Our Finest Hour

Canada Fights the Second World War

David Bercuson

• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781443418744
• eBook ISBN: 9781443418751
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

First published in 1995 as Maple Leaf Against the Axis, Our Finest Hour has been completely revised and updated, with new chapters that reflect the latest research about Canada's home front in the war and the formulation and execution of Canadian war strategy at the highest levels. Although Canada was not ready for war in 1939, the people of Canada and their armed forces eventually overcame major challenges—from the building of tanks, planes, ships and trucks and the production of huge amounts of grain, meat and vegetables to the creation of the only full Canadian field army in history and a navy and air force crucial to Allied victory. From Hong Kong to the Rhine River Crossing, Our Finest Hour delves incisively into the pivotal battles of the Second World War and the roles of the Canadian army, navy and air force. Bestselling author David Bercuson probes the war on the ground, on the seas and in the air—from the bomber offensive over Germany to the Typhoon fighter squadrons with the Second Tactical Air Force in Europe. With an unfliching eye, he provides insight into the successes and failures, triumphs and shortcomings of the Canadian military.

Our Finest Hour is at once a masterpiece of historical narrative and a celebration of a growing country's contribution during the Second World War.

CHAPTER 1

RUDE AWAKENING

The train ride east from Brest, France, was slow, halting, and hot. Inside the crowded railway cars, men of the 1st Canadian Infantry Brigade talked, smoked, gawked at the countryside, and drank the cheap wine they bought at every stop. Lieutenant Farley Mowat was one of these men, a platoon commander with the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment, the Hasty P’s. He later wrote, “The train crawled on and at the first light of dawn it came into the town of Laval, almost 200 miles inland, where it was halted by a frenzied station master. He was beside himself. ‘Are you Canadians insane?’ he cried. Do you not know that Paris has fallen and that all resistance is at an end? Do you not know that les boches are only forty miles away?”¹ It was June 15, 1940—just thirty-six days after Hitler had unleashed his panzer (armoured) forces in the west. France was in chaos, and a handful of green Canadian troops were on the verge of stumbling into the spearheads of Field Marshal Fedor von Bock’s Army Group B.

On May 10, 1940, the German army, backed by the Luftwaffe, had sliced through Belgium and Holland. Then, in a brilliant execution of tactical surprise, the Germans infiltrated through the Ardennes Forest, outflanked France’s Maginot Line, split the Allied forces, and caused the virtual collapse of the French armies. The British Expeditionary Force (BEF), accompanied by a number of French troops, began to fall back on the English Channel port of Dunkirk. Between May 26 and June 4 about 300,000 men, mostly British but including about 70,000 French soldiers, were evacuated to the United Kingdom. The remnants of the French army took their stand along the Seine River to make a last-ditch effort to halt von Bock and Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt’s Army Group A. The demoralized French were no match for the Wehrmacht; they were swept aside and Paris surrendered on June 14. It was no place for the Canadians to be.

* * * *

If William Lyon Mackenzie King had had his way, no Canadians would have been there at all. Just as he had been adamant about delaying a buildup of the Canadian armed forces as late as he could in the troubled years after 1935, he also wanted a Canadian war effort with a minimum number of casualties once Canada had declared war. In effect, he wanted Canada to fight a “limited liability” war by concentrating on providing raw materials, munitions, and war materiél to the Allies rather than sheer manpower. He would have been completely satisfied if the air force had virtually restricted itself to the defence of Canada’s coasts, the navy to guarding the sea lanes on the approach to East Coast ports, and the army to sending as few combat units as possible to European battlefields. This would keep casualties low and make the possibility of conscription remote.

King was not alone in his hesitant approach to war; Britain and France were almost as hesitant as he was in the first eight to nine months of war. Certainly both Britain and France began to mobilize after they declared war on Germany, but neither country was willing to wage all-out war, and both countries seemed to want to wait until the Germans acted before doing anything substantial. Poland was quickly overrun; neither the British nor the French made any effort at all to help the Poles resist the Germans, not even to demonstrate across the German frontier, let alone make an attempt to penetrate it. Once Poland had been swallowed by the Germans—with the Soviet Union taking its share of the spoils in accordance with the Nazi–Soviet Pact signed in late August 1939—neither Britain nor France were eager to begin offensive operations against the Nazis. The French packed their troops into the Maginot Line, the British sent a small British Expeditionary Force to France to shore up French defences north of the Maginot Line, and both countries waited for Belgium to decide whether or not to renounce neutrality so that the Belgian army, and Belgian defences, could be integrated into the Allied war effort. The Royal Air Force spent the first months of this Phoney War (Sitzkrieg, or “sitting war”) dropping leaflets on Germany. War had been declared, but neither France nor Britain showed any enthusiasm for fighting it.

In Ottawa, there were at least two continuing themes in the government’s approach to the Canadian war effort. First, Ottawa insisted that Canada’s war effort be paid for by Canada and that it be as self-contained as was practical. That meant that although Canadians would fight under the overall command of British (and later also American) commanders, Canadian units would maintain their integrity as Canadian units and would almost always be commanded by Canadians. Second, the government aimed to make the Canadian war effort highly visible to Canadians and to Canada’s allies.

There was a reason for this approach: the government believed that Canadian unity could be guaranteed for the duration only if the war effort was seen by the people of Canada to be Canadian. In effect, that Canada was fighting as an ally, to achieve its own war aims, and not as a lesser party in a large coalition. Fielding an identifiable Canadian army or air force might do that. It would also make it more difficult for the major Allies to downplay the Canadian contribution to the war. The lesson Ottawa had learned from the First World War was that when it came to making the peace, or playing a role in designing the postwar world, one of the qualifications for inclusion in the process was the importance of a nation’s war effort.

Although Canada did not declare war until September 10, 1939, the armed forces began to gear up for the coming conflict in late August. The government’s Defence Scheme No. 3 called for the formation of a mobile force to defend Canada, and on August 25 a number of militia units were activated to assist in the protection of federal property, guard essential communications, and man coastal defence installations. On September 1—the day Germany invaded Poland—an order was issued establishing the Canadian Active Service Force (CASF) to consist of two infantry divisions and ancillary troops. Canada’s three Permanent Force infantry regiments—the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry (PPCLI), the Royal 22e Regiment (R22eR), and the Royal Canadian Regiment (RCR)—were mobilized with one battalion in each brigade of the 1st Canadian Infantry Division to give that division a professional core. Fourteen militia regiments from across Canada were also mobilized to form the balance of the 1st and all of the 2nd Canadian Infantry Division. On September 19 King announced that the 1st Division would be available for overseas service if required (i.e., if requested by the British) and that the 2nd Division would be kept under arms in Canada for the time being.

Across Canada, militia regiments opened the doors of their armouries, set up a rudimentary selection procedure, dug musty uniforms out of storage, and went looking through armoury basements and storage lockers for First World War–era Lee-Enfield .303 rifles, Lewis guns, mortars, any military arm they could find. There were only twenty-three Bren light machine guns in the entire army. There was virtually nothing else besides rifles. There were no modern uniforms, no combat boots, no field equipment, no overcoats, no pre-packaged rations, almost no up-to-date crew-served weapons such as artillery, and fewer than a dozen tanks. In the militia units being mobilized—at that early stage of the war, most were not mobilized—new recruits wore crazy combinations of civilian clothes and bits of First World War uniforms. The absence of appropriate army boots posed a particular challenge because much of the so-called training the men would receive in the coming months was in the form of long route marches. Neither the lack of equipment nor the poor state of readiness seemed to bother the potential volunteers; throughout September and into October they lined up at recruitment centres and waited patiently to be processed. There were more volunteers than the army needed for its two divisions and many were turned away.

Why did they join? There is no doubt that many of them sought relief from unemployment or from dreary, low-paying jobs. Others thought the army and the war would be a chance to get away from home, see some of the world, and take part in a great adventure. Still others joined out of genuine patriotism, or from a belief that Hitler was wrong and had to be stopped. There was no great outpouring of the sort of naive, wide-eyed patriotism that had marked the first year or so of the First World War. There were few crowds cheering marching soldiers, no jingoistic music hall songs, little boisterousness in the whole business of recruiting and training. The prevailing feeling throughout the country was one of resignation and grim determination.

Lack of equipment, lack of space for training, and a poorly designed divisional structure were not the only difficulties hampering the Canadian Army in 1939; leadership was a major problem, especially in the early stages of the war when most of the officers in charge of army units were incapable of leading men into battle. Since most of the army units being prepared for war in the fall of 1940 were militia units, most of the officers were militia officers. Few of them lasted even until their units entered battle; many of those who succeeded them in command proved inadequate. Many were veterans of the First World War and too old or too set in their ways to fight a new kind of war. For one thing, they did not have the sheer physical stamina that younger men possessed. When British General Bernard L. Montgomery inspected Canadian units and their commanders in the spring of 1942, he concluded that most of the battalion commanders were totally unsuited to the job of training their men or leading them in combat. As a result, there was a wholesale housecleaning of officers right up to the divisional level. But in an army as wedded to the regimental system as the Canadian Army was, some of the newly appointed battalion commanders were little better than the men they replaced. Still, there were some militia officers who were excellent and by the time the war moved into its final year, they had, for the most part, come to the fore from the battalion level right up to divisional commands. Two of Canada’s best field generals—Bert Hoffmeister, who eventually commanded the 5th Canadian Armoured Division, and A.B. Matthews of the 2nd Canadian Infantry Division, were both militiamen.

It was clear from the start of this war that Permanent Force officers would fill virtually all the staff, planning, and support positions. In the spring of 1939, the PF officer corps numbered just 446 men. In the words of Chris Vokes, who later commanded the 1st Canadian Infantry and 4th Canadian Armoured Divisions, “Over 50% of the then serving officers in the PF were useless for active service, either from old age, ill health or inefficiency.”¹¹ The vast majority of Canadian army officers were graduates of the Royal Military College, located in Kingston, Ontario, and founded in 1876. An excellent academic institution, RMC did not do enough in the interwar years to prepare PF officers for the most important job a military officer can have: command in battle. In large measure, that reflected the approach of A.G.L. McNaughton, whose philosophy regarding arms and war dominated the army’s thinking in this era.

When the government decided that it was going to send a Canadian division overseas in the first weeks of the war, there was little doubt that McNaughton was going to be its General Officer Commanding (GOC). From that position McNaughton was eventually elevated to GOC First Canadian Corps and then GOC-in-C First Canadian Army. An intelligent and innovative engineer, McNaughton had distinguished himself in the artillery in the First World War, but he did not apparently believe that a field officer required special knowledge about tactics, uses of weaponry, leadership techniques, etc. Thus the Royal Military College gave Canadian officers a good education and taught them leadership, but most received little realistic training about leading soldiers in war.

McNaughton was a strong Canadian nationalist and believed that Canada’s army in the Second World War should fight together as the Canadian Corps had in the First World War. He bitterly resisted any attempt by the British, no matter how trivial, to interfere in the daily administration of the Canadian Army. But the legal and command position that McNaughton was in was full of contradictions. In matters considered operational, Canadian units in the field were under the overall command of the British. In other words, McNaughton always had a British superior officer above him in the chain of command. Nevertheless, McNaughton was also the ranking Canadian officer in the United Kingdom and was, thus, charged by the Canadian government with overall responsibility for the Canadian Army there. He could, for example, refuse an assignment his British superiors wished the Canadian troops to carry out. In administrative matters, he was the ranking Canadian officer in charge of Canadian Military Headquarters (CMHQ), established in London in November 1939 and responsible only to the Chief of the General Staff in Ottawa and, through him, to the minister of national defence. Later in the war, when the First Canadian Army was fighting on the Continent, a de facto division of function evolved between CMHQ, increasingly seen as the forward echelon of National Defence Headquarters, and Headquarters, First Canadian Army.

On December 10, 1939, convoy TC 1 sailed from Halifax with 7,400 men of the 1st Division; it reached the United Kingdom seventeen days later. The rest of the division arrived in subsequent convoys with the last men arriving on February 7, 1940. The division was settled in Aldershot, near Salisbury Plain, a familiar base to any Canadian who had gone overseas with the army in the First World War. The winter was cold and wet, the housing conditions poor, and the English food bad and difficult to get used to. The Canadians had been sent to England so soon in the mistaken belief that opportunities for training would be much better there than in the harsh Canadian winter. But it was difficult to train in the cold and wet, and the Canadians were little better trained for war by the early spring of 1940 than they had been when they left Canada. That was not much of a problem at that point, however, because the German invasion of Poland had long since ended, and an eerie quiet had settled over the European battlefields. Over the winter of 1939–40, Hitler’s generals prepared for an all-out offensive in the west while Hitler held out the hope that Britain and France would now reverse the decision they had made on September 3, especially since Poland could no longer be saved. It was the time of the Phoney War, or Sitzkrieg, and the Canadians could sit as well as the best of them.

* * * *

Like the army, the Royal Canadian Navy was alerted to prepare for hostilities even before Canada declared war. By the end of August 1939, the RCN consisted of six River Class destroyers and a handful of small minesweepers and other auxiliary vessels, eleven ships in all. This fleet was certainly not the navy that Vice-Admiral Percy Nelles had dreamed of; in May 1939, the government had announced plans to build or acquire eighteen Tribal Class destroyers—powerful, fast, and very well-armed warships that were considered by some to be the equivalent of small cruisers—eight dedicated anti-submarine vessels, sixteen minesweepers, and eight fast motor torpedo boats to be divided between Halifax and Esquimalt. The Tribal Class destroyer had become the mainstay of British fleet destroyers in the late 1930s. Much larger than previous British destroyers, the Tribal had an average displacement of 2,000 tonnes, carried six 4.7-inch guns in three double turrets as main armament, and was equipped with a wide array of anti-aircraft and heavy machine guns as well as torpedoes. It also had a top speed of 36 knots. But Canadian shipyards were incapable of building these vessels; Canadian industry could not even supply suitable steel for warships. Thus the question remained unanswered at the outbreak of the war as to how Percy W. Nelles, Chief of the Naval Staff (CNS) since 1934, would be able to obtain these destroyers.

Nelles had had a career rather typical of Royal Canadian Navy officers; he had served aboard British cruisers in the First World War and risen to command of a British destroyer in the Atlantic and West Indies squadrons in 1929. He was the first captain of the destroyer HMCS Saguenay and spent a year at the Imperial Defence College in the United Kingdom before returning to Ottawa to become Chief of the Naval Staff in 1934. He was a strong traditionalist but equally a strong believer that Canada’s eventual major contribution to the war at sea was not being recognized by its British and (eventually) American allies—and he fought hard to change that fact, eventually succeeding by the fourth year of the war. Nelles and the rest of the RCN’s high command would pursue the desire to build a “big ship” navy throughout the war and would, in part, succeed. But the reality of the war at sea that began to unfold in the late summer of 1940 presented the navy with a very different set of circumstances; the hard facts that then emerged ensured that these aims would be undermined by the need to put Canadian escort ships—whatever was available—into action as quickly as possible.

On August 26, the Royal Canadian Navy issued orders that no merchant vessel could take to sea from a Canadian port without RCN authority; a similar order had already come from London regarding British merchant ships and the Royal Navy. Thus began the regime known as Naval Control of Shipping by which the two navies assumed full authority to control all merchant and passenger traffic across the North Atlantic for purposes on instituting a convoy system at the very beginning of the war. Then, five days later, Fraser and St. Laurent sailed for the East Coast from Esquimalt; they arrived at Halifax on September 15 and were sent to sea as escort vessels for convoy HX 1 one day later.

Both Nelles and the Royal Navy expected the Royal Canadian Navy to be put under command of the RN upon the outbreak of war and the small Canadian fleet to be deployed as the British required. King strongly resisted. As far as he was concerned, the RCN had been built up for the defence of Canada. In practical terms, this meant escorting convoys from the East Coast and preparing to defend Canadian waters from whatever might threaten them. Not until the German attack westward in the spring of 1940 did King relent and allow Canadian warships to be deployed across the Atlantic in aid of the British fleet.

The North Atlantic was one of the most important theatres of the Second World War and the RCN was in the battle from the very beginning. If anyone needed proof of how desperate the coming war at sea would be, that proof was provided within hours of the British declaration of war on Germany when the German submarine U-30 sank the British passenger ship Athenia, bound for Montreal from the United Kingdom, some 400 kilometres west of Ireland. The attack came without warning, in contravention of rules governing submarine warfare laid down in the 1930 London Naval Treaty and signed by Germany in 1936; 118 lives were lost. And although the sinking of the Athenia was clearly the act of one submarine commander and not, at that time, a reflection of a general German policy of embarking on unrestricted submarine warfare, it was only a matter of time before that happened. As an anti-commerce weapon, the submarine was most effective when it struck without warning, wre...

Table of contents

• Maps
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Rude Awakening
• Chapter 2: The RCN Enters the Battle of the Atlantic
• Chapter 3: Canada Against Japan
• Chapter 4: The Agony of Dieppe
• Chapter 5: The Deadly Skies
• Chapter 6: The RCN on Trial
• Chapter 7: Roll Up Our Sleeves for Victory: The Home Front
• Chapter 8: Fighting as a Colony: Canada’s Wartime Strategy
• Chapter 9: Bombing Germany
• Chapter 10: Victory at Sea
• Chapter 11: Sicily
• Chapter 12: Ortona
• Chapter 13: Via ad Romam
• Chapter 14: Juno Beach
• Chapter 15: The Ordeal of Normandy
• Chapter 16: The Scheldt
• Chapter 17: Victory
• Afterword
• Bibliography of Sources Cited
• Endnotes
• Index
• Photo Credits
• About the Author
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher