A 'deafening silence': Canada still struggles with the Second World War's legacy, says historian

Seventy-five years ago today, a little-known Canadian colonel a half-blind veteran of the First World War satpen in handbefore a dark cloth-covered table on the quarterdeck of the American battleship U.S.S. Missouri.

Allied warships had assembledin a long, greyline in the stifling heat of Tokyo Bay a mute audience for the moment thevictors met the vanquished.

Along with a host of military glitterati that includedU.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,claimed45,000 Canadian lives and leftanother55,000Canadiansphysically and mentally scarred was finally over.

Once the shooting stopped, saidhistorian Tim Cook, war-wearyCanadians wereeager to forgetthe war or at leastto 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 forgettingbothers Cook. It's reflected in thetitle 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 toldCBC News. "History often divides us."

Cook one of the country's leading military historians and authors said he's baffled byCanadians' apparentreluctance 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 warCosgrave among them wrote sometimes eloquent and movingaccounts of their experiences under fire.

That didn't happen in Canada followingthe Japanese and German surrenders in1945, 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."

Some Canadian war correspondents wrote booksin the immediate aftermath of the victory, hoping to speak to history but senior military commanders and leaders subsequently shied away.

Unlike the American and British generals who wrote Second World Warmemoirs(Dwight Eisenhower, George Patton and Bernard Montgomery), Canadiancommanders Harry Crerar, Andrew McNaughton, George Pearkes and Guy Simmondsall chose to remain silent and allowed biographers to tell their stories sometimes decades after the fact.

Cook said the reluctance of many returning Canadian soldiers to discuss the war beyond the tight circles of Royal Canadian Legion halls a silence that persisted for decades also contributed to Canadians' lack of engagement with the country's experiences in the Second World War.

The 'comfortable' image of Canada the peacekeeper

The advent of peacekeeping has also tainted Canada's view of the conflict,he said.

While some critics have argued successive governments have exploited the peacekeeping mythology, Cook said he's very proud of Canada's peacekeeping legacy. Butpeacekeeping "became a very comfortable symbol for us," he said."I argue in the book that it too has contributed to the silencing of the Second World War."

In the 1960s, Cook said,Remembrance Day ceremonies in Canada suffered from dwindling attendance.It was only in the 1980s and 1990s whenthe war was beingre-examined through American popular culture propertieslikethe hit movieSaving Private Ryanthat a deeper appreciation began to take root, he said.

Cook argues that revival of interesthappened almost too late at a timewhen many veterans had already passed away and few living Canadians remembered the war as a personal experience.

"We shouldn't expect the Americans or the British and the Germans and the Japanese to talk about the war" in the same way Canadiansexperienced it, he said.

"If you don't tell your own story,no one else will."

History can be "dangerous" for politicians, Cook argues,because of the divisions it leaves behind (the conscription crisis of 1944 damagedEnglish-French relations in Canada)and the effect of itsdarker chapters such asthe internment of Japanese-Canadians when theycome to light.

Many of the international institutions that were born out of the Second World War areunder attack today. That's just one reason why remembering the war is so important, said Cook.

"I'm not suggesting we should write heroic history and that we need to chest-thump and stand behind the flag. But I do think we need to tell our stories."