| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 59

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Jeffrey A. Keshen, Saints, Sinners, and Soldiers: Canada's Second World War (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press 2004)

FOR OVER 30 years, J.L. Granatstein's Canada's War has remained the standard account of the Canadian government's handling of World War II. Granatstein's hand is evident here, for he encouraged his former graduate student to explore "Canada's Bad War." The result is an impressive, wide-ranging synthesis that details the complexity of life in wartime Canada. Drawing on a wide range of primary sources to explore an exhaustive list of issues, Saints, Sinners, and Soldiers sets a new standard.

Despite unprecedented government controls and media campaigns that failed to heal the divides over conscription, Keshen details how Canadians showed a remarkable patriotism during World War II. A country of eleven million people put over one million people in uniform, including over 50,000 women. Canadians paid for it with ever-increasing taxes and War Savings Certificates that were foisted on them in advertising campaigns, company payroll deductions, and by young Miss Canada volunteers. Even so, Keshen shows that Canadians across the country became wealthier than they had ever been before.

But, to quote journalist Charles Lynch, "not everyone was nice ... in Canada's good war." (5) Organized labour and farmers often had good reasons to complain, and they did. Despite efforts to control inflation through the Wartimes Prices and Trade Board, many landlords in bloated Canadian cities shamelessly gouged their overcrowded tenants. Black markets catered to unpatriotic appetites for beef, tobacco, rubber, gasoline, and alcohol. Social commentators fanned anxieties about wartime marriages, venereal diseases, the consequences of women in factories or in uniform, and juvenile delinquents. Although not always accurate, Keshen shows that these concerns spawned an enduring legacy of both conservative and progressive social movements after the war.

Keshen also strips away any kind of romantic hue we may have about the Canadians who served overseas. Highly censored letters gave little measure of a soldier's life to the folks back home. Until the Americans arrived, the British took a dim view of the Canadians' drinking and carousing. So did the Italians and the Dutch. On the issue of venereal disease, the commentators at home were right: like their fathers a generation before, Canadian servicemen suffered high rates of infection. Their casualty rates in battle were not as high as their fathers' but they were still substantial, including 42,042 dead. Keshen maintains that the Veterans Charter could not guarantee everyone a successful reintegration into civilian life at war's end — for many the physical, social, and psychological impact of the war was too much. But government programs offering land, education, or housing were just some of the "progressive, bold, and often ground-breaking initiatives that provided millions with the means to achieve greater personal growth, social mobility, [and] financial security." (286) With a certain reluctance, Keshen concludes that on the whole World War II was a 'good war' for Canadians.

This summary does little justice to the breadth of this work. Keshen has drawn upon a wide and impressive body of sources. Government reports offer a sound statistical overview, but also a good sense of the many regulations that became such a fact of life in wartime Canada. Even the voluntary contributions to the war effort, an area that is so often ignored in many discussions of wartime Canada, came under government edict. Public opinion polls help Keshen provide a glimpse into how Canadians felt, for example, about the level of butter rationing in 1943. Only 43 per cent of those polled thought it appropriate. (107) Newspaper accounts and scores of interviews further offer a more detailed sense of how individuals viewed the war and its effects. To Keshen's credit, he does not lose the voices of Canadians in this wide discussion.

These voices are especially refreshing in two chapters that detail the role of women who worked in both civilian and military roles. Here Keshen takes gentle issue with Ruth Pierson's "now-received version" that the "relatively minor breakthroughs" the war offered Canadian women were largely reversed after 1945. Keshen's wide source base depicts a very complex experience for Canadian women. As he notes, inequities were apparent during the war and continued after. But the war also spawned a genuine appreciation for the capabilities of women that their children may not have fully appreciated in the decades to follow. Responding to the idea that married Canadian women simply returned to the home after the war, Keshen notes that the number of married women in the Canadian workforce increased fourfold between 1941 and 1951. (169) It took far less than a generation to entice married women back into the workforce.

Keshen was undoubtedly right to develop a set of thematic discussions, but reviewers are equally right to speculate about how this work may have revealed other things if organized differently. Certainly this national overview hints at a number of regional studies. Serge Durflinger has recently published a fine discussion of Verdun, Quebec, during World War II, but a similar study of wartime Montreal seems long overdue. Indeed, in a city that saw its mayor interned over his opposition to conscription, that by newspaper accounts saw an enduring black market and red-light district, a study of wartime Montreal may reveal a great deal that cannot be explained in a national study.

As impressive as is Keshen's wide research there are times when it seems divorced from a broader context. Consider the five paragraphs in which Keshen addresses the liberation of the Netherlands by Canadian troops. In the first two, Keshen briefly summarizes the Germans' harsh treatment of the Dutch in the war's final months, as well as the "widely and deeply felt" gratitude the Dutch felt for their Canadian liberators. (253) Then in three much longer paragraphs, Keshen begins with how "Some Dutch accused the Canadians of exploiting their desperation as they would an enemy, using cigarettes, food, fuel ... to drive hard bargains to obtain items such as family jewellery." (254) "Many Dutch men" resented the Canadians for seeing Dutch women, a situation that caused "near-riots" in two Dutch cities during the summer of 1945. Finally, Keshen cites three Canadian military memoranda to show that, among other things, a Dutch newspaper had charged Canadians with infecting nearly 2,000 Dutch prostitutes with VD, and that the infection rate of the 2nd Canadian Division had "reached 130 per 1,000" by May 1945. (255) Such memoranda are worth citing, but without context they offer a misleading impression. Nowhere, for example, does Keshen mention that the Canadians helped ease widespread starvation through the spring and summer of 1945 at a cost that would fill three Canadian war cemeteries on Dutch soil.

There are other noteworthy omissions. It is curious that a book examining Canada's 'bad war' does not detail in some way the wartime treatment of either Italian or Japanese Canadians. It is also interesting that he does not expand upon a brief but intriguing discussion at the outset on the literary memory of the war. Of course the former topic has been covered elsewhere; perhaps Keshen plans to develop the latter — a Death So Noble for World War II — in another work.

Just as Jack Granatstein's work has done, Jeffrey Keshen's work will enliven Canadian war and society seminars for a long time to come.


Geoffrey Hayes University of Waterloo

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