Military history should be shared

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 13/12/2023 (844 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I grew up with living memories of Canada at war.

Every Sunday morning, I was greeted at the church door by Geordie Sutherland (wounded at Passchendaele), and regularly chatted with a string of Second World War veterans after service. A neighbour survived the surrender of Hong Kong and still suffered from his experiences in a Japanese POW camp.

Family stories of service (my maternal grandfather was a tank mechanic through the liberation of Holland) were mixed with memories of friends and their families, bridging past to present. My father lived in Halifax during the war, where his father had volunteer responsibilities as an army chaplain, and then he served in the Royal Canadian Naval Reserve, retiring as a lieutenant commander (CD) from HMCS Tecumseh in Calgary.

Nor was it just the older generations. High school and university friends were cadets, and members of the militia. I read many stories, fiction and non-fiction, about various wars. As a historian, 20 years ago I started teaching at the Royal Military College, hearing current experiences of Canada at war from my colleagues and students.

When Remembrance Day rolls around every year, the memories — the pain, grief and loss of war — are tangible and visible to me. That history always had a face — it was real, because it was personal. It has been my privilege to know some of the 40,000 Canadians who deployed in some capacity or another — often, more than once — to Afghanistan, and others who have gone into harm’s way, elsewhere, places such as Cyprus, Golan Heights, Bosnia, and Kosovo, too.

So, when asked to teach my senior course on technology, warfare and society by distance again this January, I knew I had to update some materials. Remembering my colleague, Sean Maloney, had been working for years on a history of Canada in Afghanistan, I reached out to him.

I found it was finished — three long volumes, hundreds of pages, printed through the Canadian Army Press — but unavailable! The author couldn’t even send me a copy to read or use. Eight hundred printed copies, in English and French, were sent to army units across the country. There was no PDF version available — the CBC journalist who broke the story on Nov. 10 had to cadge a copy (briefly) from the Canadian War Museum.

I was incensed. For me, this showed utter disrespect of the service of those 40,000 Canadians, the sacrifice of the 158 who never came home, and their families. No doubt this situation was a product of some unflattering stories from Maloney about leaders and their choices. So, I resolved to raise some hell here.

But, of course, this is Winnipeg, so when I mentioned the problem to some militia friends at a dinner a couple of weeks ago, I was offered the loan of one of their regiment’s (still shrink-wrapped) two copies. The very next day, the army released the PDFs… so the column I was brewing could take a more positive turn.

Someone, somewhere, finally had a clue. Nor was it the army’s fault — the presentation volumes were accompanied by a lovely letter from Canadian Army Commander, Lt.-Gen. Jocelyn Paul: “It is perhaps the most important historical work reflecting the modern Canadian Army.”

He continues, “it is my sincere desire that (it) will provide a concrete foundation for future generations to study and reflect upon this complex chapter in our history and empower thoughtful debate.”

Exactly! (Bravo Zulu!) And so, thankfully, my students next term will read a lot of those PDF pages.

There is a backstory, of course — not mine to tell — but the time it has taken to produce these volumes, and the persisting obstacles to their general circulation, speak of conflicts behind the political wire, to the shame of everyone involved.

It should not have taken a CBC story on Remembrance Day — nor the threat of critical op eds — to ensure that we all learned something of what Canada experienced in its longest war.

There should be physical copies in every Canadian library (I would like my own!), and the PDFs widely circulated.

History matters. Without it, our memories fade and the next generation remains ignorant and vulnerable. We can’t learn (or teach) the lessons of Afghanistan, if we don’t know what they were.

Peter Denton is adjunct faculty at the Royal Military College of Canada.