Crerar’s Lieutenants: Inventing the Canadian Junior Army Officer, 1939-45

Drawing on a wide range of sources and exploring the issue of leadership through new lenses, this book looks at how the army selected and trained its junior officers after 1939 to embody the new ideal. It finds that these young men – through the mentors they copied, the correspondence they left, even the songs they sang – practised a “temperate heroism” that distinguished them from the idealized, heroic visions of officership from the First World War.

Fascinating and highly original, this book sheds new light on the challenges many junior officers faced during the Second World War – not only on the battlefield but from Canadians’ often conflicted views about social class and gender.