During the Second World War, Canadian factories produced mountains of munitions and supplies, including some 800 ships, 16,000 aircraft, 800,000 vehicles, and over 4.6 billion rounds of ammunition and artillery shells. However, the end of hostilities in 1945 turned the leftover assets into peacetime liabilities. Alex Souchen provides a definitive account of the disposal crisis triggered by Allied victory and shows how Canadians responded to the unprecedented divestment of public property by reusing and recycling military surpluses to improve their postwar lives. War Junk recounts the complex political, economic, social, and environmental legacies of munitions disposal in Canada by revealing how the tools of war became integral to the making of postwar Canada.

Alex Souchen's profile page

• Commended, C.P. Stacey Award

Alex Souchen is a historian specializing in warfare, society, and the environment in Canada, based in Kingston. He received his PhD from the University of Western Ontario and held a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Laurier Centre for Military Strategic and Disarmament Studies. He currently holds an Associated Medical Services Postdoctoral Fellowship at Trent University’s Frost Centre for Canadian Studies and Indigenous Studies.

Alex Souchen’s fine work speaks to the enormous economic, political, as well as environmental consequences of wartime disposal. The breadth of this work is truly impressive.

University of Toronto Quarterly

War Junk makes an entirely fresh contribution to a growing body of scholarship on Canada and war in the twentieth century.

Andrew Iarocci, Canadian Military History