Canada and the Great War: Western Front Association Papers (review)

Reviewed by: Canada and the Great War: Western Front Association Papers Ian M. Brown Canada and the Great War: Western Front Association Papers. Edited by Briton C. Busch. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003. ISBN 0-7735-2570-X. Maps. Photographs. Notes. Pp. xi, 240. $22.95. This anthology is the product of the September 2001 Western Front Association's Ottawa Seminar and, as with all such works, is a mixed bag. The work is comprised of twelve chapters that cover a wide range of topics, all of which influenced Canada's efforts in the Great War (First World War). The chapters are an interesting and at times eclectic mix of popular and scholarly history. Three in particular should attract the attention of military historians. First, Patrick Brennan provides a fascinating study of Brigadier General William Griesbach's evolution as a military commander learning his craft on the western front. By 1918 Griesbach had become a skilled and successful practitioner of the art of command. Brennan makes one observation in particular, that "some of the problems of open warfare were insurmountable with the technology available in 1918" (p. 89), which should be adopted as a maxim by anyone who studies the Great War. Second, Roger Sarty argues persuasively that the naval cooperation between Canada, Great Britain, and the United States in the northwest [End Page 1275] Atlantic helped lay the groundwork for the greatly increased scale of cooperation in the Second World War. American assistance to the Royal Canadian Navy proved of critical importance in spite of its small scale because the RCN needed all the additional antisubmarine assets that it could lay its hands on. Finally, Syd Wise provides a study of the BEF's Amiens offensive that is a corrective to the "Teutonophile" school of thought prevalent in the United States, which believes that the German army provided nearly all examples of innovation on the western front. Regarding the well-known, indeed lionized, Colonel Georg Bruchmüller, Wise states accurately, "it is in fact the case that German artillery innovations were preceded by similar innovations in both the British and French armies, yet so pronounced is the predilection among many historians to believe in the superiority of German methods that these innovations have been largely ignored" (p. 195). This chapter should be read by anyone who studies the Great War. W. David Parsons's overview of Newfoundland's experience in the war provided a pleasant surprise—Newfoundland's Great War experience is often overlooked because it did not join the Canadian confederation until 1949. Owen Cooke's study of Canadian airmen in the allied intervention in Russia is another interesting study of a largely ignored event. Clearly, the Seminar organizers made a considerable effort to highlight lesser known events or experiences. At the same time, it is unfortunate that none of the papers examined the Francophone experience. The very nature of the war's impact on Canada—on the one hand creating in Anglophone Canadians a sense of national identity heretofore absent, while simultaneously triggering the 1917 conscription crisis that nearly split the county apart—means that the lack of a Francophone example makes the work seem incomplete. This absence notwithstanding, Canada and the Great War is well worth reading. Ian M. Brown Coventry Health Care, Inc. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Copyright © 2004 Society for Military History

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