaotic and seemingly random engagements with a skilled and determined enemy. It is only retrospectively that battles are given names and an overall purpose; for Kipp they are simply terrifying and potentially deadly encounters. Though not always easy to follow, this sense of disorder is a refreshing change from many accounts that treat battles as well-ordered chess matches with foregone conclusions. For this alone it deserves a wide audience alongside Denis and Shelagh Whitaker's Tug of War (2000) and Geoffrey Hayes's fine regimental history, The Lincs (1986).

Because We Are Canadians should also dispel any notion that combat in the Second World War was somehow an easier and less traumatic experience than in the First World War. Casualty rates were frightfully high, and Kipp freely admits that he suffered from shell shock or battle fatigue on at least three occasions. Scenes of death and destruction were common, and at one point Kipp's unit witnesses a British soldier suddenly commit suicide. In a particularly moving passage, he recounts sobbing uncontrollably in a basement with a dozen other soldiers after an attack. Like many veterans, Kipp returned home with physical and psychological scars that never fully healed.

If Kipp stumbled, often literally, from battle to battle, Laurence (Laurie) Wilmot strode almost serenely by comparison. His slim volume is an expanded version of an account that first appeared in Blake Heathcote's Testaments of Honour (2002). The result is a remarkable and unique view of war from a non-combatant. An Anglican chaplain attached to the West Nova Scotia Regiment ('West Novas') in Italy, Wilmot exudes a certainty of purpose noticeably absent from Kipp's story. Convinced of the danger of Nazism to the world and of the justness of the Allied cause, Wilmot entered the chaplain corps out of a sense of duty and conviction. Ultimately, Wilmot credits his strong faith with allowing him to carry out his difficult duties of ministering to the living, caring for the wounded, and burying the dead.

Not content to remain behind the lines and convinced that a chaplain's place should be among the fighting men, Wilmot often ventured into the battlefront to the constant dismay of his superiors. There he offered moral counsel, conducted burial parties, and helped evacuate the wounded. During the regiment's efforts to pierce the Gothic Line at the Foglia River in 1944, Wilmot...