The Fight for History: 75 Years of Forgetting, Remembering, and Remaking Canada's Second World War - Softcover

Cook, Tim

 
9780735238374: The Fight for History: 75 Years of Forgetting, Remembering, and Remaking Canada's Second World War
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0735238375 ISBN 13: 9780735238374
Verlag: Penguin Canada, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

A masterful telling of the way World War Two has been remembered, forgotten, and remade by Canada over seventy-five years.

The Second World War shaped modern Canada. It led to the country's emergence as a middle power on the world stage; the rise of the welfare state; industrialization, urbanization, and population growth. After the war, Canada increasingly turned toward the United States in matters of trade, security, and popular culture, which then sparked a desire to strengthen Canadian nationalism from the threat of American hegemony.

The Fight for History examines how Canadians framed and reframed the war experience over time. Just as the importance of the battle of Vimy Ridge to Canadians rose, fell, and rose again over a 100-year period, the meaning of Canada's Second World War followed a similar pattern. But the Second World War's relevance to Canada led to conflict between veterans and others in society--more so than in the previous war--as well as a more rapid diminishment of its significance.

The Fight for History is about the efforts to restore a more balanced portrait of Canada's contribution in the global conflict. This is the story of how Canada has talked about the war in the past, how we tried to bury it, and how it was restored. This is the history of a constellation of changing ideas, with many historical twists and turns, and a series of fascinating actors and events.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

TIM COOK is Chief Historian and Director of Research at the Canadian War Museum. His bestselling books have won multiple awards, including four Ottawa Book Awards for Literary Non-Fiction and two C.P. Stacey Awards for the best book in Canadian military history. In 2008 he won the J.W. Dafoe Prize for At the Sharp End and again in 2018 for Vimy: The Battle and the Legend. Shock Troops won the 2009 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction, and Lifesavers and Body Snatchers won the 2023 Ottawa Book Award and was shortlisted for the 2022 Templer Medal for Best Book. Cook is a frequent commentator in the media, and a member of the Royal Society of Canada and the Order of Canada.

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Introduction
 
“Nobody would be interested in reading about the Second World War after 1948,” said Canadian minister of national defence Brooke Claxton shortly after Hitler and his Nazis were defeated. Claxton’s flippant comment was made to Colonel Charles Stacey, who was the army’s official historian and who would become Canada’s most influential military historian. At the time, Stacey was frustrated by the government’s lack of interest in publishing an official history—one based on government and military records during the war that would have been closed to civilian researchers because of security concerns—and he would come up against this political ambivalence for years to come. He found that politicians were worried by, even afraid of, what a historian might uncover and reveal to the public. But Stacey refused to let Canada’s war effort be forgotten, and he railed against the politicians, eventually overseeing or writing several foundational army histories, as well as Arms, Men, and Governments, a crucial 1970 study on Canada’s wartime policy. Despite such successes, Stacey and other historically minded Canadians who wished to chronicle the country’s wartime story would also find themselves struggling against inertia, fear, and apathy among the general public. It was not only distrustful politicians but also many Canadians who were uninterested in celebrating or commemorating Canada’s role in the Second World War.
 
One of the challenges that Stacey and others faced was that even as war had shaped Canada’s destiny over centuries, Canadians did not see themselves as a warrior people. From Indigenous conflicts to the wars of empire that made Canada a British colony, and from the pre-Confederation colonies resisting the incursions of the United States to the shattering effects of Canada’s Great War, armed conflict had transformed the nation time and time again. War would determine whether we would be ruled by the English or French or Americans; it would forge a reputation for Canadians on the world stage, and it would nearly rend the country apart before ushering in developments like income tax or the federal vote for women. And yet despite these epic changes, some joked, Canadians didn’t pay much attention to the legacy of war because they were too busy trying to stay warm. Others concluded that although Canada’s destiny was shaped by war, without a revolutionary war or a civil war to define itself, its leaders emphasized gradual constitutional changes in explaining the country’s political character. Canada’s isolated geography and alliance systems certainly allowed it to avoid spending huge sums on defence. Stacey offered a famous dictum on the country’s condition: “Canada is an unmilitary community: Warlike her people have often been forced to be; military they have never been.”
 
And yet the suggestion that somehow Canadians would be indifferent to reading about the Second World War only a few years after it ended seemed absurd given Canada’s enormous contributions. Canada mobilized early for the long fight against Hitler, his Nazis, and other fascists, and by war’s end the country of 11.5 million had close to 1.1 million men and women in uniform. Choosing to declare war independently against Germany, Canada had raised substantial formations to fight in the air, at sea, and on land in the global war. For six years, Canada supported its allies—primarily Britain and the United States—as a junior if equal member of the Western alliance. Canada’s participation was all the more important after France, Belgium, and the rest of Western Europe were defeated and occupied by the Germans. The price of victory had been high, with 45,000 Canadians killed and another 55,000 physically wounded. Thousands more suffered from wounds to the mind and spirit. The survivors came home and were rewarded with generous benefits from the government that enabled them to build new lives and a new country.
 
With veterans making up one in three adult males in the 1950s, along with the more than 50,000 women who served, it would be easy to assume that the aftermath of the Second World War would permeate Canadian society. But that was not the case. In fact, the war was rapidly pushed aside, evoking little relevance in the fast-changing postwar years and for much of the twentieth century.
 
 
 
This book seeks to track and untangle the complicated, contested, and ever-shifting meaning of that war over the past seventy-five years. Canada’s commitment to winning, whatever the cost to its citizens, forever changed the trajectory of the nation. The gears of the war effort drove massive political, economic, social, and cultural transformations across society. Government intrusion into the lives of Canadians was furthered by the war through the massive mobilization of resources and, in the immediate postwar period, through an unparalleled effort to help service personnel integrate back into society. The war created a million new veterans who needed to be treated with respect; the injured had to receive care. Meanwhile, Canada’s dead were honoured to assuage the grief of next of kin and the soldiers’ communities.
 
Over time, a particular form of social memory emerged surrounding Canada’s war effort. Social memory is the constellation of thoughts, ideas, and key events that people create and embrace to make sense of their society. Often this involves forging an agreed-upon version of the past that resonates in the present. The past may not change, but how we view it does. And while there are many strands of memory, not all are dominant. As part of the interplay of ideas, historians uncover new evidence that slowly makes its way into the school texts, although often popular culture is more effective in shaping our understanding of history. A novel like Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1981), a film like Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998), an exhibition at the Canadian War Museum—all read, seen, or visited by hundreds of thousands or millions—can have a tremendous impact on what Canadians know about their history.
 
After Canada’s monumental contribution to victory, it is surprising that Canadians’ engagement with and interest in the Second World War faded in the postwar years. This “Necessary War” had been fought against an evil regime—Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich—and large segments of the country’s citizenry bore almost any burden to win the war. While some were unmoved by the war effort, often for political or religious reasons, and sometimes because of distance from the front or isolation in rural areas, most Canadians stood behind and firmly supported the war effort. But within a decade, the war’s meaning changed dramatically, losing its potency to move Canadians as a galvanizing symbol of pride and sacrifice. How memory shifts can be difficult to decipher; harder still is understanding why. Often controversy is involved, as groups fight over a new meaning or hold fast to old ones, and that is certainly the case with Canada’s disputed war memory. Of course, these discussions and debates often tell us more about the present than the past. In the late 1960s, for example, some Canadians, disaffected by the toll of the Vietnam War, clashed with veterans over the relevance of Remembrance Day, a day with sacred origins in 1919. As novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen once said, “All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.” As this book will show, the past rarely lies still in its grave; it is continually dug up, reanimated, and...

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Verlag
Penguin Canada
Erscheinungsdatum
2021
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0735238375
ISBN 13 
9780735238374
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
512
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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Verantwortliche Person
GPSR Kontakt
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Europaallee 1
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Deutschland

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