With Allied bombers hammering the dead German cities, with the unstoppable and vengeful Russian armies converging on the prize of Berlin, and with Hitler soon to take his own life in the final days of his Thousand Year Reich, which had come up 987 years short, Canadians were still fighting and dying up to the last days of the Second World War in Europe. The final weeks of the war are the focus of Mark Zuehlke’s On to Victory.
Zuehlke has already made a successful career of chronicling Canada’s Second World War land campaigns, with less memorable ventures into other aspects of the nation’s military history. With his trademark style of allowing eyewitness accounts to drive the narrative, as well as his own deft writing, he is often described as one of Canada’s premier writers of military history.
That may be true, but is he a good historian? Zuehlke’s first couple of books relied heavily on the first-hand material garnered from interviews with veterans, which left his stories potted and sometimes disconnected from the larger picture, either of Canadian forces or of the Allied war effort. But he has steadily improved with each of the eight volumes that now comprise the Canadian Battle Series.
Indeed, this offering reveals a far deeper engagement with the official records and a desire to place the story of the intense fighting into Germany and the liberation of the Netherlands into a wider context. Zuehlke succeeds in finding that middle ground between writing academic history and relying exclusively on strung-together eyewitness accounts. This is good history, told well, and makes for powerful reading. Despite a broadening of the story to include some of the Allied forces and the strategic backdrop against which they fought, Zuehlke’s focus is still with the soldiers fighting on the ground. And he is at his strongest here.
The reader is exposed to the relentless battlefield, as the infantry claws its way forward against a desperate German defender fighting for his homeland. Canadian gunners shatter the enemy lines in heavy bombardments, as the tanks crash forward, driving through heavy resistance, finding ways to knock out the feared 88s and other anti-tank defences.
The raw sights of battle, the cacophony of sounds, the stench of the dead — it is all here in its full brutality. Even though the war was unwinnable for the Germans, they fought to the bitter end. The Canadians, along with their Allied comrades, were forced to clear village after village, advancing over fire-swept ground, and always losing men.
The subtitle of On To Victory highlights the “Canadian Liberation of the Netherlands.” This is strange, since most of the book is devoted to the desperate advance into Germany. From D-Day to the end of the war, the First Canadian Army suffered 44,339 casualties, including several thousand in the final weeks of the campaign.
This is a book about battle, with very little devoted to life behind the lines, the social interaction with civilians, or anything else other than grinding warfare. The liberation gets the short end of the stick here, but it acts as a capstone to the Canadian sacrifice on the battlefields of Germany. On to Victory provides stark evidence that the enemy had to be bludgeoned into defeat right up to the final days of the war in May 1945.
— Tim Cook (Read bio)
Tim Cook is a member of the Order of Canada and the author of eight history books, including Fight to the Finish: Canadians and the Second World War.