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...

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...

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 ...

The first four Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan were repatriated at Canadas largest military base in 2002. The fallen soldiers were driven down the 172-kilometre stretch of highway between Trenton and Toronto, and pedestrians lined the overpasses, hoping to make a connection with the grieving families. The support these people show isnt political; its not a movement for or against Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan. Its always been a grassroots movement about showing respect for our f...

In late 1942, Britain was desperate to win the ongoing Battle of the Atlantic. German U-boats had sunk hundreds of Allied ships containing millions of tons of cargo that was needed to continue the war effort. Prime Minister Churchill had to find a solution to the carnage or the Nazis would be victorious. With the support of Churchill and Lord Louis Mountbatten, eccentric inventor and amateur spy Geoffrey Pyke proposed a dramatic project to build invincible ships of ice—massive, unsinkable ...

In August 1917, the Canadian Corps captured Hill 70, a vital piece of ground just north of the French industrial town of Lens. The Canadians suffered some 5,400 casualties and defeated three days of determined German counter attacks. This spectacularly successful but shockingly costly battle was as innovative as Vimy, yet only a handful of Canadians have heard of it or of subsequent attempts to capture Lens, which resulted in nearly 3,300 more casualties. In Capturing Hill 70, lea...