A Reading List for Remembrance Day
For Remembrance Day we have selected a few of our recent military history titles to create a reading list. The list is varied and includes a novel about German occupied Northern France during World War I, a study on combat motivation for Canadian soldiers during WWII, the stories and memories of those in Newfoundland during WWII and more!
Strangers in Arms
Combat Motivation in the Canadian Army, 1943-1945
By Robert Engen
A penetrating study of why soldiers fight and what sustained Canadians in battle during the Second World War.
Why do soldiers fight? What keeps them going? What compels them to face death when their long-time comrades have fallen around them? Strangers in Arms addresses these questions in a groundbreaking study of the behaviour, morale, and motivations of Canadian infantrymen on the front lines of the Second World War.
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Invasion 14
A Novel
By Maxence Van der Meersch, Edited and translated by W. Brian Newsome
An epic novel recounting the German occupation of northern France during World War I.
Based on personal experience, survivor testimony, and documentary research, Invasion 14 portrays the German occupation of northern France during World War I. Regarded by critics as Maxence Van der Meersch’s finest work, the novel is set in Lille, Roubaix, and nearby villages along the Belgian border, with the front lines just miles away and the shelling routinely audible. An antiwar novel that goes beyond the trenches, this book is not about combat but its consequences, providing remarkable insights on the plight of French civilians and German soldiers as each group struggles to survive.
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Occupied St John’s
A Social History of a City at War, 1939-1945
Edited by Steven High
The stories and memories of those who lived through the Second World War in Newfoundland.
In January 1941, the hulking twenty-one thousand ton troopship Edmund B. Alexander docked in St John’s harbor, carrying a thousand American soldiers sent to join the thousands of Canadian troops protecting Newfoundland against attack by Germany. France had fallen, Great Britain was fighting for its survival, and Newfoundland – then a dominion of Britain – was North America’s first line of defence. Although the German invasion never came, St John’s found itself occupied by both Allied Canadian and American forces.
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No Free Man
Canada, the Great War, and the Enemy Alien Experience
By Bohdan S. Kordan
An exploration of the “enemy alien” experience in Canada during the Great War.
Approximately 8,000 Canadian civilians were imprisoned during the First World War because of their ethnic ties to Germany, Austria-Hungary, and other enemy nations. Although not as well-known as the later internments of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War, these incarcerations played a crucial role in shaping debates about Canadian citizenship, diversity, and loyalty.
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Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914-1919
Official History of the Canadian Army in the First World War
By G.W.L. Nicholson, Introduction by Mark Osborne Humphries
An authoritative and extensively illustrated account of how the Canadian Army experienced the Great War.
Colonel G.W.L. Nicholson’s Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914-1919 was first published by the Department of National Defence in 1962 as the official history of the Canadian Army’s involvement in the First World War.
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