On War & Society

In his new book The Fight for History: 75 Years of Forgetting, Remembering and Remaking Canada's Second World War, Tim Cook reminds us that "if we do not tell our own stories, no one else will." But the ways in which Canadians have chosen to remember the Second World War has been far from consistent. Once viewed as the necessary war, the country quickly put the conflict behind itself. Cenotaphs built in the shadow of the Great War were simply given an addendum. There was no national Second World War memorial; no major monument to commemorate victories in Normandy or the Netherlands. For many years, when Canadians spoke of the war they spoke of tragedy, blunders and mistakes. But in the twenty-first century, Canadians and veterans have since reclaimed the legacy of the war. As veterans dwindle and historians open up new avenues for understanding this contentious past, Tim Cook joins us once again to make a plea to fellow Canadians to continue the fight for their history.

David O'Keefe is the author of One Day in August: The Untold Story Behind Canada's Tragedy at Dieppe and his most recent book, Seven Days in Hell: Canada's Battle for Normandy and the Rise of the Black Watch Snipers. Never one to shy away from public exposure, O'Keefe has also been prolific in film and television, creating and collaborating in more than fifteen documentaries. In this wide-ranging interview, O'Keefe discusses the thirty-year journey behind his research into the Black Watch snipers, the benefits and challenges of doing history on film and television and the impact that the pandemic has had on research and public outreach.

Tim Cook is a historian at the Canadian War Museum a two-time winner of the CP Stacey Award for the best book in the field of Canadian history, the 2009 winner of the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction, the 2013 winner of the Pierre Berton Award for popularizing Canadian history and a member of the Order of Canada. With such a long list of public and academic honours, Tim is that rare historian who has managed to find success both within and beyond the academy. With a scarcity of academic jobs and a new generation of historians embracing digital outlets to disseminate their work, Kyle Falcon discusses with Tim the importance and challenges of writing public history.

At the age of 13, Ted Barris asked his father a common question: "Dad what did you do in the war?" This began a fifty-seven-year investigation into his father's war experiences as a sergeant medic in the US Army during its bloodiest campaign during the liberation of Europe. The book that grew out of this question: Rush To Danger: Medics in the Line of Fire shares stories of combat medics from the American Civil War to more recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. I sat down with Ted to discuss his book and the one burning question that he never had a chance to ask his father: what motivates medics to rush into danger?

Henri Bourassa was a French Canadian nationalist, politician, journalist, and "one of the most…vocal voices of dissent in Canada during the First World War." Despite Bourassa's significance on the Canadian home front and within the international pacifist movement, his story is little-known outside of Quebec. Geoff Keelan sits down with Kyle Falcon to discuss Bourassa's life and legacy, and how the methods of biography can help us appreciate this uniquely Canadian figure's place amongst an international community of dissent during the First World War.

Approximately 750,000 people were killed over four years during the American Civil War, two-thirds of these fatalities were caused by disease. This staggering death count was a shock to American physicians who were unregulated, undertrained and operating in the dark. But the war also offered opportunities. In the laboratory of the battlefield, medical practitioners gained access to an abundance of cadavers as well as demand for more efficient structures of organisation and dissemination of knowledge. Historians have debated the extent that war alters medicine. In her book, Learning from the Wounded, historian Shauna Devine argues that in the case of the American Civil War, the violence had a profound and lasting influence on American medical science and practice. In this episode of On War and Society, Devine speaks with Kyle Falcon about historical myths, the politics of the body and the lessons that can be learned for new generations of medical practitioners when we place the American Civil War under the knife.

In the summer of 1937, Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon MacKenzie King spent four days in Berlin. He arrived at Friedrichstrasse Station, home of the impressive U-bahn subway which was built in preparation for the 1936 Berlin Olympics; a year later this same station would transport Jewish children to Britain. During his time in Berlin, King visited a Hitler Youth Camp, which was later absorbed into the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Before he returned to Canada, King sat face to face with Adolf Hitler at the Reich Presidential Palace. "My sizing up of the man as I sat and talked with him," King later reflected, "was that he is one who truly loves his fellow-men, and his country, and would make any sacrifices for their good." When King returned to Berlin in 1946, those sites that so impressed him nine years earlier were now in ruins. Today they are marked with memorials to the victims of Nazism. In his new book, Four Days in Hitler's Germany: MacKenzie King's Mission to Avert a Second World War, Robert Teigrob of Ryerson University, shares King's travels through a history of Berlin before, during and after Nazi rule. In this episode of On War and Society, Teigrob sits down with Kyle Falcon to discuss McKenzie King's four days in Berlin and the complicated moral questions that it raises about present-day diplomacy and historical commemoration.

Bankruptcy, famine in the countryside, and a starving army were just some of the crises facing Louis XIV in 1709. Eight years into the War of the Spanish Succession, the allied armies led by the Duke of Marlborough, had also managed to breach the French defences on the Flanders frontier. Threatened with the prospect of invasion, Marshal Villars and his French forces met Marlborough in the field resulting in the climactic Battle of Malplaquet, halting the allied advance and changing the course of the war. Or so this is how the battle if often remembered. Darryl Dee is not so sure. His research questions the idea that the Battle of Malplaquet, and battles in general, can ever be so decisive. In this episode of On War & Society, Darryl Dee and Kyle Falcon discuss researching and teaching the great battles in history.

On this month's episode Of On War and Society, Kyle Pritchard sits down with Dr Roger Sarty to discuss the life and career of CP Stacey. Sarty explains how CP Stacey went from being a young student with no interest in research to the founding father of Canadian military history. Throughout his career Stacey faced considerable set backs in the form of limited finances, a tight job market, a public initially hostile to his work and personal tragedy. But through his own hard work and the considerable of help from his family and fellow historians, Stacey was able to make a career as a historian, first in the army as historical officer and later as a university based historian. As a historian Stacey displayed a rare gift for understanding the demands of war, a gift which earned him the admiration of the Canadian Military. But despite his success Stacey remained a humble and deeply generous man who helped start the career of some of Canada's greatest historians.

Blaine Chiasson is an associate professor in Chinese History at Wilfrid Laurier University with a specialization in the history of colonization in Northeastern China. He is currently working on a history of the occupation of Beijing and Tianjin by the Eight Nation Alliance during and after the Boxer Rebellion.