The Best Little Army In The World

J. L. Granatstein

• Publisher: Patrick Crean Editions
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781443439336
• eBook ISBN:
  9781443439343
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

This is the story of the Canadian First Army that fought its way from Juno Beach at D-Day in June, 1944, through Normandy, into the Netherlands to liberate that country, to the terrible battles in the Scheldt area, and finally into Germany in 1945. This is also the story of how Canada, which had no army to speak of in 1939, raised a citizen army and turned it into one of the very best fighting armies in World War II, one which helped defeat the most implacable, desperate and battle-hardened German army over the course of 11 months in '44 and '45. Canada has always produced astonishingly effective soldiers, and this book is about one of their finest moments.

The argument of this book is that the Canadian army changed from an amateur force in 1939–41 into the supremely skilled and formidably equipped army by late 1944 that was able to prevail against a first-class enemy. In effect, the citizen soldiers became professionals, able to organize and plan, to move and fight, and to win against the best army the world had ever seen, the Wehrmacht.

This is the astonishing story of how Canada mobilized its men, women and industrial resources to raise a military of 1.1 million from a population of only 11 million. The army trained and learned on the job, and though the losses in killed and wounded were high, they were less than in the Great War. This is a story of courage, skill and persistence.

CHAPTER 1

Going to War Again: 1939–43

The best little army in the world did not exist on September 10, 1939, when Canada declared war on Adolf Hitler’s Germany. The Non-Permanent Active Militia (NPAM), the nation’s part-time soldiers, numbered some 50,000 men scattered across the land, from Prince Edward Island to British Columbia. Many of the militiamen were veterans of the 1914–18 war; others had joined because their friends and neighbours belonged to the local regiment; still others enlisted for something to do in the dreary years of the Great Depression. Jobs were scarce all across the country, the world seemed to be threatened by fascism and communism, and many men craved a sense of stability and some social status. Even in hard times, the militia provided an anchor. But in many of these understrength units, the soldiers were merely names on a list; most active participants had received only basic training in their local armoury, though they could at least march and fire a rifle. Very few had ever participated in serious (or even non-serious) military exercises during their annual two weeks of summer training, and in any case, there was literally no modern military equipment—no tanks, no armoured cars other than a handful of already obsolete models, few trucks, nothing but Great War–vintage artillery, no modern light machine guns, and frequently little or no ammunition. There were not even enough Great War steel helmets to equip more than a single division, something fewer than 20,000 soldiers. It was all a far cry from the great Canadian Corps that had smashed the German army during the Hundred Days of 1918, demonstrable proof that complete governmental neglect could reduce the military to obsolescence in two decades. Without up-to-date equipment, there was no army.

Without hard training, there were no soldiers either. Summer training was run along the lines of “bang-bang, you’re dead,” and “no, I’m not; clank-clank, I’m a tank” at Sarcee Camp or Valcartier or Petawawa or others. The federal government, grappling with the crippling Great Depression and the widespread antipathy to the military that had developed out of Canadian isolationism and out of the shock and revulsion at the casualties and losses in “the war to end war,” had starved the militia. The Army budgets in the last years before the start of the Second World War were only $18.7 million in 1937–38, $16.7 million in 1938–39, and $21.4 million in 1939–40. This, however, was a big improvement over 1930–31, when the militia budget had been all of $11 million. In current 2015 dollars, we might multiply these numbers by sixteen or seventeen.

Those pathetically small militia budgets included the sums for Canada’s professional soldiers, the Permanent Force (PF). The PF in 1939 numbered some 4,261 all told, with 450 of those being officers. The able commanders of battalions and brigades who had remained in the Army after the Great War were now mostly in their fifties; many were older, in ill health, or hopelessly out of date in their thinking. Junior officers were recent graduates from the Royal Military College or direct-entry young men. None of the PF officers had ever seen full-strength units on exercise. There were no full-strength units to see: the country’s three PF infantry battalions and its two cavalry regiments, three field artillery batteries, transport companies, and other units were all sadly understrength. Units were scattered across the country—the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry had one company in Winnipeg and its other one in Esquimalt, British Columbia. Only once after 1929 had there been a large Permanent Force training exercise—and that exercise, in the summer of 1938, was deemed a fiasco. “Simply put,” wrote historian Brian Reid, “the regular army, which was responsible for training the militia in the science of war, did not have a clue.” “The Canadian military were not soldiers,” Lieutenant-General Maurice Pope later remarked of the PF, “although we had many experts on the King’s dress regulations.” In effect, there were almost no generals able to lead troops—if Canada had had any trained troops!—on operations.

And yet, and yet, there were some glimmers of hope. Many militia officers were truly dedicated to their hometown regiments. Even though they had to pay for their own uniforms, the officers in many units donated their pay in the 1930s to buy boots for their soldiers—boots the Quartermasters’ Stores could not provide. Others, officers and non-commissioned officers (NCOs) alike, devotedly turned up two nights a week to train and tried to keep up with the military literature, especially the Canadian Defence Quarterly, published from 1929 by the Department of National Defence. The most ambitious captains and majors applied for the Militia Staff Course (MSC), which trained them for staff posts with lectures and a two-week summer stint of TEWTs, or Tactical Exercises Without Troops. The MSC and the Advanced Militia Staff Course for majors brought militia and PF officers together; so too did the examinations for militia colonels. As a result, at the outbreak of war, there were a few hundred staff-trained officers among the 5,000 officers in the Non-Permanent Active Militia. None of these men were truly ready to take on staff posts in wartime operations, but at least they had the basic rudiments.

The best Permanent Force officers also sought out staff training in the United Kingdom, Canada having no staff college of its own. The British Army operated two staff colleges, one at Camberley, southeast of London, and the other in northern India, at Quetta. Entry to the two-year program was by competition and was open to captains with at least six years’ service across the British Empire. The PF ran a preparatory course at the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ontario, and insisted that those sitting the British examinations also pass the Militia Staff Course. Ordinarily, four Canadian officers a year went to the staff colleges, three to Camberley and one to Quetta; in all, between the world wars, sixty-three PF officers earned the coveted “psc,” the post-nominal denoting that they had passed the rigorous course. The first year of the course focused on staff work at the brigade and division levels, the second on work at division, corps, and army headquarters. For Canadians, none of whom had seen large-scale units in the field, the course was difficult, although it did provide the opportunity to observe—and for some, like Captain Guy Simonds, to participate in—large British exercises. Some of the Canadians, officers such as Simonds and Major E.L.M. Burns, enjoyed their time of freewheeling discussion and learned much; these two officers intelligently debated the best ways to use armour in the pages of the Canadian Defence Quarterly in 1938.

There was also the Imperial Defence College (IDC) in London, a one-year course, usually reserved for brigadiers, that was devoted to high strategy and international relations. Canada sent thirteen officers to the IDC between the world wars, giving its rising stars the opportunity to see how the world appeared to Chiefs of the Imperial General Staff and senior British politicians. Among the Canadian graduates were A.G.L. McNaughton, Harry Crerar, E.L.M. Burns, and Maurice Pope, all officers who would hold high rank in the wartime Canadian Army. There were some perks on these important courses—Harry Crerar’s daughter remembered that they had a batman/groom, a cook/general housekeeper, and a parlourmaid; in Ottawa, they had only a cook.

This staff training marked some progress for the tiny Permanent Force and the larger, but still small, militia. Some, but not much. An army of two corps with five divisions and fifteen brigades—the force Canada put into the field overseas in the Second World War—needed staff officers of skill at every level, and, for health or other reasons, not every psc or graduate of the Militia Staff Course was available for overseas service. Staff officers were needed to fill posts in Ottawa, in home defence formations, and in the Military Districts across the country. At the minimum, the headquarters of First Canadian Army required 241 staff officers in ranks from captain to brigadier; the two corps headquarters each needed 68 staff officers, the five divisions had slots for from 13 to 19 staff officers each, and the fifteen brigades needed from 3 to 5 staff officers apiece, depending on whether they were infantry or tank brigades. The pre-war production from staff colleges and courses met some, but hardly all, of the required number of more than 500, without allowing for postings, illness, or battle casualties. There was, for example, such a shortage of trained staff officers that the creation of II Canadian Corps, originally planned for July 1, 1942, had to be delayed for six months. Good staff work, good training, and battle planning made the difference between amateur night and professionalism. The trained and experienced officers necessary for this could not be conjured up overnight.

There had, of course, been interwar planning under way in the army’s Directorate of Military Operations and Planning at National Defence Headquarters, notably the preparation of contingency plans. Defence Scheme No. 1, drawn up by Colonel J. Sutherland “Buster” Brown in the 1920s, laid out the Canadian plan in the event of war between the United States and Britain, not a totally impossible eventuality. What was unreal, however, was Sutherland Brown’s intent to send spoiling attacks into the United States “and [to] occupy the strategic points,” including Spokane, Seattle, Portland, Fargo, Minneapolis, and St. Paul. How the untrained, ill-equipped militia could have accomplished this Herculean feat was left unsaid.

More to the point was Sutherland Brown’s Defence Scheme No. 3, the plan that his directorate first prepared in the late 1920s for a large expeditionary force to fight at Britain’s side. The Chief of the General Staff, Major-General Andrew McNaughton, sent out the first draft of No. 3 in 1934; privately, he had even pencilled in the names of senior commanders, a clear attempt to ensure that a meddling defence minister could not again do as Sam Hughes had done in 1914 and throw away carefully prepared mobilization plans.

The Army could plan all it wished, but it was the politicians who would decide when and if Canada went to war, and what if anything Canada would contribute to the fight. The Liberal government of Mackenzie King had been returned to power in the general election of 1935, and the prime minister, if he was not wholly isolationist in attitude, was acutely sensitive to the dangers that participation in war would pose to Canadian unity. The memories of the bitter political conflict concerning overseas conscription in the Great War remained fresh in his mind, and in French Canada’s. Francophone Canada was anti-British, anti-imperialist, anti-war, and deeply suspicious of the Anglo-Canadian majority. The Liberals depended on electoral support in Quebec, and King would do nothing to jeopardize this. That helped to explain the pathetic defence budgets of the late 1930s; moreover, King correctly believed that the primary task for Canada’s military was to defend the homeland, not to fight abroad, and such funding as the military received was directed mainly to the Royal Canadian Navy and the Royal Canadian Air Force.

The government did agree that the militia should be reorganized and re-equipped when resources permitted—unfortunately, that seemed to mean never. And in 1937, King made clear that Army planning was not to be based on an expeditionary force. Defence Scheme No. 3 was duly revised into a home defence plan, but in fact it retained a “field force” of two divisions for overseas service. King’s defence minister, Ian Mackenzie, a Great War veteran from British Columbia, collaborated in the subterfuge, even closing his eyes when the Army staff exaggerated the possible scale of attacks on Canada to bolster the case for new equipment (not that this produced much of anything). And after the Munich Crisis of September 1938, the army’s senior leadership actively but secretly began planning to dispatch overseas a huge expeditionary force of seven divisions, efforts about which it did not tell the government. Engaged in the excruciating exercise of trying to bring a united Canada into a war that he could see coming as clearly as the soldiers, Mackenzie King would have been furious had he known of these plans.

But he didn’t know, and both King and Conservative leader Dr. R.J. Manion publicly promised in March 1939 that they would not countenance conscription for overseas service in any war. King added in Parliament that “the days of great expeditionary forces of infantry crossing the oceans are not likely to recur.” That comment did not stop the Army planners, and Brigadier Harry Crerar was charged with putting the finishing touches on the expeditionary force scheme. Smart and able as Crerar was, his plan called for Canada to mobilize six infantry divisions capable of fighting in a temperate climate against a “civilized enemy.” No one knew if King and his Cabinet would ever agree to such a force, but Crerar counted on majority English Canadian public opinion, still always ready to back Britain, to demand that at least one and perhaps two divisions be dispatched overseas as a minimum.

Crerar was right in his belief that opinion in English Canada was pro-British, and it scarcely mattered whether Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s London was in favour of appeasement, as it was until Hitler swallowed all of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, or if it was beginning to believe in the need for war to check Hitler, as it was when the Nazis threatened Poland. The memory of the casualties and political strife of the Great War remained, however. And although there was scant enthusiasm except in the English-language newspapers after Canada’s declaration of war against Germany on September 10, pressure on the government to send troops overseas began at once. The government had already, on September 1, ordered Defence Scheme No. 3 put into effect, authorizing the mobilization of two infantry divisions and a corps headquarters. Militia and PF units were called up and guards posted at vital points such as power plants, canals, and key bridges. Thinking of a very limited war effort, King had still hoped to avoid sending infantry overseas, but his Cabinet insisted on this as early as September 7. Still, the finance minister said, there was no money, and on September 19, the ministers agreed to send a single division “when required and trained in Canada.” A second division was to be kept available in Canada, but, King added, “It was apparent that a third division could not be thought of at this time, if we were not to occasion protest across the country itself and even more to impair the credit of Canada.” War had begun, but the Depression mentality decreeing that spending be limited persisted. It would do so until June 1940 and the fall of France.

The prime minister had wanted the Royal Canadian Air Force to be Canada’s major contribution to the war effort, and within days of the announcement that a division would go overseas, Britain asked that Canada lead—and largely pay for—a major air training scheme. The eventual result of this overture was the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, a massive effort that produced in all 131,000 aircrew. If the idea had reached Canada before the decision to send infantry overseas, that commitment might not have been made. As it was, the RCAF eventually reached a strength of 250,000, a very substantial force that enlisted many of the cream of the crop. With the Royal Canadian Navy taking in another 100,000 men, many of the best-educated recruits were lost for the Army. This certainly had implications down the road.

The 1st Canadian Division nonetheless began to take form. It was to consist of three brigades, each with three infantry battalions, artillery, transport, signals, engineers, and other units. Each brigade would number approximately 5,000 men, each battalion just under 1,000, and the division’s strength in all would be some 20,000 officers and men. The three Permanent Force battalions—the Royal Canadian Regiment, the Royal 22e Régiment, and the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry—were included, one per brigade, and the militia units deemed by the regulars in Ottawa to be the best provided the remainder—the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment from eastern Ontario, the 48th Highlanders from Toronto, the Edmonton Regiment, the Seaforth Highlanders from Vancouver, the Carleton and York Regiment from New Brunswick, and the West Nova Scotia Regiment. Two of the brigade commanders were militiamen: one a Montreal dairy owner, the other the proprietor of the E.D. Smith jam company. The third was Brigadier George Pearkes, VC, from the PF.

Permanent Force officers were not happy that militiamen were so prominent. Christopher Vokes, a captain at the time, later wrote that “what was mobilized was a mob . . . an organized mob, in uniform. The militia officers and sergeants had a vague notion what to do . . . They could probably lead a parade down the street . . . but that was about the size of it. When it came down to training soldiers for war they knew absolutely nothing.” W.A.B. Anderson, a PF artillery captain in 1939 and postwar a lieutenant-general, remembered that the tension between the militia and the regulars was very real. There was little mutual respect in 1939, though this diffused over six years of war. The PF culture was strong, and some, like militiaman Brigadier Stanley Todd, who became a superb wartime artillery commander, were aware they’d got where they did without PF help. Anderson remembered the unpleasantness of hearing people talk in the Camp Petawawa mess about “goddamn PF know-it-alls.” The tension existed, as did the amateurishness. In truth, though, all the Canadians were amateurs in September 1939.

King had selected, as commander of the 1st Canadian Division, Major-General Andrew McNaughton, who had served as a brilliant, innovative artillery commander in the Great War, as Chief of the General Staff from 1929 to 1935, and as head of the National Research Council (NRC), Prime Minister R.B. Bennett appointing him to that post after McNaughton ran the army’s Depression relief camps. The relief camps had taken unemployed men off the streets and paid them 20 cents a day to build infrastructure or cut trees, but the scheme stirred enough controversy that McNaughton had been shunted to the NRC. But the general was a force, and Prime Minister King knew it. McNaughton might have had Tory connections, but he was a “scientific soldier,” one who believed in using weapons to minimize casualties, and this greatly appealed to Mackenzie King. Anderson recalled that McNaughton had an aura about him, a flamboyance without trying for it, and that he could come into any group and liven it up; he was “bright as all Hell.”

Still, the prime minister worried about McNaughton because the general did not always seem to understand that he was subordinate to civilian authority. The soldiers, in the general’s view, took priority; McNaughton had teared up as he spoke to King about his responsibility for the lives of his men. And in early December, when the prime minister talked to McNaughton just before he left for Britain, King wrote in his diary, “I felt a little concern about his being able to see this war through without a breakdown. I felt he was too far on in years to be taking on so great a job.” McNaughton was only fifty-two, but King was right.

Nonetheless, Andy McNaughton was a first-class mind with a scientific bent, a nationalist, a commander who had the affection and trust of his division. He was happiest looking under a truck to fix the transmission or checking the hydraulics on guns. But he was no great trainer of troops, as it turned out, and his judgment of his senior officers was not always the best. In the autumn of 1939, however, McNaughton was almost certainly the best available man for his job.

His division, on the other hand, was far from ready for battle. Some units had only Great War uniforms; others still had no boots. There was almost no heavy equipment—Ottawa was counting on Britain to provide this once the troops went overseas. Nonetheless, in early December 1939, the largely untrained men of the 1st Canadian Division embarked for Britain in high spirits. Matthew Halton, the Toronto Daily Star’s foreign correspondent, was there to welcome them: “Seldom have I been more moved and thrilled when, in last Sunday’s gray mists, I saw the vanguard of the Canadian army—sons and brothers of the men of Vimy Ridge—land on British soil,” he wrote. The Times of London caught the sp...

Table of contents

• Maps
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Going to War Again: 1939–43
• Chapter 2: From D-Day to the Closing of the Falaise Gap
• Chapter 3: Clearing the Scheldt
• Chapter 4: Operations on the Maas and Rhine
• Chapter 5: The Liberation of the Netherlands
• Chapter 6: Aftermath
• Appendix 1: Table of Ranks
• Appendix 2: Organization of the Canadian Army Overseas
• A Brief Note on Sources
• Acknowledgements
• Index
• Photos Section
• About the Author
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher