Ottawa writer George Blackburn’s The Guns of Normandy was one of the unheralded publishing successes of 1995, its virtues touted by word of mouth among old soldiers and military historians. Deservedly so, too, because it was one of the best war memoirs ever written by a Canadian.

This second volume, continuing 79-year-old Blackburn’s story from the clearing of the Channel ports through the Scheldt and Rhineland battles to V-E day, is a stunning successor. Blackburn’s story ranks with RCAF pilot Murray Peden’s A Thousand Shall Fall – and that is the highest of high praise.

Blackburn was a FOO, a Forward Observation Officer, who operated with the frontline infantry, calling in fire on enemy counter-attacks and concentrations. FOOs usually did not last long in action, not surprisingly, but Blackburn had a charmed life – he was the longest lived FOO in First Canadian Army, or so he was told. But as his luck held, he lived with increasing fear, and his book deals frankly with his constant dread and his anguish over the deaths of his friends. He saw too much death from mines, mortars, and Schmeissers, and his book alternates between raging at the Germans killed by his guns and compassion for the old men and boys the Nazis were throwing into combat in the final days. Whatever their age, most Germans fought superbly, and Blackburn, as a gunner, believes that artillery and the techniques developed for concentrating massive fire on short notice were the difference between victory and defeat.

The book is full of stunning vignettes. A squeamish Blackburn is persuaded to take the boots from a still-warm dead German, his conscience bothering him, but only for a time. Then, he and his colleagues, eager for sweets, open parcels sent from Canada for soldiers already dead – and they find a mother’s note urging her boy to keep dry. As they read it, the son’s fresh-killed body is lying just outside the door in the rain, face-up.

This great book deserves a wide readership. Canadians today simply do not know what their soldiers went through, and they should. As Blackburn notes at Christmas, 1944, for the surviving men of his Regiment, this was their fifth Christmas away from home. Five years of absence from family, five years of training and fighting the best army in the world. Winning, too. This epic should be part of every Canadians’ consciousness, but sadly it is all but forgotten.