The Sappers' War: 12th Field Company Royal Canadian Engineers, Oct 1943 to Sept 1945
What follows is a review of the history of the 12th Field Company, Royal Canadian Engineers, primarily relating to the time that the company was in the Italian and Northwestern European theatres during World War II. Though the book focuses on the experiences of a particular company of Canadian military engineers, it also discusses some of the wider issues of the second world war and how it affected the people who lived through the era, civilian and military. Among those are my father (a sapper or military engineer) and mother (a war worker in wartime Britain and ultimately a war bride).
Thus, this is meant to be an informal and unofficial history of the company, written by an interested party in an effort to understand what these men went through during this period, and how that experience affected them and other people who lived through the war. The military aspects of the company's history are there (e.g. fighting, building bridges, detecting mines, maintaining routes), as are the cultural factors that influenced them and their times (e.g. the movies that they watched, the drinking they did, the many diseases they faced, their interactions with the Italian, British and other civilians that they lived among, their worries for the future). Some focus on life on the British home front is also given, via the experiences of my mother and her family.
Since many people had family and relations that lived during this time, it is my hope that the account will be of general interest to them, and to any that have a particular interest in this critical interval in history. Also, though the text relates specifically to Canadian sappers, I believe that many of the experiences will be common to the soldiers and loved ones of other nations who lived through the war, especially Americans and those from Britain and the British Commonwealth.
The primary sources of this document are the 12th Field Company War Diaries and related orders, with some material from The History of the Corps of Royal Canadian Engineers, Volume 2 as well as various official histories by the Department of National Defence. Various other published sources are used as well, especially when discussing the wider issues of the war or the army experience (e.g. Churchill’s history of the war) , or conversely when relating very specific episodes of the war (e.g. Popski’s Private Army in late 1944). Personal accounts of my father’s or mother’s stories also augment the narrative. I have tried to fit those in during appropriate time periods, though some stories are more general and have therefore don’t necessarily relate to the time period being discussed. Nonetheless, they do help capture the essence of “being there” during the war years.
The War Diary is a day by day account of the primary activities of a given unit, as recorded by personnel in the headquarters staff of that unit, and signed off by the commander of the unit. As such, it is an official record, though the writers often brought a bit of their own character into the document. Naturally, as a relatively brief document it can’t hope to capture the complexity of the individual stories of 280 or so men, so the family lore generally has no corresponding entry in the War Diary, though there are sometimes tantalizing hints and near-verifications of these personal accounts.
There are a number of other sources for the book, from official histories to popular history books. I include quotations and references from these works (an eclectic mix), as I believe that they also shed light on different aspects of this period of time, and besides that, are just interesting accounts, in and of themselves.
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