Fields of Fire

FIELDS OF FIRE The Canadians in Normandy Terry Copp Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. xvi, 348pp, $40.00 cloth (ISBN 0-8020-3730-5)Canada's official historians dominated the interpretation of the Second World War for several decades. The primary author and the driving force behind the official army series, Colonel C.P. Stacey, held command over the field, but his work was not unassailable. In writing contemporary history, Stacey found it difficult to condemn the generals of the Canadian high command, whom he knew and respected. At the same time, Stacey refused to downplay the failures of the Canadian forces during the Normandy fighting. His occasional harsh conclusions relating to the Canadian army in battle, and his finding fault at the junior-officer level, were based on the assumption that the British and American forces had their own challenges, but that it was the role of their historians to analyze these events. Because of his international reputation, Stacey's work was often used by other historians to justify claims that the Canadians were among the weakest fighting forces in Europe. By the 1980s, the interpretation of the Canadian army had begun to change, with Reginald Roy, Terry Copp, Robert Vogel, and John English reappraising Stacey's foundational work.Building on earlier publications, Terry Copp argues in Fields of Fire that the Canadian army was a more effective fighting force than historians have suggested previously. Despite Canadian generals like Charles Foulkes commenting that his troops were match for the battle-experienced German troops encountered in Normandy, Copp has constructed a strong case to re-evaluate the Canadians in battle. There were no easy victories in Normandy. The Canadian forces were ordered to attack dug-in defenders, situated on reverse-slopes, protected by superior tanks or tank-killer artillery and, in many cases, with equal or superior combat force ratios. Copp also reveals that the overwhelming Allied command of the air over Normandy did not equate to overwhelming support for the soldiers at the front. There is no doubt that the Allied air forces harassed and wore down German fighting efficiency throughout the campaign, and perhaps more than Copp gives credit for, but he is also right to question the operational effect of airpower at the sharp end, where Allied ground forces were still forced to meet and destroy dug-in defenders.The Canadian army's harshest critics usually point to the slow advance of the Canadians in breaking out of the Normandy beachhead or the failure to close the Falaise gap. The Canadians indeed made slow progress, but they, and all Allied forces, confronted battlefield conditions that would have been familiar to any Great War soldier of an earlier generation

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