The first in-depth examination of Canadian conscripts in the final battles of the Great War, Reluctant Warriors provides fresh evidence that conscripts were good soldiers who fought valiantly and made a crucial contribution to the success of the Canadian Corps in 1918.
Foreword / By J.L. Granatstein
Introduction: Slackers, Shirkers, and Malingerers
1 “The Blood Dimmed Tide”
2 Canada’s New Fighting Forces
3 The First Canadian Conscripts in Combat
4 Conspicuous Gallantry at Amiens
5 “Draft Men” and the Battle of the Scarpe, 1918
6 The Hardest Single Battle: The Drocourt-Quéant Line
7 Canal du Nord and the Brotherhood of Arms
8 A Dangerous Advance Continued
9 Cambrai and Iwuy: “For a time hell was loose”
10 Honour and Duty in the Pursuit to Mons
11 The Equal of the Best
Conclusion: Evidence has a Way of Dissolving Theories
Appendices
Notes; Bibliography; Index
Patrick M. Dennis is a retired Canadian Air Force colonel who served abroad for over twenty-two years, including tours as Canada’s deputy military representative to the NATO Military Committee in Brussels, Belgium, and as the Canadian defence attaché to Israel. He is a graduate of the United States Armed Forces Staff College and the NATO Defence College and holds a master’s degree in communication from the University of Northern Colorado. In 1986, he was invested by Governor-General Jeanne Sauvé as an Officer in the Order of Military Merit. After leaving the military, he lectured on global political-military affairs at Wilfrid Laurier University and was a part-time instructor with the Canadian Forces College, Toronto, specializing in command and management and the law of armed conflict. Currently, he is an adjunct associate with the Laurier Centre for Military Strategic and Disarmament Studies.
Patrick M. Dennis's Reluctant Warriors, another compelling entry in
the UBC Press/Canadian War Museum Studies in Canadian Military
History series, is a topical and long overdue examination of a
fascinating chapter of Canada’s Great War experience … The work has
immense emotional resonance, a welcome change from the detachment
so common to operational history, buttressed by the author’s
personal connection to the story … Reluctant Warriors is ... a cri
de coeur that demolishes old assumptions about conscripts in combat
and provides an important contribution to the larger question of
what Canada gained – and lost – in the First World War.
*Conference of Defence Associations Institute*
[Reluctant Warriors] takes aim at oft-repeated tales characterizing
conscripts as shirkers and malingerers who arrived too late and
with too little training to contribute in any meaningful way to the
war effort. Dennis provides a corrective, proving that draftees
were a significant stream of reinforcements during periods when
casualty rates kept Canadian units chronically understrength… this
book really shines when it mines the personal testimony of the
conscripts.
*Prairie History*
This is a first-rate book, well written and coherent. It is very
readable and I recommend it to both serious scholars of the war and
to the casual historian.
*Conference of Defence Associations Institute*
Patrick Dennis has provided a well-researched study that should be
an important part of any intellectual discussion on the Canadian
First World War experience.
*Canadian Military History, Vol 27, Issue 2*
Reluctant Warriors: Canadian Conscripts and the Great War, another
compelling entry in the UBC Press/Canadian War Museum Studies in
Canadian Military History series, is a topical and long overdue
examination of a fascinating chapter of Canada’s Great War
experience.
*Stand To! The Journal of the Western Front Association, No. 113*
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