"The Longest Battle: The RCN in the Atlantic 1939-1945" (used book)

The Longest Battle: The RCN in the Atlantic 1939-1945

by John D. Harbron

About the Book

Used Book. Hardcover. Dust jacket included. Good condition. Some damage to the binding.

-- from the back

In Canada, which often forgets the great events of its history, “looking astern” has special appeal during the fiftieth anniversary year of the relentless five-and-a-half-year Battle of the Atlantic.

Given the chronically uncertain course of world events in the half century that separates us from the far-off mid-1940s, when more than ninety thousand young men and women served in the wartime navy on shore and at sea, it is understandable why the sacrifice, devotion to duty, love of country and deep longings of Canadians in the navy for home and peace at the war’s end are, at best, distant memories.

Yet author John D. Harbron helps us remember that Canada’s wartime production of hundreds of ships for the navy and thousands of aircraft for both the Royal Canadian Air Force and the royal Air Force, in addition to the training tens of thousands of young men and women in skills they would later apply to postwar careers, was the root of the Canadian industrial democracy of our own era.

If the spirit of Canadian nationalism was born in the World War One trenches of Flanders and France, then it was reborn during World War Two in the wartime mess decks of the Royal Canadian Navy. In September 1939 the tiny Canadian navy went to war as a pliant auxiliary of the Royal Navy. In May 1945, it emerged at the peace as a full-blown, confident Canadian national institution in which Canadians had been drawn together in a common cause.

In our navy, a Canadian creature of the twentieth century, founded in 1910, bloodied in two world wars and the Korean conflict of 1950-1953 and with recent service in the United Nations’ military coalition in the Gulf War, the spirit remains of the men and women who fought the Battle of the Atlantic and built the hundreds of Canadian ships that helped to win it.