Canada’s Second World War
, President & CEO, Historica Canada •“All wars,” the novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen once observed, “are fought twice—the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.” Then there is Canada, where our unending interest in defining our identity means we relive wars many times over. We do so with attitudes ranging from indifference to willful ignorance to periodic pride and appreciation of both our achievements and losses.
With that in mind, the influential Canadian military historian Tim Cook, who has taken up the torch from Jack Granatstein and the late Desmond Morton as a new generation’s pre-eminent voice in the field uses the quote as a framing device in his superb new book The Fight for History: 75 years of Forgetting, Remembering and Remaking Canada’s Second World War. As Cook notes, our relationship with our country’s role in the Second World War is “complicated, complex and ever-shifting.” That attitude is quite different from other Allied partners who fought the war to its bloody but successful close. In the United States, Cook writes, “the Second World War is the ‘Good War’ in which the Americans defeated their evil enemies.” [MORE]