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Pathogens for War explores how Canada and its allies have attempted to deal with the threat of germ warfare, one of the most fearful weapons of mass destruction, since the Second World War. In addressing this subject, distinguished historian Donald Avery investigates the relationship between bioweapons, poison gas, and nuclear devices, as well as the connection between bioattacks and natural disease pandemics. Avery emphasizes the crucially important activities of Canadian biodefence scientists...

History has told us something about our war dead but very little about our war wounded. Veterans with a Vision provides a vibrant, poignant, and very human history of Canada's war-blinded veterans and of the organization they founded in 1922, the Sir Arthur Pearson Association of War Blinded. Serge Durflinger details the veterans' process of civil re-establishment, physical and psychological rehabilitation, and social and personal coping and describes their public advocacy for government pension...

In her award-winning "Band of Sisters: American Women at War in Iraq", Kirsten Holmstedt described how female soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines are fighting on the front lines in Iraq despite the military's ban on women in combat. Now Holmstedt tells the stories of America's fighting women as they come home from Iraq. Some return with grave physical wounds, but all struggle with the psychological toll of battle while readjusting to life at home. As Holmstedt so poignantly shows, these women...

The battle of Vimy Ridge in April 1917 saw Canadian troops storm a 14-kilometre long escarpment that was believed to be impregnable. This was the first time in Canada's history that a corps-sized formation fought together as a unit under its own leadership. Canadian troops persevered under heavy fire to take the ridge. The battle has since been much celebrated in Canada, as historians and descendants seek to explain the huge losses that military and political leaders accepted in a war that produ...

While the Second World War raged in Europe, an equally fierce war was taking place with Japan in the Far East.

This explosive biography exposes the myth of Canadian war pilot Billy Bishop.

Charles Henry Tweddell (1869-1921) was one of several thousand Canadian soldiers who fought with British forces in the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902). A methodical diarist, Tweddell recounts his year of service from the time he left Quebec City until his return. Tweddell's diary captures the sounds, sights, and stench of war, its friendships and rivalries, its routine and boredom, its death, disease, and injury. Readers are taken into the battlefield and the British military's disastrous medi...

We often picture life on the Canadian home front as a time of austerity, as a time when women went to work and men went to war. Graham Broad explodes this myth of home front sacrifice by bringing to light the contradictions of consumer society in wartime. Governments pressured Depression-weary citizens to save for the sake of the nation, but Canadians had money in their pockets, and advertisers tempted them with fresh groceries, glamorous movies, and new cars and appliances. Broad reveals that o...

This tract of land in Niagara-on-the-Lake has witnessed an amazing cavalcade of Canadian history. For 250 years a large tract of oak savannah at the mouth of the Niagara River designated as a Military Reserve has witnessed a rich military and political history: the site of the first parliament of Upper Canada; a battleground during the War of 1812; and annual summer militia camps and the training camp for tens of thousands of men and women during the First and Second World Wars. In the midst o...

During the "Hundred Days" campaign of the First World War, over 30 percent of conscripts who served in the Canadian Corps became casualties. Yet, they were often considered slackers for not having volunteered. Reluctant Warriors is the first examination of the pivotal role played by Canadian conscripts in the final campaign of the Great War on the Western Front. Challenging long-standing myths, Patrick Dennis examines whether conscripts made any significant difference to the success of the Canad...

When it first flew in 1957, the Avro Arrow was the world's best supersonic combat aircraft. It was the proudest achievement of the engineers and designers who came out of Canada's world-leading aircraft industry. They had delivered other notable aircraft, including the world's first passenger jet, but the Arrow put them ahead of everyone else in the field. The Arrow was designed to protect Canada against the military threat posed by the Soviet Union and its long-bombers loaded with nuclear weapo...

Les Forces d'operations speciales (SOF) n'ont jamais fait partie integrante des capacites militaires du Canada. Des unites speciales ont certes existe a certaines periodes de notre histoire, mais elles ont toujours oeuvre dans l'ombre, a la limite de la reconnaissance. Elles ont presque toujours ete marginalisees. Cependant, la tragique attaque lancee par des terroristes sur les tours jumelles du World Trade Center a New York, le 11 septembre 2001, a considerablement modifie leur image. Les SOF...

This classic of small-unit warfare focuses on the young Canadian soldiers who helped liberate Northwest Europe in World War II. The 5th Canadian Infantry Brigade landed in Normandy a month after D-Day in 1944 and quickly found itself in hellish fighting near Caen and in the costly and controversial battle for Verrieres Ridge. As the war then moved into Belgium and Holland, the 5th faced a weakened but still potent German Army, and its battles north of Antwerp and in the Scheldt Estuary rank amon...

An official account of the crisis in the Persian Gulf that traces the Canadian Forces' commitment to the Gulf region in response to Iraqi aggression in 1990-1991. This title includes text in French.

On Easter Monday 1917 with a blizzard blowing in their faces, the four divisions of the Canadian Corps in France seized and held the best-defended German bastion on the Western Front - the muddy scarp of Vimy Ridge. The British had failed to take the Ridge, and so had the French who had lost 150,000 men in the attempt. Yet these magnificent colonial troops did so in a morning at the cost of only 10,000 casualties.The author recounts this remarkable feat of arms with both pace and style. He ha...

An Allied unit comprised of Canadian and American troops, the First Special Service Force or "Devil's Brigade" struck fear into the very heart of the Axis. In the dark, early days of the Second World War, the Allies found themselves with their backs against the wall. With their armies, tactics, doctrine, and equipment in tatters, the Allies turned to special operations forces to carry the fight to the Axis enemy until their conventional forces could be built up once again. Specially selected a...