The First World War was a literary conflict producing some of the most memorable poems, novels and plays of the twentieth century. While the Second World War left behind a striking visual record, including famous pictures such as Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima and Wait for Me Daddy, the First World War is not generally remembered as a visual conflict…

In 1965, in the coastal province of Phú Yên, US Armed Forces embarked on an effort to pacify one of the least-secured regions of South Vietnam. Often described as the “other war” to win the “Hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese, pacification was, in reality, a destructive process that relied on the means of conventional warfare to succeed. Clearing,…

Canada’s military history in Northwest Europe has been told many times. On 6 June 1944, Canadian forces landed on Juno Beach as part of Operation Overlord, before quickly establishing a bridgehead and moving inland where they encountered, but ultimately overcame, stiff resistance. As the German Reich shrunk in the face of the Allied advance, the Ca…

The United States and the Philippines have been intimately bound by conflict. A US colony from 1898 to 1946, it remained an important US ally in the Pacific. In that time, hundreds of thousands of Filipinos fought and died for the United States, including against fellow Filipinos who opposed their US colonizers and against the Japanese occupation. …

In April 1918, Canadian soldier Frank Toronto Prewett was buried alive on the Western Front. Managing to claw his way out of the earth, Prewett was reborn but with a lasting trauma that manifested in a curious way. while recuperating alongside Siegfried Sassoon and W.H.R. Rivers at Lennel House, Prewett started to act and identify as an Iroquois ma…

The first half of Britain’s twentieth century was shaped by death. Between 1914 and 1918, over 700,000 men died in the First World War, followed by another 250,000 between 1918 and 1919 from the influenza pandemic. Over three decades later, another 380,000 were killed fighting in the Second World War as well over 60,000 civilians from German air ra…

For a long time historians studying the First World War had to rely on the memoirs of soldiers, but over the last several decades, more and more letters have made their way into the archives as family members inherit and donate the written material of their relatives. These sources have initiated a new wave of scholarship devoted to identifying how…

In the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks, five people were killed and another seventeen were injured from anthrax spores as part of a deliberate attack against members of the US media and Senate. Fears quickly spread that this was another incident of Islamic terrorism. As part of the US-led War on Terror, large sums of money and resou…

On the morning of 6 December 1917 two cargo vessells, the SS Mant Blanc and SS Imo collided in Halifax Harbour. The resulting catastrophic explosion occurred thousands of miles away from the Western Front but it was a direct result of the First World War. The war was also essential for what followed. Of the 3000 troop garrison located at Halifax, 1…

In his new book The Fight for History: 75 Years of Forgetting, Remembering and Remaking Canada’s Second World War, Tim Cook reminds us that "if we do not tell our own stories, no one else will." But the ways in which Canadians have chosen to remember the Second World War has been far from consistent. Once viewed as the necessary war, the country qu…

David O’Keefe is the author of One Day in August: The Untold Story Behind Canada’s Tragedy at Dieppe and his most recent book, Seven Days in Hell: Canada’s Battle for Normandy and the Rise of the Black Watch Snipers. Never one to shy away from public exposure, O’Keefe has also been prolific in film and television, creating and collaborating in more…

Tim Cook is a historian at the Canadian War Museum a two-time winner of the CP Stacey Award for the best book in the field of Canadian history, the 2009 winner of the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction, the 2013 winner of the Pierre Berton Award for popularizing Canadian history and a member of the Order of Canada. With such a long list …

At the age of 13, Ted Barris asked his father a common question: “Dad what did you do in the war?” This began a fifty-seven-year investigation into his father’s war experiences as a sergeant medic in the US Army during its bloodiest campaign during the liberation of Europe. The book that grew out of this question: Rush To Danger: Medics in the Line…

Henri Bourassa was a French Canadian nationalist, politician, journalist, and “one of the most…vocal voices of dissent in Canada during the First World War.” Despite Bourassa’s significance on the Canadian home front and within the international pacifist movement, his story is little-known outside of Quebec. Geoff Keelan sits down with Kyle Falcon …

Approximately 750,000 people were killed over four years during the American Civil War, two-thirds of these fatalities were caused by disease. This staggering death count was a shock to American physicians who were unregulated, undertrained and operating in the dark. But the war also offered opportunities. In the laboratory of the battlefield, medi…

Bankruptcy, famine in the countryside, and a starving army were just some of the crises facing Louis XIV in 1709. Eight years into the War of the Spanish Succession, the allied armies led by the Duke of Marlborough, had also managed to breach the French defences on the Flanders frontier. Threatened with the prospect of invasion, Marshal Villars and…

On this month's episode Of On War and Society, Kyle Pritchard sits down with Dr Roger Sarty to discuss the life and career of CP Stacey. Sarty explains how CP Stacey went from being a young student with no interest in research to the founding father of Canadian military history. Throughout his career Stacey faced considerable set backs in the form …

As Canadians, there is a sense that international collaboration has acted and continues to act as a positive force in the world today. Yet certain events serve as a reminder that the foundations of our international relationships have sometimes developed not out of cooperation, but out of aggression and intervention. The Boxer Rebellion unfolded du…

The Italian Campaign during the Second World War remains a subject of controversy—whether it was “Normandy’s Long Right Flank” or a costly stalemate continues to be debated by historians to modern day. Terry Copp, director emeritus of the Laurier Centre for Military Strategic and Disarmament Studies, believes he has found a new multinational approa…

Jewish people are traditionally depicted as victims in the Second World War literature. This should come as no surprise, as six million Jews were killed at the hands of the Nazis during the Holocaust. Ellin Bessner, in her new book Double Threat, insists that at least in the case of Jewish Canadians, they were not just victims of the war but also a…

Sometimes we find Canadians in the most unlikely of places. During the Second World War, within the crews of airmen responsible for breaching the Ruhr dams of Nazi Germany, there were thirty Canadians. In 1943, these men, along with about a hundred others, took to the skies in May 1943 aboard nineteen Lancaster Bombers to drop the now infamous boun…

As the Second World War fades from living memory, D-Day, the Allied operation whose success led to the liberation of France and the rest of Western Europe from Axis forces, continues to serve as a microcosm for the preservation of democratic values in the world today. For those who fought, D-Day has important lessons to teach about how the past is …

The contribution of nurses to attend to the wounded was essential to military care and recovery during the First World War. Less noted is the role of the middle class and educated, though largely unqualified, women who assisted in filling in the gaps at overburdened hospitals and convalescent homes as voluntary nurses. In this episode, guest host K…

Sometimes we forget that the field of war and society encompasses so much more than Canada. Many of the guests we've had on our show study the history of war and society in Canada, but in this episode, Wilson Bell speaks about the Soviet Gulag system during the Second World War and his new book, Stalin's Gulag at War. Wilson Bell is an associate pr…

Shell shock has become a stand-in for the experience of all soldiers of the First World War. And it has also become one of the most popular topics of inquiry for historians of the First World War. Mark Humphries, associate professor history at Wilfrid Laurier University and Director of the Laurier Centre for Military Strategic and Disarmament Studi…

We know a lot about the urban experience during the First World War in Canada but far less about the rural equivalent. Canadian historians sometimes assume––and quite wrongly––that the urban Canadian experience of the war can stand in for the rural. But it can't. Jonathan Vance's new book A Township at War shows that the conventional narrative of t…

Since the late 1990s, Canadian historian Tim Cook has carved out a niche in the field of First World War history. In his two-volume social history of the war, he spoke of a soldiers’ culture, which bound Canadians together on the battlefields and helped them cope with the immense stress and strain of war from 1914 to 1918. This year, published with…

Tim Cook loves to write. As many Canadian historians will attest, Tim is one of the most prolific writers in the profession––both in terms of volume and content. Since 1998, Tim has published a dozen books on the First and Second World Wars, greatly advancing our knowledge of both. But how does he do it? In this month’s episode, Tim discusses the p…

Military families are essential to the care of veterans in both the past and present. Yet current veteran policies and programs do not fully provide the necessary services military families require for the process of healing and recovery. For the final episode of our four-part series on the past and present experiences of veterans in Canada, two sc…

Soldiers returning from the battlefield rarely return unscathed. Yet veterans’ families continue to be inadequately prepared for the difficulties of military life. For episode three of four on the past and present experiences of veterans in Canada, two scholars and two veterans discuss the effects of veteran deployment and eventual discharge on mil…

Wars often time come home. Reintegration into civilian life comes with a whole new set of challenges for veterans. For the second part of our four-part series on the past and present experiences of veterans in Canada, two historians and two veterans discuss the instability of civilian life for many veterans after having served in the military. Ment…

Too often we forget the casualties of war. Whether on film, in novels and even in writing history, scenes of soldiering and warfare pervade while the aftermath is ignored. Nationalism is deeply intertwined with many twenty and twenty-first century wars, making it sometimes difficult to acknowledge war’s painful legacies. Over the next few months, w…

Since 2014, there has been an outpouring of literature on the First World War that has moved the field in exciting new directions. Over thirty books have been released by Canadian academic presses over the past almost four years, including titles on conscription, shell shock, and the memory of the war. But before these books were published, Mark Hu…

Nearly 660,000 bags of mail were sent to Canada from soldiers in France and Belgium during the First World War. In this episode, Dr. Kristine Alexander sits down with Kyle Pritchard to discuss her research on the topic of families, children, and letter-writing during the First World War. Kristine is an associate professor in history, a Canadian Res…

Billy Bishop is one of the most recognizable names in the military history of Canada. He was Canada’s top ace during the First World War, credited with over seventy victories during his career as a pilot with Royal Flying Corps. But there were many other pilots whose names have been forgotten because of Bishop’s looming shadow. Graham Broad, associ…

Discussions of the First World War in Europe are dominated by the events that transpired in France, Great Britain and Germany. But on the periphery of Europe, fascinating local, regional, national and international conflicts were also at play. The Finnish Civil War was one of these interesting, peripheral events. Fought between the socialist Reds a…

The image of the mushroom cloud, commonly associated with a nuclear explosion, provides a stark reminder of the power and devastation of the atomic age. Aware of the horrible circumstances involving Hiroshima and Nagasaki, few may realize the full extent of nuclear weapons testing in the postwar period. Dr. Martha Smith-Norris, an associate profess…

Post-traumatic stress order (or PTSD) remains a prominent issue within the Canadian military and has affected thousands of veterans who returned home. At the end of 2017, the Nova Scotia government announced that an inquiry will be made after a veteran shot and killed his daughter, wife and mother, then hanged himself in 2016. It is suspected that …

Many have fallen down the rabbit hole of over-researching. Telling the entire story is tempting, but it is an unattainable standard. Reconstructing the past out a series of texts simply cannot measure up to the multifaceted and dynamic realities of an all-encompassing history. And so it is imperative that historians abandon this idealized goal––if …

The Conscription Crisis was the central political conflict of the First World War, affecting not only the Canadian government but having an immediate impact on over 400,000 Canadians who were registered for conscription with the intention of being sent overseas. Historians have focused on national divisions between English and French, rural and urb…

Christopher Nolan’s film Dunkirk hit theatres this past summer. It was met with critical acclaim and made hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office. It is arguably one of the greatest war films Hollywood has ever produced and certainly gave its viewers an authentic portrayal of the Battle of Dunkirk from the air, the water and the beach in …

The Battle of Vimy Ridge was fought in April 1917 during the First World War. Four divisions of the Canadian Expeditionary Force attacked the German stronghold of Hill 145 on the morning of 9 April, and three days later, had successfully pushed the German army off of the ridge. Since those cold and wet April days one hundred years ago, Vimy has for…

Dr. Matthew Wiseman just finished his Ph.D. on Canadian science during the early Cold War. And he is a bit concerned about the developing nuclear crisis between the United States and North Korea, as many of us are too. President Donald Trump’s fiery rhetoric has agitated Kim Jong Un and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to the point where t…

Who is Wilfrid Laurier University’s Cleghorn Fellow in War and Society? Mary Chaktsiris dropped by the studio this month to talk about her new position, teaching in a different environment, and her research into Toronto and the Great War. Mary became the Cleghorn Fellow in 2016, following a two-year stint at the Council of Ontario Universities. Tea…

What happened to Montreal during the Great War? For the past three years, distinguished military historian Terry Copp has been researching Canada’s metropolis––Montreal––from 1914 to 1918. In our conversation, Terry discusses the various social, religious and political cleavages within the city beyond the divide between English and French-speaking …

Eric Story sits down with Dr. Alex Souchen, a post-doctoral fellow at the Laurier Centre for Military Strategic and Disarmament Studies in Waterloo, ON, to discuss his research on munitions dumping in Canada during the 1940s. Alex helps explain the destructive environmental legacies of munitions dumping in Canada and around the world, and speaks ab…