In his controversial and award-winning 2003 book Fields of Fire, Terry Copp offered a stunning reversal of accepted military history, challenging the conventional view that the Canadian contribution to the Battle of Normandy was a failure. Cinderella Army continues the story of the operations carried out by the First Canadian Army in the last nine months of the war, and extends the argument developed in Fields of Fire that "the achievement of the Allied and espec...

Drawing from newspapers, journals, government reports, and archival records, Terry Copp – one of Canada’s leading military historians – tells the story of how citizens in Canada’s largest city responded to the challenges of the First World War.Montreal at War addresses responses to the outbreak of war in Europe and the process of raising an army for service overseas. It details the shock of intense combat and heavy casualties, studies the mobilization of volunteers, and fo...

With Fields of Fire, Terry Copp challenges the conventional view that the Canadian contribution to the Battle of Normandy was a “failure” – that the allies won only through the use of brute force, and that the Canadian soldiers and commanding officers were essentially incompetent. His detailed and impeccably researched analysis of what actually happened on the battlefield portrays a flexible, innovative army that made a major, and successful, contribution to the defeat of the Germ...

This WWII history critically reexamines one of the most dramatic and significant battles to follow the D-Day landings in Normandy.The destruction of the trapped German forces in the Falaise pocket in August 1944 is one of the most famous episodes of the Normandy campaign. But myths have grown up around the battle, and its impact on the course of the war is often misunderstood. In this meticulously researched study, Anthony Tucker-Jones dispels misconceptions about t...

With its trademark "you are there" style, Mark Zuehlke's tenth Canadian Battle Series volume tells the story of the 1942 Dieppe raid. Nicknamed "The Poor Man's Monte Carlo," Dieppe had no strategic importance, but with the Soviet Union thrown on the ropes by German invasion and America having just entered the war, Britain was under intense pressure to launch a major cross-Channel attack against France.Since 1939, Canadian troops had massed in Britain and trained for the inevitable ...

The ninth book in the Canadian Battle Series, Breakout from Juno, is the first dramatic chronicling of Canada's pivotal role throughout the entire Normandy Campaign following the D-Day landings.On July 4, 1944, the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division won the village of Carpiquet but not the adjacent airfield. Instead of a speedy victory, the men faced a bloody fight. The Canadians advanced relentlessly at a great cost in bloodshed. Within 2 weeks the 2nd Infantry and 4th Armour...

Take a trip back in time to the chaos and destruction of the greatest invasion in military history, viewed through the lens of Canadian paratroopers. Men of Steel is the exciting story of some of Canada's toughest and most daring soldiers in the Second World War.In the dead of night, on 5/6 June 1944, hundreds of elite Canadian paratroopers hurled themselves from aircraft behind enemy lines. That daring act set the stage for the eventual success of the Allied invasion flee...

For nearly 100 years Canada's role in ending WWI sooner than anyone thought possible has gone largely unrecognized. The Canadian Corp led by citizen soldier, Arthur Currie, became the premiere fighting force on the Western Front. The fact that Canada was not yet a formalized nation but a Dominion at the close of the war may be the reason for the absence of recognition yet the record of the Canadian WWI military accomplishments is irrefutable.Canadian soldiers unlike British "city b...

The eighth Canadian Battle Series volume is the little-told story of the tense final days of World War II, remembered in the Netherlands as the sweetest of springs,” which saw the country’s liberation from German occupation.The Liberation Campaign, a series of fierce, desperate battles during the last three months of the war, was bittersweet. A nation’s freedom was won and the war concluded, but these final hostilities cost Canada 6,298 casualties, including 1,482 dead.Wit...

The brutal battlefields of Europe during World War II were the testing ground for the young men of the 1st Battalion of the North Shore (New Brunswick) Regiment. On June 6, 1944, the soldiers landed on the coast of France as part of the first wave of the D-Day invasion. After securing the eastern flank of the Canadian landing along Juno Beach, the Regiment was in constant contact with the enemy over the next thirty days, suffering a steady strema of casualties. This led to a ferocious batt...

In the tradition of Margaret MacMillan’s Paris 1919 comes a new consideration of Canada’s most famous war and the Treaty of Ghent that unsatisfactorily concluded it, from one of this country’s premier military historians.In the Canadian imagination, the War of 1812 looms large. It was a war in which British and Indian troops prevailed in almost all of the battles, in which the Americans were unable to hold any of the land they fought for, in which a young woman nam...

During World War II, Canada trained tens of thousands of airmen under the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan. Those selected for Bomber Command operations went on to rain devastation upon the Third Reich in the great air battles over Europe, but their losses were high. German fighters and anti-aircraft guns took a terrifying toll. The chances of surviving a tour of duty as a bomber crew were almost nil.Murray Peden's story of his training in Canada and England, and his crew's o...