A double review with The Patriotic Consensus: Unity, Morale, and the Second World War in Winnipeg
by Jody Perrun
University of Manitoba Press, 292 pages, $27.95
Seventy-five years after it broke out, the Second World War still looms large in memory and in the history of the twentieth century — as it should. The concerted effort to defeat Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany truly was “a war of good against evil” and “the necessary war,” as Tim Cook aptly calls it in his latest military history. From 1939 to 1945, a staggering sixty million people were killed, including forty-four thousand Canadians. Another fifty-five thousand Canadians were wounded. The war “brought an endless grief to families and communities across Canada,” Cook writes.
As both Cook and Jody Perrun — the latter in his book about the impact of the war on Winnipeg — show so well, Canadians, with painful memories of the First World War still fresh, did not relish another conflict with the same patriotic fervour they had felt in 1914. But they could not ignore a call to duty, or the Nazi threat to a “radical shift in the existing world order,” as Perrun puts it.
Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, who managed to skilfully guide the country through the Second World War, feared that another war would tear the country apart, as had happened over conscription in 1917, and tax Canada’s finances, which were rattled by a decade of economic depression. Still, he and the members of his government, like a majority of the country’s nearly twelve million citizens, were committed to standing by Britain.
Under King’s leadership, Canada had acquired greater autonomy within the British Empire during the previous two decades. Nonetheless, when the mother country called for help in 1939, Canadians like J.K. Chapman, a twenty-year-old New Brunswicker who enlisted in November 1940, heeded the call. He and his friends, Chapman wrote, were “proud of being Canadians, [but] we were prouder still to belong to something greater: The British Empire upon which the sun never set.”
Chapman’s story, along with hundreds more like it — the intimate accounts of the men and women who fought and died battling the malevolent Nazi menace — are at the heart of Cook’s ambitious first volume of a planned two-volume history of Canada and the Second World War. In this initial instalment, his narrative starts with Canada’s entry into the war in September 1939 and ends in December 1943 during the Italian campaign with the hard-fought Battle of Ortona, which cost the lives of 1,372 Canadians.
Since he published At the Sharp End and Shock Troops in 2007 and 2008, his award-winning two-part history of Canada and the First World War, Cook, a historian at the Canadian War Museum, has become the country’s pre-eminent chronicler of the country’s military past. He only enhances his reputation in this new work, which employs the same successful formula as his earlier books: a brilliant mixture of solid research, academic perspective, personal stories, and excellent writing.
Cook, who uses a vast array of archival sources, is at his best when he narrates the story of the war — the heroism and comradeship as well as the poor military strategic planning, the tragedies, and the atrocities — through the personal experiences of Canadians who served in Europe, Asia, and around the globe. He takes his readers into Japanese prison camps following the surrender of Hong Kong in late 1941, documenting the brutality endured by Canadian POWs; to life aboard a crowded corvette in the bitterly cold North Atlantic; through a harrowing bombing mission over Germany as experienced by a member of the Royal Canadian Air Force; and to the tragic debacle of the failed raid on Dieppe, France, in August 1942, during which more than 836 Canadians were killed — some executed by the Germans on the beach — and nearly two thousand were captured.
Where Cook takes a macro view of the war by focusing mainly on Canadians serving on the front lines, Winnipeg-based history professor Jody Perrun offers a micro perspective of the war years in that city. Like most other Canadians, Winnipeggers embraced the war and were encouraged to do so by government appeals and propaganda, though the consensus was not as universal as general histories usually have it. There was dissent, for example, from conscientious objectors and the radical left, whose proponents had a visible presence among the city’s ethnically diverse population. And, though Canada was in theory fighting the evils of Nazism, prejudice and discrimination did not suddenly vanish; when black, Asian, and some Aboriginal Canadians tried to enlist in the early years of the war in Winnipeg, they were turned away.
Perrun’s book, a reworking of his doctoral dissertation, is by design more academic in approach, style, and writing than Cook’s and will likely appeal to a narrower audience. His research is impeccable, and he covers a number of issues in dissecting the city’s experience during the war. Mainly, he examines how local community organizations played a key role in promoting unity, raising money — few Victory Loan events matched the spectacle of “If Day” in February 1942, a simulated Nazi invasion of Manitoba — and boosting Winnipeg’s overall morale for the war effort. While his treatment of the city’s major ethnic groups is uneven, overall, his book, like Tim Cook’s, is an original and important scholarly contribution to the literature on Canada’s history during the Second World War.
— Allan Levine (Read bio)
Allan Levine is a Winnipeg historian and author. His most recent book is Toronto: Biography of a City.