Men at War

Politics, Technology, and Innovation in the Twentieth Century

Christon Archer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351505864
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The growing number of books on military history and the lively interest in military history courses at colleges and universities show that the study of war is enjoying considerable popularity. The reasons for this are arguable, but of immediate interest is the kind of military history that is taught and written. Here the student of war comes across an interesting division of opinion as to how military history should be written. Military history, lying as it does on the frontier between history and military science, requires knowledge of both fields. This fact often presents a difficulty to the history teacher.Generally speaking, history is a discipline by virtue of its subject matter, not by virtue of a particular methodology such as is characteristic of the sciences and of some social sciences. The perspective of Men at War is a cross between a professional internalist approach and a civilian contextual view. This separation is not unique to military history, for the same dualism tends to occur in those areas of history, such as law and medicine, that can be written both by members of the profession concerned lawyers and doctors and by those outside the profession.The problem is that at one extreme the contextual view can take the emotional content out of war, while at the other extreme the internalist view can put too much in. Men at War seeks to locate a military history that combines the professional, internalist method and the civilian, contextual method by showing that these are two fundamental sources from which a war derives. Seen in this way, this volume breaks new ground in defining the sources of twentieth-century power.

THE CIVILIAN FACTOR

Exerting Control: The Development of Canadian Authority over the Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914-1919

Desmond Morton
Erindale College, University of Toronto

On October 14th, 1914, when men of the First Contingent of the Canadian Expeditionary Force reached Plymouth on the first stage of their journey to the Western Front, their status was clear. In the meaning of Britain’s Army Act, the Canadians were “Imperial”. They were soldiers of the British Army, recruited from the Empire. In the mood of the moment, any other status would have seemed inconceivable.¹ If there was any doubt of the full integration of the Canadians in the British Army, it was laid to rest by Canada’s Minister of Militia, Colonel Sam Hughes: “we have nothing whatever to say as to the destination of the troops once they cross the water,” Hughes told the Canadian House of Commons, “nor have we been informed as to what their destination may be.”² In London, Canada’s acting High Commissioner, George Perley, assumed, “that as soon as the Canadian troops arrive here they will be entirely under the authority of the War Office and become part of the Imperial army in every sense of the word.”³ In 1914 no one presumed otherwise.

Four years later, without formal or negotiated change of legal status, the presumption was very different. If the battle-hardened Canadian Corps remained under the operational control of the British General Headquarters, the Canadians now had their own commanders, organization and tactical doctrines. They were part of a Canadian, not an Imperial, army, under the effective authority of a chain of command which stretched through the Corps to a Canadian section at General Headquarters, a Canadian cabinet minister in London and a Canadian prime minister, Sir Robert Borden, who was insistent on a voice in the higher strategy of the war. The British commander-in-chief, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, grumbled that the Canadians had come to see themselves as junior but sovereign allies. His political superior, the Earl of Derby, could only counsel resignation to altered circumstances: “we must look upon them in the light in which they wish to be looked upon rather than the light in which we would wish to do so.”⁴

This transformation marked a crucial stage in Canada’s march toward national sovereignty. Canada’s military contribution to the Allied war effort, including the trauma of conscription and the sacrifice of 60,000 lives, was the foundation for subsequent marks of international standing, from the placing of signatures on the Covenant of the League of Nations to the famous Halibut Treaty of 1923. In the practical test of wartime administration, the fragile faith in imperial federation was also tested and demolished. The overseas experience of close to half a million Canadians drove home how much they held in common and how little of it they still shared with the people of the former mother country.⁵

Few historians have addressed the significance of Canada’s developing autonomy during the years 1914 to 1918. Although Canada’s independence from imperial ties became almost a blinding preoccupation in the postwar years, interpretation was dominated by disciples of a Liberalism convinced that nothing worthwhile could emerge from the Borden years. It has been left to Canada’s military historians and to scholars of a later day to elucidate the events of the most decisive single decade in the growth of Canadian nationhood.⁶

Part of the mythology of Canada in 1914 was that the country was wholly unprepared for war. This illusion promoted Canadian self-esteem in the light of the rapid organization and despatch of the First Contingent. It also gave the Minister of Militia, Colonel Hughes, enormous and dangerous powers. In fact, Canada had an extensive mobilization plan which Hughes had scrapped on the eve of war. Her militia had expanded impressively in size and efficiency in the pre-war years. The country even had a precedent in the despatch of imperial expeditionary forces: in October of 1899, it took two weeks to recruit, organize, equip and despatch a thousand Canadians to the South African War.

Like the men of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, Lieutenant Colonel William Otter’s battalion had become subject to British military law and command as soon as it reached Capetown. Unlike the soldiers of 1914, the volunteers of 1899 were almost an embarrassment to the government. Sir Wilfred Laurier would have been glad of a pretext to tell his Quebec supporters that Ottawa had done little more than transport some perfervid imperialists to an early fate. Instead, it was Lord Minto, the Governor General, who insisted that Canada’s dignity demanded an organized regiment under Canadian officers.⁷ It was Otter who insisted that Canadians would serve together as a unit, not as detachments scattered among the British regiments. It was Canadian public opinion that forced the Canadian government to establish a direct communications link between Ottawa and the commanders of successive Canadian contingents. The unfortunate Otter, squatting under a wagon in the pouring rain, dictating letters to his staff sergeant or composing reports with the stub of a pencil, was the forerunner of the monstrous overseas Canadian military administrations of two world wars.⁸

The South African experience taught lessons which would have to be learned again in 1914-18. Canadian soldiers in the field suffered from badly designed Canadian uniforms and equipment, complained about senior officers, British as well as Canadian, and discovered a surprising sense of national identity.⁹ They returned from the war with a conviction of their military prowess, best expressed in the Militia Act of 1904. Henceforth, a Canadian officer could be good enough to command the nation’s military force. Section 69 of the new act even envisaged the possibility that Canadians might serve beyond Canada’s borders, although drafters of the section plainly envisaged no more than a hot pursuit of Yankee invaders or the seizure of the state of Maine.¹⁰

Throughout the British Empire, the South African War provoked a salutary increase in military professionalism and efficiency and a determined effort to standardize the training, tactics and staff doctrines of Britain and the dominions. Less successful in the face of Canadian economic nationalism were attempts to impose standardized weapons, uniforms and equipment. Canadian pride and entrepreneurial ambition produced the Ross rifle, the MacAdam shovel, the Oliver equipment, and boots that disintegrated in the mud of Salisbury Plain and Flanders.¹¹

As it had remained throughout the nineteenth century, Canadian military planning continued to regard war with the United States as its primary official preoccupation. However, the prospect of sharing in imperial military adventures had always attracted militia enthusiasts. In the early 1890s, Major General Ivor Herbert had quietly reorganized and strengthened Canada’s tiny permanent force so that it might some day be in a position to join its British counterparts.¹² The South African experience fostered the careful preparation of a mobilization plan for an overseas expeditionary force of an infantry division and a cavalry brigade. Designed by a gifted and articulate British staff officer, Colonel Willoughby Gwatkin, the scheme survived scrapping by Hughes to serve as at least an informal guideline in organizing both the first and second Canadian contingents. Gwatkin deserves more credit than he has ever received for mitigating the chaos created at Valcartier by the vain-glorious Colonel Hughes.¹³

In the light of his experience with his Canadian superiors, it is not surprising that Gwatkin made no prevision in his plan for continued or effective Canadian control of the expeditionary force once it left Canada.¹⁴ Nor did Hughes. Apart from the famous but almost certainly mythical episode in which the Canadian minister allegedly browbeat Lord Kitchener into keeping the Canadians together, Hughes appeared at least initially content to allow his men to march into complete British control. It was South Africa all over again.¹⁵

However, there was one substantial but scarcely recognized difference between the arrangements of 1899 and those of 1914. In the earlier conflict, the Laurier government assumed no greater initial financial commitment than to raise, equip and deliver troops to the British base at Capetown. Thereafter the Canadians depended on the austere generosity of the British taxpayer. In 1914, in a mood of effulgent patriotism, the Borden government proposed, with unhesitating Liberal concurrence, that Canada bear the entire cost of the nation’s military contribution. Parliament, the watchdog of the treasury, never barked. A Liberal back-bencher offered a vague query about the financial implications of such generosity but even he did not demand an answer. In due course, the commitment would add about a quarter of a billion dollars to the national debt.¹⁶

Far more than the National Debt was involved. Because Canada helped to pay for the music, the Borden government accumulated early and pressing reasons to criticize the orchestra. More important, the British government felt obliged to listen to the criticisms. The complaints began with the arrival in England in October, 1914 of a brash crony of Sam Hughes, Colonel John Wallace Carson. Armed with a vague mandate to watch over the comfort of the Canadians, Carson returned to Canada in December with reports of appalling conditions on Salisbury Plain and of the apparent refusal of the War Office and of the Canadian Expeditionary Force’s British commander, Lieutenant General E.A. Alderson, to remedy the situation. Carson’s reports awoke the first official Canadian reservations about British management of the common war effort.¹⁷

Carson soon returned to England, armed with the vague authority of the “Minister’s representative,” to denounce the wholesale replacement of Canadian boots, shovels, wagons, motor vehicles and other equipment by British equivalents. Both a financial and an economic issue were at stake. While the British soon made it clear that they would not present a bill for standardizing the equipment of the Canadian division, massive abandonment of Canadian material dashed hopes for rich war contracts. For a nation deep in economic recession, it seemed a savage and unnecessary blow.¹⁸

When most of the First Contingent left for France in February as the First Canadian Division, the remnants had to be organized as a base, receiving casualties, training and forwarding reinforcements, managing pay and records, and handling shipments of material and weapons, such as the Ross Rifle, which continued to come from Canada. From the first, the British withdrew from any attempt to oversee Canadian military affairs in England.¹⁹ The War Office had preoccupations enough of its own. The outcome, in the absence of any single directing force, was an unedifying mess. By the autumn of 1915 no fewer than three Canadian senior officers could claim authority from the Minister of Militia to preside over all other Canadians. One of them was Carson. Advanced by his own ingenuity and relentless pressure to the rank of major general, armed with Hughes’ personal friendship, and shameless in exaggerating his vague authority, Carson finally convinced the British that he was the proper channel for their communications.²⁰

Any base of operations comes to be regarded with contempt by fighting soldiers but the Canadian operation in England was more contemptible than most. Some of the worst problems derived from Sir Sam Hughes’ insistence on recruiting new battalions, commanded by politically influential but untrained officers, instead of finding more volunteers for existing units of the Canadian Expeditionary Force. Dozens of enthusiastic but untrained units reached England only to be dissolved. Subalterns and privates hurried off to France, leaving their seniors with a burning sense of grievance and a desperate urge to find a dignified post in the proliferating Canadian overseas organization. Such officers, like Carson himself, were ill-equipped to win the respect of fighting soldiers in France.²¹

Responsibility for the confusion belonged to the Canadian Minister of Militia. Hughes showed no inclination to resolve the conflicts of authority. When Sir Robert Borden authorized Hughes to deal directly with the British authorities, he was chagrined to discover that his Minister set the wires humming with abusive and often ill-informed messages. “You do not represent yourself alone as Minister of Militia,” Borden warned, “but the Government of which you are a member.”²² To Kitchener, the Hughes eruptions were simply “extraordinary.”

Sir Sam Hughes had a high opinion of his fellow amateurs, contempt for the professionals and no hestitation in making his views known: “It is the general opinion,” he claimed to his friend, Max Aitken, “that scores of our officers can teach the British Officers for many moons to come.”²³ However, that reputation was only forged painfully and at a high cost in lives at the front, where Hughes was firmly forbidde...