Review
DAYS OF VICTORY: CANADIANS REMEMBER, 1939-1945
by Ted Barris
Thomas Allen, 414 pp.
Review
THE LAST GOOD WAR: AN ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF CANADA IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR 1939-1945
by J.L. Granatstein
Douglas & McIntyre, 242 pp.
Sunday, May 8 is the 60th anniversary of VE-Day (Victory in Europe) and, as you’d expect, book buyers in many countries are being courted with a broad variety of retrospectives about this celebratory event that marked the western world’s new course of reconstruction and a major economic boom.
But before all that happened, there was a war to be won – a World War that defined a generation and achieved something the previous war failed to deliver: lasting peace.
The newly revised edition of Days of Victory tells Canada’s story mostly with text, compellingly written as always by Ted Barris. An accomplished journalist and author of several popular war books, including Juno: Canadians at D-Day, Barris here makes use of recollections, diaries, poems, sketches, photos and journals of Canadians who lived through the six-year war, and in many cases fought in it.
The author and his late father, Alex Barris, conducted hundreds of interviews for the lengthy project, and this expanded version of the book contains stories of Canadian heroism in the Pacific war and details of Canadian war correspondents who fought to get their copy past the censors.
The elderly who remember the war, and the younger folks who absorb it from books and History Television, all know of the disastrous raid at Dieppe, for example, in August 1942. Barris gives us an account rarely heard – that of the Canadian soldiers who were miraculously spared in the slaughter but captured by the Germans.
Dr. Wesley Clare of Kingston, Ontario and his comrades, many of them immobilized by their injuries, became trapped between a burning landing craft and the incoming tide. It became obvious "we had to surrender before the wounded drowned…. I tied a triangular bandage to a rifle, and we surrendered."
His captors soon confiscated Clare’s equipment, so he had to tend to the wounded with makeshift paper bandages. He wouldn’t see armed Allied troops again for almost three years, when the British liberated his PoW camp.
Barris chronicles the hardships and deprivations of the war, in which the human spirit prevailed, then leads us to the widespread eruption of joy that followed news of Germany’s surrender in May 1945. Adults and children alike were swept up in VE-Day parties across the country, with nurses breaking the sacred rule against wearing their uniforms outside the hospital and kids banging garbage-can lids with sticks in tempo with their impromptu victory marches.
J.L. Granatstein’s large-format coffee-table book, The Last Good War, supplements his words with 130 photos, paintings and maps primarily supplied by the Canadian War Museum. The respected York University historian, who has published more than 50 books, puts more emphasis on statistics than does Barris, a choice that tends to give the big picture greater weight than the anecdotal view. Even so, Granatstein makes good – albeit brief – use of individuals’ recollections here and there.
Many of his book’s photos are delightful, such as a snapshot of two smiling, female "farmerettes" washing their feet outside a tent between shifts of doing important agricultural work in Ontario. A more serious photo shows white-clad Canadian soldiers carrying their rifles across the snow in the Netherlands during the war’s last winter. And a picture of Japanese-Canadians being rounded up in British Columbia for forcible relocation reminds us of a shameful aspect of the largely noble war effort.
Viewed side by side, both books are elegant tributes to the Second World War’s Canadian participants at home and abroad. Created in two distinctly different styles, they make ideal companions on the bookshelf for anyone interested in one of Canada’s most important historical periods.
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