Canadian War Museum (https://www.warmuseum.ca/)
1 Vimy Place, 23$
Monday – Friday 9 am – 5 pm
Aptly named, the Canadian War Museum focusses on the martial history of the lands of Canada, before and since confederation. The recommended time is three hours to go through it, though it took me about half that.
The setup consists of four main galleries, and then a series of special venue galleries, like the Lebreton Gallery, roof, and Memorial Hall. The paths through the main galleries wind around, leading through a chronological order of history, and it’s an easy stroll where you won’t be getting lost, or find yourself in a section through which you’d already passed.
The first gallery, which was the most interesting for me, was the “Early Wars in Canada” section. It detailed conflicts amongst First Nations peoples, between them and the early European colonials, through the French then English periods, including up to the Northwest resistance and Louis Riel in 1885.
My own major interest was in the Fall of Quebec and the War of 1812, both of which had some coverage in this section. This section was light on artefacts, compared to later sections, and heavier on explanation panels, which is easy to understand, given the availability of more modern material.
The second gallery went from the South African War to the First World War, and contained recreations of trenches, and examples of plenty of weapons of war, from small arms to artillery. There was a fair bit to demonstrate what was going on in Canada during the wars, the support for and opposition to them, as well as some descriptions of the reactions towards conscription. The sheer number of people who applied for and received exemptions to service surprised me most in this section.
The third gallery was about the Second World War and contained the usual suspects in terms of the wars in Europe and the Pacific. I would have preferred more about the home front, in terms of POW camps and the internment of Japanese Canadians at the time, but World War Two is such a huge topic that it’s hard to do justice to the interest of every person walking through the doors, so I don’t hold that against them.
The final gallery was the one in which I had the least interest, the Cold War to the Present. While the official guide recommends 45 minutes, at this point I was tired from the rest, and predisposed against this time period, so I went through it much faster than that.
Generally speaking, I didn’t care for this museum, because I’m really not very interested in military history. I had the same problem with the Canadian Aviation and Space Museum. That being said, if you are interested in it, this museum’s full of artefacts and materials that will certainly delight.
