Canadian Battlefields Of The Second World War

"A guidebook detailing the Canadian role in the 1944 Normandy Campaign during the Second World War as well as the 1942 Canadian raid on Dieppe. The book seeks to teach the history of these campaigns, while providing up to date information on how to visit and navigate these sites of Canada's national heritage."--

Revision of: Canadian battlefields 1915-1918: a visitor's guide / Terry Copp, Matt Symes, Nick Lachance. -- Waterloo, Ont.: LCMSDS, A2011.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER FINALIST for the 2021 Ottawa Book Awards 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. By the end of the 20th century, Canada's experiences in the war were largely framed as a series of disasters. Canadians seemed to want to talk only of the defeats at Hong Kong and Dieppe or the racially driven policy of the forced relocation of Japanese-Canadians. In the history books and media, there was little discussion of Canada's crucial role in the Battle of the Atlantic, the success of its armies in Italy and other parts of Europe, or the massive contribution of war materials made on the home front. No other victorious nation underwent this bizarre reframing of the war, remaking victories into defeats. 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.

This book examines the Canadian battles in Northern France during the First and Second World Wars. The Great War battlefields of the Somme, Beaumont-Hamel, Vimy and Arras, and the last Hundred Days campaign are examined in great detail with many never-before-published photographs and detailed maps. The Second World War section contains a chapter on the ill-fated Dieppe raid of August 1942 as well as the 1944 Pursuit to the Seine and Channel Ports battles. Published by the Laurier Centre for Military, Strategic and Disarmament Studies and distributed by Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

A masterful retelling one of the major victories of Canadian troops over the German army’s elite division during WWII. In one blood-soaked, furious week of fighting, from December 20 to December 27, 1943, the 1st Canadian Infantry Division took the town of Ortona, Italy, from elite German paratroopers ordered to hold the medieval port town at all costs. Infantrymen serving in the Loyal Edmonton Regiment and the Seaforth Highlanders, supported by tankers of the Three Rivers Regiment, moved from house to house in hand-to-hand combat amid heavy shelling and wrested the town from the grip of the fierce German defenders. Getting into Ortona had been a battle of its own. Ortona, the pearl of the Adriatic, stands on a promontory impregnable from three sides, with seacliffs on the north and east, and a deep ravine on the west. The Canadian infantrymen, drawn from virtually every corner of Canada, attacked from the south under the command of Major-General Chris Vokes, fighting across narrow gullies, mud-choked vineyards and olive groves, into the narrow streets of Ortona itself. When the vicious battle was over, 2605 Canadians were dead or wounded. But the town that had become known as "Little Stalingrad" was now in Allied hands.

Terry Copp’s tireless teaching, research, and writing has challenged generations of Canadian veterans, teachers, and students to discover an informed memory of their country’s role in the Second World War. This collection, drawn from the work of Terry’s colleagues and former students, considers Canada and the Second World War from a wealth of perspectives. Social, cultural, and military historians address topics under five headings: The Home Front, The War of the Scientists, The Mediterranean Theatre, Normandy/Northwest Europe, and The Aftermath. The questions considered are varied and provocative: How did Canadian youth and First Nations peoples understand their wartime role? What position did a Canadian scientist play in the Allied victory and in the peace? Were veterans of the Mediterranean justified in thinking theirs was the neglected theatre? How did the Canadians in Normandy overcome their opponents but not their historians? Why was a Cambridge scholar attached to First Canadian Army to protect monuments? And why did Canadians come to commemorate the Second World War in much the same way they commemorated the First? The study of Canada in the Second World War continues to challenge, confound, and surprise. In the questions it poses, the evidence it considers, and the conclusions it draws, this important collection says much about the lasting influence of the work of Terry Copp. Foreword by John Cleghorn.

On May 11, 1942, a German U-boat torpedoed SS Nicoya, violently ending a peace in Canada’s waters that stretched back to 1812. By the end of 1944, another 18 merchant ships and four Canadian warships would be destroyed. More than 300 men, women and children—including at least 260 Canadians—died by explosion, fire or icy drowning. Drawing on numerous first-hand accounts from both Canadians and Germans, respected writer and historian Nathan Greenfield has penned a lively, revealing narrative, the first popular account of World War II in Canadian waters. This is a must-read for military history enthusiasts, veterans and their families.

The main character of this remarkable book is combat?what it was like to exist as an infantry soldier under the horrific life and death situations encountered on the World War II battlefield. Robert Rogge, a 22-year-old American volunteer with the Canadian Army, waded ashore in Normandy on D-Day, 1944. He survived eleven months of intense fighting until May 1945, when the Allies achieved their hard-fought victory in Europe. Out of his wartime experiences, Rogge graphically portrays, in a series of stunning, cinematic episodes, the animal fury, terror, raw emotions, and almost subhuman existence of frontline soldiers. Besides the blood and guts of battle, Rogge also gives us the quiet times, the joy of liberation, and the uplifting renewal of the human spirit that tenderness can provide. Fearsome Battle?with a style as immediate as yesterday?lays bare the heart of war in all its terrible reality.