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Author : Ron Corbett
Publisher : Dundurn
Page : 242 pages
File Size : 48,9 Mb
Release : 2012-04-28
Category : History
ISBN : 9781459703278
For many in Canada, the April 18, 2002 tragedy with Alpha Company signaled the true beginning of Canada's lengthy combat mission in Afghanistan. This story recounts what happened that evening through archival material and the recollections of troops.
Author : G.W.L. Nicholson,Mark Osborne Humphries
Publisher : McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Page : 709 pages
File Size : 40,8 Mb
Release : 2015-11-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9780773597907
Colonel G.W.L. Nicholson's Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914-1919 was first published by the Department of National Defence in 1962 as the official history of the Canadian Army’s involvement in the First World War. Immediately after the war ended Colonel A. Fortescue Duguid made a first attempt to write an official history of the war, but the ill-fated project produced only the first of an anticipated eight volumes. Decades later, G.W.L. Nicholson - already the author of an official history of the Second World War - was commissioned to write a new official history of the First. Illustrated with numerous photographs and full-colour maps, Nicholson’s text offers an authoritative account of the war effort, while also discussing politics on the home front, including debates around conscription in 1917. With a new critical introduction by Mark Osborne Humphries that traces the development of Nicholson’s text and analyzes its legacy, Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914-1919 is an essential resource for both professional historians and military history enthusiasts.
Author : Tim Cook
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 444 pages
File Size : 42,7 Mb
Release : 2018-09-18
Category : History
ISBN : 9780735235274
There have been thousands of books on the Great War, but most have focused on commanders, battles, strategy, and tactics. Less attention has been paid to the daily lives of the combatants, how they endured the unimaginable conditions of industrial warfare: the rain of shells, bullets, and chemical agents. In The Secret History of Soldiers, Tim Cook, Canada's foremost military historian, examines how those who survived trench warfare on the Western Front found entertainment, solace, relief, and distraction from the relentless slaughter. These tales come from the soldiers themselves, mined from the letters, diaries, memoirs, and oral accounts of more than five hundred combatants. Rare examples of trench art, postcards, and even song sheets offer insight into a hidden society that was often irreverent, raunchy, and anti-authoritarian. Believing in supernatural stories was another way soldiers shielded themselves from the horror. While novels and poetry often depict the soldiers of the Great War as mere victims, this new history shows how the soldiers pushed back against the grim war, refusing to be broken in the mincing machine of the Western Front. The violence of war is always present, but Cook reveals the gallows humour the soldiers employed to get through it. Over the years, both writers and historians have overlooked this aspect of the men's lives. The fighting at the front was devastating, but behind the battle lines, another layer of life existed, one that included songs, skits, art, and soldier-produced newspapers. With his trademark narrative abilities and an unerring eye for the telling human detail, Cook has created another landmark history of Canadian military life as he reveals the secrets of how soldiers survived the carnage of the Western Front.
Author : J. L. Granatstein
Publisher : HarperFlamingo
Page : 264 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 2004
Category : Canada
ISBN : NWU:35556035099415
"Jack Granatstein’s Who Killed the Canadian Military? is more than a history of the decline and rustout of a military that as late as 1966 boasted 3,826 aircraft (including cutting-edge Sea King helicopters) as opposed to today’s 328 aircraft-including those same Sea Kings and CF-18 fighters whose avionics are a generation out of date; the same can be said of the army and navy. Granatstein’s book is a convincing analysis of Canada’s embrace of a delusional foreign policy that equates knee jerk anti-Americanism with sovereignty and forgets that in a Hobbesian world of international relations, “power still comes primarily from the barrel of a gun” and not from Steven Lewis’s speeches about Canadian goodwill, tolerance or humanitarianism."--from amazon.com product desc.
Author : Vincent COURTENAY
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 409 pages
File Size : 43,5 Mb
Release : 2017-02-17
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 1520503318
Rideau Hall is a fast moving documented novel that covers the dashing Special Force soldiers of the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry as they fight in the Korean War. Written in the form of a novel, the illustrated work describes adventures of real people with real names, in real battles and places. The author served in the Korean War with the same Regiment. He knows the horror, the anguish, the brutality of conditions, the constant fear and tension, and an element that even seasoned instructors do not teach their trainees: The utter physical fatigue from brutal hard work and sleep deprivation at the front.This author takes the reader to the time when the Special Force unit was first formed from swashbuckling adventurers. He follows them through its initial battles, and the major battle of Kapyong. He takes them far beyond, defining the never ending effects of the war throughout the soldier's entire life. It is always there, cold, trying to drag him down, making things enormously difficult, requiring great strength to persevere.This comes through clearly. The main character's mind is filled with imagery from his time in Korea 60 years later, as he sits as an honored guest at the luncheon table in Rideau Hall with the husband of the Governor General of Canada.The reader can sense his heartbreak, his long suffering, how it will go on until the last day of his life.The near tragic thing is that the soldier written about fought in the Korean War at age 16, as did the author and many others who volunteered. There was an uplift for every soldier who served at the front, if they managed to survive for the first four or five months. They were pulled from the lines and given a five-day rest and recuperation leave in Tokyo. Some of them found the closest thing to love their lives might know, in the hotel brothels of that great city. It was still much destroyed from the bombings of World War Two.This factually history novel will acquaint readers of younger generations with a war that millions died in, but few know even the most basic things about. Who among them knows that years ago 21 different nations united to fight the invading armies of North Korea and China that had tried to conquer South Korea.It may help some readers understand the world of quaint old grandfathers who may now be in their mid-80's, or olde; and those who passed away in younger years, and who never spoke much about the Korean War.It was never a "Forgotten War" for any of them. Not even for those who tried so hard to bury the hurtful memories.
Author : Pete Fisher
Publisher : Dundurn
Page : 184 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 2011-09-08
Category : History
ISBN : 9781459700680
Canadians line the overpasses of the Highway of Heroes to show their support, grief, and pride in our fallen champions. The first four Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan were repatriated at Canadas largest military base in 2002. The fallen soldiers were driven down the 172-kilometre stretch of highway between Trenton and Toronto, and pedestrians lined the overpasses, hoping to make a connection with the grieving families. The support these people show isnt political; its not a movement for or against Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan. Its always been a grassroots movement about showing respect for our fallen champions. People young and old, emergency services workers, Canadian Legion members, military personnel, friends of the fallen, and family of fallen soldiers stand atop each bridge along the highway in the blistering heat or bone-chilling cold. After five years of this display of patriotism, the Highway of Heroes was officially named in the summer of 2007 and has been a gleaming example of a nation’s grief and its pride.
Author : D. Stanton
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 366 pages
File Size : 47,6 Mb
Release : 2014-01-06
Category : History
ISBN : 9781476780191
A Simon & Schuster eBook. Simon & Schuster has a great book for every reader.
Author : George S. MacDonell
Publisher : Dundurn
Page : 211 pages
File Size : 52,7 Mb
Release : 2002-10
Category : History
ISBN : 9781550024081
This story details the fateful adventures of two Canadian army regiments dispatched to the Pacific to face the Japanese.
Author : Neil Hanson
Publisher : Random House
Page : 488 pages
File Size : 40,6 Mb
Release : 2011-01-11
Category : History
ISBN : 9781446421901
Of all the million British dead of the First World War, only one - the Unknown Soldier - was ever returned to his native land. An anonymous symbol of all those lost without trace in the carnage of the battlefields, he was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey amid an outpouring of grief that brought the whole nation to a standstill, far outweighing even the emotion expressed over the death of Princess Diana over eighty years later. Inspired by this example, almost every combatant nation buried its own Unknown Soldier and the graves became the focus of a pilgrimage that still continues today. Drawing on largely unpublished letters and diaries, Neil Hanson has resurrected the lives and experiences of three unknown soldiers - a Briton, a German and an American. Every word is based on the testimony of those who fought, those who died and those who mourned. Few books have ever shown the terrible reality of warfare in such compelling, unforgettable detail, or told such a moving story of human life and loss. Amid all their sufferings, the common humanity of the men and their loved ones shines through. Each soldier lives on in the memory of his family to this day. They stand at the head of a ghost army three million strong, all of whom have no known grave. Their story is the story of the Unknown Soldier.
Author : Bryan Bender
Publisher : Anchor
Page : 370 pages
File Size : 52,5 Mb
Release : 2014-05-20
Category : History
ISBN : 9780307946461
In 1944 Major Marion “Ryan” McCown Jr., an earnest young Marine Corps pilot, came under attack by enemy fire and went down with his plane, lost to the dense jungle of Papua New Guinea. Some sixty years later, Major George Eyster V would find himself in the same sweltering and nearly impenetrable rain forest searching for evidence of MIAs. Coming from a long line of military officers dating back to the Revolutionary War, army service was Eyster’s family legacy. After a disillusioning tour of duty in Iraq and almost ending his army career, he accepts a posting to JPAC instead, an elite division whose sole mission is to bring all fallen soldiers home to the country for which they gave their lives. While Eyster’s search for McCown proves difficult, what emerges at the end of the unforgettable mission is an inspiring true tale of loss and redemption.
Author : Trevor Greene,Debbie Greene
Publisher : HarperCollins Canada
Page : 307 pages
File Size : 49,7 Mb
Release : 2012-03-06
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781443405140
At the age of forty-one, Trevor Greene, a journalist and a reservist in the Canadian Forces, was deployed to Afghanistan, leaving behind his fiancée, Debbie, and his young daughter, Grace. On March 4, 2006, while meeting with village elders in a remote village in Kandahar Province, Trevor removed his helmet, confident that a centuries-old pact would protect him from harm. Without warning, a teenage boy under the influence of the Taliban walked up to him and landed a rusty axe in his skull, nearly splitting his brain in two. Initially, Debbie was told that Trevor would not survive. When he did, she was told that he would never be able to communicate or move on his own. But after years of rehabilitation, setbacks and crises, Trevor not only learned how to talk and move again, but in July 2010, he stood up at his wedding, Debbie at his side and Grace carrying their rings down the aisle as their flower girl. March Forth is a remarkable story of love told in two voices: first in Trevor’s, up until the attack; then in Debbie’s, as she works tirelessly to rehabilitate her fiancé. Together, Trevor and Debbie have written the next chapter in their remarkable story.
Author : Nic Clarke
Publisher : UBC Press
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 2015-10-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9780774828918
Unwanted Warriors uncovers the history of Canada’s first casualties of the Great War – men who tried to enlist but were deemed “unfit for service.” What impact did military exclusion have on these men? Nic Clarke looks for answers in the service files of 3,400 rejected volunteers and explores the mechanics of the medical examination, the physical and psychological qualities that the authorities believed made a fighting man, and how evaluations changed as the war dragged on. In the process, he exposes the deleterious effects that socially constructed norms about health and fitness had on individual men and Canadian society during the First World War.
Author : Steven Casey
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 336 pages
File Size : 40,5 Mb
Release : 2013-12-03
Category : History
ISBN : 9780199998012
Call it the Vietnam Syndrome or Black Hawk Down blowback. It's the standard assumption that Americans won't tolerate combat casualties, that a rising body count lowers support for war. But that's not true, argues historian Steven Casey; even worse, this assumption damages democracy. Fearing a backlash, the military has routinely distorted its casualty reports in order to hide the true cost of war. When Soldiers Fall takes a new look at the way Americans have dealt with the toll of armed conflict. Drawing on a vast array of sources, from George Patton's command papers to previously untapped New York Times archives, Casey ranges from World War I (when the U.S. government first began to report casualties) to the War on Terror, examining official policy, the press, and the public reaction. Not surprisingly, leaders from Douglas MacArthur to Donald Rumsfeld have played down casualties. But the reverse has sometimes been true. At a crucial moment in World War II, the military actually exaggerated casualties to counter the public's complacency about ultimate victory. More often, though, official announcements have been unclear, out of date, or deliberately misleading--resulting in media challenges. In World War I, reporters had to rely on figures published by the enemy; in World War II, the armed forces went for an entire year without releasing casualty tallies. Casey discusses the impact of changing presidential administrations, the role of technology, the dispersal of correspondents to cover multiple conflicts, and the enormous improvements in our ability to identify bodies. Recreating the controversies that have surrounded key battles, from the Meuse-Argonne to the Tet Offensive to Fallujah, the author challenges the formula that higher losses lower support for war. Integrating military, political, and media history, When Soldiers Fall provides the first in-depth account of the impact of battlefield losses in America.
Author : Rick Hillier
Publisher : HarperCollins Canada
Page : 546 pages
File Size : 54,7 Mb
Release : 2010-06-01
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781554688463
In the summer of 2008, General Rick Hillier retired as Chief of the Defence staff of the Canadian Forces. You could almost hear the sigh of relief in Ottawa as Canada’s most popular, and most controversial, military leader since the Second World War left a role in which he’d been as frank, unpredictable and resolutely apolitical as any of his predecessors. Born and raised in Newfoundland, Hillier joined the military as a young man and quickly climbed the ranks. He played a significant role in such domestic challenges as the ice storm that paralyzed much of eastern Ontario and Quebec in 1998, and quickly became a player on the international scene, commanding an American corps in Texas and a multinational NATO task force in Bosnia-Herzegovina. But it was his role as General Rick Hillier, Canada’s Chief of the Defence staff, that defined him as a Canadian icon. In Afghanistan, Canada faced its first combat losses since the Korean War, with every casualty becoming front page news. A country formerly ambivalent, or even angry, about its role in the conflict suddenly became gripped by the drama unfolding not only in a war zone halfway around the world but in unfriendly conference rooms in Ottawa. There, as everywhere, Hillier pulled no punches, demanding more funding, more troops and more appreciation for the women and men fighting a war on foreign soil. This hard-hitting, honest account of Hillier’s role—told in his own words—will be one of the most important books published in Canada this decade.
Author : John Boileau,Dan Black
Publisher : James Lorimer & Company
Page : 490 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 2016-10-03
Category : History
ISBN : 9781459411739
John Boileau and Dan Black tell the stories of some of the 30,000 underage youths -- some as young as fourteen -- who joined the Canadian Armed Forces in the Second World War. This is the companion volume to the authors' popular 2013 book Old Enough to Fight about boy soldiers in the First World War. Like their predecessors a generation before, these boys managed to enlist despite their youth. Most went on to face action overseas in what would become the deadliest military conflict in human history. They enlisted for a myriad of personal reasons -- ranging from the appeal of earning regular pay after the unemployment and poverty of the Depression to the desire to avenge the death of a brother or father killed overseas. Canada's boy soldiers, sailors and airmen saw themselves contributing to the war effort in a visible, meaningful way, even when that meant taking on very adult risks and dangers of combat. Meticulously researched and extensively illustrated with photographs, personal documents and specially commissioned maps, Too Young to Die provides a touching and fascinating perspective on the Canadian experience in the Second World War. Among the individuals whose stories are told: Ken Ewing, at age sixteen taken prisoner at Hong Kong and then a teenager in a Japanese prisoner of war camp Ralph Frayne, so determined to fight that he enlisted in the army, navy and Merchant Navy all before the age of seventeen Robert Boulanger, at age eighteen the youngest Canadian to die on the Dieppe beaches