Armies of Peace: Canada and the UNRRA Years (review)

Armies of Peace is a study of Canada’s involvement in the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (unrra), largely covering the period from its inception in 1943 to its dissolution in 1947. The book is organized into four separate sections. Part 1, ‘The Diplomacy of Relief, Rehabilitation, and Repatriation,’ covers the role of Canadian diplomats such as Lester Pearson in the negotiations among forty-four allied governments that led to the creation of unrra. Despite the genuine interests of Canadian politicians and diplomats to help mitigate the humanitarian crisis in Europe and Asia caused by the Second World War, the authors point out that Ottawa’s motives were at least partly self-serving. Prime Minister Mackenzie King limited financial commitments to the new organization while using material aid to establish new overseas markets in an attempt to ease the transition from the wartime to the peacetime economy. Ottawa’s negotiations to position Canada as a great middle power by demanding a seat on the unrra council, as a reflection of its role as the third largest contributor, remained overall less successful than its economic strategy in light of the powerful role played by the big four: the United States, the Soviet Union, China, and Great Britain.

In contrast to this political history, parts 2 and 3, ‘A World Uprooted: Canadians, unrra, and the Challenge of the Displaced,’ and ‘Carrying Florence’s Lamp: Nurses and unrra,’ focus on the overseas service of Canadian women and men as administrators, advisors, and medical staff. The personal stories presented here cover Canadians’ involvement in missions to Egypt, Palestine, Greece, Poland, Germany, and China, providing detailed accounts of their experiences and coping strategies when confronted with the suffering of displaced persons. The final part, ‘Life after unrra,’ explores the impact that membership in the international organization had on Canadian society and how individual Canadians returning from their overseas work with unrra influenced nursing, benevolent organizations, and the emerging immigration debate. The methodology applied in the book, therefore, combines a top-down diplomatic and political history of Canada’s role in the international aid organization, with a bottom-up social history based on the experiences of Canadian unrra workers.

Armstrong-Reid and Murray make good use of archival sources in North America, Great Britain, Switzerland, and Australia, supplementing them with biographies, diaries, and interviews to create a comprehensive study of Canada’s involvement in the first United Nations aid organization. This combination of official records and personal stories illustrates multiple facets of the political realities of international negotiations and the working conditions for unrra teams in war-torn Europe and Asia. The individual accounts show how Canadian aid workers saw the conditions of displaced persons’ camps and hospitals, and how they negotiated their roles in a difficult international setting.

The authors achieved their limited goals of portraying Canadian contributions to unrra but their study would have been enhanced by placing it in a wider context. The narrow national focus on Canada and Canadians within unrra precludes a better understanding of Canada’s significance in comparison to such countries as the United States and Great Britain that dominated the organization. Rather than providing an assessment of international cooperation, this book seems to imply that Canadians were exceptional through a negative portrayal of foreign nationals and allied governments. For example, we read that Belgium’s economic self-interests ‘verged on extortion’ (87) and that Canadian Lyle Creelman ‘was appalled by how little the Dutch staff knew about proper techniques of feeding children’ (254). While French standards of ‘hygiene and sanitation in the camps [were] appalling’ (260), the ‘German civilian population regarded the unrra staff with the same open hostility exhibited towards the conquering armies’ (278) and were generally uncooperative. Based primarily on Canadian nurses’ stories, the chapter ‘Nursing with the Enemy’ surmises, ‘In fact, their collective Canadian nursing experience was superior to that of European nurses’ (285). Surprisingly, then, the book concludes, ‘While Canadian unrra...