The Canadian Battlefields in Normandy: A Visitor's Guide (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Canadian Battlefields in Normandy: A Visitor's Guide Marc Milner The Canadian Battlefields in Normandy: A Visitor's Guide. Terry Copp and Mike Bechthold. Waterloo: Laurier Centre for Military, Strategic, and Disarmament Studies/Canadian Battlefields Foundation, 2004. Pp. 152, illus., maps. $28.00 No one visiting the coast of France between the mouth of the Seine River and the Cherbourg peninsula can escape seeing commemoration of the epic battles of the summer of 1944. There on 6 June the Allies stormed ashore to begin the liberation of western Europe. Monuments, museums, and cemeteries dot the landscape in mute testament to the two and a half months of brutal fighting that followed. Most of these sites of memory are British and American, but there is a powerful Canadian story here as well. For it was here, in what Charles Stacey described as 'that now half forgotten summer,' that 'the best blood of Canada was freely poured out' on the already blood-soaked and fertile fields of [End Page 719] France. That sacrifice is well chronicled in Terry Copp and Mike Bechthold's The Canadian Battlefields of Normandy: A Visitor's Guide. Like its predecessor, A Canadian's Guide to the Battlefields of Normandy (by Terry Copp, 1994), the new guide has its roots in commemoration – in this case the sixtieth anniversary of the Normandy campaign. And like the earlier one, the new guide follows a basically chronological route through the Canadian experience, from the landings on 6 June, through the battles for Caen, the struggle towards Falaise, and the final closing of the so-called Falaise Gap in mid-August. During much of this period Canadians were in the thick of the fighting, with the 3rd Canadian Infantry and the 2nd Canadian Infantry Divisions suffering the highest and second-highest casualty rates of any Allied formation in the campaign. Most of those casualties came while fighting the cream of the German forces: the 1st and 2nd SS Panzer Corps. The guidebook's text is a primarily a brief recounting of these battles, but the historical summaries represent the latest in research in the field. Copp has made about a score of trips to the Normandy battlefields, many of them while leading groups of students and using the ground itself – still largely unchanged since 1944 – as the primary document. In what amounts to a series of seminars in the field, Copp has fed students and tour participants on war diaries, contemporary maps, and intelligence reports, has pored over fire-plans laid out on the hood of a car, and has walked the ground from every direction, working it all out in an ongoing debate. In addition to an intimate knowledge of the ground, Copp also brings to this guide a thorough and comprehensive reworking of the story based on the primary archival material. In short, over the past two decades he has rebuilt the Normandy campaign from the ground up. As a result, the historical accounts are superb, written by a professional historian who has used both the ground and the other primary sources to produce a new narrative and analysis of the events. It would be tough, indeed perhaps impossible, to find a better-informed, more critical, and up-to-date short analysis of the Canadian role in Normandy anywhere, and the guidebook is a gem for that alone. Those familiar with the traditional view of the Normandy campaign – that of bungling Allies fighting against superb Germans and winning by simple superiority in men and equipment – will find a new, quite different take here. In Copp's view, as reflected in his recent award-winning book Fields of Fire (2003), the Allies fought well – not always efficiently and effectively, but much better than postwar critics and the Germans gave them credit for. And they won. This interpretation is not, however, a simple glorification of the dead and a feting of veterans: It is not the nationalist hyperbole that often appears in battlefield guides. Rather, it is [End Page 720] the result of long years of intense research and analysis. That said, the objective of A Visitor's Guide is to honour the sacrifice of Canadians who fought a...