Normandy Landings Research Articles

D-Day in History and Memory: The Normandy Landings in International Remembrance and Commemoration

Journal Article D-Day in History and Memory: The Normandy Landings in International Remembrance and Commemoration Get access Michael Dolski, Sam Edwards, and John Buckley. (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2014. xii, 308 pp. $24.95.) Journal of American History, Volume 101, Issue 4, March 2015, Pages 1351–1352, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jav146 Published: 01 March 2015

Sex and the Greatest Generation

Sex and the Greatest Generation Shannon L. Fogg (bio) Mary Louise Roberts. What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. xii +351 pp. Map, figures, notes, and index. $30.00. Last year marked the seventieth anniversary of D-Day and the Battle of Normandy. Tours, exhibits, and special events celebrated the Allied landings that ultimately contributed to Nazi Germany’s defeat. The official tourism website for the Normandy region proclaimed “1944–2014 Normandy Celebrates Liberty.” The headline banner was set against a familiar backdrop: happy couples embracing and dancing in the street while one young woman kisses a soldier on the cheek and another man in uniform kisses the toddler girl he holds in his arms. This iconography is the version of the Liberation we have come to expect. Overjoyed French women embrace heroic American (and British and Canadian) soldiers as their liberators from the evils of Nazism. This romantic view of the war and the “Greatest Generation” that fought it is the subject of Mary Louise Roberts’ intriguing latest book. Roberts seeks to complicate the history that portrays the Liberation as a carefree celebration by placing sex at the center of the war. She argues that “sex was fundamental to how the US military framed, fought, and won the war in Europe” (p. 11). Sex, she asserts, was not just a release from combat and not just marginal to the war. Instead she argues that sexual relations between soldiers and French civilians—usually considered a private affair—had broader political consequences in postwar Europe. In order to explore these consequences, Roberts divides the book into three parts: Romance, Prostitution, and Rape. Each section examines the personal relationships between American soldiers and French civilians under these themes. Central to her examination throughout the book are the roles and consequences of myth, prejudice, and stereotype in these interactions. One of the greatest strengths of the book is its transnational approach. Roberts, a French historian by training, firmly places the history of American soldiers into the context of France at war. Unlike some comparative histories that make generalizations or offer superficial examinations of the historiography, Roberts’ book is well grounded in both the American and French literature [End Page 156] and thoroughly researched in archives on both sides of the Atlantic. (Although it would have been useful to have included a bibliography so that scholars could more easily locate sources.) In addition to being a gender history, What Soldiers Do is a nuanced social history in which individual voices of both soldiers and civilians are clearly heard. She begins the book by examining the Normandy campaign through French eyes, arguing that previous histories of the D-Day landings focus too narrowly on military strategy and marginalize the French. She views the campaign as a complex cultural encounter between two sets of people with preconceived ideas about the other. The Americans, she contends, were both allies and enemies to the Normans. While fighting battles was essential for liberation, the Allied destruction also caused civilian deaths that led to French anger as well as GI guilt. But soldiers were not confined to the battlefield. In their daily interactions with the French, American GIs found that language barriers and different customs turned them into tourists trying to find their way in a strange new land. This navigation was influenced by the stereotypes and prejudices the soldiers carried with them, which were often confirmed by their personal experiences. The French were stereotyped as behind the times, dirty, and sexually loose. These prejudices, she argues, shaped the Army’s contention that “the French were uncivilized and in need of social and political management” (p. 55). The connection between sex, the body, and French self-governance is the major thrust of Roberts’ argument throughout the book. For Roberts, sex was political and politicized. The second chapter addresses the role of myth in the relationship between the French and Americans by examining the iconography of the Liberation. The photo of an American GI surrounded by beaming French women appeared just days after the Normandy landings in the military newspaper Stars and Stripes and quickly spread to the mainstream...

Thomas Harold Martin Warburton

Thomas Harold Martin Warburton (“Martin”) did his house jobs at Leytonstone and Luton and Dunstable hospitals. He came from a long established corn feed and flour family business at Bexhill-on-Sea,...

D-Day in history and memory: the Normandy landings in international remembrance and commemoration

Over the past sixty-five years, the Allied invasion of Northwestern France in June 1944, known as D-Day, has come to stand as something more than a major battle. The assault itself formed a vital component of Allied victory in the Second World War. D-Day developed into a sign and symbol; as a word it carries with it a series of ideas and associations that have come to symbolize different things to different people and nations. As such, the commemorative activities linked to the battle offer a window for viewing the various belligerents in their postwar years. This book examines the commonalities and differences in national collective memories of D-Day. Chapters cover the main forces on the day of battle, including the United States, Great Britain, Canada, France and Germany. In addition, a chapter on Russian memory of the invasion explores other views of the battle. The overall thrust of the book shows that memories of the past vary over time, link to present-day needs, and also still have a clear national and cultural specificity. These memories arise in a multitude of locations such as film, books, monuments, anniversary celebrations, and news media representations.

Towards a History of Transnational Sex in World War II

Towards a History of Transnational Sex in World War II Elizabeth Heineman (bio) Mary Louise Roberts. What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France. University of Chicago Press, 2013. Xii + 368 pp.; ISBN 978-0-226-92309-3 (cl); 978-0-226-92311-6 (pb). In the early 1990s, I spent a few weeks reading files of the Office of the Military Government of the United States, or OMGUS, at the National Archives. There I met other doctoral students also studying the American military occupation of Germany after World War II. But my colleagues were a bit grumbly. Here they wanted to parse denazification, the reconstruction of political parties, or economic policy—and what did they find at the top of the meeting agendas of the Allied Control Council? The epidemic of venereal disease. Fine by me. I was writing about the German wartime generation of “women standing alone,” and their sexual relations with occupation soldiers—consensual, commercial, and coerced—was a big part of the story. But now I didn’t need to be the feminist trying to convince my colleagues that women’s history couldn’t be bracketed off from the rest of it. They could hear it from Eisenhower himself. For this reason, Mary Louise Roberts’s remarks to the media about her surprise at discovering just how much sex there was in the archival record of the American liberation and occupation of France caused me to smile with recognition, and to cheer her success at bringing this fact to a larger public.1 But it also made me wonder—now grumbly in my turn—why we’re still surprised. Never mind the endless revelations of sexual abuse in today’s military: the massive scale of camp prostitution at military bases in Asia was common knowledge throughout the post-World War II decades. That phenomenon, like American sexual activity in occupation Germany, has been subject to the scholarly gaze for a generation.2 Why should France be any different? I suspect Roberts might not have been quite as surprised as she claimed. One of the pleasures of seeing feminist historical scholarship attract media attention is to observe the author using her pedestal both to challenge common wisdom and to educate audiences about the delights of doing history. With her adventure-in-the-archives story, Roberts breaks the news gently that young men may have been motivated to fight for reasons that weren’t entirely altruistic, and that their behavior on the ground was not impeccable. She also communicates the excitement of historical research. Among other things, Roberts’s book—and the attention it’s received—teach us a few things about bringing our scholarship to a larger audience. [End Page 138] In fact, Roberts draws not only on her own painstaking research but also on a varied and extensive literature: on the war and occupation in France, on sex across the European theater, on race in mid-twentieth-century America, and much more. Leaving aside the French setting, What Soldiers Do is less a pioneering exploration of uncharted territory than a crowning achievement of a generation of feminist scholarship on gender, militarism, and race in the Second World War and its aftermath. It thus invites us to reflect on the state of the art and where we might go from here. Among other things, Roberts’s work highlights the challenge of writing genuinely multi-national histories, the necessarily collaborative nature of such an undertaking, and the need for synthetic work. What Soldiers Do is the first sustained treatment of American military men’s sexual activity in France, and Roberts makes clear that France mattered. Long-standing stereotypes of French eroticism encouraged fantasies of erotic adventure as a component of military service in France. African American soldiers’ expectations of a racially tolerant France made their often fatal scapegoating in rape charges there particularly crushing. And the centrality of the Normandy landing in the “greatest generation” myth raises the stakes of writing such a history in the French case. In especially stark terms, we must confront the confluence of military achievement and sacrifice on the one hand, and institutionalized sexism and racism (not to...

Re-viewing D-Day: The cinematography of the Normandy landings from the Signal Corps to Saving Private Ryan

In that it privileges the grand perspective (the landscape, and the battalion arrayed in all its splendour), The Longest Day (1962) is typical of big-picture World War II films produced up until the mid-1970s. There are few close-ups, and takes are ponderously long. The focus is on grand strategy, and an attendant grand narrative; the lens offers a blow-by-blow assessment of the massive assault. Shot in 1998, Saving Private Ryan periodically echoes this perspective but reflects modalities informed by changing technologies and a hyper-mediated culture. The result is more intimate framing, punctuated by shots sometimes adapted from the source material: footage captured on Omaha Beach, 6 June 1944, by the Signal Corps cameramen. This portrayal serves two purposes: it opens the film in spectacular fashion, introduces the main characters and prefaces their mission. This article identifies and examines filmic frames from the day of the landings; from the grand narrative of The Longest Day; and from Spielberg’s confronting representation Saving Private Ryan. The aim is to show how, through the lens alone, cinematographers approximate the character of a tumultuous and terrifying day in ways that are surprisingly similar and profoundly different.

The Poetics and Perils of Faction: Contemporary French Fiction and the Memory of World War II

In an essay published in the summer 2011 special issue of Le Debat entitled L'Histoire saisie par la fiction, the British historian Anthony Beevor describes and denounces the proliferation in contemporary culture of fictional works he labels faction. As Beevor describes them, these works include novels, films, television shows, and other entertainments that take as their subject matter important historical events and offer up provocative mixtures of fact and fiction that all too often not only distort history but in fact revise and falsify it, sometimes deliberately. As such, they mark a significant departure from earlier American variants of in works by the likes of Truman Capote in In Cold Blood, for example, or Norman Mailer in Armies of the Night. These earlier works offered highly imaginative literary accounts of current events happening at the time of writing and challenged less the borders between fiction and history than they did those between literature and journalism. (1) The dangers of contemporary as he defines it are in Beevor's view essentially twofold. First, given that the subject matter of much recent is the terrible traumas of the recent past (the Holocaust, the Cold War, the experience of totalitarianism), mixing fact and fiction irresponsibly can give aid and comfort--not to say ammunition--to politically motivated forms of historical revisionism in the present. The word faction itself of course implies a parti pris, and sometimes an extreme political position. The second danger of faction, closely related to the first, is that in a world that is becoming increasingly historically illiterate, works of can be quite persuasive in peddling what Beevor labels counter-knowledge (37), and not just to a small minority of fanatics looking for welcome confirmation of their extremist and historically dubious views. Depending on its entertainment value and degree of verisimilitude or plausibility, a work of might well take in a large and gullible public, promoting false understandings of the past that can prove politically problematic in the present. Of course, in a world in which fiction is routinely peddled as fact by governments in order to justify particular actions--who has forgotten Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction?--faction is merely one method of promoting historical untruths and manipulating and dumbing down the general public. And anything seems possible if, as the Spanish novelist Javier Cercas points out, surveys as recent as 2008 indicated that fully one-fourth of all English people believed that Winston Churchill was a fictional character and therefore never existed (5). As Beevor observes, although works of can and do focus on a wide range of historical events and traumas, the preferred subject matter of most of those works is World War II. Drawing on the American context, Beevor cites--critically--several films, most notably Saving Private Ryan. While the British historian praises the opening sequence of Spielberg's film showing the Normandy landings as the most authentic battle scene ever filmed, the rest of the movie, he argues, descends into an endless recycling of Hollywood cliches that distort history while reassuring Americans today of their eternal innocence and goodness (36). This makes them--us--all the more dangerous in the world today, in Beevor's view. As for the British context, from which he also draws examples, Beevor is sharply critical of the television series Cambridge Spies. In one episode, the Soviet mole Kim Philby learns from his superior in 1941 that the British government has decided not to warn the Soviets of the impending Nazi invasion. In point of fact, as Beevor notes, Churchill warned Stalin many times about the imminent Nazi threat, to no avail (35). What of the French context? This will be the subject of the remainder of this article. Let me note first that while Beevor's observations on in Le Debat offer an excellent general framework, they do not identify some of the most salient characteristics of French and the historical, moral, and ethical issues it raises. …

CHARLES L. ROBERTSON. When Roosevelt Planned to Govern France.

It is well known that during the early course of American participation in World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt planned on an American military occupation of France following its liberation by U.S. and British troops. The occupation never happened. Moreover, as Charles L. Robertson shows in this short and eminently readable book, there was never much real preparation for it either, and when the Normandy landings took place, France quickly came under the control of the Provisional Government established by Charles de Gaulle in Algiers. General Dwight D. Eisenhower was complicit with this Gaullist assumption of power behind the lines as Allied troops advanced, which makes all the more curious the persistent belief in France even today that a military occupation was ready and waiting and that de Gaulle somehow prevented it. Robertson's aim is to explain both the absence of an American occupation administration and the persistence of the myth that it existed.

The Blood of Free Men: The Liberation of Paris, 1944 by Michael Neiberg

the prospect of an Allied victory became more obvious, the gap between rhetoric and reality also grew wider. The much-vaunted project of creating a new national community, for example, faltered except in the area of persecuting minorities. By actively promoting a long tradition of anti-Semitism in France, Vichy came under ever-increasing pressure to help implement the final solution. Similarly, corporatism was more illusion than reality because the inevitable centralization and bureaucratization necessary for Vichy to remain in control contradicted the selfgoverning and decentralizing principles of corporatism. Chapters 7 and 8 look at “realism,” another one of those overdetermined portmanteaux with little chance to be realized. On the one hand, “realism” drew on traditional values to inspire a restoration of “real” France; on the other, “realism ” suggests compromise and acceptance of growing powerlessness under occupation . Other reforms, for example, family policy, were hardly original since pro-natalist policies predated the war. However, laws outlawing abortion, making it punishable by death, represented something radically new. Otherwise, Vichy’s view of women was predictably traditional but unrealistic in light of the many hardships of occupation. The National Revolution failed not only because of internal divisions and contradictions but because it depended on German victory in the war for success, forever rendering it unacceptably “un-French.” Lackerstein’s thorough, well-researched, and frequently brilliant analysis of Vichy breaks new ground in understanding the unsuccessful attempt by a French puppet government to carry out a “national revolution” to restore France to its former glory. St. Norbert College (WI) Tom Conner NEIBERG, MICHAEL. The Blood of Free Men: The Liberation of Paris, 1944. New York: Basic, 2012. ISBN 978-0-465-02399-8. Pp. xxxii + 298. $28.99. This is a well-written, detailed, and readable narrative of the complex events of the liberation of Paris in the last two weeks of August 1944. The advantage of Neiberg’s approach—focusing specifically on the liberation—is that it provides a perspective not often seen. The liberation of Paris is treated in most books as an “endpoint” of sorts in the allied armies’ drive eastward following the Normandy breakout, or simply as a part, albeit a major one, of a wider story of the occupation and resistance through the entirety of 1940–44. The particular framing of Neiberg’s study allows him to explore the detailed interactions between résistants within the city, allied military and political forces without, and the German occupiers , in a way that less-targeted works do not fully allow. Broad issues such as the Normandy operations, the conditions of the occupation, and the evolution of the resistance from its earliest days are treated as integral contextual foundations to the history of the liberation. For example, Neiberg’s introduction provides an overview of the occupation preceding the allied landings in Normandy, including the events that led to the rise of the resistance, as well as an overview of the different powers and factions involved. Additionally, the first four chapters explore events occurring between 6 June and 15 August, and their impact on individuals and groups who would play major roles in the liberation of the city. Neiberg discusses the hopes, anxieties, and increased hardships for Parisians during this timeframe, the leaders in the resistance and French politics, the attitudes of Axis Reviews 1279 and Allied leadership toward the capital, general Choltitz’s reputation as a “smasher of cities,” and his orders to destroy Paris. All of these elements are vital in understanding the mechanics of the city’s liberation. It is in the second half of the book, where the liberation proper is narrated, that Neiberg shows how the previously contextualized elements intertwine to form the tapestry of military and political maneuvers that would bring about Paris’s freedom. Examining these events in periods of two to four days, Neiberg takes the reader from the seizure of the Préfecture de police by the résistants to the entry of Leclerc’s Second Armored Division, Choltitz’s surrender, and de Gaulle’s arrival and establishment of a provisional government. All the while, the reader is immersed in the politics and tactics of truce negotiations and manipulations, the advantages and disadvantages...

June Maureen Hughes

June Maureen Hughes (nee Kingan) started medical training at the Royal Free Hospital in 1939 before being evacuated to Aberdeen in the blitz. On qualifying she joined the Royal Army...

Sparrow Mission: A US Intelligence Failure during World War II

The article presents an intelligence case gone bad during the Second World War, when the United States decided to drop a three-man OSS group into Hungary. Hungary, a close ally of Germany, after seeing that the war was not going to end with an Axis victory, wished to seek contact with the Western Allies in order to try to find a way out of its precarious situation. The study, based mainly on archival research, shows the evolution of the Sparrow Mission, whose goals are still unclear today. Both the preparations and the timing of the mission seem to indicate that the plan had some influence on the German decision of occupying Hungary in March 1944, and such a German move helped the Normandy landing of the Allies a few months later.

Groundwater as a military resource: development of Royal Engineers Boring Sections and British military hydrogeology in World War II

Abstract To drill boreholes for water supply, the Royal Engineers raised ten ‘Boring Sections’ between September 1939 and May 1943, eight in the UK, two in Egypt. While supporting campaigns in World War II, two deployed briefly to France, seven served widely within the Middle East (one of these in Iraq and Iran and later Malta, the others mostly operating from Egypt), one deployed to Algeria/Tunisia, four to Sicily and/or Italy (one of these onward to Greece), two deployed to support the D-Day Allied landings in Normandy and the subsequent advance via Belgium to Germany, and three served long-term in the UK. Greatest use was by Middle East Command, which at its peak had about 35 officers, 750 men and 40 drilling rigs assigned to water supply, and whose boreholes attained a cumulative length of some 40 km. The British Army used geology to help guide emplacement of boreholes in all these regions. Innovations included groundwater prospect maps at scales of 1:50 000 and 1:250 000, to help planning for the Allied invasion of Normandy and the subsequent campaign in NW Europe. Geology also helped guide groundwater abstraction by Indian Engineers in the Far East, and British/South African troops in East Africa.

Ian Charles Woolrych English

Ian Charles Woolrych English was born in Chigwell, Essex, the son of an undertaker. He was educated at Bancroft’s School, where he was miserable, and finally left to finish his...

Theodore Stafford Maw

Theodore Stafford Maw (“Stafford”) was born in Birmingham and spent his infancy in India before returning to England. He studied medicine at St Andrews University, where he excelled at both...

D-Day: the battle for Normandy

This is reissued, with a new foreword, for the 70th Anniversary. Beevor's D-Day: The Battle for Normandy is the closest you will ever get to war - the taste, the smell, the noise and the fear. The Normandy Landings that took place on D-Day involved by far the largest invasion fleet ever known. The scale of the undertaking was simply awesome. What followed them was some of the most cunning and ferocious fighting of the war, at times as savage as anything seen on the Eastern Front. As casualties mounted, so too did the tensions between the principal commanders on both sides. Meanwhile, French civilians caught in the middle of these battlefields or under Allied bombing endured terrible suffering. Even the joys of Liberation had their darker side. Antony Beevor's gripping narrative conveys the true experience of war. As near as possible to experiencing what it was like to be there...It is almost impossible for a reader not to get caught up in the excitement. (Giles Foden, Guardian). No writer can surpass Beevor in making sense of a crowded battlefield and in balancing the explanation of tactical manoeuvres with poignant flashes of human detail. (Christopher Silvester, Daily Express). Beevor is the renowned author of Stalingrad, which won the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Wolfson Prize for History and the Hawthornden Prize for Literature, and Berlin, which received the first Longman-History Today Trustees' Award. His books have sold nearly four million copies.

Eric Woods – A lone radiographer at the Normandy landings

Although much of the activity around D-day is recorded many of the support services such as radiography do not feature. This account of a radiographer at the Normandy landings gives an insight into the everyday work of a lone radiographer in the Armed Forces in the 1940s. This work is the product of an oral history taken by Jean Barrett in accordance with the acknowledged ethical requirements of oral history. Eric Wood has given his permission for the publication of his stories. The work was presented at the conference for the British Society for the History of Radiology 2008 (Sheffield).

Normandy: The Landings to the Liberation of Paris (review)

Reviewed by: Normandy: The Landings to the Liberation of Paris John A. English Normandy: The Landings to the Liberation of Paris. By Olivier Wieviorka. Translated by M.B. DeBevoise.. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-674-02838-8. Maps. Charts. Notes. Archival sources. Select bibliography. Index. Pp. xiv, 446. $29.95. This work was first published in January 2007 as Histoire du débarquement en Normandie: Des origines à la libération de Paris, 1941-1944 (Paris, Editions du Seuil) and provides a French perspective on the planning and execution of the Normandy campaign to the liberation of Paris. Wieviorka offers a sweeping account, covering with broad brush strokes the development of Allied relationships, Anglo-American economic and military mobilization, D-Day preparations and logistical arrangements, combat training, bombing and deception strategies, and German expectations, in his first six chapters. He then recounts the invasion and subsequent operations in another five chapters, including one entitled "Psychoneuroses." His last two chapters, arguably the most original and informative in the entire book, describe Charles de Gaulle's struggle for legitimacy and Allied recognition, the role of the French Resistance, and France's resurrection from the humiliation of defeat. Not everyone will agree with all of the detail that Wieviorka impressively weaves together. In a wide-ranging introduction he takes issue with Eisenhower's Crusade in Europe and, targeting Stephen Ambrose, "the curiously naïve view that the Allies fought only for principles." He further asserts that owing to "Roosevelt's credulous attachment to a peculiarly American set of ideals," the Normandy invasion led to a diplomatic Munich. In a more focused thesis statement, he alleges that soldiers and historians alike, "eager to magnify the importance of [D-Day]…have often preferred its heroic charms to the harsh realities of the day, in relegating to the margins of silence everything that contradicts the legend." The sheer violence of the campaign that followed, he argues, has been deliberately downplayed by historians seeking to glorify the exploits of Allied soldiers. In short, "American and British [End Page 1007] authors have propagated a triumphalist image of brave men who unhesitatingly sacrificed their lives to liberate France and crush Nazism." Wieviorka also charges that the specialization of historical writing in the U.S., Canada, and Great Britain has tended to obscure the interconnection of political, diplomatic, and economic aspects with the military dimension. Wieviorka correctly points out that the success of the cross channel attack was by no means a forgone conclusion, but he seems to believe that most Anglo-American historians do not share this view. In tracing the decision-making chronology of the Grand Alliance, moreover, he may also have missed the true significance of the ABC-1/ABC-22 war plans and why the Americans chose to ally so intimately with the British alone. As for the rationale underpinning the Operation Torch peripheral strategy, he would have benefited greatly from consulting Douglas Porch's excellent The Path to Victory: The Mediterranean Theater in World War II (2004). It is also striking that while he used several Richard Overy sources, he did not avail himself of that scholar's acclaimed Why the Allies Won (1995), which examined war production and technologies in depth. Wieviorka's reliance on Ralph Ingersoll's controversial Top Secret (1946) and, for that matter, F. W. Wintherbotham's sensational The Ultra Secret (1974) is also questionable. That said, Wieviorka provides a logically organized and highly readable discussion of the logistical and strategic requirements for the Normandy landing within the context of Russian operations and Soviet peace feelers to Germany. His treatment of Allied deception measures is succinct but thorough, though not particularly new. The same can be said of his discussion of the dysfunctional nature of the German high command as compared to the Anglo-American staff structure for directing operations. The emphasis accorded to the limitation of air strike collateral damage to France and her citizenry in the Transportation Plan is additionally warranted and highly informative. Throughout his work, Wieviorka provides a wealth of statistics on various economic aspects, equipment shortcomings, and troop strengths to challenge "simplistic views about the planning of the invasion." As might be expected...

Raymond Aubrey Bush

After qualifying, Raymond Aubrey Bush was called up to the Royal Army Medical Corps and was attached to the 15th Scottish Infantry Division. He served with them from 1940 to...

Review: A Blue Water Navy

A BLUE WATER NAVY The Official Operational History of Royal Canadian Navy in second World War, 1943-1945. Volume II, Part 2 W.A.B. Douglas, Roger Sarty, Michael Whitby, with Robert H. Caldwell, William Johnston and William G.P. Rawling St. Catharines: Vanwell Publishing, 2007. 05opp, $60.00 cloth (ISBN 1-55125-069-4)For three-and-a-half grueling years, from 1939 to 1942, primary role of Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) was shepherding convoys across Atlantic Ocean. It was an important role but not one that senior Canadian naval authorities relished. The long-cherished dream of building a balanced fleet dominated thinking at naval service headquarters. After three years of rapid and uneven expansion, that dream came to fruition and RCN began to participate in a far wider range of operations, from fleet destroyer and escort carrier actions to dispatching one of its newly acquired cruisers to Pacific theatre in 1945. In addition, Navy performed a myriad of other tasks ranging from amphibious operations in Mediterranean to minesweeping both at home and overseas, as well as taking part in D-Day landings in Normandy. And inshore campaign waged against modern German U-boats late in war required tactics, equipment, and skills. The scope of Canadian operations in final two-and-a-half years of war was extraordinary, especially when one considers that navy consisted of some n ships and 2,700 personnel in 1939. The story of how and why RCN took on these roles is subject of this long-anticipated operational history.Work on two-volume history began in 1987 when a team of naval historians was assembled under Roger Sarty, then senior naval historian at directorate of history, Department of National Defence. Twenty years later, this volume and its companion-No Higher Purpose: The Official Operational History of Royal Canadian Navy in Second World War, 1939-1943, Volume II, Part i, Vanwell, 2002-are results of their painstaking work. Until now, operational history of Canadian navy in period 1943-45 has not been examined to any great extent. This volume redresses that imbalance in scholarship.The research is exhaustive and, equally important, synthesis of many themes and disparate operations is impressive. The book is divided into two main sections. The first section, comprising six chapters, deals with consolidation of planning and naval operations, and examines such wide-ranging topics as fleet modernization in period 1942-43, destroyer and coastal forces' operations with home fleet, and Operation Neptune-the naval assault on fortress Europe-among other topics. The second section, entitled new directions, examines inshore antisubmarine campaign in European waters and northwest Atlantic, fleet operations in European and Arctic waters from July 1944 until V-E Day, and operations with British Pacific fleet in 1945.The authors have not shied away from controversial issues such as equipment crisis in 1943 that led to sacking of Admiral Percy Nelles, chief of naval staff. Their examination of that particular issue is both objective and balanced. Angus L. Macdonald, minister of national defence for naval service, observed at time that [i]t seems to me that some officers at NSHQ are impressed mainly with size. Careful planning and estimating, efficiency of equipment, and high skill of personnel rather than mere numbers of ships or men ought to be our watchword (182). The authors contend that the minister [did not] realize that his advisors considered modernization issue an integral part of refit crisis and presented to him as such. Without making that connection, therefore, Macdonald missed what Nelles was trying to tell him. Consequently, it is difficult to escape conclusion that Macdonald was not interested in workings of his department as long as problems did not run risk of becoming political ones (182). …

Briefing: Engineering skills shortages in China—a personal view

Two challenges from history illustrate how to mobilise an industry to face a major challenge: the engineering infrastructure for the Normandy landings and the establishment of the UK’s motorway network. China has already applied the lessons learned from these challenges to undergraduate education, but the focus is now moving to professional development. A group of leading firms, academics and ICE are cooperating to tackle this problem. This is a small step on an arduous journey but to those who judge Chinese engineers only by where they are today and not where they have come from it would be worth remembering the following Zhuang Zi quotation from the 5th century BC. ‘When Heaven is about to place a great responsibility on a man, it always first frustrates his spirit and will, exhausts his muscles and bones, exposes him to starvation and poverty, harasses him by troubles and setbacks so as to stimulate his spirit, toughen his nature and enhance his abilities.’