The (*) indicates the item is available thru Regina Public
Library/SILS.
*The Battle at Belly River: stories of the last great Indian
battle/Alexander Johnston:
The Bloody Crucible of Courage: Fighting Methods and Combat
Experience of the Civil War/Brent Nosworthy:
*Concentration Camps: a short history/Dan Stone:
*Concentration Camps: a Very Short Introduction/Dan Stone:
*Enola Gay/Gordon Thomas & Max Morgan Witt:
Grunts: Inside the American Infantry Combat Experience,
World War II Through Iraq/John C. McManus:
*Hiroshima/John Hersey:
*Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze/Peter Harmsen:
Swords Around a Throne: Napoleon’s Grande Armee/John R.
Elting:
Tennozan: The Battle of Okinawa and the Atomic Bomb/George
Feifer:
Plus 2 from Will Chabun:
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*
Behind Enemy Lines: The True Story of a French Jewish Spy in
Nazi Germany by Marthe Cohn, Wendy
Holden. ISBN-13: 978-0609610541
1.
Marthe
spoke in Regina on Jan. 7 to a very large crowd. She was raised in France’s
Alsace region and thus was fluent in French and German. Her family was
required to leave Alsace in the autumn of 1939 and found its way to
Poitiers, south of Paris. Significantly, their new IDs did not mark
them as Jews. They stayed one step ahead of the Gestapo and its French
collaborators until the liberation – though Marthe’s sister and boyfriend
perished in concentration camps.
Marthe, by
late 1944 qualified as a nurse, was attached to the 1st French
Army, where he linguistic skills soon were noticed. She trained very
briefly as an intelligence agent and, after many false starts, was inserted
via Switzerland into south Germany. Her information is credited with
assisting the final French offensive in that area in April 1945.
Postwar,
she served as an army nurse in Vietnam before returning home, marrying an
American medical student and moving to the US.
Eighty years ago, Winnipeg was the
unofficial capital of Western Canada. It was the third-most populous city
in the country and packed with railway yards, government offices,
manufacturing firms and warehouses. It took pride in its university and its
largest newspaper, the Winnipeg Free Press, the editor of which was
John W. Dafoe -- intellectual, and confidant of politicians, though
beholden to none.
His reporter in Ottawa since 1924
had been Grant Dexter, who would regularly write off-the-record memos to
Dafoe and his deputy on life and, especially, politics in wartime Ottawa.
It was not a pretty picture:
generals overwhelmed by their responsibilities and politicians controlled
by ego or a need to get re-elected. They were also the victims of
circumstance: when Britain was threatened by German invasion, Canada
rapidly expanded its military production, talking huge numbers of workers
out of other industries just as the armed services were also enlisting
soldiers. This set the stage for constant manpower crises. I’m at the stage
of the first one, in 1942, which coincided with the referendum held to
release the federal government from its 1940 promise to not send conscripts
overseas. Doing so in 1917 had set off riots and furious controversy. PM
King did not think the country could withstand a rerun.
Saskatchewan’s representative in the
federal cabinet, James G. “Jimmie” Gardiner, does not come off well,
swinging between being controlling – by unilaterally setting out for
Britain to sell grain – and self-pity.
Coming off best in these memos are
the senior civil servants who suffered under their mercurial politicians
and kept the country afloat.
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Next Meeting, Tuesday, April 2nd ,– the snow is
gone, the weather’s fine, so no reason not to join us.
Meeting begins at 7 pm.
Just bring whatever you’re reading.
Cheers, Warren
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