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This volume of daring actions showcases the countrys rich military experience while capturing the indomitable spirit of the Canadian soldier.

On April 18, 2002, "friendly fire" killed four Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan, Canada's first combat deaths since the Korean War. On April 18, 2002, Alpha Company, Third Battalion of the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, was on a training exercise at Tarnak Farms, a former Taliban artillery range in southern Afghanistan. The exercise had been underway for nearly seven hours when two American fighter pilots flew overhead. One, Major Harry Schmidt, saw the artillery fire below, and...

Looks at thirty-one special operations missions throughout history, including the battle of Tora Bora, the Falklands War, the raid on Entebbe, and the killing of Osama bin Laden.

In Verdun, English and French speakers lived side by side. Through their home-front activities as much as through enlistment, they proved themselves partners in the prosecution of Canada's war. Shared experiences and class similarities shaped responses based first and foremost in a sense of local identity. Fighting from Home paints a comprehensive, at times intimate, portrait of Verdun and Verdunites at war. Durflinger offers an innovative interpretive approach to wartime Canadian and Quebec soc...

Afghanistan is not Canada's first war in Asia. We've been there before, a half century ago in Korea. And it was a meat grinder, scarcely remembered now a war in which on one hilltop, on one April night, freshly-minted Canadians soldiers made a desperate stand that prevented catastrophe. In all, twenty-five thousand Canadians fought in Korea. By the time the shooting stopped, more than five hundred had been killed on lonely hilltops and in desolate ravines. Five hundred in only two years. I...

This book describes the organization, lists the units and illustrates the uniforms and equipment of the four Canadian divisions which earned an elite reputation on the Western Front in 1915-18. Canada's 600,000 troops-of whom more than 66,000 died and nearly 150,000 were wounded- represented an extraordinary contribution to the British Empire's struggle. On grim battlefields from the Ypres Salient to the Somme, and from their stunning victory at Vimy Ridge to the final triumphant 'Hundred Days'...

Almost since Champlain's men first settled on St. Croix Island in 1604, the French and the English fought for control of Acadia, a huge area consisting of today's Maritime Provinces and parts of Quebec and Maine. The British assault on Fort Beausejour in 1755 was the final act in this long struggle. The frontier between the two imperial powers lay along the Chignecto Isthmus, the neck of low, fertile marshlands and parallel ridges joining Nova Scotia to the mainland. Of great strategic importanc...

Fields of Fire offers a stunning reversal of accepted military history. Terry Copp challenges and refutes the conventional view that the Canadian contribution to the Battle of Normandy was a 'failure': that the allies won only through the use of 'brute force,' and that the Canadian soldiers and commanding officers were essentially incompetent. His detailed and impeccably researched analysis of what actually happened on the battlefield portrays a flexible, innovative army that made a major, and...

The Year of Magical Thinking meets Fifteen Days in this literary exploration of one Canadian's decision to enlist and go to war. What compels a young, affluent Canadian to put on a uniform and risk his life for the controversial mission in Afghanistan? And how does his family cope with his loss when he is killed there? Jeff Francis was a thirty-year-old doctoral candidate and student of Buddhism when he decided that joining the armed forces was the best way to make a difference in the world. I...

The first comprehensive history of Canadians in WWI in forty years, and already hailed as the definitive work on Canadians in the Great War, At the Sharp End covers the harrowing early battles of 1914-16. Tens of thousands, and then hundreds of thousands, died before the generals and soldiers found a way to break the terrible stalemate of the front. Based on eyewitness accounts detailed in the letters of ordinary soldiers, Cook describes the horrible struggle—first to survive in battle—and the...