Assault on Juno
Dawn, June 6, 1944. Off the Normandy coast 6,500 ships carry 150,000 Allied troops. This is D-Day, the long-awaited Allied invasion of German-occupied Europe. The Allies will storm five beaches. One is code-named Juno Beach. Here, 14,500 Canadians will land on a five-mile stretch of sand backed by three resort towns. The beach is heavily protected …
Breakout from Juno
The ninth book in the Canadian Battle Series, Breakout from Juno, is the first dramatic chronicling of Canada's pivotal role throughout the entire Normandy Campaign following the D-Day landings.
On July 4, 1944, the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division won the village of Carpiquet but not the adjacent airfield. Instead of a speedy victory, the men faced a …
Canadian Military Atlas
As a reference guide or as armchair escapism, The Canadian Military Atlas will fascinate and inform military buffs and history lovers for generations.
From the Plains of Abraham to Vimy Ridge to peacekeeping efforts in Kosovo, Canadian soldiers have offered the greatest sacrifice. Now, for the first time, the battlefields on which our soldiers fough …
Carry Tiger to Mountain
When a freighter smuggling illegal immigrants from Southeast Asia sinks offshore, Tofino coroner Elias McCann finds himself at the heart of another mystery.
Among the survivors of the tragedy is a young girl, whom Elias and his girlfriend, Vhanna, find themselves trying to protect from unknown kidnappers. Meanwhile, a relative of Vhanna's turns up a …
For Honour's Sake
In the tradition of Margaret MacMillan’s Paris 1919 comes a new consideration of Canada’s most famous war and the Treaty of Ghent that unsatisfactorily concluded it, from one of this country’s premier military historians.
In the Canadian imagination, the War of 1812 looms large. It was a war in which British and Indian troops prevailed in alm …
Introduction
To Meet with Frankness and Conciliation
In August 1814, eight men travelled to the ancient Flemish city of Ghent to negotiate the end of a war being fought on a faraway continent. They numbered three Britons and five Americans, for these were the two belligerent nations. The conflict had started on June 18, 1812, when President James Madison signed a war proclamation against Great Britain. Two years later, neither side could claim that the war went well.
The British had never wanted this war. Early summer of 1812 had been a period of great crisis for the nation, and war with America only worsened matters. Since 1805 Britain had been locked in a titanic struggle of empires for mastery of Europe. So far it had been unable to stop France’s Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte from turning most of the continent into his personal fiefdom. For the past four years Viscount Wellington’s army had been engaged in a bloody campaign to prevent France’s conquest of the entire Iberian Peninsula. In June of 1812, as the United States sent troops marching toward Canada, the British finally prevailed in Portugal. Pushing into the heart of Spain, they drove the French before them.
That, however, was about the only good news Lord Liverpool’s government could savour, for France’s setbacks could be attributed directly to Napoleon’s failure to reinforce his Iberian army. While Wellington besieged one French bastion after another in Spain, Napoleon assembled the 530,000-strong Grande Armée, eyes turned east toward Russia. Once the French boot heel rested on Russia, the little Corsican would wheel about and send Wellington, a general he considered timidly cautious, reeling right off the continent. British spies had reported the existence of Napoleon’s massive juggernaut and its purpose. Odds that Tsar Alexander’s antiquated army could stave off the French were considered poor. If Russia fell, Britain would face Napoleon alone.
The grinding war had reduced Britain’s economy to a shambles. Loss of European trade and the war’s ever-escalating costs had plunged the nation into a depression and imposed severe food shortages. Starvation had threatened during the past winter, and there was unrest in the streets. Ireland remained a festering sore – conditions there were worse than elsewhere in the British Isles. The cost of sustaining Wellington’s Peninsular Army placed enormous strain on the government’s coffers. At the same time, the Admiralty was demanding more resources to ensure the world’s largest fleet continued to master the seas that not only were so essential to retaining the empire but also served as Britain’s lifeline for food and other vital imports.
On May 11, an added crisis had arisen when Prime Minister Spencer Perceval was assassinated. On June 8, a reluctant Lord Liverpool, then secretary for war and the colonies, accepted the Prince Regent’s pleas to lead the government. The Prince had become de facto sovereign on February 5, 1811, when his father, King George III, was declared unfit to rule because of insanity. Faced with a glut of foreign and domestic crises and frantically trying to ensure a stable government to effectively deal with them, Liverpool had focused for the rest of the month on forming a workable cabinet. Most pressing were matters foreign, and to address these Liverpool decided not only to retain Viscount Castlereagh as foreign secretary but also to make him leader of the House of Commons, a position that Perceval had previously held. Believing it imperative that this wartime government have the support of the country and not just of the House of Commons, Liverpool announced that he would dissolve Parliament at the end of September and hold a general election. With all these events swirling about Liverpool and his cabinet, Britain’s government needed nothing less in the summer of 1812 than another war, on the other side of the Atlantic. But they had also been so distracted by matters domestic and European that attempts to head off such a war were half-hearted and badly bungled.
Britain had defended British North America during that summer and fall with sufficient zeal to thwart America’s attempts at conquest. Somewhat to the surprise of British colonial officials there and to the consternation of the Americans, almost all Canadians remained loyal to the Crown. In both Upper and Lower Canada the militia stepped forward to strengthen the thin ranks of the British redcoats. Local knowledge of battlegrounds and the ability of these farmers, fur traders, small businessmen, and shopkeepers turned soldiers to wage irregular war gave the defenders of British North America a much-needed edge over the numerically superior American forces.
The Americans had assumed that the colonists would welcome the chance to throw off the British yoke – particularly the French-Canadian majority in Lower Canada, themselves conquered by Britain less than forty-five years previously. In Upper Canada they had thought the many recent immigrants from the United States would welcome the opportunity to raise the American flag over their new homeland. But neither French Canadians nor American immigrants had heeded their calls to rise against the British. That refusal ultimately doomed all the attempted invasions.
Not only Canadian loyalty to the Crown dashed the American dream of an easy conquest of British North America. Most Indian nations, too, cast their lot in with Britain. Led by the charismatic warrior chief Tecumseh, the leaders of the powerful Indian confederacy on the western frontiers believed the best way to preserve their nations, their lands, and their way of life from the avarice of American settlers determined to expand the boundaries of the United States ever westward was through military alliance with Britain.
By the summer of 1814, the darkest days of the North American war appeared to have passed for British North America. Although supremacy on the Great Lakes had been forfeited, Britain’s armies in Canada had moved from defence to the offence – taking the war for the first time in strength onto American soil. Along the U.S. coastline, amphibious forces carried out major landings, and the naval blockade of the ports had crippled America’s economy.
From the Hardcover edition.
Gothic Line, The
BOOK TWO in the Canadian Battle Series
Stretching like an armour-toothed belt across Italy's upper thigh, the Gothic Line was the most fortified and fiercely defended position the German army had yet thrown in the path of the advancing Allied forces. On August 25, 1944, it fell to I Canadian Corps to spearhead the famed Eighth Army's major offensive …
Hands Like Clouds
When environmental warrior Ira Connaught turns up hanging by the neck from an ancient rainforest cedar overlooking the wasteland of a clear-cut on Clayoquot Sound, everyone seems content to declare his death a suicide. The tree spiker won't be missed by loggers, Tofino's RCMP detachment, or by many environmentalists who applauded his goals but cond …
Holding Juno
Following his national best-seller, Juno Beach, and with his usual verve and narrative skill, historian Mark Zuehlke chronicles the crucial six days when Canadians saved the vulnerable beachheads they had won during the D-Day landings.
D-Day ended with the Canadians six miles inlandóthe deepest penetration achieved by Allied forces during this long …
Juno Beach
BOOK FOUR in the Canadian Battle Series
By dawn on June 6, 1944, the rough seas facing three small resort towns in Normandy bristled with an immense armada. More than 6,500 ships prepared to disembark Allied troops in a do-or-die effort: D-Day. The 14,500 Canadians among them were to take "Juno Beach," a five-mile-long stretch protected by a seawall …
Liri Valley, The
BOOK TWO in the Canadian Battle Series
For the Allied Armies fighting their way up the Italian boot in early 1944. Rome was the prize that could only be won through one of the greatest offensives of the war. Mark Zuehlke, following his book, Ortona, returns to the Mediterranean theatre of World War II with this gripping story of courage in the face …
On to Victory
Book eight in the Canadian Battle Series,
On to Victory is the little-told story of the tense final days of World War II, remembered in the Netherlands as "the sweetest of springs," which saw the country's liberation from German occupation. The Liberation Campaign, a series of fierce, desperate battles during the last three months of the war, was bi …
On To Victory
"This volume, and indeed the entire [Canadian Battle] series, can only cement Zuehlke's position as among our foremost chroniclers of Canada at war." -- Globe and Mail
"Zuehlke's signature achievement has been to offer Canadians that missing story. He writes brilliantly...With On to Victory, Zuehlke continues building a canon all his own." -- Quill …
Operation Husky
Now available in paperback, book seven of the Canadian Battle Series.
On July 10, 1943, twenty thousand Canadian soldiers joined two great Allied armies on the beaches of southern Sicily for Operation Husky -- the first western Allied thrust to win a toehold inside HItler's Fortress Europe.
Guarding the renowned Eighth Army's left flank, 1st Canadian …
Ortona
BOOK ONE in the Canadian Battle Series
In one blood-soaked, furious week fo fighting, from December 20 to December 27, 1943, the 1st Canadian Infantry Division took 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, suppor …
Ortona Street Fight
December 20, 1943. Two Canadian infantry battalions and a tank regiment stand poised on the outskirts of a small Italian port town. They expect to take Ortona quickly. But the German 1st Parachute Division has other ideas. For reasons unknown, Hitler has ordered Ortona held to the last man. Houses, churches and other buildings are dynamited, cloggi …
Scoundrels, Dreamers & Second Sons
Between 1880 and 1914, thousands of British remittance men came to the Canadian West, urged overseas by a rapidly changing British society.
In a land of cowboys and loggers, their attempts to recreate the aura of landed gentry were sometimes misunderstood - and often ridiculed. Many Canadians thought steeplechase tracks, easels, tennis and "taking e …
Scoundrels, Dreamers and Second Sons
Between 1880 and 1914, thousands of British remittance men came to the Canadian West, urged overseas by a rapidly changing British society.
In a land of cowboys and loggers, their attempts to recreate the aura of landed gentry were sometimes misunderstood - and often ridiculed. Many Canadians thought steeplechase tracks, easels, tennis and "taking e …
Sweep Lotus
When the naked corpse of a girl known only as Sparrow is found wrapped in barbed wire on a storm-swept beach, community coroner Elias McCann must investigate the sadistic killing. Suspects abound in The Family, a gaggle of homeless youths led by a grizzled veteran of Canada's mean streets. But menace also seems to lurk around the neglected property …
Terrible Victory
BOOK SIX in the Canadian Battle Series
Terrible Victory is a gripping account of Canada's bloody liberation of western Holland, one of our finest, and most costly, military victories.
On September 4, 1944, Antwerp, Europe's largest port, fell to the Second British Army and it seemed the war would soon be won. But Antwerp was of little value unless t …
Tragedy at Dieppe
The gripping story of the Canadian Army's disastrous raid on Dieppe -- the tenth installment of the bestselling Canadian Battle Series
Nicknamed "the Poor Man's Monte Carlo," Dieppe had no strategic importance in World War II -- but the decision to assault it in August 1942 with the largest raid mounted to that date was political. With the Soviet Un …
