Mike Bechthold holds a PhD in History from the University of New South Wales, Canberra, Australia and an MA & Honours BA from Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Mike is the author or editor of eight books and numerous articles. His most recent monograph is Flying to Victory: Raymond Collishaw and the Western Desert Campaign (University of Oklahoma Press, 2017) and he is the co-author of a series of guidebooks about the Canadian battlefields of the Second World War. He specializes in the fields of military air power (especially tactical air
operations in the First and Second World Wars), the Canadian army in Normandy and Northwest Europe, and the Canadian Corps in the Great War.
Mike was recently employed as a historian with the Royal Canadian Air Force History and Heritage section where he worked on various RCAF centennial projects and was the lead author of a forthcoming material history book on air force history (100 Objects for 100 Years). He has taught history at Wilfrid Laurier University, the University of Waterloo, Conestoga College, and the Schulich School of Business at York University. For 22 years Mike worked as the Communications Director of the Laurier Centre for Military Strategic and Disarmament Studies and the Managing Editor of Canadian Military History, an academic quarterly journal. Mike is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in the UK, a Fellow of the Gregg Centre for the Study of War and Society at the University of New Brunswick, a Research Fellow at Nipissing University Centre for the Study of War, Atrocity, and Genocide, and he recently served as the Executive Director of the Juno Beach Centre Association.
