Charles Perry Stacey

Colonel Charles Perry Stacey OC OBE CD FRSC (30 July 1906 – 17 November 1989) was a Canadian historian and university professor. He was the official historian of the Canadian Army in the Second World War and published extensively on military and political matters.

Early life, education

Stacey was born in Toronto, Ontario]]. After attending the University of Toronto Schools, he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in history from the University of Toronto in 1924. That year, he joined the Canadian Militia.[1]

Stacey received a second bachelor's degree in history from Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in 1929. He received a Doctor of Philosophy degree from Princeton University in 1933.

Career

From 1933 to 1940, Stacey was a member of the history department at Princeton University.[2] With the advent of the Second World War, he was given the rank of major and appointed as historical officer to the Canadian Army. He served in the United Kingdom for most of the war, headed a team dedicated to collecting and collating information for future historians, and wrote contemporary reports. His reports provided factual details about many military operations, including the Dieppe Raid and Operation Spring.[3][4]

After the war, Stacey worked with a team to create an official history of the Canadian military operations during the conflict. He benefited from his access to the major Canadian military and political figures involved in the war, both during the conflict and afterwards, when the official histories were being finalized.[5][6] The three volume set was published in 1948.

A comment he made after the war war brides, whom he called "Most excellent citizens," became the title of a book on the subject by Eswyn Lyster.

Stacey eventually attained the rank of colonel. In total, he served in the militia and the army for 35 years (1924-1959).

From 1959 to 1975, Stacey was a professor of history at the University of Toronto. He continued to research and write analysis of Canadian military operations.[7][8] He published an autobiography, A Date With History, which presented much background information regarding the writing of the Official History of the Canadian Army in the Second World War. He extended those themes in volumes The Half Million (dealing with the Canadian forces stationed in Britain) and Arms, Men, and Government (concerning the government in Canada) during the war.

Stacey also wrote a critical analysis of the writing process of the Official History of World War I (only one of the projected eight volumes by the original author ever appeared in print).

He died in Toronto in 1989. His personal and research papers are in the University of Toronto Archives.

Since 1988, the C.P. Stacey Prize has been given by the Canadian Committee for the History of the Second World War "for distinguished publications on the twentieth-century military experience."[9]

Selected bibliography
  • Canada and the British Army (1936)
  • The Canadian Army 1939-1945 (1948), winner of the 1948 Governor General's Awards
  • Official History of the Canadian Army in the Second World War. Six Years of War: The Army in Canada, Britain, and the Pacific (Ottawa: The Queens Printer, 1955)
  • Quebec, 1759: The Siege and the Battle (1959)
    • (An updated version was published in 2001 with new material by Donald E. Graves.)
  • Records of the Nile Voyageurs, 1884-1885: The Canadian Voyageur Contingent in the Gordon Relief Expedition (Toronto: Champlain Society Publications, 1959)
  • Official History of the Canadian Army in the Second World War. The Victory Campaign: The Operations in North-West Europe, 1944-1945 (Ottawa: The Queens Printer, 1960)
  • Arms, Men, and Governments: The War Policies of Canada, 1939-1945 (Ottawa: Minister of National Defence, 1970)
  • A Very Double Life: The Private World of Mackenzie King (1976)
  • Canada and the Age of Conflict Vol. 1 (1977), (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), ISBN 0-8020-6560-0.
  • Canada and the Age of Conflict Vol. 2 (1981), (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), ISBN 0-8020-2397-5.
  • (with Barbara M. Wilson) The Half-Million: The Canadians in Britain, 1939-1946 (1987), (Toronto: University of Toronto Press).
  • A Date With History ISBN 0-88879-086-4

See also

References
  1. David Twiston Davies (1996). Canada from Afar: The Daily Telegraph Book of Canadian Obituaries. Dundurn. p. 109. ISBN 978-1-55002-252-0.
  2. Jeffrey Grey (2003). The Last Word?: Essays on Official History in the United States and British Commonwealth. Greenwood Publishing Group. pp. 11–. ISBN 978-0-313-31083-6.
  3. David J. Bercuson; Wise (22 September 1994). Valour and the Horror Revisited. McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. p. 84. ISBN 978-0-7735-6513-5.
  4. David O'Keefe (5 November 2013). One Day in August: The Untold Story Behind Canada's Tragedy at Dieppe. Knopf Canada. p. 16. ISBN 978-0-345-80771-7.
  5. J. L. Granatstein (2005). The Generals: The Canadian Army's Senior Commanders in the Second World War. University of Calgary Press. p. 16. ISBN 978-1-55238-176-2.
  6. Tim Cook (1 November 2011). Clio's Warriors: Canadian Historians and the Writing of the World Wars. UBC Press. p. 277. ISBN 978-0-7748-4125-2.
  7. Robert Jervis; Seweryn Bialer (1991). Soviet-American Relations After the Cold War. Duke University Press. p. 341.
  8. Editorials on File. 16, Part 1. Facts on File, Incorporated. January 1985. p. 536.
  9. http://www.cmp-cpm.forces.gc.ca/dhh-dhp/adh-sdh/cl-lc/index-eng.asp?con=1
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