Review: The Last Good War
| DOI | 10.1177/002070200506000416 |
| Author | Desmond Morton |
| Date | 01 December 2005 |
| Published date | 01 December 2005 |
| Subject Matter | Review |
Reviews
| International Journal | Autumn 2005 | 1153 |
THE LAST GOOD WAR
An Illustrated History of Canada in the Second WorldWar, 1939-1945
J. L. Granatstein
Vancouver:Douglas & McIntyre, 2005. x, 252pp, $55.00 cloth (ISBN 155054-
913-8)
As one of Canada’s best known political and military historians and as the
director of the Canadian War Museum who won the long, exasperating
struggle that ended this year with a final, fitting monument to Canada’swar
veterans, Jack Granatstein has earned the right to produce the book that can
easily serve most Canadian families as their own home memorial to our
greatest and most necessary war.
While Jack and I may be rivals about the relative significance to Canada
of the two world wars, who can now doubt that the Second World War had to
be fought? Not until the war was ending in Europe did most Canadians
begin to grasp the full hideous bestiality of the Nazi regime. The notoriously
vicious and deceitful propaganda of the early world war had captured most
Canadian minds and led us into unimaginable sacrifices. Early reports of the
Holocaust and other Nazi and Fascist horrors were too easily dismissed as
more of the same. Instead, Hitler really did threaten freedom, democracy,
and pluralism with a military machine that almost overcame his remarkably
similar rival, our accidental ally, Josef Stalin.
Though far more Canadians died in the FirstWorld War—about 60,000
of them, compared to about 44,000 in 1939-45—the Second World War rep-
resented a far greater mobilization of volunteers—close to 1.2 million out of
11 million—and a far greater industrial output. In the earlier war, for exam-
ple, Canadians had thrown themselves into manufacturing artillery ammu-
nition; by 1943, there was very little vital to the war effort that was not being
produced somewhere in Canada, including significant components of the
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