Canadian Experience of War – serie

The role of Canadian universities in selecting and training officers for the armed forces is an important yet overlooked chapter in the history of higher education in Canada. For more than fifty years, the University of Toronto supported the largest and most active contingent of the Canadian Officers' Training Corps (COTC), which sent thousands of officer candidates into the regular and reserve forces. Based on the rich fund of documents housed in the university archives, Varsity’s Soldiers offers the first full-length history of military training in Toronto. Beginning with the formation of a student rifle company in 1861, and focusing on the story of the COTC from 1914 to 1968, author Eric McGeer seeks to enlarge appreciation of the university’s remarkable contribution to the defence of Canada, the place of military education in an academic setting, and the experience of the students who embodied the ideal of service to alma mater and to country.

During a government career that spanned nearly the whole of the Cold War, George R. Lindsey gained a reputation as a leading defence scientist and military strategist for Canada’s Defence Research Board. His research and writing played a vital role in shaping Canadian policy in air defence, anti-submarine warfare, the militarization of space, and other areas of crucial concern in the nuclear age.The Selected Works of George R. Lindsey provides full access to a wealth of previously classified historical material regarding the scientific and technical aspects of Canadian defence and national security in the Cold War. Insightful and eye-opening, Lindsey’s writings shed light not only on one of Canada’s most influential civil servants of the Cold War era, but on the strategies, priorities, and inner workings of the Canadian defence establishment during an active and politically volatile period in world affairs.

This extensively annotated wartime diary illuminates the military service of Leslie Howard Miller (1889–1979), a Canadian soldier who served in the First World War. Miller joined the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF) in 1914. In his off-duty hours, he kept this extraordinarily eloquent diary of his training, deployment overseas, service on the Western Front, and periods of leave in the United Kingdom.Graham Broad, working from a transcription of the diary produced by Miller’s family, includes a thorough introduction and afterword, as well as over 500 notes that situate and explain Miller’s many references to the people, places, and events he encountered. Unpublished for over a century, written in bracing and engaging prose, and illustrated with Miller’s own drawings and unseen photographs, Part of Life Itself illuminates a bygone world and stands as one of Canada’s most important wartime diaries.