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Director’s Letter – “Moving Forward”

After a period of uncertainty, the Centre has developed a program for moving forward over the next several years. A revised financial plan will allow us to continue our quarterly journal Canadian Military History, published in partnership with the Canadian War Museum, and to maintain many of our research, publication, and outreach activities. Our Military History Colloquium, Windsor conference, and Waterloo and Guelph public lectures are being run on a strict cost-recovery basis. Our latest guidebook, 1812: A Guide to the War and its Legacy, was fully-funded by a Departtment of National Defence grant with John and Pattie Cleghorn generously covering the cost of printing.

We are making other changes which will allow us to devote resources to activities that offer students opportunities for both volunteer and paid employment on major digitization and new media projects. We will be completing the air photo preservation project in 2013 and will begin development of a user-friendly interface this summer. Our most important new initiative is the creation of a Massive Open Online Course or ‘MOOC’ on “Operation Overlord: The Battle for Normandy.” Students will be responsible for the production and administration of the course in partnership with Desire2Learn, an international company based in Kitchener.

We look forward to an exciting period of activity building on the commitment of Board members, friends, and the energy of the young people who make it all work.

Terry Copp
Director, LCMSDS
Professor Emeritus, WLU

Ivana Caccia, Managing the Canadian Mosaic in Wartime: Shaping Citizenship Policy, 1939-1945 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010). 359 pages.

Reviewed by Mario Nathan Coschi (McMaster University)

Ivana Caccia’s Managing the Canadian Mosaic in Wartime examines Canadian government policies concerning ethnic minorities during the Second World War. While many existing works center on the marginalization of certain ethnic groups deemed a threat to national security, Caccia focuses on attempts to mobilize ethnic minorities to support the war by integrating them into the national fabric. During the war, Caccia contends, with the pressing need to marshal all of Canada’s resources to support the war effort, including human resources, the issue of integrating ethnic minorities became a matter of national concern. Hitherto, policy-makers had seen the issue as a local one, affecting only places where there were a large number of immigrants. (p. 4) She therefore studies the advisory Committee on Co-operation in Canadian Citizenship (CCCC) and its administrative Nationalities Branch, part of the Department of National War Services, which were established to promote good relations between the government and ethnic minorities and secure the participation of the latter in the war effort. Caccia examines the papers of the politicians, government officials, and other elite men who were involved with the CCCC and Nationalities Branch found at the Library and Archives of Canada. She argues that, during the war years, these men “produced and legitimized a new discourse of national self-identification and put in place institutional structures to serve as vehicles for its validation,” which paved the way for the creation of a distinct Canadian citizenship after the war. (p. 8)

Although N.F. Dreisziger argues that there was no debate over how to integrate the various ethnic groups into Canada’s social fabric, Caccia maintains that this was not the case. (p. 6) While policy-makers held differing attitudes towards ethnic minorities, the direction they took was also influenced by the need to balance conflicting goals such as winning the war, integrating “foreigners,” defending a Canadian “way of life,” and guarding against Nazi and communist sympathizers while avoiding alienating Canada’s ally, the Soviet Union. Thus, there was no consensus over how the integration of ethnic minorities was to be accomplished resulting in policies that were at times ambivalent. Along with these concerns, simple pragmatism played a role in determining how the government dealt with ethnic minorities. Officials, for instance, chose Tracy Philipps to head up the Nationalities Branch, despite the fact that his paternalistic approach differed from that of top policy-makers, partly because he was ready, willing, and able to take on the role. That he came recommended by British authorities also worked in his favour. (p. 112-114) Conflicting personalities, budgetary constraints, illness, and frequent personnel changes also influenced the operations of the CCCC and Nationalities Branch.

Caccia’s work is, however, too focused on a small handful of intellectuals, particularly Tracy Philipps, in striving to create a new national identity during the Second World War. She devotes an entire chapter to detailing the career and life experiences of Philipps prior to his arrival in Canada in 1940. She argues that his career, which took him, in various capacities, across Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, influenced the controversial paternalistic approach he took to dealing with ethnic minorities while heading up the Nationalities Branch (p. 89). Strangely, while she goes into great detail about the operations of the Nationalities Branch during Philipps’ tenure, Caccia gives comparatively short shrift to the period after his unceremonious departure in May 1944, which she discusses briefly in the last half of the final chapter. During this period, the Nationalities Branch, which was renamed the Citizenship Division, began to focus on citizenship education as a means of integrating newcomers and preparing for a peacetime mandate.

Even when she discusses broader forces such as changing public attitudes towards racial or ethnic difference, Caccia is too narrowly focused on the role of a small handful of elites. Caccia primarily examines the papers of figures such as Philipps rather than the ethnic groups with whom they interacted. As a result, she pays little attention to the actual objects of the government policies in question, the Canadians of non-British, non-French origins. She contends that, at the time, “the voices of ethnically marginalized Canadians were not part of the mainstream political discourse” and so as a result they seldom appear in her book (p. 9). When they did “speak publicly on their own behalf,” Caccia suggests that it is because they had been “awakened” to do so by Philipps and the Nationalities Branch. (p. 159) The most vocal ethnic group in Caccia’s book are Ukrainian communists. They opposed Philipps because of his strident anticommunism and opinion on the future of the Ukraine rather than because they articulated their own views on a unified Canadian identity and how best to attain it. She only briefly mentions the Canada Press Club which included members of the ethnic press and sought to promote national unity both during the war and beyond (p. 156-157), or the Canadian Unity Council, which was created by several ethnic organizations and whose leaders resented Philipps’ paternalistic Nationalities Branch and felt they could provide a more effective alternative to it. (p. 195) In her conclusion, Caccia contends that public recognition that ethnic minorities, as well as women, needed to play, and actually did play, a vital role in the war effort brought about a rethinking of their status and roles as citizens. Could this be, at least in part, because these ethnic minorities and women began to demand equal recognition as citizens in view of their contributions and sacrifices during the war?

Managing the Canadian Mosaic in Wartime provides insight into the inner workings of a government office and the many factors, both macro, such as changing public attitudes, and micro, such as conflicting personalities, which helped shape government policy. What remains to be done is a fuller appreciation of how ethnic Canadians played an important role in shaping the discourse of national self-identification, rather than being an inert mass until spurred into action by members of the Canadian political elite.

David S. McDonough, ed., Canada’s National Security in the Post-9/11 World: Strategy, Interests, and Threat (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012). 320 pages.

Reviewed by Geoff Keelan (University of Waterloo)

In the ever-changing international arena, national security requires fresh approaches and adaptability. Works like Canada’s National Security in the Post-9/11 World: Strategy, Interests, and Threats are a valuable addition to a field of Canadian academic literature that is unfortunately limited. It is modelled after the 1995 collection Canada’s International Security Policy,[1] which was one of the first works comprehensively to discuss Canadian security policy. This collection is an attempt to update the 1995 work for the post-9/11 world. Edited by David S. McDonough, it includes contributors from a broad range of backgrounds, such as government ministers, former civil servants, military officers, and academics. The range of perspectives allows the book to escape the limitations of a single discipline or methodology. Instead, its contributors explore “strategic principles” that can “provide a guide on how to better inculcate strategy and national security concerns into Canada’s foreign and defence policies.” (p. 11) The collection is strengthened further by an impressive source base, which, depending on the author’s area of expertise, include policy journals, scholarly studies, government and military documents, and historical works. Almost all of the chapters offer a long list of citations and can serve as a valuable starting point for a scholar seeking more information about their subject.

The book is organized into five sections, each of which examine different aspects of Canada’s national security. Part One looks at “A Framework for National Security,” while Part Two examines the “The Home Front.” Part Three discusses “Regions and Players of Interest,” Part Four explores “Expeditionary Missions and the Future of the CF,” and Part Five addresses “Issues, Risks and Threats.” The years-long project from which the collection originated, the editors note, was developed to bring these “topics together under a guiding framework that offers the beginnings of a more coherent strategic approach to Canadian national and international security affairs.” (p. 8) In the introduction, McDonough outlines the “grand strategy” that ties each of the book’s chapters together. For him, each author adds to a “grand strategy [that] can perhaps best be conceptualized as a means-ends chain that helps policymakers identify the long-term, security-enhancing foreign policy goals and interests; the threats or challenges to those goals from adversaries and allies alike; and the relevant resources, capabilities and instruments of statecraft (military and non-military, national and allied) to achieve these goals.” (p. 10) Each chapter contributes a unique perspective to this broader understanding of a Canadian grand strategy, changing the work from a disparate series of policy studies to a coherent overview of Canadian national security in the decade after 9/11 and its direction in the years to come.

At its core Canada’s National Security Interests is a realist and rationalist interpretation of Canada’s international policy. It allows each of the contributors to craft their own perspective and argument and, understandably, this leads to some conflict between the authors. One such example is the authors’ differing opinions on where Canada’s interests lie in the post-Cold War era. Alexander Moens, for instance, argues persuasively that NATO and the EU are both a “vital interest” and “major interest” for Canada. (p. 142) A few chapters later, Thomas Adams and Douglas Goold both highlight the anachronism of Eurocentric international policy (p. 170, 187), and instead suggest that Canada’s new interests lie in Asia and the Pacific. Meanwhile, Douglas L. Bland and Brian McDonald highlight Canada’s defence policies which focus on “two intertwined strategic imperatives: the defence of Canada by Canadians and the defence of North America in cooperation with the United States.” (p. 232) The dialogue between contributors is a strength for an edited collection that claims to provide “the foundations for a Canadian strategic approach to national and international security.” (p. 296) These dissenting perspectives allow the reader to judge for himself/herself how Canadian strategies might evolve as Ottawa faces new challenges and opportunities in the 21^st century.

Despite these strengths, the work is not as comprehensive as it could be. One of the most glaring absences is a lack of discussion on the role of cyber operations in Canadian national security policy. There are only two brief mentions of cyber operations in the collection, and both are in the context of cyber terrorism. (p. 53, 185) A chapter devoted to the topic, or perhaps more focus within the existing contributions, would have been beneficial. Canada’s Public Safety Office and the Canadian Forces continue to expand their understanding of cyber operations, which reflects an increasing awareness of the impact cyber operations have on international affairs (as recent examples such as the Georgian and Estonian cyber attacks or the STUXNET virus demonstrate). Cyber operations increasingly will change the parameters of our own national security as well as those of our allies, and should have been addressed further in this collection. In fairness to the editors, the work began as a multi-year project at a time when cyber operations were less crucial to international security compared to 2013. Still, an opportunity for some exploratory discussion existed.

A strength of this work is its broad appeal – anyone interested in Canadian defence and foreign policy will appreciate it. Within the field of history, there are a few sections that are noteworthy. Historians familiar with David Bercuson and J.L. Granatstein will find their chapter “From Paardeberg to Panjwai” valuable as it provides a concise historical review of lessons learned from Canada’s previous military expeditionary forces. (p. 193-208) Bland and McDonald offer a tantalizingly brief explanation of the “Claxton Doctrine,” named after Minister of Defence Brooke Claxton, whose 1947 statement about Canada and the United Nations outlined the voluntary nature of Canadian participation in international actions and, according to its authors, is a position worth remembering today. (p. 231) Their “Claxton Doctrine” easily leads to historical questions about Claxton’s significance and influence on Canadian international affairs after he left his post in 1952. Equally intriguing is Bland and McDonald’s reference to a “Laurier Doctrine” (p. 228) which amounts to a limited defence policy dependent upon American military defence of the continent (and of Canada) in the case of a crisis. For historians, Laurier’s foreign policy pronunciations are usually reserved to “if Britain is at war, Canada is at war,” so this is an intriguing idea that perhaps suggests how little we know about Canadian-American relations and Laurier’s diplomatic relationship with the United States in the early 20^th century.

As interesting as some of the questions that are raised might be to a historian reading this work, there are also several claims that they might equally contest. The persistent claim throughout the work that Canada has had a strategic culture of “forward defence” from the Boer War to Afghanistan (p. 50, 98, 141) might be accurate for more recent conflicts, but it is harder to prove for the Boer War or the First World War. In an historical context, Canadian participation was not driven by a need to meet threats “over there” but rather a perceived imperial obligation to participate. To be sure, the defence of Empire was connected to defending against the German menace “in Europe” during the First World War, but few seriously considered it as a prelude to facing Germany in North America. These engagements may have led to a Canadian strategic culture of forward defence, but they are not necessarily demonstrative of it. Taking our experience in Afghanistan and searching for historical similarities is both ‘present-ist’, dangerous, and should be resisted. Similarly, Hugh D. Segal’s overview of the “toxic complacency” of the 1930s and appeasement’s failure to stop the outbreak of the Second World War (p. 60) could have benefited from some context on the limitations and beliefs of the decision-makers at that time. Including more scholarly historical works would have aided the discussion of international policy in the 1930s. It is far too easy to forget that there were pragmatic diplomatic and military considerations that informed appeasement policy, and that its failure was not necessarily inevitable.

That all being said, these issues are not wholly reflective of the collection’s quality and do not detract from its stated purpose. That several chapters misuse history to their author’s advantage is regrettable: hindsight should always be considered carefully when discussing history, especially in a multidisciplinary collection which includes valuable insights on current-day problems.

Even so, historians will undoubtedly be intrigued by the questions that the contributors raise about the history of Canadian attitudes and policy towards national security. Non-historians, likewise, will find its arguments insightful and its sources helpful. Overall, Canada’s National Security in the Post-9/11 World: Strategy, Interests, and Threats is well worth reading for anyone seeking to understand Canada’s present and future place in the world.

Book Description:

“Lt. Col. J. Laurence (Laurie) Black (1900-1992) graduated from RMC in 1921 and began his career as a reserve officer with the 8th Hussars (NB). He went active and overseas as second-in-command of the regiment in 1941. As a result of a family tragedy, he took what he thought was a temporary transfer back to Canada in 1942. These diaries and letters document his experiences battling military bureaucracy while serving the Canadian armed forces variously as training officer, intelligence officer, liaison with US forces, and even as adviser for wartime propaganda movies. His on-site analyses of Operation Greenlight (Kiska), the US management of the Attu invasion, and Canada’s western coastal defences, are insightful. His comments on the behaviour and training of Canadian and US troops, British attitudes, Japanese forces, conscription in Canada, and other issues, provide a glimpse into the war effort from a rarely seen perspective.”

About the Editors:

July 2011: Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) wait for food distribution at the Badbado camp. Famine has been declared in two regions of southern Somalia – southern Bakool and Lower Shabelle. The United Nations indicates that 3.7 million people across the country, that’s nearly half of the Somali population, are now in crisis and in urgent need of assistance. An estimated 2.8 million of those are in the south.

Somalia has spent much of the past two decades mired in a civil conflict that accelerated with the collapse of Mohamed Siad Barre’s regime. Several years of violence led to the collapse, and it has been followed by two decades of virtual lawlessness. While it has largely been men actively fighting, women have suffered famine, family disintegration, degenerating quality of life, and sexual violence in the ensuing conflict. Over the coming months this blog will detail some of the tragedies and challenges, as well as the triumphs of women in Somalia.

A coastal country in the eastern Horn of Africa, Somalia’s population is almost entirely Muslim, but is made up of several competing clans. It gained independence in 1960, maintaining a kind of democracy for nine years before Mohamed Siad Barre seized power during a bloodless coup in 1969. Barre had a vision for the country that was what some have called “social Islam.” He ostensibly tried to rid Somalia of its clan divisions and establish widespread accessible education, in part by creating an alphabet and a written Somali language.

Barre’s downfall came, in part, because of a conflict he initiated with Ethiopia – home to a number of ethnic Somalis. There are also allegations that despite his rhetoric against clans he was giving those from his own Darod clan more power within government. In 1991 he was ousted from power by a number of militias, and the country spiraled into a lawless, leaderless state that proved dangerous for everyone – especially women. Since then, the country has seen a significant turn towards a more conservative, traditional form of Islam. No single figure or group was able to step into the leadership role after Barre’s departure, but many religious leaders filled the vacuum left by the former government. This power vacuum helped facilitate the rise of al-Shabaab, an Islamic extremist group that was added to the U.S. State Department list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations in 2008.

Nov 2012: A Somali girl crosses a street on her way to school while soldiers of AMISOM’s Djiboutian contingent stand guard.

While Somalia has historically been a Muslim country, the family and cultural dynamic naturally shifted with the rise of Islamic conservatism. One of the more obvious changes began with women’s dress. Traditionally Somali women have not worn a veil. In the case of nomads, which once comprised a large part of the population, light outfits were commonly worn to permit easy movement and not impede their physically demanding lifestyle. The rise of conservative Islam, however, has led many women (by choice or coercion) to begin wearing the veil as it is seen as part of the natural order of women’s life.

Islamic conservatism has also had an increasing impact on schooling for girls and young women. Despite the push for education under Barre, the Somali school system has crumbled without a regime in power – because there is no central government, many of the schools that are operating are madrassas, Kuranic schools funded by oil-rich Middle Eastern states that have traditionally followed a more conservative line of Islam and influence Somalia through financial aid. Just as religious leaders filled positions left by the departure of the Barre government, Islamic charity organizations are now also taking over the administration of public services (like education) that have been neglected. Although not all Islamic charities promote a more conservative lifestyle than previously existed in Somalia, their influence, particularly through education, can pose significant challenges to girls’ education.

For many Somali children, most notably in rural areas, Kuranic schools are all that are available. For girls especially, who are given more domestic duties, Kuranic schools can be more flexible than formal education, and provide their only opportunity for any sort of schooling. That said, madrassas are generally run by one teacher, who rarely has any sort of secular training and who is there mainly to impart a religious education. This perpetuates an increasingly conservative culture, one aspect of which is the belief in the importance of separating the sexes, which ultimately creates greater difficulty for girls in attaining education.

Even though Somalia never attained a universal education system under Barre (particularly in rural areas), the number of children able to attend school was increasing steadily. Girls especially were benefitting, albeit slowly – from 1974 to 1984, high school enrollment for girls rose from 17 to 34 per cent. Now, shockingly few Somali children have access to even the most basic primary education. According to one study in the International Journal of Educational Research, 48 per cent of girls say they have never been to school compared to 32 per cent of boys.[1] The conservative culture creates an environment where parents are already reluctant to send their daughters to co-ed schools, but there is also a significant possibility that a male instructor will supervise them.

A related issue, especially in rural areas, is the danger of getting to school. According to the CIA, 63 per cent of Somalis lived in rural areas in 2010, so attending school generally means travelling a significant distance. This leaves girls susceptible to violent, often sexually motivated attacks. Even after arriving at school, the majority of staff and faculty are men. In 2001, men led 97 per cent of schools and held 86 per cent of the teaching positions. More recent statistics from the Somaliland and Puntland regions, where 84 and 82 per cent of teachers are male, illustrate that there has been little change over the last decade. In a culture where value is placed on a female’s virginity, fear of violence both in and outside of the school system has contributed further to a culture already averse to sending girls to school. Instead many families choose to keep their daughters close at home.

The possibility of sexual violence carries with it physical, emotional, cultural and material consequences for the young girls and their families. In Somalia a woman’s virginity is not merely a personal trait or quality. Many families rely on income from marrying off their daughters, and girls who have had sex, regardless of whether they were forced into it, bring a lower price, if anything at all. In a warzone, sexual attacks are more prevalent, which has led many families to marry their daughters at younger ages in an attempt to preempt attacks. Once married, schooling is not a priority as women are expected to fulfill the role of mother and homemaker.

Oct 2012: A woman stands at her meat kiosk, holding her child, in a market area of southern Somalia’s port city of Kismayo.

If not already married, young girls are often stuck at home helping their mother run the household. The fighting in the country has, naturally, led many families into a deeper poverty than existed in the past. With limited resources, education is either not possible for any children in a family, or prioritized for sons. Girls are expected to stay home and help their mother. In some cases, if husbands and sons are off fighting or killed, the mother becomes the breadwinner of the family and they may rely on daughters to take over running the house entirely. This happens commonly in refugee camps – women become vendors in an effort to feed their families, while men see themselves as ‘above’ selling at these venues because it is inherently a “woman’s space.”

The problem of education in Somalia has been compounded by the increase in poverty due to ongoing civil conflict. Without a central government funding schools, many institutions are scraping by with a lack of infrastructure and resources, creating unique problems for girls. For instance, girls find it more difficult than boys to attend schools where there are no washrooms with running water, for obvious sanitation reasons.

Another major hurdle to improving schooling opportunities is the number of refugees fleeing Somalia. It is nearly impossible to receive suitable education while on the run. While some refugees flee to countries with strong education systems, like Canada, many end up in refugee camps living in squalid conditions with limited food let alone educational resources. By 1993, 300,000 refugees had fled to neighbouring Kenya, many landing at Dadaab Refugee camp – often described as the world’s largest. Of those, 80 per cent were women and children.

Dec 2011: Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon (seated right) and Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser (next to Mr. Ban), President of the sixty-sixth session of the General Assembly, meet with Somali refugee families in Dadaab, Kenya. With hundreds of thousands of refugees from neighbouring Somalia, Dadaab hosts one of the largest refugee camps in the world.

The conflict in Somalia has made life more difficult for almost everyone living there, but women and girls are in a unique position. They rarely participate directly in the fighting but are victims of the conflict in both direct and indirect ways. The death of male family members in the fighting can cause anguish, but also has a domino effect in terms of family dynamics. It has led more women to take over as breadwinners, which in turn forces families to increasingly rely on their daughters to run the household. In other cases, girls can be forced into early marriages with their own household to run as a preemptive measure against sexual violence. These daily features of Somali life have been compounded by existing barriers imposed by the decaying state of the Somali education system and the rise of fundamentalist teachings, which seek to redefine women’s roles in the public and private sphere. Societal norms have shifted as an increasingly conservative form of Islam filled the vacuum of power left by Barre’s downfall. The consequence of all these factors is that girls are being denied the opportunity for a basic education, and with it, the ability to determine their own future in a country that sorely needs them to move forward towards peace.

Sagittarius Rising chronicles the life of British ace Cecil Lewis, exploring the exhilaration and terror of the first war in the skies. The autobiography recounts many compelling incidents – dog-fights over No Mans’ Land, including an encounter with the Red Baron, to his innovative defence of London against night raids – but at its heart it reveals a fundamentally different perspective of WWI: the pilots, and Lewis in particular, led a life in many ways above that of the trench-bound men below.

Volunteering to join the Royal Flying Corps during WWI appealed to a certain personality type – the risk-seeking young bloods. ‘You should live gloriously, generously, dangerously. Safety last!’ Much glamour surrounding the ‘birdmen,’ as flying was still considered something of a miracle (‘On the ground you know where you are, but in the air – well, where are you?’). ‘We who practiced it were thought very brave, very daring, very gallant: we belonged to a world apart.’ Throughout his youth Lewis dreamed of flying, making models and reading everything he could get his hands on. ‘I hardly remember a time when I was not air-minded’ (31; 136; 263; 16).

When the war broke out he seized his chance. A year too young and several inches too tall – at 6f 3in, the staff captain remarked, ‘I don’t think you could get into the machine’ – he feared being turned down, but after an agonizing three-month wait, he was admitted to the RFC.

It wasn’t long until he was flying. ‘I lived for the air. There was nothing in life to compare with taking a machine off the ground, wheeling away into the sky, trying turns, spirals, dives, stalls, gliding, zooming, doing all the stunts a pilot needs to give him confidence and nerve in a tight corner’ (36). Such stunts prepared the airmen for making decisions at 10,000 feet, split-second maneuvers at five hundred feet, and diving at a hundred miles an hour.

From the cockpit of a Parasol or Biplane, the landscape was seen with different eyes: ‘The earth, so far below! A patchwork of fields, browns and greys, here and there dappled with the green of spring woods, intersecting ribbons of straight roads, minute houses, invisible men.’ The soldiers below were also seen in new light: ‘Men! Standing, walking, talking, fighting there beneath me! I saw them for the first time with detachment, dispassionately: a strange, pitiable, crawling race, to us who strode the sky’ (57).

From the air, Lewis’s perception of his situation from that of an infantryman was stark: ‘You did not sit in a muddy trench while some one who had no personal enmity against you loosed off a gun, five miles away, and blew you to smithereens – and did not know he had done it! That was not fighting; it was murder. Senseless, brutal, ignoble. We were spared that.’ In a sense, it was true. Lewis notes that even under the most arduous conditions, pilots were never under fire for more than six hours a day. After patrol each day, their war was over, and they returned to a bed, a bath, a mess with good food, and peace until the next patrol: ‘we were never under any bodily fatigue, never filthy, verminous, or exposed to the long disgusting drudgery of trench warfare’ (45; 137).

Aerial dogfighting was more noble, more heroic: ‘if the world must fight to settle its differences, back to Hector and Achilles!’ (46).^[1] Only rarely was the diving Lewis gun used on the enemy gathered in the trenches below; and only on a single occasion was a bomb dropped, a twenty-pound explosive with a fuse pin, literally thrown overboard (most planes were not yet fitted with bomb racks).[i]

In 1916, planes were used mainly for reconnaissance. A squadron of twelve planes – three flights of four – had three main tasks. The first was observing artillery. Pilots were notified of the targets that the batteries wished to range. A firing time was agreed upon and, map in hand, the pilots took to the air. Once they were over the correct spot at the agreed time, the guns would fire below. Observing the range of the field guns, the pilot would let out his aerial – a long copper wire with a lead plummet on the end – switch on the transmitter, and call up the battery in Morse code. Various directions would be given – ‘Over,’ ‘Short,’ ‘Left,’ ‘Right’ – until the enemy target was correctly sighted (82-3).

The second task was aerial photography. Lewis’s job was to check the accuracy of the maps ahead of the Somme offensive. This required going over the front line at 7500 feet, and flying all along the enemy second-line trenches from Montauban, around the Fricourt salient, and up to Boisselle, photographing as they went. Of course, aerial reconnaissance in 1916 was a complex and difficult procedure:

‘The observer could not operate the camera from his seat because of the plane directly below him, so it was clamped on outside the fuselage, beside the pilot; a big, square, shiny mahogany box with a handle on top to change the plates (yes, plates!). To make an exposure you pulled a ring on the end of a cord. To sight it, you leaned over the side and looked through a ball and cross-wire finder.’

The difficulty, and the danger, did not stop there.

‘The pilot, then, had to fly the machine with his left hand, get over the spot on the ground he wanted to photograph – not so easy as you might think – put his arm out into the seventy-mile-an-hour wind, push the camera handle back and forward to change the plates, pulling the string between each operation’ (65).

The third vital service the planes performed was trench reconnaissance, or ‘Contact Patrol.’ Confirmation of exact positions was difficult. Even on the fourth day of the Somme offensive, the Corps Intelligence was not clear on the point. Patrolling at low altitude, often below the thousand-foot mark, pilots waited to see the flares, the position of which was marked on the map. ‘We sailed over the mines and called for flares with our Klaxon. After a minute one solitary flare spurted up, crimson, from the lip of the crater. It looked forlorn, that solitary little beacon, in the immense pitted miles of earth around. We came down to five hundred feet and sailed over it, trying to distinguish the crouching khaki figures, huddled in their improvised trenches in the khaki-coloured earth. It was not easy’ (109). Once the coordinates were established and copied down, they were dropped over battalion headquarters in a weighted message-bag.

There was, of course, much to be frightened of. Enemy guns might get the range (anything below one thousand feet received attention from machine-guns below), or the dreaded Fokker appear before them in the skies, or the engine give out and the plane go down ‘in Hunland’: ‘We were at the mercy of the fragility of the machine and the unreliability of the engine. One chance bullet from the ground might cut a thin wire, put the machine out of control, and send us, perfectly whole, plunging to a crash we were powerless to prevent’ (60). Other fears reigned, too, aside from the fragility of the machine.

As the war continued, fear became more internalized: ‘we had to win victories over ourselves long before we won any over the enemy, for it was not impossible to turn back, to tell a lie – not always easy to verify – of faulty engine, bad visibility, jammed guns, and so stave off the inevitable for one day more’ (60).

‘Inevitable’ isn’t hyperbole. The average lifespan of a WWI pilot was three weeks. ‘It was the fear of the unforeseen, the inescapable, the imminent hand of death which might, and any moment, be ruthlessly laid upon me. I realized, not then, but later, why pilots cracked up, why they lost their nerve and had to go home. Nobody could stand the strain indefinitely, ultimately it reduced you to a dithering state, near to imbecility’ (66).^[ii] Lewis was forced to confront this urge for self-preservation. But first he had to get the lay of the land.

 Woefully unprepared – he arrived in France with thirteen hours’ flying, when he should have had at least sixty – Lewis tried to log as many hours as possible, to map-read the earth beneath him, to learn how to identify landmarks at 10,000 feet, to master different types of aircraft, to judge the hazards that materialized without warning, and to find his way back through any weather like a homing pigeon.

In many ways, pilots saws themselves as fighting a different war from the soldiers below – ‘The air was our element, the sky our battlefield’ (93). Still, the trenches loomed below, a horrible place. ‘The war below us was a spectacle. We aided and abetted it, admiring the tenacity of men who fought in verminous filth to take the next trench thirty yards away. But such objectives could not thrill us, who, when we raised our eyes, could see objective after objective receding, fifty, sixty, seventy miles beyond.’ From the detached perspective of the pilot, the futility of the war was even more clear, more glaring: ‘the mountainous waste of life and wealth to stake a mile or two.’ It soon became impossible to miss the absurdity: ‘a prodigious and complex effort, cunningly contrived, and carried out with deadly seriousness, in order to achieve just nothing at all’ (93).

Other horrors lurked in ‘ground warfare,’ such as the creeping yellow mist of poison gas. Already a mile above the earth, Lewis instinctively climbed higher to escape it. ‘In the light westerly wind is slid slowly down the German trenches, creeping pantherlike over the scarred earth, curling into dugouts, coiling and uncoiling at the wind’s whim. Men were dying there, under me, from a whiff of it; not dying quickly, nor even maimed or shattered, but dying whole, retching and vomiting blood and guts; and those who lived would be wrecks with seared, poisoned lungs, rotten for life’ (120).

On one occasion, Lewis did see the trenches up close, as his plane went down (a connecting rod crystallized and snapped in half). Reality exceeded his fears.

‘It was a desolation, unimaginable from the air. The trees by the roadside were riven and splintered, their branches blown hither and thither, and the cracked stumps stuck up uselessly into the air, flanking the road, forlorn, like a byway to hell […] Every five square yards held a crater. The earth had no longer its smooth familiar face. It was diseased, pocked, rancid, stinking of death in the morning sun’ (113).

Lewis experienced much else in the skies during WWI, but it was these early experiences that stayed with him longest. Haunted by the image of yellow drifting gas below, Lewis thought of the future and feared for the worst.

‘To-day all treaties, conventions, leagues, all words of honour, contracts, obligations are evidently worth nothing once the lust for power has infected a nation. Within twenty years of these days I write [1936], every country, under a veneer of self-righteous nationalism, is preparing, with increased ingenuity and deadlier weapons, a greater Armageddon – all the while protesting their love of peace.’

Lewis felt the lesson was clear to anyone willing to look. ‘We are, collectively, the most evil and destructive of human creatures. We back up our greeds and jealousies with religion and patriotism. Our Christian priests bless the launching of battleships, our youth is urged to die gloriously “for King and Country.” We even write on the tomb of the Unknown Warrior that he died “for God!”’

Pilots were the advance guard for the wars to come. Lewis had a sense of what lay ahead; even the heroic and distant pilots could not escape the onslaught of violence matched with the advance of science.

‘The next war will see that yellow drift not stealing down into front-line dugouts, but along London streets. My breed, the pilots […] will be ordered to do violence to the civilian population. We shall drop bombs and poison the reservoirs. We shall kill the women and children. Of course the thing is insane; but then if the world submits to the rule of homicidal maniacs, it deserves to be destroyed’ (122).

For that brief period, war in the skies was clean and noble, high above the crescendo of shells and the eerie silence of the poison gas. The corpses and rats and slaughtered horses were made invisible by the distance. ‘Why, God might take the air and come within a mile of earth and never know there were such things as men. Vain the heroic gesture, puny the great thought! Poor little maggoty men!’ (57).

But pilots were men, too, and even from the loftiest height, Lewis could not sever his connection with the tragedy below, or the role he played in it. Pilots, gallant and daring though they were, were not truly a world apart. They were parts of the same whole, the body of war, and even floating above the gas or enjoying the mess hall and a bed, he did not forget it: ‘The Infantry admired our nerve while we admired their phlegm’ (137).

After the war the soldiers would meet at grand parties, dancing and drinking with ladies and civilians, both airmen and infantry, bound to the earth by their shared humanity:

‘The last notes died away and left us stranded on a hush. The goddess was created, here in the gloom, carved from a fair white silence. Then music came again: a waltz, an old slow waltz, that swung us out in couples on the turf. The journeying was over, the wandering was done; we had come home. Would there not always be, as now, a rhythm we both heard and moved to, lightly, firmly held? Should we not find, as in these mazy silent steps, a common path to last us to the end?’ (265).

Cecil Lewis, Sagittarius Rising (London, 1936; 2009)

*All images courtesy Wiki Commons. 1) Nieuport biplane fighter, Haut-Rhin, France, 1917; Paul Castelnau; 2) RFC recruiting poster, 1913; 3) British planes in formation. Unknown; 4) Aerial photograph showing German trenches east of Arras; 5) A RFC B.E.2c reconnaissance aircraft with a camera fixed to the fuselage, 1916; Imperial War Museums collections, UK; 6) Fokker aircraft; 7) Battle of Verdun; 8) Vimy Ridge, 1917; 9) German Albatross D.III fighters, Huj airfield, 1917.

MCpl. Mark R. Isfeld:

Many Canadians have served on several international missions in the course of their careers, repeatedly fulfilling their duties against the constant background of danger. One example of this special effort comes from Master Corporal Mark Isfeld. He was a combat engineer who served in three peace missions before losing his life in a landmine explosion in Croatia in 1994.

While serving overseas Mark was known for giving children in war-torn regions handmade dolls that his mother crocheted. These ‘Izzy dolls’ brought a smile and a glimmer of hope to children facing tremendous hardship. Mark’s legacy continues and thousands of these dolls have been crocheted and donated by people all across Canada. The dolls are distributed to Canadian soldiers who in turn give them to children in war-torn countries. This kind and generous act by countless Canadians keeps MCpl. Isfeld’s tradition alive.

The essay question: What is a peacekeeper? Peacemaker?

The Mark R. Isfeld Essay Contest is named after the heroic Mark R. Isfeld.  He sacrificed his life in the pursuit of peace and since his death, people across Canada have continued to make and donate “Izzy” dolls for Canadian soldiers to give to children.

Mark is just one example. Peacemakers exist throughout Canada, in our cities, towns and local communities. You may have peacekeepers living with you in your home. In honour of Mark, the Canadian Landmine Foundation wants YOU to submit an essay and tell us what characterizes a peacemaker?

Why does it matter that we have peacekeepers and peacemakers in our communities? To help you in this process, you can learn about individuals in your community or prominent Canadians that have embodied peacemaking and tell us about them. What have they done to bring about peace to their community, the country and the world? Why do you admire them? You have an opportunity to explore these ideas in your submission for the Mark R. Isfeld Essay Contest.

By doing this, YOU will have an opportunity to learn about positive role models that are dedicated to achieving a better world. Building strong commitments to peace internationally must start with an individual’s dedication to peace at home.

Open to all Canadian residents between the ages of 14 and 18. Essays may be submitted in either official language.

Prizes:

1st Place: $500.00

2nd Place: $300.00

3rd Place: $200.00

There will also be an honourable mention.

Interested in submitting an essay for this year’s contest?

Deadline: 26 May 2013

Submit your essay via e-mail or mail.

E-Mail: admin@canadianlandmine.org

or

Mail: Canadian Landmine Foundation
c/o LCMSDS Wilfrid Laurier University,
266 Marsland Dr.,
Waterloo, ON N2J 3Z1

Reviewed by Davis Brown (Assistant Professor of Political Science, Maryville University)

The phrase “military ethics” carries a certain meaning within the fields of those who traditionally have been members of ACUNS, namely scholars and practitioners of international relations and international law (including military law). That meaning is the ethical standards of behavior that govern the resort to military force and the methods and means of military operations (jus ad bellum and jus in bello, respectively). This edited collection of essays, however, is not about that form of “ethics,” but rather the ethical standards of conduct by military members within their organizations.

Jubilant Iraqis cheer U.S. Army Soldiers at a humanitarian aid compound in the city of Najaf.

There is an inherent tension between these two dimensions of military ethics. On one hand, good order and discipline within a military organization is essential to its success at the tactical, operational, and strategic levels. Military success depends on commanders being able to rely on their subordinates to follow their orders, and also on the subordinates being able to rely on each other for mutual protection and support. On the other hand, the old adage “I was just following orders” has rationalized too many tragedies in military history. Individual military members must also be able to discern when the facts on the ground are such that blindly following orders would actually impede success—or worse, constitute a manifest violation of the law of armed conflict. Balancing those competing interests and resolving those tensions is quite difficult. This book does not appear to offer any significant insight into that problem, assuming that this weighty problem is even solvable.

The value of this book, rather, is in problematizing the contemporary settings in which lapses of personal ethical conduct among the military are most likely to occur, and in offering several models for designing formal, institutionalized, programs for inculcating ethical values into the members of modern military organizations. In that vein, the audience for which this book has the greatest value is those professionals, both military and civilians, who are charged with designing such programs. The book contains comparatively little on the actual content of ethical standards of behavior, beyond the broad admonitions that military members must display courage and integrity, which they and the readers already know. Put another way, trainees in the standards of personal conduct will not find this book useful, but the trainers will.

The book is not without weaknesses, some of which are probably simply endemic to edited volumes. The quality of the chapters is varied. Some are quite informative to the reader who is unfamiliar with the scholarship of this particular type of “military ethics.” Others appear to have been included due to the position of the author or for the sake of maintaining a priori cultural diversity, for they stray from the primary focus of the volume and do not advance the reader’s knowledge of the problem at hand. A few chapters would have benefited further from more rigorous copy editing in order to improve the language and style.

The portions that should prove to be of greatest value are Chapters 2 and 4 through 8. I would, however, recommend that the reader begin with Chapter 4, titled “Ethics in the 21st Century Profession of Arms: A Context for Developing Leaders of Character.” This chapter highlights the need for military training programs to react to the rapid changes in expertise, responsibility, and corporateness, the three Huntingtonian dimensions of the military profession, which have taken place over the last generation—along with the challenges that the changed security environment poses to the same. The authors of Chapter 4 are particularly concerned about finding ways to overcome those challenges.

The challenges themselves are outlined in more detail in Chapter 8, “Morally Challenging Situations: Potential Sources of Moral Stress in a Military Context.” This chapter, which I recommend be read second, is a discourse on several sources of moral stresses. These include being forced to tolerate attitudes in a different culture that are morally offensive in one’s own, insufficient support from organization/leadership for taking action to protect innocents from immediate harm, and the fear of making the wrong decision when confronted with a moral dilemma.

U.S. soldier and Iraqi child.

Solutions to these problems are proposed in Chapters 2 and 6. Chapter 2, “Ethics Research: Moral Psychology and its Promise of Benefits for Moral Reasoning in the Military,” orients the reader who is unfamiliar with moral psychology with its cornerstone, the work of Lawrence Kohlberg, and introduces a neo-Kohlbergian model for moral behavior in the form of a Four Component Model developed by James Rest. The chapter then makes the case that ethics education will actually have an effect on military members’ moral judgment and reasoning. The chapter, however, also finds that improvements in moral judgments and reasoning do not necessarily result in increasingly moral behavior. This seems like a disturbing finding, particularly for the profession of killing people and breaking things, but if this pessimistic outlook is objectively warranted then it is best that such a finding be out in the open.

Chapter 6, Developing Responsible Leaders – Ethics Education at the Swiss Military Academy,” also reports a similar empirical finding: that the basic moral beliefs of the officer corps and their cognitive abilities to recognize moral differences have little impact in their decisions in specific conflict situations. This chapter, however, is more optimistic for it makes a case that their ethical behavior can be improved. In a thread of logic not dissimilar to Yuen Foon Khong’s book Analogies at War (1992), the chapter attributes significant effects on ethical behavior to analogizing one’s current conflict situation to prior experiences. This claim, if true, opens up the possibility that moral behavior can be improved by intervention. The form of intervention recommended in this chapter, “Mission-Specific Dilemma Training,” is a coherent series of specific scenarios from which the officers may then generalize broader principles of ethical behavior. I suggest that this is likely the most valuable lesson of this volume, for there is a tendency within the academy to teach the abstract and expect one’s students to apply broad principles to specific situations. Chapter 6 suggests that the reverse is actually more effective, at least within the military profession. It would explain, among other things, the strong preference of some military organizations—including, as one example, the U.S. Air Force—to focus their law of armed conflict training on the teaching of specific rules.

Chapters 5 and 7 address some interesting problematiques. Chapter 5, “Preparing Value-Based Commanders for the 3rd Generation Singapore Armed Force,” examines ethics education in an environment in which the rank and file is as well educated—and often even more so—than the leadership. This societal feature may undermine the traditional source of military authority, which I would call the “aristocracy” of the officer corps (though the author does not call it this). Such a development seems likely to occur in many first-world countries. If this is true, then the need, as proposed in the chapter, to design ethics education in a way to build the “moral authority” of the officer corps, not merely the intellectual, technical, and social authority, is further underscored.

Chapter 7, “Analysis of Ethical Conduct within the Australian Defence Force,” reports on a survey of officers in which a pattern of ethical lapses in deployment situations was revealed. This chapter concludes that an environment of perpetual deployment is “more ethically risky” than an environment of prevailing peace. This is probably already intuitive to the military professional, but it also suggests that ethical lapses are more likely to occur during wars of choice than wars of critical necessity.

As contemporary military operations shift from classical warfare to counter-insurgency, peacekeeping and peace enforcement, and anti-terrorism, the link between strategic success and military ethics appears to have grown stronger. Good order and discipline in the ranks is necessary for success, but so are ethical checks on commanders, however risky they may be for the subordinate. The challenge for military organizations today is to devise training programs that will effectively teach the subordinate how and when one’s personal code of ethical conduct must overcome the presumption that orders must be followed. Although flawed in several respects, this book has the potential to assist military organizations in meeting that challenge.

It has been those sorts of questions that have underpinned my own quest to understand the past. For others, the reminders of what went before are more present and tangible. A recent piece in the Brantford Expositor tells the touching story of Hannah Beckett, a student at Brantford Collegiate Institute. Her great uncle is one of the many whose names are recorded on a memorial plaque dedicated to those who gave their lives in the First World War. It is these names – so near and yet so easily overlooked in the rush of life – that lie at the heart of a fascinating initiative of which I am proud to call myself a part: the Great War Centenary Association, Brantford – Brant County – Six Nations.

The GWCA is a not-for-profit organization seeking to “preserve and make available to the public, a permanent record of our community’s involvement during the First World War…”  It is the creation of Geoffrey Moyer, a librarian and local historian who has long held a passionate interest in the World Wars and their impact on his hometown. With the hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War approaching, he has brought together a team of educators, museum professionals and other community members dedicated to telling the stories of the men and women who served in the Great War.

The GWCA stands at the nexus of history and memory, inviting all those with an interest in the First World War to recall, reflect and remember. Its crown jewel will be its website, featuring the data that Moyer has painstakingly collected on all those who took part in the conflict from Brantford and environs. However, it has already launched a highly successful First World War lecture series and has begun working in partnership with local schools to enhance knowledge of the War and those it touched. In the same way that each drop I hear through the open kitchen window nourishes the garden below, each act of commemoration undertaken as the centenary of the Great War nears helps foster a fuller appreciation of 1914-1918, both the horrors it inflicted and the heroic sacrifices it prompted from soldier and civilians alike.

The Laurier Centre for Military Strategic and Disarmament Studies and Wilfrid Laurier University are pleased to host this year’s Military History Colloquium. The colloquium will be take place from 3-5 May. We will also be jointly hosting the Canadian Nautical Research Society annual conference which will run from 2-3 May at LCMSDS (232 King St. N., Waterloo). Any conference attendees may register for the Thursday CNRS session with a $15 additional fee.

In addition to panels throughout the conference, on 4 and 5 May, there will be a spotlight on teaching – “From Theory to Practice: engaging meaningful historical inquiry and pedagogical debates on war and society in the classroom from the elementary to post-graduate education.” Details on these sessions, as well as the MHC and CNRS panels are available in the final conference program below.

This year’s colloquium will also feature a number of special plenary sessions, including a keynote by Deputy Head and Librarian and Archivist of Canada, Dr. Daniel Caron, which will be held on Friday March 3rd at 8:45 am in the Senate and Board Chamber. Dr. Caron’s talk, “Challenges of the Digital Age: A New Choreography for Building Archives” is open to the entire WLU community and the general public.

LCMSDS Director and Professor Emeritus, Terry Copp, will be presenting his keynote address, “Educating Everyman’s Memory: Historians and Public Commemoration” on Saturday March 4th at 2:45 pm.

Note that this year there will be the usual Friday night banquet (included in registration fee), but also a casual dinner on Saturday night following the afternoon plenary session. To reserve your spot, please choose your dinner options by completing the blue form after registering for the conference here. Any and all participants may attend the Saturday dinner so long as you register by choosing your meal options.

Additional Conference Details

As with last year, all announcements and discussion can be followed on Twitter, this time using the hashtag #MHC2013. LCMSDS and our staff will be live-tweeting from panels and plenaries – feel free to join in on the conversation and follow along!

Visit the following links to access the preliminary conference schedule, registration, directions, and accommodation information:

Conference Program (updated 1 Mayl)

Conference Registration and Payment

Accommodation

Getting to Waterloo

Directions to the Conference and Parking (with maps)

Registration closes: 2 May 2013

If you have questions regarding the colloquium or schedule, please contact Mike Bechthold at mbechthold@wlu.ca or 519.884.0710 x4594

For questions regarding registration or payment, please contact Caitlin McWilliams at caitlin.mcwilliams@canadianmilitaryhistory.ca or 519.884.0710 x2080