Introduction

“Nobody would be interested in reading about the Second World War after 1948,” said Canadian minister of national defence Brooke Claxton shortly after Hitler and his Nazis were defeated. Claxton’s flippant comment was made to Colonel Charles Stacey, who was the army’s official historian and who would become Canada’s most influential military historian. At the time, Stacey was frustrated by the government’s lack of interest in publishing an official history—one based on government and military records during the war that would have been closed to civilian researchers because of security concerns—and he would come up against this political ambivalence for years to come. He found that politicians were worried by, even afraid of, what a historian might uncover and reveal to the public. But Stacey refused to let Canada’s war effort be forgotten, and he railed against the politicians, eventually overseeing or writing several foundational army histories, as well as Arms, Men, and Governments, a crucial 1970 study on Canada’s wartime policy. Despite such successes, Stacey and other historically minded Canadians who wished to chronicle the country’s wartime story would also find themselves struggling against inertia, fear, and apathy among the general public. It was not only distrustful politicians but also many Canadians who were uninterested in celebrating or commemorating Canada’s role in the Second World War.

One of the challenges that Stacey and others faced was that even as war had shaped Canada’s destiny over centuries, Canadians did not see themselves as a warrior people. From Indigenous conflicts to the wars of empire that made Canada a British colony, and from the pre-Confederation colonies resisting the incursions of the United States to the shattering effects of Canada’s Great War, armed conflict had transformed the nation time and time again. War would determine whether we would be ruled by the English or French or Americans; it would forge a reputation for Canadians on the world stage, and it would nearly rend the country apart before ushering in developments like income tax or the federal vote for women. And yet despite these epic changes, some joked, Canadians didn’t pay much attention to the legacy of war because they were too busy trying to stay warm. Others concluded that although Canada’s destiny was shaped by war, without a revolutionary war or a civil war to define itself, its leaders emphasized gradual constitutional changes in explaining the country’s political character. Canada’s isolated geography and alliance systems certainly allowed it to avoid spending huge sums on defence. Stacey offered a famous dictum on the country’s condition: “Canada is an unmilitary community: Warlike her people have often been forced to be; military they have never been.”

And yet the suggestion that somehow Canadians would be indifferent to reading about the Second World War only a few years after it ended seemed absurd given Canada’s enormous contributions. Canada mobilized early for the long fight against Hitler, his Nazis, and other fascists, and by war’s end the country of 11.5 million had close to 1.1 million men and women in uniform. Choosing to declare war independently against Germany, Canada had raised substantial formations to fight in the air, at sea, and on land in the global war. For six years, Canada supported its allies—primarily Britain and the United States—as a junior if equal member of the Western alliance. Canada’s participation was all the more important after France, Belgium, and the rest of Western Europe were defeated and occupied by the Germans. The price of victory had been high, with 45,000 Canadians killed and another 55,000 physically wounded. Thousands more suffered from wounds to the mind and spirit. The survivors came home and were rewarded with generous benefits from the government that enabled them to build new lives and a new country.

With veterans making up one in three adult males in the 1950s, along with the more than 50,000 women who served, it would be easy to assume that the aftermath of the Second World War would permeate Canadian society. But that was not the case. In fact, the war was rapidly pushed aside, evoking little relevance in the fast-changing postwar years and for much of the twentieth century.

This book seeks to track and untangle the complicated, contested, and ever-shifting meaning of that war over the past seventy-five years. Canada’s commitment to winning, whatever the cost to its citizens, forever changed the trajectory of the nation. The gears of the war effort drove massive political, economic, social, and cultural transformations across society. Government intrusion into the lives of Canadians was furthered by the war through the massive mobilization of resources and, in the immediate postwar period, through an unparalleled effort to help service personnel integrate back into society. The war created a million new veterans who needed to be treated with respect; the injured had to receive care. Meanwhile, Canada’s dead were honoured to assuage the grief of next of kin and the soldiers’ communities.

Over time, a particular form of social memory emerged surrounding Canada’s war effort. Social memory is the constellation of thoughts, ideas, and key events that people create and embrace to make sense of their society. Often this involves forging an agreed-upon version of the past that resonates in the present. The past may not change, but how we view it does. And while there are many strands of memory, not all are dominant. As part of the interplay of ideas, historians uncover new evidence that slowly makes its way into the school texts, although often popular culture is more effective in shaping our understanding of history. A novel like Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1981), a film like Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998), an exhibition at the Canadian War Museum—all read, seen, or visited by hundreds of thousands or millions—can have a tremendous impact on what Canadians know about their history.

After Canada’s monumental contribution to victory, it is surprising that Canadians’ engagement with and interest in the Second World War faded in the postwar years. This “Necessary War” had been fought against an evil regime—Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich—and large segments of the country’s citizenry bore almost any burden to win the war. While some were unmoved by the war effort, often for political or religious reasons, and sometimes because of distance from the front or isolation in rural areas, most Canadians stood behind and firmly supported the war effort. But within a decade, the war’s meaning changed dramatically, losing its potency to move Canadians as a galvanizing symbol of pride and sacrifice. How memory shifts can be difficult to decipher; harder still is understanding why. Often controversy is involved, as groups fight over a new meaning or hold fast to old ones, and that is certainly the case with Canada’s disputed war memory. Of course, these discussions and debates often tell us more about the present than the past. In the late 1960s, for example, some Canadians, disaffected by the toll of the Vietnam War, clashed with veterans over the relevance of Remembrance Day, a day with sacred origins in 1919. As novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen once said, “All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.” As this book will show, the past rarely lies still in its grave; it is continually dug up, reanimated, and occasionally even weaponized.

All nations reconstruct meaning around their wars: telling battlefield stories, creating symbols, and, over time, situating those wars within the country’s social memory. In Canada, the erection of monuments—or their absence—tells us something about how Canadians envisioned the war effort. Films, plays, and novels can illustrate how the war resonated among artists. The discourse surrounding conflict and how it is taught in schools or appropriated by politicians shows how some stories are infused with weighty meaning while others are discarded or forgotten. The key role of anniversaries in focusing the media’s attention or gathering veterans together—or their failure to do so—reminds us that what we mark, honour, and celebrate is not constant over time. And, certainly, controversy and disagreement reveal the contours of a war’s invoked memory, which shifts from generation to generation and differs from nation to nation.

For the United States, the Second World War is the great crusade, the “Good War” in which the Americans defeated their evil enemies in the Pacific and in Europe. While there are no uniform views among the more than 320 million Americans, any sustained questioning of the war’s righteousness—by raising such issues as the use of atomic bombs or the racialized nature of combat in the Pacific—has been attacked vigorously as wrong, even disloyal, by politicians, veterans, and citizens. War has always occupied a central place in American history. The Second World War is the fulcrum upon which the United States emerged as a superpower, while the disastrous Vietnam War left Americans discouraged and haunted. After a decline in public interest through the 1970s, the Second World War was invoked again more forcefully in the 1980s, its image reinvigorated by politicians to tell new stories of American exceptionalism. It continues to be an important narrative within that country’s history.

The Second World War is obviously depicted as something quite different in Germany. It is the darkest event in that nation’s history, a period of madness and humiliation. At first, the survivors tried to forget, even while standing in the ruins of their country’s shattered cities and blasted countryside. But once some of the pain receded, Germany began to examine its past. This reflection took different forms in the divided country where the West embraced democracy and the East was stifled by being shackled to the Soviet Union. From the 1960s onward, the new generation in both West and East Germany questioned Hitler’s rise to power, and how he corrupted democracy and made the German people complicit in wars of aggression, genocide, and the Holocaust. This examination turned to action in West Germany, where the enduring dishonour led to financial restitution being made to Israel and to a strong desire not to repeat the past.

And yet, in the 1980s, a new strand of memory emerged that portrayed the German people as victims. In this scenario, Germans suffered at the hands of the Nazis, who, oddly, were seen as somehow apart from German society; they also endured the Allied bombing campaign that killed over 593,000 people. Of course, accepting this depiction of themselves as victims required Germans to actively forget much of their aggression against others, an act of historical revisionism that was forcefully questioned outside of the country. Since the early twenty-first century, German leaders of the reunified country have taken part in commemorative ceremonies with the nation’s Western allies as an equal partner, hoping to ease the lingering hurt of the war in a modern, industrialized, and very prosperous Germany.

For Britain, the dominant memory of the war is that of the lone island standing up against overwhelming Nazi forces, fighting as the underdog at Dunkirk, enduring the Battle of Britain, and bravely withstanding the German aerial bombardments known as the Blitz. The fact that more than half a billion people in dominions and colonies within the British Empire contributed masses of service personnel and war supplies is conveniently downplayed in favour of celebrating Winston Churchill, the pugnacious war leader who rallied the beleaguered British to defy and defeat Hitler. This was Britain’s “finest hour” and the unified war effort is deeply embedded in the nation’s psyche. For many years, the British put far more emphasis on the relatively insignificant Desert War in North Africa than on the Italian campaign or even the all-out battles in Europe, seemingly because, in that desert arena, the British were underdogs who ultimately won. And, of course, it was a victory that did not have to be shared with the Americans, who came late and initially were badly outfought. By the time of the D-Day landings in the summer of 1944, it was the British who were the junior partners to the Americans. Victory in those battles was more difficult to situate within the central narrative of the underdog.

The French have their own fraught relationship with the war, agonizing over their inglorious defeat in the summer of 1940, after which Germany occupied France. To assuage the shame, a post-war myth emerged that most French citizens had supported or fought within the Resistance against their Nazi oppressors. Only in the late twentieth century did intellectuals and politicians undergo a painful public conversation about the large number of collaborators in French society and the compliance of the Vichy regime with the Nazi occupiers.

Russia labelled its struggle as the “Great Patriotic War,” a searing memory that helped fuel the Soviet Union’s leaders’ hostile actions throughout much of the Cold War. The desperate need to avoid another costly invasion—at least twenty-seven million Soviets died as a result of direct assaults and genocidal German policies beginning in June 1941—motivated the Soviet Union to create a strong buffer zone of Communist satellite countries. Framing the war as one in which they were victims of German aggression, the Soviets used their wartime losses to justify abhorrent behaviour towards weaker nations. The Second World War was, of course, not the sole reason for the Soviet Union’s aggressive policies, but the catastrophic wartime damage became an important element of Soviet, and later Russian, identity.

Japan’s story of the war was difficult for generations of that country’s citizens to address. Cultural codes created an enforced silence within a complex interplay of willed forgetfulness, wounded pride, and national disgrace. Like many other citizens of war-torn countries, Japanese people believed that their war effort was a defensive one, forced on them by Western encroachment. A strange story indeed, especially considering Japan’s war of aggression in China, but a perspective that was easier to embrace after the United States used atomic bombs against Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. While Germany made restitutions and Mussolini’s Italy was largely ignored as a pathetic junior partner, Japan was condemned by much of the world for failing to address its wartime atrocities.

Other countries created their own wartime legacies, choosing to diminish and to forget, to elevate and celebrate. And it is not only countries that continue to struggle to make sense of the war. Jews have had their own unique and agonizing reckoning with this period in history, and the Holocaust, an event that was barely discussed until the 1960s, is now forever intertwined with attempts at understanding the war and perhaps the very nature of humanity.