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BOOK REVIEWS<br />
Source: City of Toronto Archives; Fonds 1266; Item 87506<br />
Small Arms Manufacturing, 13 October 1943<br />
One of my undergraduate history professors at the Royal Military College of Canada, the late<br />
Dr. Barry Hunt, used to say that good history should teach one something new and not merely<br />
be a recitation of facts and figures. It often takes many decades and declassification of archives<br />
to produce such work, but it is definitely worth the wait. I would certainly place this<br />
wonderful book in that category, as it shattered the myth I had believed for so long: that, for<br />
the majority of Canadians, wartime in Canada was one of extreme doing without and severe<br />
rationing. Graham Broad’s work reverses this view, and indeed he is to be strongly commended<br />
for writing in such a way as to make the topic, which could easily have been very dry, quite<br />
interesting. One wonders if the Department of Finance might take a few lessons from this book<br />
in terms of how to make an ostensibly fiscally tragic national event (war, in this case) turn out<br />
to be a boon for the economy. It might be interesting to do a similar study of the economic<br />
impacts of the First World War on the Canadian economy, as well as the impacts of other<br />
military conflicts and campaigns in which we have engaged.<br />
Highly recommended, but given the sticker price (a bit of a shocker, actually, but that’s how<br />
it was listed on the Chapters/Indigo® website), you might be better off borrowing it from a<br />
library or asking your local DND library to order it for you. That’s good, modern consumer<br />
culture, I reckon.<br />
WWW.ARMY.FORCES.GC.CA/CAJ 147
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