On War & Society

The Nigerian Civil War which began in 1967 was precipitated by a series of military coups that destabilised the nation. The southeastern Igbo region declared itself the Republic of Biafra, prompting a retaliatory declaration of war and a crippling embargo by Nigeria's military government. The ensuing conflict lasted until 1970, resulting in over 100,000 military casualties and more than a million...

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. But the war's visual record is massive. States...

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, holding, and destroying communist incursions in t...

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 Canadians were tasked with liberating the Netherland...

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. Filipino immigrants also enlisted to serve on the...

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 man. A gifted poet, his writing attracted the attent...

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 raids. The shockingly high death toll of the Great W...

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 civilian relationships were maintained, nurtured...

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 resources were mobilized in the name of biodefense and...

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, 1500 were awaiting transport to Europe and provided...

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 quickly put the conflict behind itself. Cenotaphs b...

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 than fifteen documentaries. In this wide-ranging...

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 of public and academic honours, Tim is that rare h...

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 of Fire shares stories of combat medics from the...

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 to discuss Bourassa's life and legacy, and how the...

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, medical practitioners gained access to an abundance of...

In the summer of 1937, Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon MacKenzie King spent four days in Berlin. He arrived at Friedrichstrasse Station, home of the impressive U-bahn subway which was built in preparation for the 1936 Berlin Olympics; a year later this same station would transport Jewish children to Britain. During his time in Berlin, King visited a Hitler Youth Camp, which was later absorbed...

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 his French forces met Marlborough in the field re...

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 of limited finances, a tight job market, a public...

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 during the high tide of imperialism at the turn of...

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 approach to studying the Italian Campaign as he zeroes i...

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 active players in the eventual victory of the Alli...

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 bouncing bombs that would devastate enemy power plants...

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 remembered and what stories we tell to future gene...

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 Kyle Pritchard sits down with Linda Quiney to discu...