Canada at War

Canada has fought in every major conflict of the twentieth century. The standard account of those wars is real, and the courage it celebrates is genuine. But the cast is narrow.

It excludes the Black Canadians who had to fight for the right to fight at all - the soldiers of the Coloured Corps who defended Upper Canada in 1812, knowing that an American victory meant re-enslavement, and who were disbanded after the war without the recognition their service earned. It excludes the Indigenous soldiers who served at per-capita rates among the highest of any demographic group in Canada, who fought at Vimy Ridge and Normandy and Kapyong, and who returned home to find their reserve lands redistributed to white veterans under the same legislation that was supposed to reward their service. It excludes the women who flew every aircraft in the British military inventory - Spitfires, Typhoons, Lancaster bombers - ferrying them in conditions that grounded combat pilots, and who waited seventy years for Canada to call them veterans. It excludes the merchant seamen who died at higher rates than any branch of the armed forces and who were classified as civilians when the benefits were distributed. It excludes the prisoners of Hong Kong who endured three and a half years of Japanese captivity because a government sent them to an indefensible position it had reason to know was indefensible. It excludes the intelligence agents of Camp X and the SOE who parachuted into occupied France and never came back. It excludes the soldiers who came home with shell shock that the military preferred to call cowardice, and the peacekeepers who watched genocide under a mandate that prevented them from stopping it.

Canada at War tells twelve stories of twelve dimensions of Canada's military history that the standard account has left inadequately told. The Black soldiers who made Canada and weren't named in the making. The Indigenous veterans who were betrayed by the country whose uniform they wore. The women pilots whose capability was demonstrated and then ignored for a generation. The civilian sailors who died like soldiers without being called soldiers. The prisoners, the spies, the nurses, the forgotten Korean veterans, the shell-shocked survivors, the engineers whose aircraft was cancelled and destroyed, and the peacekeepers who saw what peace actually costs.

These are not comfortable stories. They are the honest ones. And the honest account of what Canada's wars actually required - and who actually provided it - is more remarkable than the mythology that has substituted for it.

The fourth volume in the Canada's Hidden History series.