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Originally published on July 24, 2023.

On July 30, 1906, Charles Perry (C.P.) Stacey was born in Toronto, Ontario. He would go on to serve as the Canadian Army’s official historian during the Second World War (1939–1945) and lead what is now known as the Directorate of History and Heritage in the Department of National Defence.

Stacey began his studies at the University of Toronto, where he completed his Bachelor of Arts in 1924—the same year he joined the Royal Canadian Corps of Signals (RCCS). He continued his studies with a second bachelor’s degree from Oxford University in 1929 and a doctorate from Princeton University in 1933. His thesis on the British Army in Canada helped establish him as an expert in military history. 

Stacey was a faculty member in the History Department at Princeton in 1940, when he was promoted to the rank of major in the RCCS and appointed historical officer for Canadian Active Service Force. These new roles saw Stacey stationed at the Canadian Military Headquarters in London, England, to report and document Canadian participation in the Second World War. As a result, he was one of the first to critically assess Canadian involvement in such deadly and controversial battles as Dieppe Raid of 1942, for example. 

In 1945, upon returning from England, Stacey was appointed Director of the Historical Section of the General Staff, a position he held until retiring from the army in 1959. He also began work on a comprehensive history of the Canadian Army during the Second World War, beginning with The Canadian Army 1939-1945, which received the Governor General’s Award for Literary Merit. He followed that with Six Years of War: The Army in Canada, Britain, and the Pacific (1957), The Victory Campaign: The Operations in North-West Europe 1944-1945 (1960), and Arms Men and Governments: The war policies of Canada (1970). Stacey went on to write other notable works of history on topics ranging from the life of Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King to the mid-18th-century battle between French and British forces for control of Québec. 

In 1965, Stacey became the first director of what is now known as the Directorate of History and Heritage in the Department of National Defence. He also taught at the University of Toronto from 1959 to 1976. An influential early contributor to the field of Canadian military history, C. P. Stacey died in 1989 at the age of 83.