From its creation in 1910, the Royal Canadian Navy was marked by political debate over the countrys need for a naval service. The Seabound Coast, Volume I of a three-volume official history of the RCN, traces the story of the navys first three decades, from its beginnings as Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Lauriers tinpot navy of two obsolescent British cruisers to the force of six modern destroyers and four minesweepers with which it began the Second World War. The previously publishe...

A comprehensive history of Canada’s submarine service and the people who have served in it.Through a Canadian Periscope’s second edition celebrates the story of the Canadian submarine service on the occasion of its centenary in 2014.Created in 1914, at the beginning of World War I, Canada’s submarine force has overcome repeated attempts to sink it since then. Surprise, controversy, political expediency, and naval manipulation flow through its one hundred-ye...

The eighth Canadian Battle Series volume is the little-told story of the tense final days of World War II, remembered in the Netherlands as the sweetest of springs,” which saw the country’s liberation from German occupation.The Liberation Campaign, a series of fierce, desperate battles during the last three months of the war, was bittersweet. A nation’s freedom was won and the war concluded, but these final hostilities cost Canada 6,298 casualties, including 1,482 dead.Wit...

The second volume in the WWII history "written with simplicity, lucidity, and gusto" by the legendary leader and Nobel Prize winner ( The New York Times).In Their Finest Hour, Winston Churchill describes the invasion of France and a growing sense of dismay in Britain. Should Britain meet France's desperate pleas for reinforcements or conserve their resources in preparation for the inevitable German assault? In the book's second half, entitled simp...

December 20, 1943. Two Canadian infantry battalions and a tank regiment stand poised on the outskirts of a small Italian port town. They expect to take Ortona quickly. But the German 1st Parachute Division has other ideas. For reasons unknown, Hitler has ordered Ortona held to the last man. Houses, churches and other buildings are dynamited, clogging the streets with rubble. Germans with machine guns lie in ambush. Snipers slip from one rooftop to another. The Canadians seem to have walked...

Dawn, June 6, 1944. Off the Normandy coast 6,500 ships carry 150,000 Allied troops. This is D-Day, the long-awaited Allied invasion of German-occupied Europe. The Allies will storm five beaches. One is code-named Juno Beach. Here, 14,500 Canadians will land on a five-mile stretch of sand backed by three resort towns. The beach is heavily protected by a seawall, barbed wire, underwater obstacles and hundreds of mines. Behind these defenses a heavily armed German force waits inside thick con...

Between 1950 and 1953, nearly 30,000 Canadian volunteers joined the effort to contain communist incursions into South Korea and support the fledgling United Nations. All the services were there and all served with distinction. The Royal Canadian Navy led a daring rescue of troops from the port of Chinnampo in 1950; members of the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry won the highest US battle honour at Kap’yong in April 1951; the Vandoos turned the tide at Hill 355; and twice -- at H...

In the Service of Peace simple words that adorn the obverse of every United Nations medal, yet behind this eloquence lurks violence and an unheralded heroism invisible to an often misunderstood quarter of Canadas military history. The Canadian contribution to peacekeeping is enormous but ensnared in a lethal mythology that has seen it abandoned to popular folklore. From the early and intrinsic Canadian contribution to the U.N. Emergency Force in 1956, through the blur of the frenetic 1990s...

National BestsellerAt the height of the First World War, on Easter Monday April 9, 1917, in early morning sleet, sixteen battalions of the Canadian Corps rose along a six-kilometre line of trenches in northern France against the occupying Germans. All four Canadian divisions advanced in a line behind a well-rehearsed creeping barrage of artillery fire. By nightfall, the Germans had suffered a major setback. The Ridge, which other Allied troops had assaulted previou...

In the early morning of August 19, 1942, over five thousand Canadian troops landed on the beach at Dieppe to reclaim the shore from German troops occupying France. It was a mission doomed from the start. Mere hours later, over two-thirds of the men were dead, wounded, or taken prisoner by German forces. It was the worst disaster in Canadian military history, and historians have found no convincing explanation for why the operation was mounted in the first place.Through first-hand a...

In the spring of 1885, it appeared that war was about to set the Canadian West aflame. Louis Riel had established a Metis provisional government at Batoche, and the Cree, led by war chief Wandering Spirit, had killed settlers, taken hostages and forced the capitulation of Fort Pitt. Among the forces marshalled to quell the unrest was an elite scouting unit of the Alberta Field Force, led by the charismatic Sam Steele of the North West Mounted Police. Aggressive, tenacious and supremely con...

Undeniably, the 1990s were a period of crisis for the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF). Drastic budget reductions and a series of endless scandals all collided to form the perfect storm. The outcome of this was nothing short of the implosion of the Canadian Armed Forces Officer Corps.Stripped by the government of the right to regulate itself, the Officer Corps, which represented the nation’s stewards of the profession of arms, was forced to reform itself. Key to this transformation was ...