Books explore the stories of Canadians at war

Local authors reveal often-forgotten aspects of military history

The title of Janette Higgins’ memoir of her father is “Fighting for Democracy” (FreisenPress, 2020). It’s about her father’s service against Fascism in the Spanish Civil War. Her title might also apply to John Boyko’s much larger and compelling study, “The Devil’s Trick: How Canada Fought the Vietnam War” (Knopf Canada, 2021). Both books have a Canadian focus, both deal with foreign wars, and both merit our attention as excellent histories by local authors. Each provides a window into oftenforgotten aspects of Canadian military history in the 20th century.

The two, however, have different aims and scales of vision. Higgins’ book is a first effort — a “proud” biography of Jimmy Higgins (19071982), an English-born “orphan” who immigrated to Canada in 1928 and chose to fight against Fascism in the Spanish Civil War before settling down in Peterborough and raising his family.

By contrast, Lakefield’s John Boyko is an impressive historian with seven well-received books to his credit. “The Devil’s Trick” is a multifaceted study of the Vietnam War — its beginnings, its gruesome years of jungle warfare, and its prolonged after-effects. It focuses on the involvement of Canadians, be they diplomats, politicians, soldiers, activists, or postwar Indochinese immigrants.

The Higgins story is about individualism and democratic activism in everyday life. During her Peterborough upbringing as one of five children, Janette Higgins slowly discovered parts of her father’s extraordinary back story. At first, she only knew that he had had “a rough time during the Depression” but then in 1960 had keenly involved himself in Walter Pitman’s political campaign for ‘the New Party.’ She also knew that he wrote letters to the Editor of “The Examiner” on matters of social inequity. Until workplace injuries forced him to retire, he spent his working life here in the factories of CGE and Outboard Marine. But by the time he was buried in Little Lake Cemetery in 1982, Janette had learned a great deal more about his “secret life.”

Not long after arriving in Canada in 1928, Jimmy found himself struggling to survive as a single man in the Great Depression. While in Saskatoon in the 1930s he did some writing about his early life; later, at his family’s urging, he wrote more.

In 1983 a book appeared entitled “The Tall Soldier, My 40-Year Search for the Man Who Saved My Life.” Its author was a Spaniard named Manuel Alvarez, then living in Vancouver. Alvarez’s pursuit of his saviour-hero had struck gold in 1978 when he found Higgins in Peterborough; his ‘tall soldier’ was by now a stooped and elderly man. However, as a member of the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion, Higgins had rescued Alvarez from a flood in his Spanish village; he then vanished before he could be thanked.

Alvarez was not the only person whose life Higgins saved over the course of his lifetime.

Entering Spain illegally in 1937 to join the republican resistance to Franco’s fascism, Jimmy fought as a machine-gunner for nearly two years under often harrowing conditions. But he has been battle-tested on the Canadian prairies during the Depression where wages were often cut and employers showed little sympathy for their workers. There he became a labour organizer, participated in the Regina Riot, and connected with the Communist Party, thereby earning the suspicions of the RCMP. Finally, on a friend’s suggestion, he set out for Spain, crossing the Pyrenees on foot to join the Mac-Paps. Over 1700 Canadians volunteered to fight Franco in the mid-1930s — 400 died.

It is a remarkable story of personal struggle, perseverance and dedication. Higgins was not a joiner nor easy to get along with, but he was a man of action, a fighter, and a loyal friend. Once he settled in Peterborough he morphed into a dedicated family man, winning the admiration of his wife and daughters though he seldom elaborated upon the life he had led before coming to Peterborough.

John Boyko’s “The Devil’s Trick” is a much more ambitious and farreaching book. Its moral implications for Canada are troubling and inescapable. It skilfully unfolds a complex narrative by means of six selected story lines; each allows Boyko to be specific and personalized on the one hand and farreaching and disturbing on the other. I came away not only impressed by the power of the narratives he creates but by his sensitive handling of issues that continue to affect us. Those were indeed dark days. “The devil’s trick,” he writes, “is convincing leaders that war is desirable, the rest of us that it’s acceptable, and combatants that everything they are doing and seeing is normal or, at least, necessary.”

For my part I was an undergraduate at an American university as the war began. There I watched many of my classmates go through their ROTC training in preparation for military service. When I (happily) returned to Canada in the late spring of 1966, the SDS organiza- tion (Students for a Democratic Society) on campus were mostly frustrated in their attempts to garner attention from an unsympathetic student body.

Soon a number of my classmates went off to Vietnam. The positive mood of John F. Kennedy was still upon much of the country and they were inspired to serve their country. At least seven of them died in those distant sweltering jungles, mostly as helicopter pilots. I stored away that grim news even as my own disapproval of the war increased.

I was surprised and rather saddened by John Boyko’s assertion that “Canada has always been a warrior state.” He adds, “It has fought or involved itself in war proudly, often reluctantly, and sometimes covertly.” But, allowing for that reluctance and covertness (think of the Spanish Civil War), he seems to be right. As one reads into the six personalized stories he unfolds, it becomes clear that “The war changed Canadians” and “changed Canada.” Again he is right.

Boyko begins with two welltrained diplomatic teams that served Canada loyally in the early days of the conflict. I knew little of the work of Sherman Lett (the 1950s) and Blair Seaborn (the 60s) as they led coteries of well-disciplined diplomats assigned to prevent the war from happening. “Vietnam” had become a contentious political ground between the forces of democracy and communism (China and the Red Scare) and war seemed inevitable given American defiance and communist aggression.

Lett and Seaborn headed up the ICC (the International Control Commission) that was appointed to diffuse conflicts in the region, even though it was powerless to deal with the trouble spots as they emerged. Serving several Canadian governments in succession, the ICC could advise but exert little real power. Presidents Kennedy and Johnson welcomed their careful opinions but in crucial matters ignored their advice.

Meanwhile Canadian companies profitably supplied guns and military equipment to American troops at home and abroad, and later made napalm and Agent Orange for American use.

Chapter 3 concerns the activism of Claire Culhane, a nurse who served in Vietnam and became a “fearless fighter” against the war. Her relentless campaigning against the Vietnamese war and other injustices made her seem like “a One Woman Army.” I had not heard of her previously, but her sustained humane efforts deserve a book in themselves. The role that communism played in her values links back to Jimmy Higgins and is a factor not to be ignored.

Boyko then looks at the experiences of an American draft-dodger (Joe Erickson) and a Canadian soldier in Vietnam (Doug Carey) before offering a hair-raising picture of Rebecca Trinh’s family struggling in 1979 to escape from Indochina to Canada under very trying circumstances. Overall, “The Devil’s Trick” is a powerful, thought-provoking book that makes us aware on many levels of the contradictions of that messy war even as it reveals the scars that we as Canadians still bear today.