National Network for Equitable Library Service

When Great Britain and its dominions declared war on Germany in August 1914, they were faced with the formidable challenge of transforming masses of untrained citizen-soldiers at home and abroad into competent, coordinated fighting divisions. The Empire on the Western Front focuses on the development of two units, Britain's 62nd (2nd West Riding) Division and the Canadian 4th Division, to show how the British Expeditionary Force rose to this challenge.

Most Canadians know little, if anything at all, about the role of the Canadian Air Force in the 1999 Kosovo Air War. Yet lives were at put at stake as mission dedication and military skill were pushed to the limit. Some of Canada's most prominent journalists attempted to report on the war, but came away virtually empty handed. Daily briefings given at the National Defence Headquarters provided so little information most Ottawa journalists simply stopped going.

What was the First World War really like for Maritimers overseas? This epistolary book, edited by historian Ross Hebb, contains the letters home of three Maritimers with distinct wartime experiences: a front-line soldier from Nova Scotia, a nurse from New Brunswick, and a conscripted fisherman from Prince Edward Island. Up until now, these complete sets of handwritten letters have remained with the families who agreed to share them in time for the one-hundredth anniversary of the Great War's end in 2018.

During the First World War, Henri Bourassa - fierce Canadian nationalist, politician, and journalist from Quebec - took centre stage in the national debates on Canada's participation in the war, its imperial ties to Britain, and Canada's place in the world. In Duty to Dissent, Geoff Keelan draws upon Bourassa's voluminous editorials in Le Devoir, the newspaper he founded in 1910, to trace Bourassa's evolving perspective on the war's meaning and consequences.

Private James Herbert (Herb) Gibson was 26 years old when he volunteered for service in the Canadian Expeditionary Force in the First World War. Born near Perth, Ontario and descended from Scottish settlers, Gibson enlisted against his father's wishes because he viewed the war as justified and felt he needed to do his part. "Without fear and with a manly heart" collects his personal letters and diaries as well as those sent to him by family and friends. They reveal his beliefs, hopes, realizations, and tragedies through an account of his contribution to the war.

Canada's Mechanized Infantry explores the development of the Canadian Army's infantry after the First World War. Modern studies of technology and war have tended to focus on tanks and armour, but soldiers discovered that military success really depends on the combination of infantry, armour, and artillery. Peter Kasurak demonstrates how the Canadian army implemented successful infantry vehicles and doctrine to further its military goals during the Second World War until organizational constraints took hold in the postwar period.

In the summer of 2006, a Canadian army patrol travelling through Afghanistan's Panjwayi region surprised an unexpectedly large force of Taliban fighters. The soldiers of the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry had stumbled into a hornet's nest; the largest buildup of Taliban forces in the region since their regime had fallen in 2001. As their commanders threw more and more soldiers into what became a gruelling, drawn-out struggle, the battalion's Charlie Company found itself at the forefront of every firefight and ambush in a desperate, two-month pitched battle.

Canadians often characterize their military history as a march toward nationhood, but in the first eighty years of Confederation they were fighting for the British Empire. War forced Canadians to re-examine their relationship to Britain and to one another. As French Canadians, Indigenous peoples, and those with roots in continental Europe and beyond mobilized for war, their participation challenged the imagined homogeneity of Canada as a British nation.

For Home and Empire is the first book to compare voluntary wartime mobilization on the Australian, Canadian, and New Zealand home fronts. Steve Marti shows that collective acts of patriotism strengthened communal bonds, while reinforcing class, race, and gender boundaries. Which jurisdiction should provide for a soldier's wife if she moved from Hobart to northern Tasmania? Should Welsh women in Vancouver purchase comforts for hometown soldiers or Welsh ones? Should Māori enlist with a local or an Indigenous battalion?

Countries have instituted policies to make their armed forces more inclusive, and soldiers now undergo cultural awareness training before seeing active duty. Policy makers and military organizations agree that culture is important. But what does "culture" mean in practice, and how is it important? Culture and the Soldier answers these questions by examining how culture both shapes the military and can be wielded by it, to good or ill effect.