Halifax is the Canadian city most affected by the wars of the 20th century. A vital convoy port in the First World War, the city was devastated by a huge explosion in December 1917. In the Second World War the city saw U-boats torpedoing ships just offshore and suffered through a horrific V-E day riot that resulted in the looting of the downtown core.

Journalist Stephen Kimber has done a fine job in recreating the Halifax of the Second World War. He focuses on individuals – children, lovers, journalists, servicemen, a madam – and ties their stories together into a breezy, absorbing chronology. The grimy city, straining to accommodate the 60,000 additional men and women who doubled its population in a few wartime years, had few restaurants and fewer bars, restrictive liquor laws, and poor housing. It was a situation ripe for exploitation, and the 20,000 sailors based there and the countless merchant sailors who visited were ripped off at every turn by bootleggers, hookers, and landlords.

In between sojourns in Halifax, the sailors headed off to sea, fighting the U-boats that took a terrible toll. One ship captain, Desmond Piers, married during the war but was at sea more than he was at home, a situation experienced by many thousands of others. Yet people still had lives, jobs, romances, and tragedies on a daily basis, and Kimber captures all of this human drama.

The capstone of his account is the V-E Day riot – which in fact began on the night of May 7, 1945 and continued on V-E Day, May 8. This was a genuine donnybrook with the looting of liquor stores and breweries, the trashing of public and private property, and public fornication. The sailors who led the mob wanted to smash the city they hated; the civilians who joined in saw the opportunity to loot and get drunk. The Royal Canadian Navy, and especially the local commander, Admiral Leonard Murray, refused to act until the mob was unstoppable.
Kimber has told Halifax’s story well. There are few who remember these events, and the shining city of today happily bears almost no comparison with that of 1945.