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Journal of Military and Strategic Studies
Journal of Military and Strategic Studies
The Ross Ellis Annual Memorial Lecture in Military and Strategic Studies
At Play in the Fields of Museologists: Two Years at the Canadian War Museum
By J.L. Granatstein
Abstract
Ross Ellis was one of those young men who stepped forward during the Second World War to create the First Canadian Army. In many ways he was typical of those who provided the backbone of the officer corps. But as a subaltern, then a company commander, and finally the Commanding Officer of the Calgary Highlanders through some of the most difficult and terrible battles of the war in Northwest Europe, he was untypical in that he was a natural leader with an instinctive grasp of tactics, a man of courage and perseverance and compassion who made his regiment into what David Bercuson called it, “a battalion of heroes.” I think it most appropriate that this Centre and this University should honour Ross Ellis with an annual lecture, and I am greatly honoured to be asked to give the third Ellis Lecture.
My subject this afternoon is historical and museological. It is also a fragment of the autobiography I will never write. I have participated on the fringes of some important events, I have lived through some interesting times, but I do not believe that anyone, anywhere, would ever be interested in reading my maunderings over my life. I have some vanity, but nowhere near enough to try to inflict my autobiography on the world.