100 Books Like Turvey

This is a book of unparalleled scholarship by Canada’s finest military historian of all time.

Stacey’s magisterial, wide-ranging, immensely insightful, deeply researched, and engagingly written masterpiece illuminates those many policies and personalities that governed Canada’s tremendous war effort during the Second World War. It is literally one-stop shopping for understanding Canada’s wartime political intricacies (and intrigues!), diplomatic manoeuvring, and industrial and military mobilization.

No stone is left unturned, and Arms, Men, and Governments is, and will remain, unequalled. It has greatly influenced my understanding of this pivotal moment in Canadian military history, and I refer to it constantly in my research and teaching.

Terry Copp is one of Canada’s foremost military historians and his towering knowledge is on full display in this brilliant study of Canada’s role in the 1944 Normandy Campaign. Copp interviewed dozens of veterans and visited Normandy some 20 times to walk the ground and see the unfolding of the battle through the men’s eyes.

Fields of Fire redresses an imbalance in our understanding of Canada’s battlefield performance in Normandy that several leading international and some Canadian scholars feel was underwhelming. But not Copp.

He minutely and compellingly re-examines and convincingly contextualizes Canadian generalship, the terrain over which the men fought, the nature of German defences, Canadian casualties of 18,000 in just ten weeks, including psychological casualties due to battle exhaustion, and other factors that oblige us to assess the Canadians’ performance more positively.

He is palpably proud of these men’s achievements and deeply sensitive to the cruel fates of… show more.

How many Canadians knew of the Second World War German submarine campaign against our east coast and even the inshore waters of the St. Lawrence River?

Michael Hadley delivers this fascinating story in a richly detailed book based in masses of Canadian and German sources. German U-boats sank more than 20 merchant and naval vessels in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and in the river without loss to themselves and also landed spies and erected an automated weather station in Labrador.

Some of these sinkings were within sight of land and one vessel, the small ferry Caribou, was sunk with heavy loss of civilian life. Hadley’s well-illustrated, authoritative book takes you from the U-boat attacks to the Canadian military responses to the political and social consequences of unpreparedness. It’s a reminder that Canada, too, was a battlefront.

North Atlantic Run was the first hard assessment of the Royal Canadian Navy’s campaign in the North Atlantic shepherding supply convoys to Britain.

Milner’s understanding of the naval war and Canadian naval policy is unsurpassed. His descriptions of Canada’s corvettes and destroyers going to sea with hastily trained crews and often inferior technology help us realize just how hard the men’s tasks were in the face of experienced U-boat crews.

The navy was stretched very thinly, and it is sobering that many convoys under Canadian protection suffered grievous losses in the desperate years 1942-43 when compared to those escorted primarily by British forces that benefitted from the latest submarine detection equipment. But the tide turned in 1943 and the Canadians played a massive role in ensuring that it stayed that way until war’s end.

I found this original edition, published in 1949, in a used bookstore back in the early 1990s. It was the first memoir I read about a soldier and the higher-up officers he reported to who fought in the same regiment as my late uncle. 

Johnson contributed to two books I wrote on the official history of the 18th Infantry Regiment in World War II. His was a personal memoir up to the time his war was cut short after the Normandy Invasion. The writing style is sweeping and one of the better memoirs I’ve read about an anti-tank battalion during the big war.

Shapiro, a Canadian war correspondent, landed with the troops on the beaches on D-Day and his other experiences rise to the surface in his novel about life during the blitz and the events leading up to D-Day. Shapiro always considered his a historical novel. His descriptions are those of someone who lived the tale. The hero is a U.S. soldier who found himself deeply in love with an English woman. This book came out a few years after the war when the war was fresh in our minds. It was like reliving those wonderful days all over again.

This is the best book out there to introduce the reader to the 1944 Normandy Campaign. 

Clash of Arms examines how the Western Allies improved their battlefield combat effectiveness in order to defeat the forces of the Third Reich and break out of the Normandy bridgehead.

Critically, Hart also examines the German way of war and how the Germans stubbornly sought to adapt in the face of Allied superiority. Packed with detail and superb analysis, this book examines in detail the military campaign of each army within the Normandy bridgehead.

First published in 1959, some 15 years after the Allied invasion of Normandy on D-Day, Cornelius Ryan’s book stands as a classic narrative of that amphibious assault. Writing in the vivid prose of an experienced journalist, Ryan also conducted research like a seasoned historian. He interviewed combatants of every nation and rank and sent questionnaires to many others. I feel like I am in the thick of the fight alongside Allied soldiers in the landing craft approaching the beach and with Germans hunkered down in the fortifications trying to stop their amphibious assault. Throughout his narrative, Ryan blends analyses of the good and bad decisions made by both sides.   

Published in time for the 50th anniversary of D-Day (Operation Overlord) in 1994, Ambrose’s 656-page tome covers the broad scope of the massive, history-changing operation, with special attention paid to the parachute and glider operations. The author details the overall planning of the air-and-sea operation—and analyzes why the most carefully planned invasion in history nearly went terribly wrong. This is the ultimate history of the battle that changed the outcome of World War II.

The descriptions of interpreting aerial reconnaissance photos during the Second World War were interesting. But the real hook for me was the compelling portrayal of small-town Saskatchewan life in the 1940s. The heroine—and the book does have a streak of chick lit about it—sounded like the real people I met while working as a reporter in Saskatchewan during the mid-1970s. Her hometown was recognizable, too. I keep hoping some of the spirit of these places and their people will survive well into the 2000s.