History has always played a role in Elora resident Terry Copp’s academic life.
With 15 authored or co-authored books, Copp has become an expert on many facets of war, in particular battles of the First and Second World Wars.
It’s been a topic close to his heart – and it consumes considerable amounts of his time.
“I’m an evidence-based historian,” Copp said in a recent interview with the Advertiser.
He’s worked as a history professor at McGill University in Montreal, where he earned his degree in 1962, and took up a post at Wilfrid Laurier University in 1975 until he retired 2005.
Copp is a professor emeritus of history at Laurier and is the director of the Laurier Centre for Military, Strategic and Disarmament Studies, which he co-founded in 1991 with Dr. Marc Kilgour, a professor at Laurier.
Today the centre also involves naval historian Dr. Roger Sarty, political science professor Dr. Alistair Edgar and communications director Mike Bechthold, who is responsible for the quarterly journal Canadian Military History.
Initially Copp’s interests were in two related fields at McGill.
“I started life as a social historian in Montreal,” he said of the study of working poor that captured his interest at the time. He moved on to the field of labour relations.
“I was interested in the field of unionization,” he said. He abandoned his work on unions because he felt they were moving too far to the left.
“I became a military historian in 1981 just by luck,” he recalled.
His mentor, professor Robert Vogel, was looking for a partner to help out with a book on military history. Copp said Vogel’s expertise was in European military history. What he could bring to the writing, he felt, was a Canadian perspective.
The partnership led to Copp specializing in Canadian military history.
“Bob suggested we do something together and there was no way he would be interested in the Canadian labour movement,” Copp said of his switch to war studies. “I thought it was a good idea.”
Publishing companies were not interested due to a general lack of interest in the subject. Publishing house McClelland and Stewart felt the book could come out in a soft cover format, but the authors wanted illustrations and photos included to tell the whole story and went ahead on their own and had it published around 1981.
Eventually the authors had to self publish their books, which resulted in five volumes called Maple Leaf Route, with subtitles for each volume.
As a historian, Copp read books and saw television productions about various stages of the great wars. What struck him was, as highlighted in conversations he had with war veterans, the inaccuracies contained in books and on television.
“In writing military history I met a lot of veterans,” Copp said of his concerns about accuracy. “I felt I had an obligation to tell the real story and by the end of the 1980s I felt an obligation to keep on going.”
Copp has dealt with, and continues to explore, different facets of war – from battle strategies to personal experiences faced by soldiers.
Battle Exhaustion: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Canadian Army, 1939-1945, a book co-authored by Copp and historian Bill McAndrew was published in 1990 and took a different angle in viewing the war. It dealt specifically with the experience of Canadian soldiers in battle.
Copp also wrote Battle Exhaustion and the Canadian Soldier in Normandy several years later.
“When I wrote it there weren’t many studies done on battle exhaustion,” he said of the ailment now commonly known as post traumatic stress disorder.
“The large majority of individuals diagnosed as suffering from battle exhaustion exhibited what the psychiatrists described as acute fear reactions and acute and chronic anxiety manifested through uncontrollable tremors, a pronounced startle reaction to war-related sounds, and a profound loss of self confidence,” he wrote of his studies.
“The second largest symptomatic category was depression with accompanying withdrawal.”
At the centre housed just south of Wilfrid Laurier University on King Street, a staff of about eight students is constantly working on a variety of war-related material.
Among them is graduate student Brendan O’Driscoll who last week completed digitizing land war photos taken in 1944 and 1945.
The work involved digitizing and identifying the location of photos taken leading up to the end of the war, largely in France.
It involved 120,000 photographs Copp retrieved from the Canadian War Museum. It’s a sticky topic that received coverage in a large Canadian daily Newspaper and caused some embarrassment at the federal level.
“In the 1980s we acquired air photos taken by the 1st Canadian Army … used to make maps,” Copp said of the photographs. “It’s a very unique collection. It means we will have them up on our archival website.”
Many show craters where bombs were dropped and the strategic facilities allied forces were trying to knock out.
Copp is hoping they can be used in an educational process where those viewing can attempt to identify the area the photo captures and possibly comment on the reasons why the areas were bombed.
O’Driscoll has worked with Copp for more than two years and considers the professor his “mentor.”
“In my capacity as a research assistant for Terry, I have preformed a multitude of tasks,” O’Driscoll said.
“They range from anything as complicated as my primary task as manager of the aerial photos digitization project, to organizing Terry’s courses, preparing for conferences, and any number of tasks as simple as typing up syllabi or acting as Terry’s brainstorming partner.”
Working with Copp, O’Driscoll has also had the opportunity to travel outside Canada.
“Not only has Terry given meaningful employment to promising students in a field related to their subject, but the job itself, for many of us, has yielded extra opportunities for personal growth and advancement,” he said.
“For me, opportunities to travel has been a prominent aspect of working for Terry,” O’Driscoll said. “Aside from the 2010-11 Cleghorn Battlefield Tour, Terry also supported my application to travel with another professor to Russia, allowed me the opportunity to do research at the National Archives in London, UK, and brought me along as a driver/assistant on the most recent course-based battlefield tour in May to June, 2013.”
Each year Copp takes a group of students and high school history teachers to battlefields to better understand strategies and why certain decisions were made.
“What we try and do at the centre is research and outreach,” Copp said. “I’m asking people to comment on the information they had at the time.”
It’s a similar scenario Copp wants to involve people in when it comes to the ill-fated 1942 Allied raid – largely a Canadian effort – on Dieppe, France during the Second World War.
The raid claimed about 900 Canadian soldiers and was considered a disaster. Of the roughly 6,000 Allied soldiers who made it ashore, over 3,600 were either killed, wounded or captured.
Copp contends much was learned from the raid that would eventually lead to the successful beachhead landings in Normandy on June 6, 1944.
“It’s to try and make people go back to 1942,” said Copp.
His concept is that accurate knowledge is gained about what really took place by gathering as much historical information as possible.
With another project, Copp is hoping to advance the study of the effects of war on soldiers by studying documents related to survivors of the First World War. The records being used for the study will not include names of individuals, but will allow researchers to discover how they coped with their injuries after returning home, including their social standing.
“Every veteran who applied for a pension created a file,” he said of the research material. “We want to address the issues.”
Eventually the information will be available on the centre website.
“They (website viewers) could draw a picture of what the war meant to them,” he said of the study and the information about how soldiers were impacted in their lives after war.
“Nobody is preparing to do it on the scale we are doing it.”
Copp’s latest foray into publishing is the release of his most recent book: 1812 – A Guide to the War and its Legacy. The book is co-authored with Matt Symees, Caitlin McWilliams, Nick Lachance, Geoff Keelan and Jeffrey W. Mott.
“The authors … believe that the War of 1812 was an important event in North America history with lasting consequences for Canadians, Americans and First Nations,” a promotional review of the book states.
“This guidebook, published by the Laurier Centre for Military, Strategic and Disarmament Studies, uses modern satellite images, archival records, paintings and contemporary photographs to help readers understand what happened and why it happened that way.”
Copp is also busy on the lecture circuit. He will be speaking at the Wellington County Museum and Archives in February to discuss earlier beachhead landings that led to the Normandy D-Day invasion 70 years ago.
“As we approach the 70th anniversary of the landings in Sicily – Operation Husky – we examine the Canadian role in the liberation of the island and the beginning of the Italian campaign,” Copp said of the topic in a release from the museum.
Later this year he is planning a lecture series for Members of Parliament and their staff on the First World War. The series will include lectures by both French and English historians.
Despite his hectic schedule, Copp manages to escape to Florida each winter with his wife, Elora artist Linda Risacher Copp, to concentrate on writing.
He said a phrase used around the Laurier office sums up the philosophy of those involved on military history and the soldiers who fought.
“They fought for the liberation of Europe and the hope of a better world,” Copp said.
