The Good Allies

Picture this: at a time when several large countries around the world are behaving in an increasingly belligerent manner, Canada’s military is under-equipped and under-sized. To our north, we are especially vulnerable, a logical potential entry point for enemies. To our south, the United States is beset by bitter internal political divisions – including, most notably, isolationists arguing that the country should stay off the international stage and focus instead on domestic concerns.

So goes the bleak opening scenario of historian Tim Cook’s latest book, The Good Allies: How Canada and the United States Fought Together to Defeat Fascism During the Second World War. Cook, the chief historian at the Canadian War Museum, and author of a dozen bestselling books, here takes on arguably his most ambitious topic yet – and succeeds brilliantly. The subtitle describes a familiar and welcome outcome with which we’re all familiar — but so many of the steps that led to that end will be, to most Canadians, a surprise. Today, we take our close relationship with the Americans for granted, even though the two countries increasingly move in different directions. As Cook deftly demonstrates, before the start of the last world war, that closeness was far from a given: at various times in the 1930s, senior people in both countries even fretted over the prospect of armed conflict with the other. [MORE]