Though its subtitle suggests otherwise, Douglas Hunter’s War Games really has less to do with hockey than with military history. In this thoroughly researched and largely unenergetic volume, Hunter has compiled parallel accounts of Mackenzie King’s government during the Second World War and the evolution of the NHL during the same period. While Hunter does his best to reveal how the two institutions influenced one another, his narrative quickly becomes a lengthy account of the conscription crisis in which “Hockey’s Fighting Men” are just bit players.

The character Hunter places at the centre of both dramas is Conn Smythe, a distinguished veteran of both world wars and the man who built Maple Leaf Gardens and the hockey team that occupied it. After returning from France, where he was seriously wounded in battle, Smythe became a vehement opponent of King’s waffling conscription policy. He argued that ill-trained volunteers were being sent to die in Europe while conscripted soldiers were earmarked for home defence, a contingency that seemed unnecessary as the tide of war moved in the Allies’ favour.

As Hunter relates, Smythe’s haranguing eventually won over the defence minister, J. L. Ralston, who lost his post when he opposed King’s stand on conscription. But while he occasionally points out indirect relationships like this, Hunter never really convinces his reader that the NHL or its bigwigs played anything more than incidental roles in the political drama of the early 1940s.

Hunter treats only a few players in any detail, though his best writing surfaces in his account of Bob Carse, a promising young Chicago Blackhawk who serves in Holland, where he is wounded, captured, interned, and finally liberated in the spring of 1945. Hunter weaves bits of Carse’s story throughout the book, putting a human face on the events. Ultimately, though, War Games becomes simply a wordy history of the conscription crisis, occasionally sprinkled with marginally relevant hockey lore.