Lifesavers And Body Snatchers

Download or read book Lifesavers and Body Snatchers written by Tim Cook and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-09-13 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *FINALIST FOR THE 2023 OTTAWA BOOK AWARD* *SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 TEMPLER MEDAL FOR BEST BOOK* From Canada’s top war historian, a definitive medical history of the Great War, illuminating how the carnage of modern battle gave birth to revolutionary life-saving innovations. It brings to light shocking revelations of the ways the brutality of combat and the necessity of agonizing battlefield decisions led to unimaginable strain for men and women of medicine who fought to save the lives of soldiers. Medical care in almost all armies during the Great War, and especially in the Canadian medical services, was sophisticated and constantly evolving. Vastly more wounded soldiers were saved than lost. Doctors and surgeons prevented disease from decimating armies, confronted ghastly wounds from chemical weap-ons, remade shattered bodies, and struggled to ease soldiers’ battle-haunted minds. After the war, the hard lessons learned by doctors and nurses were brought back to Canada. A new Department of Health created guidelines in the aftermath of the 1918–1919 influ-enza pandemic, which had killed 55,000 Canadians and millions around the world. In a grim irony, the fight to improve civilian health was furthered by the most destructive war up to that point in human history. But medical advances were not the only thing brought back from Europe: Lifesavers and Body Snatchers exposes the disturbing story of the harvesting of human body parts in medical units behind the lines. Tim Cook has spent over a decade investigating the history of Canadian medical doctors removing the body parts of slain soldiers and transporting their brains, lungs, bones, and other organs to the Royal College of Surgeons (RCS) in London, England. Almost 800 individual body parts were removed from the dead and sent to London, where they were stored, treated, and presented in exhibition galleries. After being exhibited there, the body parts were displayed in Canada. This uncovered history has never been told before and is part of the hidden legacy of the medical war. Based on deep archival research and unpublished letters of soldiers and medical personnel, Lifesavers and Body Snatchers is a powerful narrative, told in Cook’s literary style, which reveals how the medical services supported the soldiers at the front and forged a profound legacy in shaping Canadian public health in the decades that followed.

Download or read book The Good Allies written by Tim Cook and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2024-09-17 with total page 577 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From our country's most important war historian, a gripping account of the turbulent relationship between Canada and the US during the Second World War. The two nations entered the war amidst rivalry and mutual suspicion, but learned to fight together before emerging triumphant and bound by an alliance that has lasted to this day. When the Second World War broke out in 1939, it set in motion a deadly struggle between the Axis powers and the Allies, but also fraught negotiations between and among the Allies. On questions of diplomacy, economic policy, industrial might, military capabilities, and even national sovereignty, thousands of lives and the fate of the free world depended on back-room deals and desperate trade-offs between soldiers, diplomats, and leaders. In North America, Canada and the US strained to forge a new military alliance to guard their coasts and fend off German U-boats and the menace of a Japanese invasion. Wartime economies were entwined to produce a staggering contribution of weapons to keep Britain and other allies in the war. The defence of North America against enemy threats was essential before the US and Canada could send armies, navies, and air forces overseas. In his trademark style, Tim Cook employs eyewitness accounts to vividly lay bare the brutality of combat and the courage of North Americans under fire. Behind the fighting fronts, the charged and often secret communications between national leaders Churchill, Roosevelt, and King reveal how their personalities shaped the outcome of history’s most destructive war, the fate of the British Empire, and the North American alliance that lives on to this day. The Good Allies is a masterful account of how Canadians and Americans made the transition from wary rivals to steadfast allies, and how Canada thrived in the shadow of the military and global superpower. In exploring this complex and crucial dimension of the Second World War and its legacy, Cook recounts two nations’ story of cooperation, of sacrifice, and of bleeding together to save the world from the fascist threat.

Download or read book Atrocity on the Atlantic written by Nate Hendley and published by Dundurn. This book was released on 2024-02-13 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How a German submarine sank a Canadian military hospital ship during the First World War and sparked outrage. On the evening of June 27, 1918, the Llandovery Castle — an unarmed, clearly marked hospital ship used by the Canadian military — was torpedoed off the Irish Coast by U-Boat 86, a German submarine. Sinking a hospital ship violated international law. To conceal his actions, the U-86 commander had a submarine deck gun fire on survivors. One lifeboat escaped with witnesses to the atrocity. Global outrage over the attack ensued. The incident became a pivotal case at the Leipzig War Crimes Trials, an attempt to establish justice after the Great War ended. The Llandovery Castle trial resulted in a historic legal precedent that guided subsequent war crimes prosecutions at Nuremberg and elsewhere. Atrocity on the Atlantic explores the ship’s sinking, the people impacted by the attack, and the reasons why this wartime atrocity was largely forgotten.

Download or read book The Secret History of Soldiers written by Tim Cook and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-09-18 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There have been thousands of books on the Great War, but most have focused on commanders, battles, strategy, and tactics. Less attention has been paid to the daily lives of the combatants, how they endured the unimaginable conditions of industrial warfare: the rain of shells, bullets, and chemical agents. In The Secret History of Soldiers, Tim Cook, Canada's foremost military historian, examines how those who survived trench warfare on the Western Front found entertainment, solace, relief, and distraction from the relentless slaughter. These tales come from the soldiers themselves, mined from the letters, diaries, memoirs, and oral accounts of more than five hundred combatants. Rare examples of trench art, postcards, and even song sheets offer insight into a hidden society that was often irreverent, raunchy, and anti-authoritarian. Believing in supernatural stories was another way soldiers shielded themselves from the horror. While novels and poetry often depict the soldiers of the Great War as mere victims, this new history shows how the soldiers pushed back against the grim war, refusing to be broken in the mincing machine of the Western Front. The violence of war is always present, but Cook reveals the gallows humour the soldiers employed to get through it. Over the years, both writers and historians have overlooked this aspect of the men's lives. The fighting at the front was devastating, but behind the battle lines, another layer of life existed, one that included songs, skits, art, and soldier-produced newspapers. With his trademark narrative abilities and an unerring eye for the telling human detail, Cook has created another landmark history of Canadian military life as he reveals the secrets of how soldiers survived the carnage of the Western Front.

Download or read book Seven Days in Hell written by David O'Keefe and published by Harper Perennial. This book was released on 2020-08-25 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A riveting tour de force by Canada's leading military historian about the heroic Black Watch's fight for survival at Verrières Ridge Centred around one of Canada's most storied regiments, Seven Days in Hell tells the epic tale of the bloody battle for Verrières Ridge, a dramatic saga that unfolded just weeks after one of Canada's greatest military triumphs of the Second World War. O'Keefe takes us on a heart-pounding journey at the sharp end of combat during the infamous Normandy campaign, when more than 300 Black Watch Highlanders from across Canada, the United States, Great Britain and the Allied world found themselves embroiled in mortal combat against elite Waffen-SS units and grizzled Eastern Front veterans. Only a handful walked away. Pinned down as the result of strategic blunders and the fog of war, the men were thrust into a nightmare where station, rank, race and religion mattered little and only character won the day. Drawing on formerly classified documents and rare first-person testimony from the men who fought on the front lines, O'Keefe follows the footsteps of the ghosts of Normandy, giving a voice yet again to the men who sacrificed everything in the summer of 1944.

Download or read book The Fight for History written by Tim Cook and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-09-08 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER FINALIST for the 2021 Ottawa Book Awards A masterful telling of the way World War Two has been remembered, forgotten, and remade by Canada over seventy-five years. The Second World War shaped modern Canada. It led to the country's emergence as a middle power on the world stage; the rise of the welfare state; industrialization, urbanization, and population growth. After the war, Canada increasingly turned toward the United States in matters of trade, security, and popular culture, which then sparked a desire to strengthen Canadian nationalism from the threat of American hegemony. The Fight for History examines how Canadians framed and reframed the war experience over time. Just as the importance of the battle of Vimy Ridge to Canadians rose, fell, and rose again over a 100-year period, the meaning of Canada's Second World War followed a similar pattern. But the Second World War's relevance to Canada led to conflict between veterans and others in society--more so than in the previous war--as well as a more rapid diminishment of its significance. By the end of the 20th century, Canada's experiences in the war were largely framed as a series of disasters. Canadians seemed to want to talk only of the defeats at Hong Kong and Dieppe or the racially driven policy of the forced relocation of Japanese-Canadians. In the history books and media, there was little discussion of Canada's crucial role in the Battle of the Atlantic, the success of its armies in Italy and other parts of Europe, or the massive contribution of war materials made on the home front. No other victorious nation underwent this bizarre reframing of the war, remaking victories into defeats. The Fight for History is about the efforts to restore a more balanced portrait of Canada's contribution in the global conflict. This is the story of how Canada has talked about the war in the past, how we tried to bury it, and how it was restored. This is the history of a constellation of changing ideas, with many historical twists and turns, and a series of fascinating actors and events.

Download or read book Vimy written by Tim Cook and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-03-07 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER Winner of the 2018 JW Dafoe Book Prize Longlisted for British Columbia's National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction 2018 Runner-up for the 2018 Templer Medal Book Prize Finalist for the 2018 Ottawa Book Awards A bold new telling of the defining battle of the Great War, and how it came to signify and solidify Canada’s national identity Why does Vimy matter? How did a four-day battle at the midpoint of the Great War, a clash that had little strategic impact on the larger Allied war effort, become elevated to a national symbol of Canadian identity? Tim Cook, Canada’s foremost military historian and a Charles Taylor Prize winner, examines the Battle of Vimy Ridge and the way the memory of it has evolved over 100 years. The operation that began April 9, 1917, was the first time the four divisions of the Canadian Corps fought together. More than 10,000 Canadian soldiers were killed or injured over four days—twice the casualty rate of the Dieppe Raid in August 1942. The Corps’ victory solidified its reputation among allies and opponents as an elite fighting force. In the wars’ aftermath, Vimy was chosen as the site for the country’s strikingly beautiful monument to mark Canadian sacrifice and service. Over time, the legend of Vimy took on new meaning, with some calling it the “birth of the nation.” The remarkable story of Vimy is a layered skein of facts, myths, wishful thinking, and conflicting narratives. Award-winning writer Tim Cook explores why the battle continues to resonate with Canadians a century later. He has uncovered fresh material and photographs from official archives and private collections across Canada and from around the world. On the 100th anniversary of the event, and as Canada celebrates 150 years as a country, Vimy is a fitting tribute to those who fought the country’s defining battle. It is also a stirring account of Canadian identity and memory, told by a masterful storyteller.