My mother and I have received and are going through my Grandfather's military service records and learning quite a bit about Grandpa. One thing we're drawing a blank on and may have been involved with later diagnoses of Psychoneurosis was a friendly-fire incident that may have occurred in Caen about a month after Caen fell.
To our understanding an American heavy bomber squadron dropped their bombs on Caen and the 8th Canadian Infantry Brigade to which my Grandfather was attached in the support company. Where would I look to find any details on this incident? Everything in his personnel records has to do with his time outside of France and there is a gap between July 1944 and September 1944.
Thanks for any help you can provide!
Edit: Just want to throw this in here, my request has nothing to do with who bombed whom and I don't feel like getting my righteous rage on today. I'm just trying to find out what happened to dear old Grandpa.
Based on the description you’re providing, this sounds like this was the friendly fire incident during Operation Totalize, on 8 August 1944, when a number of American bombers hit Canadian and Polish forces in rear areas near Caen. This was not the only incident of friendly fire from heavy bomber support in the Normandy campaign, but based on the comment about it being American bombers, and the approximate location of the incident, it sounds like it is the most likely.
Terry Copp is arguably the most prolific Canadian military historian to write extensively about Normandy in recent decades. A number of his publications will cover these events, including his book Fields of Fire: the Canadians in Normandy (available in multiple editions). He has also written a series of history columns for Legion Magazine, including this one, which mentions the friendly fire incident towards its end. The online article doesn't provide much detail, but there should be more in the book.
The journal Canadian Military History has a searchable database of archives here, and it would be worth a look.
On psychoneurosis in the Canadian context as it relates to the Second World War, a couple of works worth a look are:
Terry Copp and Bill McAndrew, Battle exhaustion : soldiers and psychiatrists in the Canadian army, 1939-1945, (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1990) - there may be more recent editions.
Terry Copp and Mark Osborne Humphries, Combat stress in the 20th century: the Commonwealth perspective, (Kingston, Ont.: Canadian Defence Academy Press, 2010).
Another useful step would be to look up the war diaries for your grandfather’s unit. If you have his records, you should know its identity, or be able to figure it out. Some of these war diaries are now available online, and Library and Archives Canada (LAC) has information on looking them up. It’s a slightly awkward process, but there’s a good chance it can be done entirely online. In addition to the war diaries for your grandfather’s unit, it’s worth keeping in mind that other war diaries (e.g. for 8th Brigade) also exist and may also be available online.
A further question: when you say “military service records”, are you referring to documents your grandfather would have kept at the end of his service (pay book, etc.) or to his personnel file? It sounds like you have ordered and received his personnel file from LAC, but if you haven't, there is information on doing it here.
If you've ordered your grandfather's file you may already be aware of this, but it’s worth keeping in mind that depending on his date of death, there are various limitations on the information available. If he has been deceased for less than 20 years, LAC will only release some personal information, and only to immediate family, such as your mother. That may explain the gap in the records. If your grandfather has been deceased for at least 20 years, those restrictions do not apply. In that case, there are different options for ordering his personnel file, including the “genealogy package” and the full file. The “genealogy package” contains a selection of documents from his file, rather than its full contents. The full file costs more in copy costs, and will also take longer to receive because there are more documents to be reviewed for privacy issues, but it will also contain more documents and information.
A further possibility would be to look up the personnel files for anyone from your grandfather’s unit who was killed in the incident, to see if they contain any relevant documents. If you have access to the paid-access genealogy website Ancestry (sometimes available free through local libraries, etc.), one of the databases is for the personnel files of Canadian Second World War fatalities. It provides access to digitized copies of selected documents from those files. While the Ancestry database has a search function, it’s somewhat imprecise. As a result, you may want to try to locate relevant fatalities through the search functions on the websites for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and for the Canadian Virtual War Memorial, which allow you to search by unit and date of death, without necessarily having to provide individual names.
Hope this helps, and feel free to ask if you have any follow-up questions.