In his controversial and award-winning 2003 book Fields of Fire, Terry Copp offered a stunning reversal of accepted military history, challenging the conventional view that the Canadian contribution to the Battle of Normandy was a failure. Cinderella Army continues the story of the operations carried out by the First Canadian Army in the last nine months of the war, and extends the argument developed in Fields of Fire that "the achievement of the Allied and espec...

With Fields of Fire, Terry Copp challenges 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 successful, contribution to the defeat of the Germ...

Battalion- and company-level account of the vital contributions of Canadian soldiers to victory in Europe in World War II. Based on war diaries, casualty reports, and after-action interviews. The author is one of Canada's preeminent military historians.

Drawing from newspapers, journals, government reports, and archival records, Terry Copp – one of Canada’s leading military historians – tells the story of how citizens in Canada’s largest city responded to the challenges of the First World War.Montreal at War addresses responses to the outbreak of war in Europe and the process of raising an army for service overseas. It details the shock of intense combat and heavy casualties, studies the mobilization of volunteers, and fo...

There could be no truer witness to the enormity of the First World War and its terrible cost in lives than the memorials and war cemeteries along the old Western Front. In Canada, no less than in the other dominions of the British Empire, the war left a conflicting legacy of pride and sorrow that endures to this day.The soaring Vimy Memorial, the Brooding Soldier, and the monuments honouring Canada’s significant contribution to the Allied victory symbolize the spirit of shared sacr...

Battalion- and company-level account of the vital contributions of Canadian soldiers to victory in Europe in World War IIBased on war diaries, casualty reports, and after-action interviewsThe author is one of Canada's preeminent military historiansConsisting of the Calgary Highlanders, the Black Watch, and the French-speaking Règiment de Maisonneuve, the 5th Canadian Infantry Brigade landed in France in early July 1944 as part of British General Bernard Montgomery's...

Brave Battalion presents the story of four Canadian Highland regiments that were banded together as the 16th Battalion. Ninety years after the end of WWI, this work honours those soldiers and makes their stories a vivid reality. Focusing on the Canadian Scottish (Princess Mary’s) Battalion, Mark Zuehlke presents the harrowing experiences that bonded the men and which came to represent the uniting and rising of a nation beginning to realize its potential.Complemented by map...

An in-depth look at the role armored formations played in the struggle between the Nazis and the Soviets.Hitler's panzer armies spearheaded the blitzkrieg on the Eastern Front. They played a key role in every major campaign, not simply as tactical tools but also as operational weapons that shaped strategy. Their extraordinary triumphs—and their eventual defeat—mirrors the fate of German forces in the East. And yet no previous study has concentrated on the history o...

In the tradition of Margaret MacMillan’s Paris 1919 comes a new consideration of Canada’s most famous war and the Treaty of Ghent that unsatisfactorily concluded it, from one of this country’s premier military historians.In the Canadian imagination, the War of 1812 looms large. It was a war in which British and Indian troops prevailed in almost all of the battles, in which the Americans were unable to hold any of the land they fought for, in which a young woman nam...

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...

There have been thousands of books on the Great War, but most have focused on commanders, battles, strategy, and tactics. Less attention has been paid to the daily lives of the combatants, how they endured the unimaginable conditions of industrial warfare: the rain of shells, bullets, and chemical agents. In The Secret History of Soldiers, Tim Cook, Canada's foremost military historian, examines how those who survived trench warfare on the Western Front found entertainment, solace, relief,...

A bold new telling of the defining battle of the Great War, and how it came to signify and solidify Canada's national identity.Why does Vimy loom so large in Canada's identity—and should it? Tim Cook, Canada's foremost military historian and a RBC Taylor Prize winner, examines the battle of Vimy Ridge in April 1917 and the way the memory of it has evolved over a hundred years. Vimy is unlike any other battle in Canadian history: it has been described as the "birth ...