The Admirals: Canada's Senior Leadership in the Twentieth Century

Michael Whitby, Richard H. Gimblett, and Peter Haydon, eds., The Admirals: Canada's Senior Leadership in the Twentieth Century. Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2006. 414 pp. $25.99 paper. The ten scholarly articles and six reminiscences by former Canadian admirals contained in this interesting edited work grew out of a two-day conference held at Halifax in 2002. As Michael Whitby rightfully notes in the fine Introduction, despite recent considerable progress in the writing of Canadian naval history--the first volume of the three-volume official history of the Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) came out in 2002--it has been long recognized that insufficient attention has been paid to the individuals who served in the navy (15, emphasis in the original). In part, this omission reflects a perhaps natural bias toward the study of Canadian Army history in both official and academic circles, given the sheer size of the Canadian Corps in the First World War and then the Canadian Army in the Second World War. Escorting convoys across the Atlantic Ocean, no matter how vital to the final Allied victories over Germany in both those conflicts, lacks the dramatic cachet of seizing a seemingly impregnable Vimy Ridge in April 1917 or charging ashore at Juno Beach on 6 June 1944. But navies--and not just in Canada, for the problem long existed in the Royal Navy and the United States Navy too--also possess a deserved reputation for displaying a profound and proud anti-intellectualism, preferring ship drivers and technicians to deep strategic thinkers like Herbert Richmond or Alfred Thayer Mahan. The historians here, a virtual who's who of Canadians interested in the RCN, seek to depart from this trend, giving us real insight into the men who led the small Royal Canadian Navy. Reconstructing the past was not always easy. As Richard H. Gimblett's chapter on Canadian-born Admiral Charles E. Kingsmill sadly notes, another naval officer, Percy Nelles, later allowed Kingsmill's papers to be destroyed, reasoning that his former commander would have wanted that drastic step taken. Despite a paucity of primary material, Gimblett manages to overturn the received historical version of Kingsmill's tenure as head of the RCN. Gimblett maintains that while Kingsmill did not create a proud or robust service, he managed to build a reasonably sound foundation for an RCN that was but a decade old when Kingsmill departed. The man who succeeded Kingsmill as head of the RCN, the British-born Walter Hose, had a much tougher time, as William Glover makes clear. Hose had to face Canadian governments utterly intent on getting a decided peace dividend after the horrific human and material costs of the Great War, and a Canadian militia keen to squeeze out the RCN for money and political influence. But while Glover briefly outlines Hose's clever rationale for maintaining the RCN, he spends more time on Hose's unremarkable early career than on the often bitter fight with General A. G. L. McNaughton. This is an unfortunate omission, because Hose's true talent was his superior bureaucratic infighting skills: despite McNaughton's effort to gut the RCN, Hose saved his beleaguered service. …

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