Annual Booklist 2024 : Dr Tim Cook
Dr. Tim Cook is Chief Historian at the Canadian War Museum. He has curated permanent, temporary, travelling, and digital exhibitions. He is the author or editor of 19 books, many of which have won history and literary-non fiction awards. Vimy: The Battle and the Legend (2017) was a finalist for the Templar Medal. His latest book is The Good Allies: How Canada and the United States Fought Together to Defeat Fascism During the Second World War (2024).
I am an historian of the two world wars, with an emphasis on the Canadian armed forces. As a former archivist, museum curator, and public historian, I value the ability of historians to write clearly and evocatively, while still drawing upon unexplored sources from the archives or new ways of interpreting the past. The books below tilt towards the Canadian army, but the first, by Richard Holmes, shaped my own approach to writing military history. All of these books are impactful and, I suppose, personal, in how they sparked new ideas, stimulated research, or showed me a new way to understand warfare.
Richard Holmes, Firing Line (1985). Brilliant, evocative, and haunting, Firing Line explores the alchemy of solders’ experiences in battle. I first read this while studying for a Master’s of War Studies degree at the Royal Military College of Canada, and it has stayed with me ever since. The Firing Linen reveals how soldiers in the brutality and chaos of combat find ways to cope and endure, how they kill and are killed, and how they and societies emerge from the shock of conflict. Holmes’s reminds us to never lose sight of individuals in the vortex of war.
Doug Delaney’s The Imperial Army Project: Britain and the Land Forces of the Dominions and India, 1902-1945 (2018) A former member of the Canadian Armed Forces and now a professor of history at the Royal Military College of Canada, Delaney has created a wide-ranging, transnational study of how the British Army and dominion forces planned, communicated, trained, forged doctrine and conducted operations. Grounded in multiple archives, Delaney’s work deftly handles the dominions’ relations to London, and how they learned to fight together as an imperial force.
J.L. Granatstein’s Canada’s Army: Waging War and Keeping the Peace (2011). Written by Canada’s most important and prolific historian, Granatstein drew upon over fifty years of his own research into Canada’s armed forces – and as author of some 60 books -- to create this unparalleled survey of the Army over 300 years of military history. Weaving together national policy, operational art, evolving tactics, and the personal experience of soldiers, there is no better book to understand the history of Canada’s Army.
Mark Harrison, The Medical War: British Military Medicine in the First World War (2010). Soldiers fight and die. Others are wounded. An efficient medical system saves lives and bolsters morale. Harrison’s fine book presents the centrality of medical care in spaces of violence. The human element of war is sometimes exposed most poignantly and awfully in the field ambulances, clearing stations, and hospitals.
Will Bird, Ghosts Have Warm Hands (1968). This is a classic memoir from Canadian infantryman Will Bird. Written with remarkable candour, Bird lived through some of the most devastating battles of the First World War while fighting with the 42nd Battalion. His brother was killed and he returned to Canada, eventually becoming a journalist and advocate for veterans. There are many fine memoirs by Canadians in the Army, but this one has always been a gateway for me to better understand the war on the Western Front.
When does a contemporary war become one worthy of historical examination? History is written in stages, usually first by participants and journalists, and later, as the archives are opened, by historians. But with paper records giving way to terabytes of data, one wonders what sources will be used to make sense of modern global wars? Along these lines, I’d like to read a book “not yet written” on the evolving and interconnected nature of records, archives, and historical engagement with armies, past, present, and future.