Winnipeg's Great War

I love looking back in time and exploring history, whether it be around the world or whether it be right here in Winnipeg. The book “Winnipeg’s Great War” by Jim Blanchard is one of those local historical looks at how the city of Winnipeg was affected and shaped by World War I, which lasted from 1914-18.

Blanchard set out to basically educate readers about the happenings in the city during this time, and he did exactly that, so you could say that worked in the book. Each statistic that he mentioned made the content that much more interesting. Also, I loved the quotes from all the newspaper articles including the Free Press and the Telegram. It was very cool to see how stuff was written and reported on nearly 100 years ago.

And it’s interesting to note that, yes, the statistics worked well in the book, but at the same time, improvements could be made. There were so much stats, names, dates for readers to remember that it became virtually impossible to know what was going on without looking back in the book. Would it have been better if Blanchard had divided the book into chapters about the different topics (The war, Manitoba Government, women,) rather than separate the chapters into years? (1914,1915, etc…) His transitions in the chapters to completely different topics seem a little quick and tough to follow at some points.

Again, some of the statistics, especially casualty numbers, have a shocking effect on readers, including myself, and in the times we live in now, it is absolutely incredible reading the accounts of what happened nearly 100 years ago in the same city we live in. Blanchard mentions some streets where buildings located and I found myself trying to envision the street now and then envision it nearly a century ago.

Jim Blanchard is a very dedicated individual and mentioned how he had worked almost three years on the book. He said how he has already completed two books and is working on a third one, about the city in the 1920s. You have to love a guy like Blanchard, digging through the history books, and at the same time informing others of the historical happenings.

And sorry to jump on the bandwagon, but this book resembles another book familiar to journalism majors, Hiroshima. It tells the happenings of a specific city during the war and the effects the war had on the city told through tons of factual information. I guess the difference, though, is that Hiroshima is told mostly through first-person accounts, while this book didn’t do nearly as much of that. Blanchard has so much to write about and get to, that he probably couldn’t the approach that Hiroshima author John Hersey did.

The obvious thing that journalists can learn from this book is that so much dedication is needed to produce a history book of this magnitude. Blanchard explained how he spent nearly three years working on this and how he spent weeks and weeks sitting in a library, looking through 90-year old newspapers. I can see how this process would completely scare away some journalists, and maybe that’s why there hadn’t really been a retrospective of Winnipeg during World War I, because of the amount of research and dedication needed.

In conclusion, for historical lovers like myself, Winnipeg's Great War was a great read, and I would definitely read future works from Blanchard about the history of Winnipeg.