Military and Oral History Conference:
Between Memory and History
Sydney F. Wise and the Writing of Men in Arms.
Roger Sarty, Wilfrid Laurier University
Sydney F. Wise (1924-2007) co-authored Men in Arms: A History of Warfare and its Interrelationships with Western Society, which was first published in 1956. Widely used as a university text book, re-published in five new editions over the next thirty-five years, the book was a signal contribution in the development of military history from a largely technical subject of interest mainly to military professionals into an academic discipline. Richard A. Preston, the co-author, was a well established university historian, but Wise had barely embarked on his academic career. Having entered the Royal Canadian Air Force right out of high school during the Second World War, Wise used his veterans’ benefits to attend the University of Toronto. He wrote his parts of Men in Arms soon after he became a junior lecturer at the Royal Military College of Canada, his first academic job.
The present paper, one in a series of studies of how pioneering books in academic military history came to written, is based on an oral history interview with Dean Wise a year before his death, and an interview with his widow in the year after his death. Dean Wise had deposited his papers in Carleton University archives, and the author examined these papers prior to the oral history interviews in order to frame the questions. The paper also draws on the papers, and other archival collections, in order to assess the oral accounts.