During the Second World War, more than 4,000 civilian nurses enlisted as Nursing Sisters, a specially created all-female officers? rank of the Canadian Armed Forces. They served in all three armed force branches and all the major theatres of war, yet nursing as a form of war work has long been under-explored. An Officer and a Lady fills that gap. Cynthia Toman analyzes how gender, war, and medical technology intersected to create a legitimate role for women in the masculine environment of the military and explores the incongruous expectations placed on military nurses as ?officers...

Between 1936 and 1939, almost 1,700 Canadians defied their government and volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War. They chose to leave behind punishing lives in Canadian relief camps, mines, and urban flophouses to confront fascism in a country few knew much about. Four hundred died there.

Michael Petrou has drawn on recently declassified archival material, interviewed surviving Canadian veterans, and visited the battlefields of Spain to write the definitive account of Canadians in the Spanish Civil War. It reveals who these men and women were, why they volunteered, how they...

The first comprehensive study of naval operations involving North American squadrons in Nova Scotia waters, Frigates and Foremasts offers a masterful analysis of the motives behind the deployment of Royal Naval vessels between 1745 and 1815, and the navy's role on the Western Atlantic.

Interweaving historical analysis with vivid descriptions of pivotal events from the first siege of Louisbourg in 1745 to the end of the wars with the U.S. and France in 1815, Julian Gwyn illuminates the complex story of competing interests among the Admiralty, Navy Board, sea officers, and...

The First World War's appalling death toll and the need for a sense of equality of sacrifice on the home front led to Canada's first experience of overseas conscription. While historians have focused on resistance to enforced military service in Quebec, this has obscured the important role of those who saw military service as incompatible with their religious or ethical beliefs. Crisis of Conscience is the first and only book about the Canadian pacifists who refused to fight in the Great War. The experience of these conscientious objectors offers insight into evolving attitudes...

Fighting from Home paints a comprehensive and, at times, intimate portrait of Verdun and Verdunites at war. Serge Durflinger offers an innovative interpretive approach towards understanding wartime Canadian and Quebec social and cultural dynamics.

In Verdun, English and French speakers lived side by side. Durflinger shows that, through their home-front activities as much as through enlistment, French-speaking Verdunites were partners beside their English-speaking neighbours in the prosecution of Canada's war. Shared experiences and class similarities facilitated the...

The extended peace the world anticipated following the decisive Allied victory in the Second World War was abruptly shattered in June 1950 by the invasion of South Korea by communist North Korea. Responding to a United Nations? call to assist the South Korean regime, Canada deployed an 8000-man brigade to the peninsula to fight as part of an American-led UN force.

This comprehensive account of the Canadian campaign in Korea provides the first detailed study of the training, leadership, operations, and tactics of the brigade under each of its three wartime commanders as well as its...

For more than six decades, the Canadian Rangers, a group of citizen-soldiers, has quietly served as Canada's eyes, ears, and voice in isolated coastal and northern communities. Drawing on official records, interviews, and participation in Ranger exercises, Lackenbauer argues that the organization offers an inexpensive way for Canada to "show the flag" from coast to coast to coast. The Rangers have also laid the foundation for a successful partnership between the modern state and Aboriginal peoples, a partnership rooted in local knowledge and cross-cultural understanding.

Soldiers found guilty of desertion or cowardice during the Great War faced death by firing squad. Novels, histories, movies, and television series often depict courts martial as brutal and inflexible, and social memories of this system of frontline justice have inspired modern movements to seek pardons for soldiers executed on the battlefield. In this powerful and moving book, Teresa Iacobelli looks beyond stories of callous generals and quick executions to consider the trials of nearly two hundred soldiers who were sentenced to death but spared by a disciplinary system capable of...

Although the Allies claimed victory at the end of the Second World War, the United States' invention of the atomic bomb and its replication by the Soviet Union posed new dangers for all nations. In Peace Prepared examines what Canada's Cold War Army did to prepare for war against the Warsaw Pact armies - and why and how it did it.

Drawing on previously classified documents from both sides of the conflict, Andrew Godefroy reveals that although the Third World War never happened, peacetime operations played a significant role in the evolution of Canada's army. Officers,...