The memories, journals, reports, war letters and war novels written by World War II French Canadian combatants has raised little interest among historians and are mostly unknown by the public. This work comes and goes between the writings of combatants and historiographic knowledge to create a balance between what was lives and what was studied and analyzed.
The author begins by explaining the method he used to approach each evidence and put his theory in perspective by inscribing it among those of other historians like Charles Ardant du Picq, Jean Norton Cru, John Keegan abd Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau who wrote the foreword of this book.
By reading this work, we learn in which conditions lives those infantrymen, artillerymen, seamen and aviators who fought in Italy and western Europe or were held prisoner in Japan or Germany. We can see the violence they suffered and inflicted on the battlefield or in prisoner camps, the fear they experienced, the starvation and hardships they endured and we can understand better the means by which they held on.
Finally, those evidences show us in words the atrocities of war, just like some movies already did in images. It is an essential work that makes those strong stories available to a larger public and shows another face of this war most often seen through the eyes of the historians.
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