I don’t like war. Violence, in general, repels me and warlike violence, in particular, terrifies me. War is always awful, dirty and nasty. How can I explain, then, that I am passionate about the history of the Second World War? The paradox is perhaps only apparent.
My true passion, deep down, is people, their nature and their culture, their thinking and their behavior, their history and their destiny. And war, the ultimate test which suspends all others because it is a question of life or death, is obviously an experience powerfully revealing of what lies deep within the human being.
The war lifts the veil on the ugliness and misery of the latter, but also on its beauties and its grandeur. The war is Hitler, but it is also de Gaulle; it brings the cowardly collaborators out of their lair, but it brings the valiant resistance fighters into the maquis.
I wish it didn’t exist, but, as Freud said to Einstein in 1932 in Why the war?I am forced to note that it has been necessary since the beginning of humanity and that only, perhaps, the progress of civilization, which involves the deepening of each person’s culture, can contain it.
So I’m interested in war so that it doesn’t happen again. By knowing better what causes it – the appetite for power and profiteers, said Einstein; an instinctive death drive, Freud added – and what it causes – hell on earth, basically – humans will perhaps end up turning away from it. We could thus read it, as a fascinating and terrifying vestige full of lessons, instead of doing it. I’m dreaming, I know.
A political scientist specializing in the military and strategic aspects of international relations, Stéphane Roussel says he has been obsessed since childhood by the history of the 1939-1945 war, the episodes of which fascinate and repugn him at the same time.
In The Second World War. Germans and Canadians face to face (Septentrion, 2024, 156 pages), he looks more specifically at the confrontation between the Germans and the Canadians on the battlefields, with the intention of shaking up some preconceived ideas. Like the other works in the indispensable “Today History” collection, Roussel’s book can be read in one go and with great pleasure, despite the appalling nature of the subject treated.
The liberation of the Netherlands by Canadian troops in May 1945 is still rightly considered today “as one of the great feats of arms in Canadian history.” To free Holland from the Nazi yoke, which had been occupied since 1940 and in which 112,000 Jews out of the country’s 140,000 were killed, Canada sacrificed approximately 7,500 soldiers. Quebecer Léo Major distinguished himself by single-handedly liberating a town of 50,000 inhabitants.
This glorious story, however, does not tell everything. At the end of the war, the repatriation of Canadian soldiers home took time. Tens of thousands of them therefore stay put and do not always behave like gentlemen. Some engage in looting or trafficking in basic necessities and others believe they are free to do anything sexually. When these liberators finally left the country in the spring of 1946, the Dutch breathed a second sigh of relief.
An expert in military security, Roussel devotes two chapters to “emblematic devices” of the conflict. The first is the Tiger, a terrifying German armored vehicle of incredible power, but of a heaviness which makes it ineffective in many combat zones. The second is the Sherman, a more modest American assault tank, but more mobile and above all produced in greater quantities.
One of the examples of this tank, nicknamed Bomb, will accompany the members of the Les Fusiliers de Sherbrooke regiment throughout the war and will be repatriated to the country in 1945, to be exhibited in the capital of Estrie where it is still located. The war is also that: an industrial confrontation, which the Allies, thanks above all to the Americans, won.
Even though it was not one of the main actors in this conflict, Canada played an important supporting role, notably through its participation in the Normandy landings of June 6, 1944 with approximately 15,000 soldiers. In the following days, 156 of them were taken prisoner before being brutally murdered by the SS in defiance of all the laws of war.
Roussel, who draws an illuminating portrait of the nature of the SS, this “armed arm of the Nazi Party”, clearly shows that, under Hitler, “it is the State itself which becomes criminal”, thus releasing the worst impulses of an entire people.
Unfortunately, international current events force us to conclude that such a danger does not only belong to the past.
Columnist (Presence Info, Game), essayist and poet, Louis Cornellier teaches literature at college.