Review: Armies of Peace

Abstract

ARMIES OF PEACE Canada and the UNRRA Years Susan Armstrong- Reid and David Murray Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. 482pp. $65.00 cloth (ISBN 9780-8020-9321-9)Between 1943 and 1947, hundreds of Canadians from all walks of life went to work for the United Nations relief and rehabilitation administration (UNRRA), an obscure international agency established by the allies in November 1943 to aid victims of the Second World War. As Susan ArmstrongReid and David Murray explain in their new book, Armies of Peace: Canada and the UNRRA Years, the organization aimed to prevent a replay of the economic and political catastrophes that destabilized the international system after the First World War. By helping refugees, fighting epidemics, and providing food and assistance at no charge to countries under axis occupation, the agency's architects believed UNRRA would hasten political and economic recovery and lay the foundations for a multilateral trading system. Together, they hoped these efforts would prevent a recurrence of the devastating economic depressions and wars endemic to the first half of the 20th century.Armstrong-Reid and Murray have attempted the first investigation of Canada's participation in this Herculean effort. Using a wide variety of sources from Canadian and international archives as well as the personal papers of key participants, the authors explore Canada's diplomacy and economic policies vis-a-vis UNRRA. The work also examines the role that individual Canadians played in the organization's operations: most of the book actually consists of colourful vignettes of Canadians who worked for the agency in various corners of the globe as administrators, medical specialists, social workers, supply officers, and nurses. The work concludes with an explication of the government's attitude towards UNRRA's dissolution, and a discussion of the postwar activities of the individuals who worked for the agency in Canadian national and international life.While this work offers much insight into the evidence it presents, readers looking for an overarching thesis or argument will be hard pressed to find one. For better or worse, the book is largely anecdotal, and may have benefited from more discipline, contextualization, and criticism. Some readers may also find problems with the book's method of focusing on a nationstate to tell the story of an international organization. Still, these issues do not take away from the exceptional nature of these authors' findings, which are the result of years of research and hard work. Armstrong-Reid and Murray have exposed many of the most intractable problems faced by international agencies, and they have rescued the heart-wrenching stories of many individual Canadians, such as Elizabeth Brown, who in spite of Zionist threats risked her life to repatriate Jewish refugees to Europe from Palestine, and Margaret Kilpatrick, who removed children from German homes to return them to their biological parents.These stories will be useful for scholars, foreign policy practitioners, and individuals pursuing careers in humanitarian aid work. For one thing, they reveal many of the personality traits that distinguish the successful international aid worker from the unsuccessful one: fortitude, resourcefulness, independence, adaptability, and humility. They tell us that these Canadians were usually highly educated humanitarians with a penchant for adventure; more often than not, they were women eager to escape the confines of a male- dominated society. Their experiences, we also learn, shaped the postwar world. Many of these Canadians devoted their careers to international aid work, manning the ranks of a panoply of new UN agencies: IRO, FAO, WHO, UNESCO, and UNICEF. Others sought to change Canada's immigration laws and reform its welfare, social, and medical systems as educators and activists.Historians and other scholars may be disturbed that these facts too often become ends unto themselves. …