daftandbarmy
Army.ca Dinosaur
- Reaction score
- 31,896
- Points
- 1,160
And this is still happening, to a large degree, for those conflicts our troops have been involved in since WW2:
A 'deafening silence': Canada still struggles with the Second World War's legacy, says historian
Tim Cook argues Canadians have a blind spot when it comes to their role in a war that changed the world
Seventy-five years ago today, a little-known Canadian colonel — a half-blind veteran of the First World War — sat pen in hand before a dark cloth-covered table on the quarterdeck of the American battleship U.S.S. Missouri.
Allied warships had assembled in a long, grey line in the stifling heat of Tokyo Bay — a mute audience for the moment the victors met the vanquished.
Along with a host of military glitterati that included U.S. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Col. Lawrence Cosgrave accepted the surrender of the Japanese empire on Canada's behalf. He signed on the wrong line, causing a minor kerfuffle that was soon rectified by MacArthur's chief of staff with a stroke of his own pen.
The Second World War ended at that moment.
The most deadly and destructive conflict in human history — a war that killed at least 75 million people worldwide, claimed 45,000 Canadian lives and left another 55,000 Canadians physically and mentally scarred — was finally over.
Once the shooting stopped, said historian Tim Cook, war-weary Canadians were eager to forget the war — or at least to move on from it. Few people know, and even fewer appreciate, the somewhat droll role Cosgrove played in that great moment three-quarters of a century ago.
That act of collective forgetting bothers Cook. It's reflected in the title of his latest book: The Fight for History: 75 Years of Forgetting, Remembering and Remaking Canada's Second World War.
One of the book's working titles was "The Deafening Silence."
"It's not easy to talk about our history," Cook told CBC News. "History often divides us."
Cook — one of the country's leading military historians and authors — said he's baffled by Canadians' apparent reluctance to come to grips with the war's legacy.
Following the First World War, Canadians built monuments from coast to coast. Canadian soldiers who served in that war — Cosgrave among them — wrote sometimes eloquent and moving accounts of their experiences under fire.
That didn't happen in Canada following the Japanese and German surrenders in 1945, said Cook.
"We didn't write the same history books. We didn't produce films or television series," he said. "We allowed the Americans and the British and even the Germans to write about the war and to present it on film."
"If you don't tell your own story, no one else will."
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/ww2-second-world-war-pacific-japan-anniversary-1.5708496
A 'deafening silence': Canada still struggles with the Second World War's legacy, says historian
Tim Cook argues Canadians have a blind spot when it comes to their role in a war that changed the world
Seventy-five years ago today, a little-known Canadian colonel — a half-blind veteran of the First World War — sat pen in hand before a dark cloth-covered table on the quarterdeck of the American battleship U.S.S. Missouri.
Allied warships had assembled in a long, grey line in the stifling heat of Tokyo Bay — a mute audience for the moment the victors met the vanquished.
Along with a host of military glitterati that included U.S. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Col. Lawrence Cosgrave accepted the surrender of the Japanese empire on Canada's behalf. He signed on the wrong line, causing a minor kerfuffle that was soon rectified by MacArthur's chief of staff with a stroke of his own pen.
The Second World War ended at that moment.
The most deadly and destructive conflict in human history — a war that killed at least 75 million people worldwide, claimed 45,000 Canadian lives and left another 55,000 Canadians physically and mentally scarred — was finally over.
Once the shooting stopped, said historian Tim Cook, war-weary Canadians were eager to forget the war — or at least to move on from it. Few people know, and even fewer appreciate, the somewhat droll role Cosgrove played in that great moment three-quarters of a century ago.
That act of collective forgetting bothers Cook. It's reflected in the title of his latest book: The Fight for History: 75 Years of Forgetting, Remembering and Remaking Canada's Second World War.
One of the book's working titles was "The Deafening Silence."
"It's not easy to talk about our history," Cook told CBC News. "History often divides us."
Cook — one of the country's leading military historians and authors — said he's baffled by Canadians' apparent reluctance to come to grips with the war's legacy.
Following the First World War, Canadians built monuments from coast to coast. Canadian soldiers who served in that war — Cosgrave among them — wrote sometimes eloquent and moving accounts of their experiences under fire.
That didn't happen in Canada following the Japanese and German surrenders in 1945, said Cook.
"We didn't write the same history books. We didn't produce films or television series," he said. "We allowed the Americans and the British and even the Germans to write about the war and to present it on film."
"If you don't tell your own story, no one else will."
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/ww2-second-world-war-pacific-japan-anniversary-1.5708496
