Clio's Warriors: Historians and the Writing of the World Wars

Tim Cook. Clio's Warriors: Historians and the Writing of the World Wars. Vancouver and Toronto: UBC Press, 2006. ix + 326 pp. $85.00 cloth. $29.95 paper. It has not taken long for Tim Cook, a scholar at the Canadian War Museum, to establish himself as one of the top new historians of the Canadian military. His previous book, No Place to Run: The Canadian Corps and Gas Warfare in the First World War, was recognized as the best book in Canadian military history in 1999-2000. This new work, based on his Ph.D. dissertation, not only adds to his reputation in the military realm, but it also demonstrates the expansion of his research interests beyond the analysis of technical warfare and into the intriguing realm of intellectual history and historiography. Clio's Warriors, explains Cook, less concerned with Canada's military involvement in the two world wars than with how historians have interpreted those events (3). It chronicles the development of a tradition of intellectual rigor in the writing of Canadian military history shared both by the government-appointed official historians and the academics who followed them. More broadly, this book examines how politics and personalities affected the way that the national war records were created and the public and private pressures that were faced by the official historians as they attempted to create a foundation for future scholars. Through Cook's cogent analysis, the reader is introduced to some of the period's most important chroniclers of Canada's past, Max Aitken, Archer Fortescue Duguid, and Charles P. Stacey, as well as those generals and politicians who made their work possible, if not always easy. One comes to appreciate the tremendous impact of the national government in shaping the military history of a country, be it through providing (or indeed limiting) funding for the research or permitting (or denying) access to the relevant records. Cook is at his best when he provides a narrative account of the historians and their struggles. His writing, while occasionally repetitive, is accessible, and he is able to explain even the most technical aspects of war in a way that will not overwhelm the general reader. His thorough grasp of the relevant literature and impressive mining of the available primary material--material that would have been significantly more useful to future scholars if it had been collected in a general bibliography at the back (UBC Press, possibly the best university press in the country, should know better)--add credibility to his findings and establish this study as authoritative. This is a bold book that makes a number of potentially contentious claims, most if not all of which are entirely believable. Cook's explanation of the way in which Aitken manufactured a distinct identity for the Canadian Corps as military elites in the First World War is well documented and utterly convincing. While Cook concedes that official historians consciously held back material from the public on occasion, he defends those historians reasonably, portraying them as far less enslaved to their government sponsors than others have supposed. His criticism of the emphasis of official historians such as Stacey on the larger narrative as opposed to the individual soldier is equally credible, in spite of the time and political constraints that they faced. His condemnation of the federal Liberals in the postwar period, and particularly of the minister of defence, Brooke Claxton, exposes the party's obsession with power fairly, and the account of Stacey's battles with them is balanced in spite of Cook's obvious sympathies for the academics. …

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