About

 

Workers and Soldiers: Adventures in History

^{Terry Copp in his own words}

The invitation to write this memoir came with the suggestion that readers would be interested in an explanation of the various changes in my research and teaching agenda over a fifty-year career. This question, usually phrased as ‘Why did you switch from social to military history?,’ had led to earlier attempts to reflect on my professional life as a historian for graduate seminars at several universities.¹ Looking over the notes and in one case the text for these occasions, I was struck by the dangers of constructing memory without reference to hard evidence. Before beginning this exercise I reviewed my correspondence, daybooks, grant applications, and other materials from the ‘Copp Papers’ held by the Wilfrid Laurier University Archives.

Two things immediately stood out: it would be impossible to separate elements of my personal history from the narrative, and it would be equally misleading to impose a pattern when so many decisions were determined by opportunities presented or denied by the peer review process of journals and granting agencies. All academics know that peer reviews are the worst way of evaluating research, except all the others, and while I have certainly quarrelled with negative judgments of my work, I have lived happily enough with the consequences.

I grew up in a lower-middle-class family, the second of three children. We lived in the Montreal streetcar suburb of Notre-Dame-de-Grâce (NDG). Our rented, ‘cold water’ flat was ‘below Sherbrooke Street,’ a friendly neighbourhood of blue-collar workers, tradesmen, and clerical workers. There were no visible minorities in the 1940s or 1950s and few French-speaking Canadians. The children of British and Italian immigrants merged easily with the Canadian-born. There was a significant Jewish population in NDG, and adults certainly engaged in anti-Semitic remarks, but I have no recollection of such behaviour among teenagers. The school system divided us along linguistic and religious lines with agnostics, Protestants, Jews, and those of Orthodox faiths in the Protestant School Board and Roman Catholics in English- or French-language schools. What saved the situation was the lack of any residential segregation, and for boys the park-based team sports where no one cared which school you went to or what faith your parents professed.

My father, born and raised in Dublin, was the son of an English official of the Irish Land Office and an Anglo-Irish mother. Their terrace home in Dublin was a handsome Georgian residence, and no doubt much was expected of the three Copp boys. The death of my grandparents in 1912 within months of each other changed everything. The two elder brothers soon left: Percy for Canada and Douglas to become a boy soldier. Raised by a maiden aunt, my father recalled forced attendance at Sunday School and church, a primary school that taught penmanship and English grammar, apprenticeship to a printer at age fourteen, and the extended family’s decision to send him to live with his brother in Canada two years later. All of this matters to me because my father was largely self-educated, with a passion for learning and argument. His experience with the Church of Ireland made him a confirmed agnostic openly hostile to organized religion and most authority – traits I tend to share.

High school never made much sense to me, and after repeating grade 10 it was therefore entirely fitting that my matriculation marks were utterly mysterious. Tutoring might explain a 68 in Algebra, the first time I ever passed an exam in the subject, but where had a 76 in Geometry come from? How could my Chemistry mark be higher than the one for English Literature? I had never got less than an 80 in History, so what had led to a mark in the low 60s? What did I care – I had graduated with a high enough average, my father pointed out, to go to McGill. I was having none of this. The prospect of doing required courses in Latin, Math, and French held no appeal. In 1956 Sir George Williams offered a Liberal Arts program without language or math requirements. In first year arts, students had to take Social Science, Natural Science, and Humanities – three compulsory year-long courses, but after that it was a buffet where one could graze.

Actually, being a college student was even better than I had imagined. The general education courses demanded little. I had no trouble getting A’s and was put on the Dean’s Honours List. The three ‘bird’ courses allowed plenty of time to search the stacks, read novels, and focus on my other classes, especially an introduction to European history. The lecturer was Bob Vogel, who would soon become my mentor and close friend. Bob, as generations of McGill students will testify, was an incomparable university teacher. His method was to engage the class in considering the problem he was outlining. We weren’t to be passive listeners but junior historians engaged in a quest to uncover not so much what happened, but why it happened that way. Bob seemed genuinely interested in our questions, and I wasn’t the only one who began to read ahead on the topic, eager to participate.

The Sir George Library was certainly modest, even by 1950s standards, but the basic books were there, along with all the major historical journals on open shelves. I read widely. In my first year Bob, after marking the term essays and Christmas exams, asked me to stay after class. We went for coffee in the drab little restaurant in the ymca building next door. The Pam Pam, Montréal’s first continental espresso cafe, one of the many blessings the Hungarian revolution gave to Montreal, was still in the future. His mission that day was to persuade me to transfer to McGill. He had gone to Sir George, taking mostly night courses while driving a taxi, and had felt ill-prepared for graduate work. He was sure I was destined to be a historian and wanted me in a proper honours program. It was impossible not to be flattered by this attention.

Bob was persistent. Born in Vienna in 1929, he was the only child of a well-established family. His father, a veteran of the Austro-Hungarian air force in the Great War, got his family out of Austria in 1939 at the urging of comrades who insisted that the Nazis were serious and no Jew, no matter how respected, could survive in the Third Reich. Arrangements for visas were made, and the small family travelled by train to Amsterdam, their modest wealth converted into diamonds, which were sewn to Mrs Vogel’s lapels and one of Bob’s toys. They ended up in Wales, where Bob attended school and developed an admiration for the Royal Navy and a deep interest in British history. He won a scholarship to Oxford but knew that his parents, who had decided to immigrate to Canada, would need him. McGill was Bob’s Oxford and he couldn’t understand why I refused to change universities.

One result of this little drama was a meeting with the chair and only full-time member of the history department, Edward Eastman McCullogh, who naturally encouraged me to stay at Sir George. Ed spent his entire life in revolt against his rural Ontario, Irish Protestant upbringing, though he could never shake a Sunday School pledge to avoid alcohol. His M.A. thesis (he did not begin PhD studies for some years) was an examination of British press reaction to the crisis of July–August 1914. Many years later I helped him revise the manuscript, which was published in 1999.² The argument in the thesis was in tune with Ed’s passionate dislike of every aspect of the British Empire. Britain, he insisted, had not gone to war over Belgium, but intervened on the side of France, determined to check Germany and preserve the balance of power. For Ed, this not particularly original or controversial interpretation was proof that Britain had ‘caused’ the First World War by encouraging France and presumably Russia to resist the legitimate claims of Germany to European hegemony. When Fritz Fischer gave a lecture at Sir George outlining the argument of his book Germany’s War Aims, which had not yet been translated into English, Bob Vogel and I sat with Ed, who seemed about to have a heart attack. In spite of – or perhaps as a result of – his agitation, Ed failed to ask a question; Bob in contrast raised several critical points that engaged Fischer’s interest.

I took several courses from McCullough in second and third year. I rarely agreed with him but enjoyed arguing alternate views. At one point I tested his patience with a paper defending British colonial policy in Nigeria. In 1957–8 Cameron Nish joined Ed as the department’s Canadian historian. Cameron, like Ed, had strong views on most subjects and insisted on telling us what they were, stimulating my competitive instincts. It was Cameron who introduced me to R.G Collingwood. He assigned The Idea of History as the text in a third-year philosophy of history course, and we discussed it for an entire term. The Idea of History remains the most influential single book I have ever read. The introductory lecture in most of my courses begins with a discussion of Collingwood, and my own writing has been guided by ideas developed from his notion of logically compelling evidence. Not all of my students have accepted the view that what matters most in history is the clarity of the question, but I have continued to argue that if we can agree on what we are asking and what body of evidence we are using, it will be possible to establish a ‘true’ answer – true in the sense that anyone who asks the same question of the same evidence will arrive at the same logically compelling answer. The major reason that historians disagree about the past, I insist, is because they ask very different questions and use different evidence.

Sir George required a B.A. thesis. The topic I selected, ‘Robert Borden and the Imperial War Cabinet,’ bridged my interest in Canadian and international history and required immersion in the Public Archives of Canada. In those days the archives on Sussex Street allowed researchers into the shelves to pick up the file box of documents, and work continued well into the night. The archives became an addiction from which I have never recovered. The disappearance of the undergraduate thesis as a requirement for honours history students is surely one of the most regrettable changes we have made.

Despite my interest in history, I was still headed toward law school and politics. I had become a Diefenbaker and then an Alvin Hamilton ‘Red Tory’ in university and was keen to be part of the action in Ottawa³ until McCullough asked me if I was interested in teaching Cameron’s courses while he spent a year at Rochester beginning a PhD with Mason Wade. I was twenty years old and in my third year of a B.A., so naturally I said yes. The trick was to graduate in time to begin teaching in September 1959. It turned out that my two summers in the Canadian Officer Training Corps (COTC) were worth a full credit, and with three further summer school courses I could graduate in time. Two weeks before my twenty-first birthday, I met my classes. I had gone to high school or begun college with some of the students, but this did not prove to be a problem, and I enjoyed every minute, even when I was less than a lecture ahead of the students.

A condition of my employment at Sir George was to register for an M.A. at McGill. McGill assumed that if you had an honours degree you were ready to do research, and that was what an M.A. was all about. My M.A. thesis was to be supervised by the department’s sole Canadian historian, John Irwin Cooper. Professor Cooper, as I was to call him throughout his life, was a pleasure to talk to one-on-one, though how he ever managed to teach three large undergraduate courses was a mystery to me. Cooper was painfully shy and quiet-spoken but firm in his views. I wanted to continue working on Borden as the wartime prime minister and had prepared an outline citing material in the Borden and Laurier Papers. He regarded this as far too ambitious for an M.A., and after some discussion I agreed to do a study of the General Election of 1908 as an introduction to politics in the Laurier-Borden era.⁴ The idea was to find a kind of base year before the naval issue-reciprocity deluge.

My job at Sir George ended and I spent the summer hitchhiking to Ottawa to work on my M.A. thesis. On one of the return trips a black station wagon roared past me, stopped, and began to back up. It was raining lightly and I was glad to get a ride, though the driver was a French-speaking priest in clerical garb. He told me his name and said he was a professor at Laval. I immediately launched into a eulogy of the work of Albert Faucher and Maurice Lamontagne,⁵ gradually realizing that I was talking to the former dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences, the formidable Georges-Henri Lévesque. We had a great discussion about Quebec history that ended when he let me off in Montreal. Father Lévesque encouraged me to learn French and think about studying at Laval.

I had decided on a different course of action, applying for a position as a history teacher at Westmount Junior High. Despite the existence of well-established private schools such as Lower Canada College and Selwyn House, Westmount Junior attracted students from upper Westmount professional and business families as well as children from ‘Lower Westmount.’ Classes were segregated by gender and by perceived ability or academic accomplishment. I taught five classes of grade 9 boys numbered from 9B1 to 9B5. They were all full of interest to me, and I often think I did some of the best and most valuable teaching of my life in that school. My last class, 9B5, was the non-academic stream full of kids with learning or discipline problems. Most of them came to the school from Weredale House, a home for boys on the edge of trouble with the law or simply neglected or abandoned.

I took over as coach of both the football and hockey teams and was thoroughly enjoying every aspect of the job. I am quite certain I would have become a high school teacher if I had avoided the issue of Weredale. The school saw my 9B5 boys as an unwelcome burden imposed by proximity to Weredale. There were no special resources and no attempts to enrich their experience. I visited the home, talked to the staff, and came away appalled by the workhouse conditions and attitudes of the supervisors. I wrote a long letter outlining my views and sent it to the newspapers. George Ferguson, the editor of the Montréal Star, called and asked to see me. He wanted to publish the letter but warned me there would be consequences, as Weredale had many prominent supporters. The letter was published, the reaction was toxic, and my career with the Protestant School Board was over.⁶

After completing my M.A. thesis in the fall of 1961 I spent four marvellous months travelling in Europe. On my return I applied for a sabbatical replacement job at United College, now the University of Winnipeg. My letters of reference did the trick and I began teaching two sections of the upper year survey of Canadian history. United College was still under censure from caut over what is known as the Crowe Affair,⁷ but I had never heard of the controversy and no one mentioned it. The students were great, my colleagues friendly, and the city full of energy and activity. Bob Kymlicka, who was to have a distinguished career as a political scientist, was a close friend and enjoyed debate as much as I did. Bob had far more developed political ideas than anyone else I knew, and his rational, centrist, liberalism helped to shape my instinctive, half-formed views.

While in Winnipeg I applied for and was accepted into the PhD program at McGill, this time with Cooper’s agreement that I would pursue the study of Robert Borden as wartime prime minister. After a few months of archival research in Ottawa I realized that the task was beyond me. The main outlines of his attempt to obtain a ‘voice’ in imperial foreign policy, membership in the Imperial War Cabinet, and gradual disillusionment with having gained responsibility for decisions without the power to shape them had fascinated me as an undergraduate, but up close Borden was just a dull, conventional politician focused on patronage problems and the chaos created by Sam Hughes. When Craig Brown agreed to write the biography of Borden, he reached a similar conclusion but persisted, accepting the prime minister for who he was and crafting a compelling narrative.

I went back to high school, taking a job as an emergency replacement for a geography teacher in Lindsay, Ontario. Geography had been one of my ten matriculation subjects in high school, but otherwise I knew little about what I was to teach. The grade 13 class was determined that I follow the rote learning drills of my predecessor to prep them for the provincial final, but there was room to experiment, especially with the grade 12 class. I was delighted to be back in the classroom, and after some initial resistance to a substitute teacher, the kids were great.

Plans to seek a full-time teaching job and attend summer school to begin qualifying to teach in Ontario were put on hold when Don Savage, then a professor teaching African history at Loyola College, called asking if I would be interested in returning to Montreal to replace their Canadianist A.J.M. ‘Jack’ Hyatt, who had moved to Western. No interview process was suggested, for in the small community of historians in Montreal it was easy to make a few enquiries. A few days later a letter arrived from John Cooper asking, in a somewhat apologetic manner, if I would consider coming to McGill to teach his courses while he was on sabbatical. Within a few weeks it was agreed that in 1964–5 I would teach two courses at McGill and one at Loyola, then in the following years teach the Canadian survey at McGill while becoming a full-time faculty member at Loyola.

It is necessary to remember that the rapid expansion of Canadian universities in the 1960s required recruiting hundreds of American professors who were hired for almost every field except Canadian history. The majority of my marvellous Loyola colleagues were such Americans, most of whom returned to the United States in the next decade. McGill was of course different. Noel Fieldhouse, Charles Bailey, Milos Mladenovich, Cooper, H.W. Senior, Stanford Reid, and Bob Vogel were British, European, or Canadian trained. The most exotic member of the department was Laurier Lapierre, who was beginning his career as a public figure on This Hour Has Seven Days.

Master’s students at McGill were required to take a team-taught historiography-philosophy of history seminar. With Laurier Lapierre otherwise occupied, I was asked to teach the Canadian section of the course. It was here that I met Arthur Silver, who later became my first graduate student. Lapierre was supposed to be Arthur’s supervisor so our arrangement was informal but intense. Silver came to McGill from the University of Toronto with a good honours degree and a very clear idea of the thesis he wanted to write. He was better educated and far more intellectual than I was, so supervision meant encouraging him to develop and express, on paper, his ideas.⁸ Arthur returned to the University of Toronto for his PhD and then joined the U of T department. His major book, The French Canadian Idea of Confederation, became a classic.

Arthur became one of the authors of a series of booklets I edited, Problems in Canadian History, aimed at secondary schools.⁹ This project, which bridged my continued interest in high school teaching and research, provided the opportunity to work with other exceptional scholars. Bruce Trigger was working on the manuscript that would become The Huron Farmers of the North, the first of his ground-breaking studies on First Nations. He agreed to join the series, and we published The Impact of Europeans on Huronia in 1969.¹⁰ Confederation 1867,¹¹ the only title published in both official languages, was the result of a meeting with Marcel Hamelin, who was then at Laval completing his PhD. Marcel and I remained close friends, sharing ideas about history and politics until his work as rector of the University of Ottawa absorbed all his energies. At one point in the 1970s we planned to collaborate on a comparative history of Quebec and Ontario, but we both went off in different directions.

Marcel and I met through our mutual friend Jacques Monet. Jacques was a colleague at Loyola College, where his enthusiasm for Canadian history and engaging personality made him a superb teacher.¹² The three of us were serving on a committee created to advise the Quebec Ministry of Education on a common high school history curriculum. Among the other members were Michel Brunet¹³ and the formidable Maurice Séguin. The atmosphere was cordial but electric. Jacques and Marcel were Liberals and federalists, while the University of Montreal historians were consciously laying the foundation for what they hoped would be an independent Quebec. Another participant, Denis Vaugeois, who would become a Parti Québeçois Cabinet minister, was then editing Boreal Express, a facsimile historical newspaper. As the two individuals most interested in pedagogy, we got on famously. Vaugeois’s book, L’Union des Deux Canadas, Nouvelle Conqûete?, which on my copy is inscribed as a ‘travail de Jeunesse,’ was, I thought, a valuable extension of the ‘conquest hypothesis.’ I was obviously becoming a closet Quebec nationalist.

Throughout the 1960s I was teaching a full load at Loyola and a large, three-hundred-student survey course at McGill. I was also the history instructor at Labour College of Canada, a summer program sponsored by the Canadian Labour Congress on the campus of the Université de Montréal. Loyola was my real graduate school. Colleagues like Geoff Adams, Don Savage, and Dave O’Brien, and students such as Roberto Perin and Carol Bacchi made for a stimulating environment, and I gradually accepted my role as a university professor.

By 1968 I was a married man with a wife, who has been the centre of my life for more than forty years, and two young stepchildren. Our third child was born in 1972, and family life gradually took priority over all other matters. I say ‘gradually’ because in 1969 I was deeply involved in what became known as the ‘Loyola Crisis’ – a struggle to save the jobs of a number of faculty who were being dismissed as part of a process to re-establish Jesuit control of the college. Don Savage and I led the breakaway Association of Loyola Professors with my friend Brian Mulroney as our lawyer. Brian persuaded the Quebec government to appoint a one-man commission to investigate the situation, and Perry Meyer’s report restored almost everyone in their jobs.¹⁴

After the furour died down, Don and I found our positions at Loyola untenable. Don left to begin his career as executive secretary of caut while I accepted an offer to return to Sir George Williams. One of the conditions of the offer from Sir George was that I give up teaching the survey course at McGill. I was reluctant to do this but had little choice. The lighter teaching load offered the prospect of time to complete a manuscript I had begun at Loyola, but the impact of the October Crisis and the internal conflict that plagued the Sir George department made for a difficult time.

Fortunately the opportunity to spend a year as a visiting professor at the University of Victoria arose, and we made the trip to the west coast in August 1971. We lucked into a rented house on Ten Mile Point and promptly fell in love with Victoria and the island. The department was welcoming, and with a light teaching load of three two-term courses I was able to complete a large part of the manuscript that became The Anatomy of Poverty: The Condition of the Working Class in Montréal 1897–1929.¹⁵

The book began as a study of the impact of urban progressivism on the city, the result of a seminar in North American history I shared with David O’Brien and then Bill Akin, the American historians at Loyola. By 1968 I had decided that while the reformers were interesting, their impact was marginal, and I began to turn the chapters upside down, or right side up, focusing on the socio-economic system within which the working class lived. In June 1972 I presented an overview of the work at the Canadian Historical Association.¹⁶ Michael Cross and Syd Wise approached me immediately afterwards, proposing that I write a 65,000 word manuscript to launch a new social history series McClelland and Stewart had agreed to publish. The word limit required some rewriting and cutting, but the result was a better book with a catchy title selected by the editors.

By the time The Anatomy of Poverty appeared in 1974, I was working on a sequel with the working title ‘Depression and Recovery.’ To my surprise neither Cross and Wise nor McClelland and Stewart were interested. I presented papers and published parts of my research, but it was evident that I was working against the grain of a new approach to working-class history inspired by E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class. A paper I wrote on ‘Montréal’s Municipal Government and the Crisis of the 1930’s’¹⁷ prompted considerable comment. John Taylor, Carleton University, wrote a detailed critique, which included the following: ‘Men like Camillien Houde, by their rhetoric and activity essentially fudged desperate reality, and by drawing the lightning of discontent to them, impeded or smothered legitimate reform impulses.’ My reply to John’s letter questioned the importance of left-wing ‘legitimate reform impulses’ and noted that David Alexander, an economic historian at Memorial, had criticized my work from quite another direction. David, whose sudden, early death was a tragedy for the profession and all who knew him, insisted that unless I could show where the money for significant wage increases and transfer payments was to come from, given the limited and shrinking wealth produced by the Canadian economy, I was ignoring reality.¹⁸ I tried to address these issues in articles on ‘The Rise of Industrial Unions in Montréal’ and ‘The Impact on Wage and Price Controls on Workers in Montréal 1939–1947,’ but neither made it past the peer review process.¹⁹ My approach to the history of workers was apparently seen as old-fashioned or simply uninteresting.

By then I was teaching at Wilfrid Laurier University, which I joined in 1975. Sir George Williams, which merged with Loyola College to become Concordia University in 1974, was an exciting urban campus, and my graduate students, especially Michael Piva and Paul Lârocque, were a pleasure to work with, but the department was deeply dys-functional. Despite the best efforts of George Rude to lead by example, discontent flourished. Everyone assumed that leaving Quebec was a political act for English-speaking Montrealers, but we would have happily stayed in Montreal if negotiations with McGill had been successful.²⁰

At Laurier I encouraged students to explore the history of Kitchener-Waterloo and the surrounding towns. A senior undergraduate seminar led to the completion of Industrial Unionism in Kitchener,²¹ which we self-published. A number of ba theses on Galt, Welland, Brantford, and other towns followed. It was this community-based work that led me to write the iue in Canada,²² a union-sponsored history that involved learning about Brockville, Peterborough, and Picton with return trips to Montreal. My final contribution to labour history was writing the first drafts of three chapters for Desmond Morton’s book, Working People: An Illustrated History of Canadian Labour.²³ My local labour market–union organization approach was a poor fit for a survey text and when, for the second edition, Des added new chapters including a critical account of the Free Trade Agreement, which I thought was good and necessary public policy, we decided amicably that my name would be removed from future editions.

By then I was well into my new career as a military historian working on what would become the five-volume Maple Leaf Route series. A change in direction seemed necessary in 1980, but why military history? The suggestion came from Bob Vogel, who wanted to start a new research project after two terms as McGill’s dean of arts. We decided on a study of the military events of September–October 1944; he would examine the German sources and handle the Montgomery-Eisenhower strategic debate, while I studied the Canadian army at the tactical level. In the preface to Fields of Fire: The Canadians in Normandy I wrote,

As we began to plan our work Bob introduced me to Clausewitz and other military writers; but in the course of our discussions we decided that a social historian, escaping a world dominated by Marxists was entitled to be suspicious of yet another 19th century authority figure. We agreed that history at the  divisional, brigade, and battalion levels might be best understood by a new reading of the primary sources, including interviews with veterans and a careful study of the ground over which the battles had been fought.²⁴

I had no background in military history. My only previous connection with the Canadian army was two summers in cotc as an officer cadet, so I really was starting from scratch. I had a research question – ‘How were the battles won and at what cost?’ – but no inkling of the answers. C.P. Stacey’s official history provided a fairly detailed outline of events but few clues as to why there were so many days of ‘bloody fighting and failure’ before success was achieved. His two pages on ‘The Attack across the Leopold Canal’ did not leave much room for detailed analysis.²⁵

I wanted to see the battlefields before going any further with the War Diaries and other records in Ottawa. In May 1980 my wife and I borrowed a twenty-year-old mg from a friend living in England, crossed to Calais, and began the first of many journeys over the battle-fields. The mg, which was great fun to drive, leaked in the rain and had several mechanical problems, which added to the adventure.²⁶ We arrived at the Leopold Canal on a fittingly cold, rainy morning. I was stunned by the terrain, which was little changed from 1944. On subsequent battlefield study tours I have told students that much of my research agenda developed that morning, standing on the large pillbox dominating the section of the canal that the Regina Rifles and Royal Montréal Regiment were ordered to capture on 6 October 1944. It seemed like an impossible task, and I needed to know why it had been attempted and what happened to the men involved. I now knew that battlefield terrain was a vital primary source for military history and I decided I would walk the ground before I wrote about any part of the campaign. We next drove to Moerkerke, where the Algonquin Regiment had tried to cross a double canal line a few weeks earlier. We then spent several days exploring the polders of the Breskens Pocket and the ‘beaches,’ Amber and Green where the ‘Buffaloes’ carrying the 9th Brigade had landed. I came away with a new set of questions about endurance and innovation. Our first joint effort, “‘No Lack of Rational Speed”: First Canadian Army, Sept 1944,’²⁷ addressed most of these issues. Actually exploring the routes followed by the Canadian divisions from the River Seine to the Leopold Canal illuminated General Crerar’s complaint to C.P. Stacey that the official historian had not paid sufficient attention to the obstacles, including the many rivers and canals that had bedevilled the Canadians in September 1944.²⁸

To me it was evident that we could not really understand the battle for the approaches to Antwerp without examining the preceding months of combat and broader strategic debate. We decided to study the entire ten-month campaign and spent much of the next six years on the five volumes of the Maple Leaf Route series.²⁹ McClelland and Stewart were interested in a single volume on Normandy but not the illustrated, document-rich books we were planning. With assistance from a friendly banker, we published the series ourselves, using child labour (my children) to pack, ship, and invoice bookstores.

The series was a critical – and eventually, commercial – success. C.P. Stacey, in reviewing volume 5, noted that with its publication younger readers would finally learn who won the war. Stacey was poking fun at our decision to publish five separate volumes over a five-year period,³⁰ but he was also recognizing that we had tried to write our account of Normandy, the Scheldt, and the battles of 1945 without allowing the reader or ourselves to anticipate future events. The battle of Normandy especially had been too often studied by historians who seemed impatient with the men of 1944 who did not have the sense to fight the battle the way the historians, with full hindsight, would have.

Military history was not a popular field among academics in the 1980s. My Laurier colleagues, who had hired a social-labour historian, accepted my transformation, or so it seemed during the thirteen years I served as department chair. Friends who were also historians expressed the hope that I would soon return to respectability. Two factors kept me working on war-related topics. Interviews with veterans provided friendships, fascinating source material, and a host of new questions. And student interest in the field was enormous. My Second World War survey course grew to have the largest registration in the Faculty of Arts, and the department was attracting excellent students who choose Laurier specifically to study military history or war and society topics. The generation that came of age in the 1980s and 1990s shared none of the broad anti-war sentiment so common among young people in the sixties and seventies.

I began to offer a graduate seminar in War and Society. Geoff Hayes, now a professor at the University of Waterloo, wrote his M.A. thesis on the Lincoln and Welland Regiment in 1983–4,³¹ and over the next twenty years other equally promising graduate students including Shaun Brown, Mike Bechthold, Chris Evans, and Lee Windsor completed M.A. theses in military history under my supervision. Laurier did not offer a PhD in history until Jamie Snell, John English, and I negotiated the agreement that created the Tri-University Program in 1994. My students Ian Miller³² and Scott Sheffield³³ were the first to receive a Laurier history PhD.

While working on Maple Leaf Route, a number of questions arose that could not be fully dealt with in the context of a broad history of the campaign. The young men of the infantry battalions, who did not know the Battle of Normandy would be won by late August, were exposed to enough continuous stress to sap their reserves of physical and mental strength. One in five casualties among the Allied forces were categorized as ‘neuropsychiatric,’ and an elaborate diagnostic and treatment system was created to address the problem. I had found the War Diaries of No. 1 Canadian Exhaustion and No. 1 Neuropsychiatric and Plastic Surgery Hospital while searching for better data on casualties and other losses the military called ‘wastage.’ I made a list of the doctors involved and, following the practice developed as a labour historian, I set out to locate and interview as many of the key figures as possible. Doctors Burdett McNeel and Travis Dancey, who commanded the battle exhaustion unit in Normandy and Northwest Europe, were particularly helpful, as was Dr. Clifford Richardson, who had served as the senior Canadian psychiatrist at 21 Army Group. All three men were confident that in a large majority of cases the symptoms were situational and temporary, so long as the soldier was reassigned to a non-combat role.³⁴

The book Battle Exhaustion: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Canadian Army 1939–45,³⁵ written with Bill McAndrew, was intended as both a chapter in the history of the war and the history of psychiatry. The outcome was not entirely satisfactory. Co-authorship, which had worked well with Robert Vogel, was a rockier road, with McAndrew committed to the view that our job was to find answers to questions that later generations of military writers had developed while I was struggling to learn what it all meant to the men who experienced stress and the doctors who treated them.³⁶

Questions about manpower policy, leadership, training, tactics, strategy, and the alleged limitations of the fighting power of the Allied forces might, I thought, be partially answered by our work, but not if our questions developed from established interpretations. One particular difference of opinion plagued our partnership. The army administered a rough and ready iq screening, known as the M-Test, to many of its recruits. The Canadian Army believed that the test measured something or other accurately and seemed to believe that the score correlated with many other things. Generally speaking, those with higher scores became officers or went to the mechanized and technical branches. Those with lower scores went to the Service Corps and the infantry. It was not difficult to understand why psychologists, struggling to establish their profession, had sold this dubious system to the army, or why the army bureaucracy had bought a simple method of personnel selection packaged with a scientific label. But historians had to be cautious. Quite apart from problems with the concept, design, and administration of the M-Test, it seemed unlikely to me that battlefield performance correlated with a test score. Throughout the 1960s I had spent my fall evenings coaching ‘park’ football in NDG and Lachine.³⁷ I thought I knew quite a lot about older teenagers and their development. I discussed the debate over personnel selection with Dr. Jack Griffin, who had organized the army’s selection program in Canada during the war and reluctantly agreed that identifying those pre-disposed to battle exhaustion or good leadership skills had proven difficult.³⁸

After completing my part of Battle Exhaustion, I focused on a history of the Fifth Canadian Infantry Brigade. This project provided an opportunity to study combat at the tactical level and to examine questions of leadership and morale. Fifth Brigade was composed of two Montreal-based battalions, ‘Le Régiment de Maisonneuve’ and the ‘Black Watch,’ who were joined by the Calgary Highlanders. I crisscrossed the county to conduct interviews and hired a research assistant to help with a detailed analysis of the personnel records of all those who had been killed in action with the brigade, a sample group of 1100 names.

The preface notes that while the book could not have been completed without the interviews, it was not based on them. Conversations with veterans usually proved unreliable on specifics and were useful mostly in framing questions about leadership and morale. Relying on war diaries, message logs, and historical officer interviews conducted immediately after the battle, narrowed the scope of the story, leaving questions that could not be answered to those who enjoyed speculation. I thought The Brigade was a significant book, but publishers were still leery of scholarly works on military history. Neither McGill-Queen’s nor anyone else was interested. Linda McKnight, who had been my editor at Copp Clark and was now a literary agent, was polite but firm: the manuscript was not suitable for trade publication. In the end, a former student who was trying to establish a military history publishing venture borrowed the money (from me) to print two thousand copies. Fortunately it sold well enough to pay back the loan and earn some decent royalties. The book, with a new preface, was republished for sale in the United States and internationally in 2001, thanks to another former student, Chris Evans, who is Stackpole’s editor for military history.³⁹

A third project conceived during the Maple Leaf Route years was centred at McGill, where Bob Vogel employed a German-language graduate student to help him examine material from the Bundesarchiv in Freiburg. We outlined an ambitious plan to investigate the impact of tactical air power in the Battle of Normandy, using both German and Allied sources. Historians like B.H. Liddel Hart and John Terraine had described air power as the decisive factor in the Normandy campaign – a view we had begun to question after coming across an unpublished report on ‘Operational Research in Northwest Europe,’ which offered a very different assessment of the role of the air force in support of the land battle. Our requests for major funding were rejected and the ambitious project died.

If there was little interest in military operational research, might a coveted research grant, with time off from teaching and administrative duties, be available for further work on battle exhaustion? The British Army Review had published a paper I wrote on the subject,⁴⁰ and after Battle Exhaustion was published, interest in the topic was evident among both historians and military psychiatrists in Britain and the United States. The new project was titled ‘The Shock of Battle: Psychiatrists and the Interpretation of War Neuroses from the Great War to the Gulf War.’⁴¹ An application for a Killam Research Fellowship met a familiar fate. One referee was positive, the other, appraising from a medical background, agreed that while my work on the First World War (which I had never written on) was adequate, I lacked the qualifications to investigate the history of psychiatry.⁴²

Fortunately a new development offered an exciting opportunity. A colleague, Marc Kilgour, suggested we make a joint application to the Department of National Defence for a five-year grant through the arms-length Security and Defence Forum. Marc’s interest in mathematical models for disarmament verification and my work on military operational research proved to be a good fit in 1991, and we were awarded the first of four five-year grants that financed the core activities of what we called the Laurier Centre for Military Strategic and Disarmament Studies (LCMSDS).⁴³

Marc became the director, but most of the funds were used to hire one of our outstanding M.A. graduates, Mike Bechthold, to serve as our administrator and managing editor of a new journal, Canadian Military History (CMH). We also began a military history colloquium, which has met annually for more than twenty years. Since its inception LCMSDS has played a major role in developing the fields of military history and war and memory in Canada. Described as a ‘journal-in-magazine format’ CMH began as a biannual publication, but we were soon flooded with material from across the country, and in 1998 it became a quarterly. The journal was planned as a venue for young scholars who were encouraged to present their research in a way that would attract the interest of veterans and the general public as well as academics. Each issue included features such as memoirs or primary documents, as well as well-illustrated articles. We established a solid partnership with the Canadian War Museum, which provided articles for each issue. An informal review process was used until Roger Sarty became the editor in 2006 and set up a formal peer-review system, making the article section of the journal officially ‘refereed.’

LCMSDS inherited a remarkable resource acquired for the university in 1985. During a visit to the War Museum I had come across a reference to a collection of air photos and eventually tracked down six large crates in a corner of the storage area in the ‘Vimy’ building – an old bus garage. The air photos had been used by First Canadian Army in 1944–5 and then were shipped to the Joint Air Photo Interpretation School in Rivers, Manitoba. When the base closed in 1971 the crates were sent to the Canadian War Museum but were never opened. We were able to borrow some of the photos to use in the Maple Leaf Route series, and then to our surprise the museum reported that as no one seemed to want the collection, would LCMSDS like to acquire it? The late Shaun Brown, then a graduate student working at the centre, drove a rental truck to Ottawa and brought the packing crates to the university – an event indicative of the state of the Canadian War Museum and military history in the 1980s.⁴⁴ The archive contains high-resolution air-photo coverage of the areas of France, Belgium, Holland, and Germany where First Canadian Army operated and has been used by environmentalists as well as historians. LCMSDS is currently digitizing the 200,000 photographs to make the material more broadly accessible.⁴⁵

The centre’s budget included modest funds for research, including travel, and I was able to expand my interest in military operational research. Scientists had long been involved in weapons development, and there were isolated examples of what would come to be called ‘operational research’ in the First World War, but it was the application of radar to air defence that led scientists to argue that operational decisions should be subjected to scientific analysis. The optimal use of existing weapons systems, including the machine/man interface, as well as ideas for new technology, involved operational research.

Historians of the contemporary world have some great advantage denied to those who study earlier periods: the opportunity to interview participants in the events under study. I was able to track down a number of the key players, including O.M. Solandt, the former head of the Canadian Defence Research Board. In 1939 Solandt was at Cambridge studying physiology; by 1943 he was deputy superintendent of Army Operations Research.⁴⁶ Solandt was a delight to work with. He offered access to his papers, subsequently deposited in the University of Toronto archives. In England I was able to meet with a number of the principal scientists involved in army operational research, particularly David K. Hill, Tony Sargeaunt, and Michael Swann. All were willing to be interviewed and to provide personal papers.⁴⁷ I was able to publish a number of articles on aspects of this research and to write the introductory essay to an edition of Operational Research in Northwest Europe: The Work of No. 2 ors,⁴⁸ but  a manuscript titled ‘Scientists and the Art of War,’ which MacMillan uk wished to publish, was never completed. Military history was becoming a popular and controversial subject in the 1990s and I was increasingly drawn into public history projects.

Brian McKenna and the cbc were partly responsible for the new interest in Canada’s role in the Second World War. The Valour and the Horror television series outraged most veterans, including many who had shown little previous interest in telling their story. The controversy that erupted led to hearings before a Senate Committee and to the creation of the No Price Too High Foundation, which sought funds to produce a documentary that would ‘seek ways of re-establishing an accurate collective memory of the meaning of the sacrifices of the war.’⁴⁹ I joined producers Andy Charters and Dick Neilsen to assist with research and as on-camera historian for a five-part television series. I then wrote the text of a book using the series title.

While working on No Price Too High I became involved with the Canadian Battle of Normandy Foundation, established by another group of veterans who were shocked to discover that the exhibits at a new museum in Normandy, Le Memorial, did not so much as mention the Canadian role in the liberation of the area. They were equally disturbed by the pervasive presence of the American Battle of Normandy Foundation, which was building a large memorial garden at the museum and bringing students from a number of American universities to study in Caen.

Money was quickly raised for a Canadian Memorial Garden and a program of student bursaries. Syd Wise of Carleton University and I became co-chairs of the Education Committee persuading the foundation to sponsor a battlefield study tour rather than a course of lectures at Le Memorial. My wife and I with Serge Durflinger led the first student group tour in 1995; by then I had written two battlefield guidebooks designed to link the basic war narrative to actual battle sites. Writing the guidebooks required extensive travel in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany to establish the best ‘stands’ for understanding the battles. We naturally had to stay in a variety of hotels and try out various restaurants, all in the interests of research.⁵⁰ Other projects kept cropping up. Legion Magazine asked me to write a regular column – a gig that continues to the present.

One of the many contributors to the features section of CMH, the late Lieut-Colonel (ret’d) Gordon Brown dso, seemed to have an exceptional memory and extensive contacts with fellow veterans. His regiment, the Regina Rifles, fielded one of the most effective and interesting battalions in the Canadian Army, and he readily agreed to a suggestion that we compile a war history using first-person accounts and recollections. The book was published in 2001 and soon sold out.⁵¹

During my research trips to the United Kingdom I had met with Ronnie Shephard, an operational research scientist whose career went back to the Second World War. Ronnie had amassed a large collection of military operational research documents, and when he suddenly died, his son asked me to take responsibility for the material, donating it to an archive in the United Kingdom or transferring it to Canada. From discussions I knew that Ronnie preferred Canada, and in 1996 I donated the Ronnie Shephard Military Operational Research Archive to LCMSDS, establishing a major archival resource for military historians.

My own work on operational research was interrupted by the invitation to give the Joanne Goodman lectures at the University of Western Ontario in 1998. I decided to revisit the Normandy campaign, drawing upon all the research I had pursued since completing the volumes of Maple Leaf Route. The three lectures proved to be a starting point for both Fields of Fire: The Canadians in Normandy (2003) and Cinderella Army: The Canadians in Northwest Europe (2006).

The lectures and Fields of Fire began with a commentary on historiography titled ‘Military History without Clausewitz.’ After critiquing the received version of the campaign comparing Allied inadequacies with the alleged superior combat performance of the German army, I argued that the evidence pointed in a very different direction. Research on what actually happened on the battlefield suggested ‘that the achievement of the Allied and especially the Canadian armies in Normandy has been greatly underrated while the effectiveness of the German army has been greatly exaggerated.’⁵² The argument was further developed in Cinderella Army, with particular emphasis on the challenges overcome by Canadian divisions committed to operations to clear the approaches to Antwerp in October 1944. Both volumes included appendices, which offered detailed statistics on casualties and much else. The books were well received, though many military historians found the main thesis hard to accept. Generalizations about the superior combat effectiveness of the German army are deeply imbedded in the historical literature, despite evidence of operational rigidity and strategic failure.

I retired from full-time teaching in 2005 just before the abolition of compulsory retirement. Perhaps the timing was fortunate, as I had long argued in favour of retirement at sixty-five. As professor emeritus I have taught a one-term course each fall and continue to serve as director of LCMSDS– an unpaid but fulfilling activity. With Roger Sarty as editor of CMH I have been able to devote more time to expanding the activities of the centre, especially publications and student research projects. Our battlefield guide series now includes three titles on the Italian campaign, three on Northwest Europe, and most recently Canadian Battlefields 1915–1918.⁵³ Best of all, I have the opportunity to collaborate and learn from a number of exceptional undergraduate and graduate students who volunteer at the centre.⁵⁴ They are the best antidote to aging I can imagine.

 

Footnotes

1. I would like to extend my thanks to Kellen Kurschinski and Caitlin McWilliams for their comments and editorial assistance with this article.
2. E.E. McCullough, How the First World War Began(Montreal: Black Rose, 1999).
3. My involvement with the Progressive Conservative Party included participation in the leadership campaign that resulted in the selection of Robert Stanfield. I served as Alvin Hamilton’s Quebec organizer – an indication of how limited his support was in that province.
4. Terry Copp, ‘The Canadian General Election of 1908’ (mathesis, McGill University, 1962).
5. Their essay on Quebec’s industrial development, ‘History of Industrial Development,’ in Essais sur le Quebec Contemporain, ed. J.C. Faleradeau, 23–37 (Quebec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 1953), greatly influenced my view of Quebec history.
6. The letter dated 22 June 1961 appeared in the Montréal Starin early July and prompted a large number of other letters largely in support of Weredale. A year later George Ferguson wrote to me, noting, ‘Had it been possible the same gentry would have seen to it that I was thrown into the street too!’ See George V. Ferguson to John Terry Copp, 11 July 1962, Weredale File, Terry Copp Papers, Wilfrid Laurier University Archives, Waterloo, on (henceforth ‘Copp Papers’).
7. For a brief account of the conflict over the dismissal of Harry Crowe, see Philip Girard, Bora Laskin: Bringing Law to Life(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 272–84. See also Ken McNaught, Conscience and History: A Memoir (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990).
8. A.I. Silver, ‘French Canadian Attitudes towards the Northwest and Northwest Settlement 1870–1890’ (maThesis: McGill University, 1965).
9. A.I. Silver and Marie-France Valleur, The North-West Rebellion(Toronto: Copp Clark, 1967).
10. B.G. Trigger, The Impact of Europeans on Huronia(Toronto: Copp Clark, 1969).
11. J.T. Copp and Marcel Hamelin, Confederation 1967(Toronto: Copp Clark, 1966).
12. Jacques Monet, The Last Cannon Shot(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969). Jacques and I shared a seminar while his book was still in press.
13. St Joseph’s Teachers College invited Michel Brunet and me to debate the idea of Confederation as ‘Cent ans de l’injustice’in 1968 on the assumption that sparks would fly. We found ourselves in close agreement over the historical issues, differing on the best way to resolve the conflict. I was a keen supporter of asymmetrical federalism and later of the Meech Lake Accord, while Brunet saw independence as inevitable.
14. Perry Meyer, ‘Inquiry into the Situation at Loyola College,’ March 1970, Copp Papers. I was involved in the Meyer inquiry throughout the hearings as the spokesperson for the Association of Loyola Professors, discussing each day’s proceedings with Brian Mulroney and following his advice. I learned a great deal about negotiation from the former prime minister, and although we have not talked in many years I, like so many others who worked closely with him, retain respect and affection for him.
15. Terry Copp, The Anatomy of Poverty: The Condition of the Working Class in Montréal 1897–1929(Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1974) was translated as Class ouvirère et pauvreté (Montreal: Boreal Express, 1978).
16. J.T. Copp, ‘The Condition of the Working Class in Montréal, 1897–1920,’ Historical Papers / Communications historiques7, no. 1 (1972): 157–80.
17. Terry Copp, ‘Montréal’s Municipal Government and the Crisis of the 1930’s,’ in The Useable Urban Past: Planning and Politics in the Modern Canadian City, ed. Alan F.J. Artibise and Gilbert A. Stelter, 112–29 (Toronto: Macmillan, 1979). John Taylor to Terry Copp, n.d., Copp Papers.
18. John Taylor to Terry Copp, 7 Aug. 1978; and Terry Copp to John Taylor, 12 Aug. 1978, Copp Papers.
19. A version of one paper was published in 1982 but it was by invitation. Terry Copp, ‘The Rise of Industrial Unions in Montréal, 1937–1945,’ Relations Industrielles / Industrial Relations37, no. 4 (1982): 843–75.
20. The issue blocking a McGill appointment was rank. Since I did not have a PhD I was asked to accept a position as an assistant rather than an associate professor – a rank I had held for five years. I declined.
21. Terry Copp, ed., Industrial Unionism in Kitchener 1937–1947(Elora, on: Cumnock, 1976). Cumnock is the name of an abandoned hamlet on Highway 6 near our first home in Wellington County.
22. Terry Copp, Theiue in Canada, (Elora, on: Cumnock, 1979).
23. Desmond Morton with Terry Copp, Working People: An Illustrated History of Canadian Labour(Ottawa: Deneau and Greenberg, 1980).
24. Terry Copp, Fields of Fire: The Canadian in Normandy(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), xii.
25. C.P. Stacey, The Victory Campaign: The Operations in North-West Europe, 1944– 1945(Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1966), 393–5.
26. The brakes failed on one occasion, but as we were in Holland I geared down and used my foot on the ground to bring us to a full stop.
27. Terry Copp and Robert Vogel, “‘No Lack of Rational Speed”: First Canadian Army, September 1944,’ Journal of Canadian Studies16, nos 3 and 4 (Fall/Winter 1981): 145–55.
28. Ibid., 146.
29. The five volumes, Maple Leaf Route: Caen(1983), Falaise (1983), Antwerp (1984), Scheldt (1986), and Victory (1988) were distributed with Maple Leaf Route as publisher. The series was awarded the first C.P. Stacey prize in 1990.
30. C.P. Stacey, review of Maple Leaf Route: Victory, by Terry Copp and Robert Vogel, Canadian Historical Review70, no. 4 (1989): 410–11.
31. Geoffrey Hayes, The Lincs: The Lincoln and Welland Regiment at War(Alma, on: Maple Leaf Route, 1986).
32. Ian H.M. Miller, Our Glory and Our Grief: Torontonians and the Great War(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002).
33. Scott Sheffield, The Red Man’s on the Warpath: The Image of the ‘Indian’ and the Second World War(Vancouver: ubc Press, 2004).
34. The interview transcripts and correspondence may be consulted in the Copp Papers.
35. Terry Copp and Bill McAndrew, Battle Exhaustion: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Canadian Army, 1939–1945(Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990). The book won the C.P. Stacey prize in 1992 and was a finalist for the Hannah Medal, Royal Society of Canada.
36. The reviews of Battle Exhaustionwere largely favourable, though only Isabel Campbell seemed to notice the conflict in the approach of the authors. She wrote, ‘Copp concentrates on battle exhaustion, its nature, extent, and treatment . . . while McAndrew places battle exhaustion in a larger framework of battlefield behaviour . . . the changes in approach are awkward at times and distracting.’ Isabel Campbell, review of Battle Exhaustion: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Canadian Army, 1939–1945, by Terry Copp and Bill McAndrew, Archivaria 32 (1991): 178–9.
37. I coached the ‘Lachine Lakers,’ a juvenile, seventeen-to-nineteen football team and the Loyola Junior Varsity Team.
38. Jack Griffin’s reservations about the sections of Battle Exhaustiondealing with personnel selection, which led to our continuing conversation on the subject along with other correspondence with Canadian and British psychiatrists, may be found in the Copp Papers.
39. Terry Copp, The Brigade: The Fifth Canadian Infantry Brigade, 1939–1945(Stoney Creek, on: Fortress, 1992). Republished with a new preface by Stackpole Books, 2007.
40. Terry Copp, ‘Battle Exhaustion and the Canadian Soldier in Normandy,’ British Army Review85 (Apr. 1987): 46–54.
41. Part of the argument of the book was outlined in my essay ‘From Neurasthenia to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: Canadian Veterans and the Problem of Persistent Emotional Disabilities,’ in The Veterans Charter and Post World War II Canada, ed. Peter Neary and J.L. Granatstein, 149–59 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999). In 2007 Mark Humphries, a former student working with me at the centre while writing his PhD dissertation, collaborated with me on a book of readings published as Terry Copp and Mark Humphries, Combat Stress: The Commonwealth Experience(Kingston: Canadian Defence Academy Press, 2010).
42. Killiam Application File, Copp Papers.
43. Funding from the sdfceased on 31 March 2012. Fortunately, private donors led by John Cleghorn have pledged support and the centre will survive.
44. L.F. Murray to Terry Copp, 15 Oct. 1985, Copp Papers. Murray, then associate director of the Canadian War Museum, reported that the collection had been ‘offered to the National Photographic Collection and it is not interested.’
45. The progress of the project and examples from the collection may be found on the centre website, www.canadianmilitaryhistory.ca.
46. Solandt’s career is outlined in C.E. Law, George Lindsay, and David M. Grenville, eds., Perspectives in Science and Technology: The Legacy of O.M. Solandt(Kingston: Queen’s Quarterly Press, 1994).
47. The transcripts of interviews and correspondence are in the Copp Papers.
48. Terry Copp, ed., Montgomery’s Scientists: Operational Research in Northwest Europe(Waterloo, on: Laurier Centre for Military, Strategic and Disarmament Studies Press, 2001): 11–12.
49. Terry Copp with Richard Neilsen, No Price Too High: Canadians and the Second World War(Toronto: McGraw-Hill-Ryerson, 1996), 9.
50. Terry Copp, The Canadian Battlefields in Normandy: A Visitor’s Guide(Waterloo, on: lcmsds Press, 1994); and Copp, The Canadian Battlefields in Northwest Europe: A Visitor’s Guide (Waterloo, on: lcmsds Press, 1995).
51. Gordon Brown and Terry Copp, Look to Your Front . . . Regina Rifles: A Regiment at War, 1944–45(Waterloo, on: lcmsds Press, 2001).
52. Copp, Fields of Fire, 13.
53. Terry Copp, Matt Symes, and Nick Lachance, Canadian Battlefields 1915–1918: A Visitor’s Guide(Waterloo, on: lcmsds Press, 2011).
54. Our website, www.canadianmilitaryhistory.ca, illustrates these activities.