On War & Society

Military families are essential to the care of veterans in both the past and present. Yet current veteran policies and programs do not fully provide the necessary services military families require for the process of healing and recovery. For the final episode of our four-part series on the past and present experiences of veterans in Canada, two scholars, a veteran and a caregiver continue their discussion of the effects of military service on veterans' families. Drawing comparisons between veteran and family experiences during the First World War and the present, the guests discuss current research and the challenges mental trauma places on the family dynamic. These challenges include recognizing the sacrifices of military spouses and the risk of intergenerational trauma being passed down to veterans' children. The discussion reveals how the fears of veterans and their families have been shaped by changes in government responsibilities to the veteran community over the past century and how this history continues to inform current veteran policy and program reform.

This episode in funded by the Department of National Defence. It is hosted by Dr. Geoffrey Hayes of the University of Waterloo. Panelists are Dr. Jessica Meyer, Dr. Deborah Norris, Jody Mitic and Kim Davis.

Dr. Geoffrey Hayes is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Waterloo and a faculty associate of the LCMSDS. His research focuses on Canadian military history. He is the author of Crerar's Lieutenants: Inventing the Canadian Junior Army Officer, 1939-45, published with UBC Press in 2017, as well as the co-editor of Vimy Ridge: A Canadian Reassessment (2007) and Canada and the Second World War: Essays in Honour of Terry Copp (2012).

Soldiers returning from the battlefield rarely return unscathed. Yet veterans' families continue to be inadequately prepared for the difficulties of military life. For episode three of four on the past and present experiences of veterans in Canada, two scholars and two veterans discuss the effects of veteran deployment and eventual discharge on military family well-being. Their discussion reveals the need to listen to military family advocates to better inform policy, but also how many military families are unaware of the financial and emotional support available, and the fear of admitting vulnerability that sometimes prevents veterans and military families from receiving the therapeutic, financial and community assistance they require.

This episode in funded by the Department of National Defence. It is hosted by Dr. Geoffrey Hayes of the University of Waterloo. Panelists are Dr. Jessica Meyer, Dr. Deborah Norris, Jody Mitic and Kim Davis.

Wars often time come home. Reintegration into civilian life comes with a whole new set of challenges for veterans. For the second part of our four-part series on the past and present experiences of veterans in Canada, two historians and two veterans discuss the instability of civilian life for many veterans after having served in the military. Mental trauma, both sustained on the battlefield and even after returning home, contributes to this instability, as the government and larger Canadian society fails to understand the challenges many veterans face.

This episode is funded by the Department of National Defence. It is hosted by Dr. Amy Milne-Smith of Wilfrid Laurier University's History Department. Panelists are Dr. Mark Humphries, Dr. Claire Cookson-Hills, Bruce Moncur and Marie-Claude Gagnon.

Too often we forget the casualties of war. Whether on film, in novels and even in writing history, scenes of soldiering and warfare pervade while the aftermath is ignored. Nationalism is deeply intertwined with many twenty and twenty-first century wars, making it sometimes difficult to acknowledge war's painful legacies. Over the next few months, we are hoping to counter that narrative by bringing the historical and contemporary experiences of Canadian veterans to the fore.

This episode is part one of two on the past and present experiences of veterans in Canada. A panel consisting of two historians and two veterans discuss issues relating to mental health and trauma among Canadian veterans of twentieth and twenty-first century wars.

This episode is funded by the Department of National Defence. It is hosted by Dr. Amy Milne-Smith of Wilfrid Laurier University's History Department. Panelists are Dr. Mark Humphries, Dr. Claire Cookson-Hills, Bruce Moncur and Marie-Claude Gagnon.

Since 2014, there has been an outpouring of literature on the First World War that has moved the field in exciting new directions. Over thirty books have been released by Canadian academic presses over the past almost four years, including titles on conscription, shell shock, and the memory of the war. But before these books were published, Mark Humphries wrote an intriguing 2014 article in the Canadian Historical Review about the historiography of the First World War in Canada and where he thought the field should lead next. Among several other revealing insights, he urged future scholars to adopt a transnational approach that would challenge the exceptionalist literature that characterizes Canadian First World War history-writing. But where has the field gone since? Mark has some thoughts.

Mark is the director of the Laurier Centre for Military Strategic and Disarmament Studies, the Dunkley Chair in War and the Canadian Experience and an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Wilfrid Laurier University.

References

Tim Cook. Clio's Warriors: Canadian Historians and the Writing of the World Wars. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006.

------. The Secret History of Soldiers: How Canadians Survived the Great War. Toronto: Allen Lane, 2018.

Patrick Dennis. Reluctant Warriors: Canadian Conscripts and the Great War. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2017.

Richard Holt. Filling the Ranks: Manpower in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914–1918. Kingston & Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2017.

G.W.L. Nicholson. Official History of the Canadian Army in the First World War: Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914–1919. Ottawa: Queen's Printer, 1962.

Pierre Nora. "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire." Representations26 (1989): 7–24.

Gary Sheffield. Forgotten Victory: The First World War: Myths and Realities. London: Headline, 2001.

Hew Strachan. The First World War: To Arms. Vol. 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Nearly 660,000 bags of mail were sent to Canada from soldiers in France and Belgium during the First World War. In this episode, Dr. Kristine Alexander sits down with Kyle Pritchard to discuss her research on the topic of families, children, and letter-writing during the First World War. Kristine is an associate professor in history, a Canadian Research Chair, and Director of the Institute for Child and Youth Studies at the University of Lethbridge. Her book Guiding Modern Girlspublished in 2017, examines the connections which linked girlhood with colonialism and empire in the post-war and inter-war periods. In her new research, Kristine contends that letter-writing is a valuable entry point into the study of family under wartime conditions and finds that a more critical approach to these letters reveal soldiers often defied the emotional tropes historians have assigned to them.

References

Alexander, Kristine.Guiding Modern Girls: Girlhood, Empire, and Internationalism in the 1920s and 1930s. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2017.

Dubinsky, Karen, Adele Perry, and Henry Yu, eds. Within and Without the Nation: Canadian History as Transnational History. Toronto: University of Toronto, 2015.

Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.

Glassford, Sarah, and Amy J. Shaw, eds. A Sisterhood of Suffering and Service: Women and Girls of Canada and Newfoundland during the First World War. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2012.

Keshen, Jeffrey. Propaganda and Censorship during Canada's Great War. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1996.

Billy Bishop is one of the most recognizable names in the military history of Canada. He was Canada's top ace during the First World War, credited with over seventy victories during his career as a pilot with Royal Flying Corps. But there were many other pilots whose names have been forgotten because of Bishop's looming shadow. Graham Broad, associate professor of history at King's College at Western University, has uncovered the story of another ace, Eddie McKay, from London, Ontario. In this episode, Broad talks about not only the story of McKay, but also the process of researching and writing the story of McKay.

References

Graham Broad, One in a Thousand: The Life and Death of Captain Eddie McKay, Royal Flying Corps. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017.

Discussions of the First World War in Europe are dominated by the events that transpired in France, Great Britain and Germany. But on the periphery of Europe, fascinating local, regional, national and international conflicts were also at play. The Finnish Civil War was one of these interesting, peripheral events. Fought between the socialist Reds and the anti-Russian Whites, the civil war began with a Red coup d'état and a White-led mass imprisonment of thousands of Russian army soldiers in January 1918. Few agree on who started the conflict, but the result was nonetheless tragic. More than 36,000 people were killed in just three and a half months. The legacies of the civil war were far-reaching. In the following decades, Finns left their home country in search for a new life. The political ideologies that were so stark during the Finnish Civil War remained for generations.

Guest: Alec Maavara

References

Maavara, Alec. Finland Divided: The Finnish Civil War 1918. Finland Divided. https://finlanddivided.wordpress.com (accessed March 25, 2018).

The image of the mushroom cloud, commonly associated with a nuclear explosion, provides a stark reminder of the power and devastation of the atomic age. Aware of the horrible circumstances involving Hiroshima and Nagasaki, few may realize the full extent of nuclear weapons testing in the postwar period. Dr. Martha Smith-Norris, an associate professor of history at the University of Saskatchewan, explores this topic in her recent book, Domination and Resistance: The United States and the Marshall Islands during the Cold War.

The United States seized the Marshall Islands from Japan toward the end of the Second World War and in the years that followed conducted extensive nuclear weapons and missile testing in this region of the central Pacific. Military testing in the Marshalls reinforced the US strategy of deterrence, but as Martha tell us, grand strategy and nuclear politics came with drastic consequences for the local population. Not only did the United States test nuclear bombs and missiles in the Marshall Islands, military scientists also conducted research to measure the effects of human exposure to radioactive fallout. Exposed Marshallese experienced immediate and lasting effects to their health and daily life. Testing led to the displacement of local communities and widespread ecological ruin. Martha explains this history from the perspective of the Marshall Islanders who responded to US domination with indigenous acts of resistance, acts that she argues deserve continued recognition and support.

Guest host: Dr. Matthew Wiseman (@MatthewSWiseman)

References

Smith-Norris, Martha. Domination and Resistance: The United States and the Marshall Islands during the Cold War. Honolulu: University Of Hawai'i Press, 2016.

Post-traumatic stress order (or PTSD) remains a prominent issue within the Canadian military and has affected thousands of veterans who returned home. At the end of 2017, the Nova Scotia government announced that an inquiry will be made after a veteran shot and killed his daughter, wife and mother, then hanged himself in 2016. It is suspected that he had PTSD. Cases such as these have been featured in the media after many wars in the past, not just the more recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Dr. Meghan Fitzpatrick, a postdoctoral fellow in War Studies at the Royal Military College in Kingston, ON, just published a book on mental trauma during one of these past wars––the Korean War from 1950–53. She visited the studio to discuss her book, the various ways the military treated mental trauma on the battlefields of Korea, and also the costs of that trauma when soldiers returned home. At the end of the conflict, many veterans became disentangled in the politics of memory, as the conflict in Korea was not viewed as a legitimate war. It left many veterans bitter with the treatment they were given after protecting the democratic order in the world.

References

Fitzpatrick, Meghan. Invisible Scars: Mental Trauma in the Korean War. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2017.