When I excitedly departed for London to search the National Archives on 11 June, I felt – thanks to the encouraging words of my colleagues (“the archives are amazing,” “a million times better than any in Canada,” etc.) – that I was headed for the historians’ Shangri-la.  It would be a nerd’s paradise with organisation, efficiency, and a never ending supply of cappuccinos; a place where documents sought you out, rather than vice-versa.  After all the hype, in a little place in the alleys of my mind I actually thought The National Archives (TNA) in London might just write my dissertation for me.

Sadly they didn’t.  But I quickly understood some of the hype: the turnover time for document delivery is light-years faster than in Canada Archives (LAC)—aided perhaps by the location of the documents not just in the same city, but the very same building! Photography is permitted without having to fill out forms each time new documents arrive; and yes, the café does offer pretty good lattés. 

Yet, TNA (which I steadfastly called the PRO out of respect for historians’ notorious resistance to change) still presents challenges to the fastidious researcher, notably its limited hours of operation.  Recently the archives’ hours changed from six days/week to the current five days a week from 9am-7pm Tues/Thurs and 9-5 Wed/Fri/Sat.  I never felt like I was maximizing my time in the UK, no matter how rapidly I snapped photographs (and my colleague once managed to snap 4000 in a single day).  While the forced weekend tourism time was nice (I highly recommend the Lake District), I did not have the time to search all of the documents I had targeted.  TNA also limits researchers to three files at a time and these, to be clear are files - not file boxes like at LAC. These files can be small affairs; one file I ordered consisted of a single page.  According to my colleagues, the turn-around time for documents has recently slowed from 20 minutes to around 40—and sometimes even an hour or more.  I had to maintain precise timing with new orders or risk running out of documents before the next batch arrived.  On the whole, however, TNA is pretty darn good and doing its best with a tight budget.

My frustration with inefficiency really grew after my experience in the Imperial War Museum archive.  Admittedly I didn’t arrive in the best frame of mind.  I was already frustrated by the fact that the IMW doesn’t allow photography and charges 40 pence/photocopied page -- quite the racket!  Then, in a small room with only 6 or 7 researchers, I had a terrible time even getting documents.  On a number of occasions I asked for more of the boxes I had pre-ordered, only to sit and wait (once for over 40 minutes!) for the friendly lady working the desk to find an archivist who could then get my boxes. 

It was then, as I sat and contemplated how it was that I had come all this way to sit in this room doing nothing, braced to pay 200 pounds in copy fees for something that I could photograph better and more quickly myself, while I seriously - if foolishly – contemplated whether I might just omit Oliver Leese from my dissertation on the Italian Campaign, just to give myself a small victory over this anachronistic archive, that it hit me: digitization is at the root of archives’ challenges.  While I certainly wouldn’t want to turn back the clock, we seem now to be stuck in an awkward transition between paper and digital.  After a hesitant start TNA, like LAC, has now completely embraced the digital revolution, and in so doing has lost a major source of income, particularly from the genealogists who make up a significant portion of the archives’ daily visitors. Indeed, tour buses arrive at TNA each day, delivering up scores of family researchers who queue patiently for assistance and, when the time is right, gingerly activate their digital cameras. Five years ago these folks doled out stupendous sums for photocopies of their grandfather’s court-martial conviction or their great great uncle’s hearth tax receipt.  On this trip I overheard one Luddite agree to pay 46 pounds for a scan of a single off-sized page.  Now the pressure is on for archives to digitize entire collections.  While I have personally benefited from the efforts of LAC to digitize their holdings (sometimes I let the ramblings of Mackenzie King rock me to sleep), a side effect has been a reduction in reading room hours and service to compensate.  I can only imagine that the slower turn-around time at TNA is partly a result of the same pressures, combined with budget cuts.  On the other hand, access to digital documents (either of your own or the archives’ creation) has made me bitter towards those archives, like the IMW, that still charge a prohibitive amount for photocopies, even though this was (I hate to admit it), probably in their best interest monetarily.

What is the answer?   Can the archives fit into the digital world and still make their budgets? Is there any system that can satisfy an impatient-picture-taking-frugal (grad school has its perks, but money isn’t one of them)-history student like myself?  Maybe not.  One answer could be for archives to start charging a small photography fee at a daily rate, thus allowing pictures while also justifying the added costs of offering longer hours.  Yet this goes against my belief that archives should promote free access to information for anyone interested. A 10 pound/day photo fee, for example, would cost the student researcher about $500 over a month.    

Until a system develops that can satisfy every aspect of our research needs, I recommend the following: (1) plan to spend more time in the archives than you think you’ll need, or accept that you will have to take a return trip because you will likely find much more than you expected; (2) coordinate your trip with your peers so that you can cost-share a flat and go on pub-tours of London  together; (3) love the research, enjoy the lattés, and try to slip your supervisor your photocopy bill.

In the 1960s, arms control emerged as a major issue in international politics.  The world had come perilously close to nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the search for ways to avoid another brush with Armageddon was on.  For instance, the hotline between the White House and the Kremlin dates from this period.  But perhaps the most significant change in atmosphere was a consequence of the idea that mutually agreed arms reductions would benefit all sides.

Arms control developed into an enormous enterprise.  Soon there were many treaties and agreements, an elaborate diplomatic, military, and governmental infrastructure, a large number of committed NGOs, and the deployment of considerable intellectual capital.  Arms-control proposals that the superpowers, and others, would at least talk about appeared with great rapidity, supporting organizations and structures were established, and inspection procedures developed and implemented.  Of course, cynics never failed to note that the effort spent on figuring out how to circumvent, or even undermine, arms control was at least equal to the effort to develop and enforce it. Nonetheless, arms control was a great success, at least measured in its own terms.

But by the turn of the millennium the Cold War was over, and commentators were proclaiming the death of arms control.  Some hard-won agreements, like the CFE (Conventional Forces in Europe) Treaty became meaningless, and simply fell by the wayside.  Others, like the NPT (Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty), were still seen as important, but were burdened with doubts, as states party either ignored their treaty obligations or carried them out half-heartedly. Yet arms control is a legacy that may still be valuable to us, and may even be adapted to assist us in addressing problems not even dreamed of when it began.

The end of the Cold War brought 9/11, and with it the understanding that we are all vulnerable to terrorism. Can arms control do much in the face of politically-motivated violence against non-combatants and their property carried out by non-state actors?  Because it began as restrictions on governments and their militaries, arms control would seem unable to offer much protection against the activities of shadowy organizations organized into secret cells.

But, in the realm of Weapons of Mass Destruction, there are three continuing arms control agreements that might help, providing, of course, that there were adequately retooled and refocused.  The NPT, the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) and the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) are all relevant to reducing the threat that terrorists will use these terrible weapons.  In the last few years, there has been some discussion and speculation about how these agreements apply, and whether they can be adapted to protect against terror. Most of my thoughts on this subject were developed at a recent Workshop in Lancaster, UK, on the subject of Terrorism and Weapons of Mass Destruction.

All three of the BWC, CWC, and NPT are administered by respected international agencies with competent professional staff.  They contain clear requirements for storage, reporting, and usage. Their provisions embody extensive knowledge about what is weaponizable and how such weapons might be delivered.  But challenges of adapting the three agreements to protection against terrorism are quite different.

At one extreme is the BWC, which has the weakest central agency and no verification provisions whatsoever.  (Besides the usual intrusion argument, inspections for biological weapons are seen as unlikely to be successful because evidence is so easy to destroy.)  But the world might be increasingly willing to strengthen the BWC to deal with substate groups at the expense of a stronger organization and some inspection rights.  Nonetheless, adapting the BWC poses some problems that will be extremely difficult to resolve, problems rooted in the technology itself.

The CWC has a stronger central agency staffed with professionals who have the right, and the ability, to carry out inspections.  The challenge of adapting the CWC to protect against terrorism seems to lie mainly in the scale of the inspections; the CWC is designed to detect military quantities of chemical weapons, whereas terrorists’ ends are generally served by much smaller amounts.  Searching for “tiny” quantities of banned materials again raises the issue of intrusiveness.

Of the three agreements, the NPT is probably easiest to adapt to address terrorism.  In fact, the IAEA, the enforcement agency for the NPT, is already doing a great deal toward that end.  Its material balance accounting tests against the diversion of nuclear materials make it difficult to accumulate fissionable substances, at least from declared facilities. This effectiveness has been achieved through the IAEA’s mastery of its technology, developed over the years, and partly because of the relative paucity of nuclear installations in the world (relative to, say, chemical plants).  Of course, there is more that the IAEA might do, but basic physical facts about radioactivity seem to give it a leg up.

The special features of the NPT account for its greater potential, but are also linked to some specific problems that the IAEA must face. First, participation by declared nuclear powers in the NPT is essentially voluntary; smaller countries usually act on advice from the IAEA that larger countries would regard as intrusive.  Another problem is money.  The IAEA has a remarkable record of doing more with less, but extending its mandate even further must surely hasten the inevitable financial crisis.

In conclusion, arms control agreements have some potential to offer protection against terrorism.  They have some remaining utility for their original purposes, so it is problematic whether retooling them, as would be necessary to a greater or lesser degree, would be worth the effort.  But for some specific cases they are already doing a good job, and we should be thinking about how to expand and develop them.

Interested readers can find an fuller account of the workshop in Terrorism and Weapons of Mass Destruction: Responding to the Challenge, Ian Bellany, ed., Routledge Global Security Series, Oxford, 2007

Marc Kilgour is a Professor of Mathematics at Wilfrid Laurier University, Adjunct Professor of Systems Engineering at the University of Waterloo and Research Director of Conflict Analysis as well as a founding member of at the LCMSDS

What Next: The Canadian Forces Post-Afghanistan at the Canadian Forces College,

Toronto Ontario September 16-17, 2010 

Sponsored by the Laurier Centre for Military Strategic and Disarmament Studies 

in conjunction with the Centre for National Security Studies

Click here for the Program

For more information please contact Alistair Edgar

Neither of the towns above ranks among the destinations that attract so many travellers to Italy, but for Canadians they represent the beginning and the end of a significant chapter in our history. That chapter opens on July 10, 1943, when 1st Canadian Division came ashore with the Anglo-American forces committed to the invasion of Sicily, and ends in February of 1945, when after twenty months and five major battles 1st Canadian Corps made its dry-eyed parting from Italy to take part in the final assault against Nazi Germany. Nearly seven decades after the war, the young men from all parts of Canadawho fought in Italyhave grown old and are now fading away, but the ancient landscape of Sicilyand Italyremains the dramatic setting for their efforts and exploits. The monuments and war cemeteries marking the “Maple Leaf Route” invite Canadians of the present day to retrace their forebears’ steps and to partake of the multifaceted human experience of the Italian Campaign. Nearly 100,000 Canadians served in Italy, leaving a wealth of histories, memoirs, war art, photographs, correspondents’ reports, and oral accounts to tell their story.

German prisoners-of-war carrying wounded members of the 1st Canadian Corps through Cesena. October 21, 1944, Cesena, Italy.

The series of guidebooks to the Canadian battlefields in Italy which Matt Symes and I have now completed is an attempt to provide Canadians with a resource serving two ends at once. I took on this project as something of a layman, for, although trained as a historian, my specialisation in Byzantine studies was about as remote from Canadian history as ancient Egypt. This lack of background, however, had its advantages, since it forced me to keep asking myself what the non-expert yet deeply interested visitor to the battlefields (such as I was) would need to know. From giving adult-education courses on the Italian Campaign, and from talking with fellow Canadians in Italy, I tried to gain a sense of the context and measure of information necessary to form a coherent picture of events without drowning the audience in details – an easy thing to do, alas, and a particular trait of military historians. So the first task in assembling the guidebooks was to condense the accounts of each battle into an irreducible minimum while emphasizing the reasons why the fighting took the course it did. I should say here, by the way, that many of the regimental histories are minor classics in themselves – Kim Beattie’s history of the 48th Highlanders (Dileas), Farley Mowat’s The Regiment, or Fred Cederberg’s The Long Road Home being only a few outstanding examples – and that there are two remarkable French Canadian memoirs, Claude Châtillon’s Carnets de guerre and Gaston Poulin’s 696 Heures d’enfers avec le Royal 22e Régiment which richly deserve translation for the light they shed on the lesser known legacy of the Italian Campaign.

Despite the volume of material, doing the research and writing was the easy part. Blundering through the remoter parts of Sicily and Italy, maps and campaign accounts in hand, proved to be challenging, frustrating, and rewarding simultaneously. The roads change names every twenty feet or so, and it seems that the Autostradas were designed to run through every Canadian battlefield. Still, in most places the setting has changed very little. The roads and landmarks are where they should be, and as I roamed in search of various sites, I was increasingly struck by the courtesy and helpfulness of the locals who went out of their way to point me in the right direction, or, as often happened, to take me to the place I was looking for. I soon learned to ask the older men for directions, since they retained the memory of placenames no longer used and had kept the ways of another time, which included an automatic hospitality to strangers. Laying out the routes for each tour was a lengthy process of trial and error, involving first the location of significant sites, then investigation of the road connections, and finally the development of an itinerary that followed the flow of events and kept the visitor aware of the importance of the terrain. I can only hope that visitors to the battlefields will find, as I did, that examining the setting gives them an understanding of events that the narrative histories, no matter how good, cannot. Far more importantly, touring the battlefields gave me much greater appreciation, bordering on awe, for the physical obstacles that Canadian soldiers faced and overcame – not only the infantrymen who scaled Assoro, mouseholed at Ortona, punctured the Hitler Line and the Gothic Line, and slogged through the sodden ground of the Romagna, but also the tank crews, the engineers, the service corps, and the staffs who all in their various capacities coped with the challenges posed by the corrugated ground and endless succession of rivers. Two thoughts recurred as I beheld the places made famous in Canadian military annals: how the hell did they do it, and thank God it wasn’t me at the ripe old age of 19 or 20 having to pick my way through “the Gully” or across the Lamone.

The journey is not over. Now that the guidebooks are done, Matt and I are creating an online supplement.  Click Here for the online supplement for The Canadian Battlefields in Italy: The Gothic Line and the Battle of the Rivers.

Eric McGeer is a teacher at at St. Clement's School in Toronto and a research associate of the LCMSDS. He received his doctorate from L'Université de Montréal, and as a specialist in Byzantine history he has concentrated on Byzantine warfare and law.

My wonderful existence as a Research Coordinator at the Laurier Centre for Military, Strategic and Disarmament Studies and a first year PhD student at Royal Military College, ended when my husband secured a great new job in Arizona. I loved my affiliation with LCMSDS and I could not wait to be a trail blazer with my PhD in War Studies, studying army civil affairs during the Second World War campaign in Northwest Europe.

I first became intrigued with the concept of nose art when the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum’s B-25 Mitchell bomber “Grumpy” visited my hometown of Windsor, Ontario, about eight years ago for an air show. Like you may expect, her name alluded to the most ill-tempered of Snow White’s companions and the design showcased the dwarf in a blue outfit with thick white beard. The fairy tale character’s testy demeanour seemed fitting for the aircraft’s growly engines. Yet in May 2009, after years of being “Grumpy” she became “Hot Gen.” Apparently the aircraft had spent a long period under “Hot Gen” before her more recent Disney inspired stint. For the museum, then, returning to the old adage was an ode to an aviation legacy; but for me, the discovery that “Grumpy” had not always been “Grumpy” was disheartening. Changing the nose art not only changed the look of the aeroplane, but it also seemed to give the aircraft an entirely new personality. Since then, I have wondered if nose art existed for practical reasons, perhaps providing airmen a sense of fondness to their aircraft in a similar way as what I had experienced myself. At the same time, I have struggled to comprehend the appeal behind something so temporary and ephemeral, yet so evocative. This dichotomy, combined with an affinity for vintage aircraft, led me to focus my Masters research around the concept of Canadian nose art and the bomber crew mentality of No. 6 Group Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF), the contingent of fourteen Canadian bomber squadrons formed to serve within RAF Bomber Command.

It has recently been estimated that sixty-two percent of all war related deaths in the twentieth-century were non-combatant.  This translates to more than 54 million civilians having perished in all military conflicts of the last century.  Much has been written on the cataclysmic impact of war on society in the Second World War and continues to be a topic of interest for many scholars of post-1945 international relations.  The history of the First World War, however, has been written almost irrespective of examining civilian casualties.  My Ph.D. thesis entitled, “A ‘Weapon of Starvation’: The Politics, Propaganda, and Morality of Britain’s Hunger Blockade of Germany, 1914-1919” focuses on the British naval blockade imposed on Germany between August 1914 and July 1919 when the Treaty of Versailles was eventually ratified.  The blockade has received relatively little attention in the historiography of the First World War, despite the assertion in the British official history that extreme privation and hunger resulted in more than 750,000 German civilian casualties.

The Laurier Centre for Military Strategic and Disarmament Studies has an extraordinary collection of aerial reconnaissance photographs from the Second World War.  We have used these photos extensively in our various publications over the years but we keep making discoveries.  I have been working with these photos since I was an undergrad (a long time ago) and I thought I knew the collection well, but I continue to find amazing images.  Last fall I was looking through the collection (I can't even remember what it was I was originally searching for!) and I came across a photograph that showed a large number of vehicles in a rectangular field.  It took me a while to figure out where the photo was taken and cross reference it with a topographical map, but I eventually realized that I had found a photograph of the field where Worthington Force ended up after it getting lost.  The story of the battlegroup is well known - during Operation Totalize Worthington Force, made up of the tanks of the British Columbia Regiment and the infantry of the Algonquin Regiment, were ordered to make a night march to capture Point 195.  Somehow, the battlegroup got lost and ended up near Point 140. Nobody knew it was there, including the men of the battlegroup, and over the course of the day the battlegroup was destroyed by determined German counterattacks.

Over Friday and Saturday 18/19 June a group of some 40 people (military history and security studies scholars from Laurier, RMC, and Queens, Naval Reserve officers and members of the public) gathered at HMCS Cataraqui in Kingston for the Laurier Military Centre's first conference in eastern Ontario.  The event was a very successful first effort in what has become a growing series of regional conferences highlighting military history, current strategic issues and the role of Reservists in Canada's foreign and defence operations.  This event was much in keeping with those themes.  On Friday evening Dr. Whitney Lackenbauer gave a vigorous and thought provoking presentation of the history and current trends of Canadian Arctic Security.  On the Saturday morning Dr. Roger Sarty gave an equally insightful examination of Canadian anti-submarine operations in the Gulf of St. Lawrence during the Second World War; in this centenary of the Canadian Navy he paid particular attention to the efforts of the RCN.  The day was capped off by a panel of four recent veterans speaking on their diverse experiences in Afghanistan ranging from an NCO's perspective on Canada's interaction with the Afghan population to aviation operations to the work of two Naval Officers in very non-traditional roles.  Both the CO of HMCS Cataraqui, LCdr Susan Long-Poucher, and the Centre's Director, Prof Terry Copp, were pleased at the quality of the presentations and the engaging discussions and look forward to running another session in 2011.

by Randy Wakelam