J.L. GRANATSTEIN
I have been writing about conscription for more than forty years. I first touched the subject when I did my master’s degree at the University of Toronto in 1961–2 and looked at the Conservative Party’s misfortunes in the Second World War, misfortunes that arose out of its Great War policies and were compounded thanks to its views on manpower and Quebec in the 1939–45 war. That subject became my doctoral dissertation in 1966 and my first book, The Politics of Survival: The Conservative Party of Canada, 1939–1945 (1967). From there I went on to write Canada’s War: The Politics of the Mackenzie King Government, 1939–1945 (1975), a study of the King government in the war and one in which I looked closely and very favourably at the way King had finessed the conscription issue so much better than Sir Robert Borden. My next book, with J. Mackay Hitsman, was Broken Promises: A History of Conscription in Canada (1977), and here for the first time I went through the manuscript sources on the Great War and, not surprisingly, concluded that I had been right: King had done much better than Borden, conscription was a disastrous issue for national cohesion and, moreover, it had little military impact in either war. I was positively derisory in my comments on the 24,132 conscripts under the Military Service Act (MSA) who had arrived in France by 11 November 1918 and no less so about the 16,000 home defence conscripts sent overseas after the conscription crisis of November 1944. Since more than 600,000 men had enlisted in the army in the Great War and 750,000 in the Second World War, the relatively tiny numbers of conscripts scarcely mattered, or so I believed. ‘Conscription has simply not worked in Canada,’ I said in the last lines in Broken Promises, ‘and there seems no reason to believe that it ever will.’1
I held this position firmly until, in 1984, I read Denis and Shelagh Whitaker’s book Tug of War, a study of the First Canadian Army’s struggle to clear the Scheldt and open the great port of Antwerp for the Allies’ use in the autumn of 1944. A Second World War Royal Hamilton Light Infantry officer and battalion commander of exemplary courage, Denis Whitaker understood, as I had not, that under-strength infantry units were at much greater risk in action. An infantry battalion with a nominal strength of 950 men could lose a third, a half, or even three-quarters of its strength in an afternoon, and every loss of a trained soldier left the unit weakened and its firepower reduced. Casualties fell most heavily on the brave, the section commander who led his men forward, the platoon sergeant who rallied the defence, the company commander who, in desperation, called down artillery fire on his own position. A section of ten could be reduced to five in a moment, but in the next attack a day later that same section ordinarily was expected to cover the same ground as if it were at full strength. Generals almost invariably assigned a battalion of 400 men the same kind of objectives to attack or the same portion of front to defend as they did when it was at or near full strength. With fewer men, the casualties increased as the firepower available in the offence or defence decreased. Unit cohesion, the intangible bonds that make men willing to fight and die for their comrades, also suffered from heavy casualties. Shattered survivors needed time to recover and to mourn.
Wounded soldiers en route for Blighty, ca. 1918 (Archives of Ontario, C224-0-0-10-7. AO 257)
To keep units up to strength, trained infantry reinforcements were essential. If replacements knew how to operate their weapons effectively and understood the basic principles of section and platoon tactics, they could add to the battalion’s power. If they did not, if new men had to be shepherded by soldiers acting as nursemaids and shown what to do, they detracted from that strength and were a danger to themselves and their comrades. Moreover, arriving without the personal ties and loyalties that bound the regiment together, the new men were also friendless, completely lacking the personal support systems that were so essential if soldiers were to fight well. Such networks took time to develop, and if the replacements went into action at once, as they did too often, they did so all but alone. Especially after the losses in Normandy and in the Gothic Line battles in Italy, in the Second World War the army received too many ill-trained or untrained reinforcements and put them into the line at once. More Canadian soldiers died as a result.
The Whitakers’ book forced me to rethink my treatment of conscription in the Second World War, obliging me to give the military necessities equal weight in the balance with the political requirements. In The Generals: The Canadian Army’s Senior Commanders in the Second World War (1993), particularly in the chapter on Generals Maurice Pope and Ken Stuart, I tried to do so.
This brief essay is my attempt to be more even-handed in assessing conscription in the Great War. I admit that the military side of the equation receives its due weight forty years later than it should have. Mea culpa.
Recruiting in Canada had slowed after mid-1916 and by the spring of 1917 was running at only 4,000 men per month, far below replacement needs. Many of the volunteers opted for any corps but the infantry, making even those low numbers deceptive. This decline undoubtedly was a reaction to the high rate of casualties and to the gradual drying up of the pool of potential volunteers in English Canada. The British born, the portion of the population that provided a wholly disproportionate percentage of enlistments in the first two years of war, were now all but depleted. A British War Office study had calculated at the beginning of 1917 that 37.5 per cent of British-born Canadians had enlisted. Enlistment of the native born of British extraction was 6.1 per cent, and foreign-born Canadians had sent 6.5 per cent into the military.2 Those men who remained out of the army, their lapels regularly pierced with white feathers by women ‘recruiters,’ were under strong pressure to enlist. But the high number of casualties, the long lists of the killed, wounded, and missing that regularly appeared in the newspapers, were positive disincentives to joining the army.
At the same time, part of the difficulty was that the government could not decide if it was better to take a farmer or a tool and die maker and turn him into a soldier. Where could such a man provide the greatest service? Even after the National Registration taken at the end of 1916, even after the passage of the Military Service Act in the next year, and even after the destructive German offensives of March 1918 led the Borden government in a panic to cancel all the exemptions from conscription it had issued before and after the December 1917 election, this same problem existed.3 The mismanagement of manpower that had begun with Sam Hughes’s first call for men in August 1914 had never been properly corrected.
In French Canada, where enlistments were low and slow, there was no shortage of men, only of a willingness to serve overseas. The War Office study of Canadian manpower calculated that only 1.4 per cent of French Canadians had joined up, the lowest rate in the white empire.4 Whether the secret British calculations were correct is almost immaterial. The numbers were known in the broad outline to Canadians, and the Quebec enlistment failure infuriated many English Canadians, who could neither appreciate nor understand the numerous and varied rationalizations produced in Quebec to explain this situation. The truth of the matter was that just as in English Canada the public pressure on men was to enlist, in Quebec the pressure was not to enlist. Hume Wrong, scion of a distinguished Toronto family, who had served overseas in a British regiment until being badly wounded and invalided home, wrote privately and only half-jokingly in May 1917, ‘I would welcome a little military activity in Quebec. My C.O. and I have arranged a little punitive expedition … And I should delight in catching Bourassa and Lavergne [the anti-conscriptionist leaders].’5 Many in English Canada shared that view – and they were not joking at all.
While it was primarily the refusal of the vast majority of Quebecois to enlist that drove the politics of the conscription issue at home, it was also the unwillingness of fit men in English Canada to serve. The government had tried every expedient to avoid an issue that even the dullest politician could see was bound to be terribly divisive, and not only in Quebec. Farmers, labour, ethnics, and parents of young, fit men – none of them wanted conscription that would take away men who did not want to fight from their jobs and families. On the other hand, those with sons, brothers, and fathers at the front wanted them to receive the fullest support. The manpower issue was a terrible one for politicians and the country.
Because many in the government had believed there was a threat from the 393,000 German-born Canadians and the 130,000 immigrants from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, substantial numbers of troops had been kept at home. The 1916 Prairie Census showed that 7.8 per cent of the west’s population were born in enemy territory.6 Just as worrisome, in the United States German Americans, Irish Americans, or German sympathizers constituted a potential threat of invasion. The Fenian raids were within the living memory of men and women, and some soldiers, like the septuagenarian General W.D. Otter, had had their first taste of war against the Irish Americans fifty years before. The prime minister also worried about ‘thugs, gunmen, or other lawless individuals, instigated by German emissaries,’ who might carry out sabotage attacks, and he certainly feared raids across the border.7 These fears kept 16,000 soldiers on guard duty against a threat that had scarcely ever existed, though the government could not ignore it. From October 1915 to September 1916 the government had also directed that a minimum of 50,000 Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF) volunteers be retained at home on training or other duties to protect against all eventualities.8
As casualties mounted overseas, the chief of the General Staff, General Willoughby Gwatkin, looked for ways to replace the volunteers on home defence duties and get them into action. In January 1917, Gwatkin told the militia minister, Sir A.E. Kemp, that there were 62,000 men under arms in Canada, 50,000 of them CEF and 12,000 militia on active service. The response, approved by the cabinet in January and February 1917, was to recruit 50,000 men into a Canadian Defence Force (CDF) for home defence. The CDF began recruiting in March, seeking ‘men to volunteer for home defence by joining the active militia. An opportunity is now afforded to those who have been prevented from undertaking Overseas service to join this movement.’ The Militia Department proposed that CDF volunteers train with CEF volunteers, and serve at a slightly lower rate of pay and allowances on the same terms – to six months after the end of the war – as CEF recruits. The plan called for all 50,000 to be enrolled in April and to go off to summer camp in May.9
With the United States in the war after 6 April, there was no longer even the most remote possibility of a military threat from the south, though the prospect of sabotage (of which there had been almost none in Canada) did remain. Potential CDF recruits could figure this out, and they could also see that there was no need for 50,000 men to be retained in Canada. Most, no doubt, feared that if they joined the Canadian Defence Force they would be converted to the CEF and despatched overseas. As a result, volunteers who might have been eager to do their military service only in Canada stayed away from the CDF in droves. By 25 April fewer than 200 men had signed up. Preordained as it may have been, conscriptionists in the government, the military, the media, and the public viewed the CDF failure as proving that only compulsion could produce men now.10 In the first month of recruiting for the CDF, coincidentally the month of the great Canadian victory at Vimy, casualties overseas were 23,939; volunteers for the Canadian Expeditionary Force numbered 4,761.11 Conscription’s hour had arrived.
To the surprise of the army leadership, Sir Robert Borden decided to impose conscription on his return from a visit to Britain and France in May. The prime minister had been persuaded by the Allies’ grave situation and by the needs of the men at the front, and he was bound and determined to achieve his goal. For the next seven months, during and after the progress of the Military Service Bill through Parliament and through the formation of an almost wholly English-speaking coalition government and a bitter, divisive election in December 1917, conscription dominated the public debate.
Overseas, the soldiers watched and waited, most hoping that conscripts would provide the reinforcements the Corps needed. Lieutenant General Sir Arthur Currie had responded to Borden’s congratulatory message on his appointment as Corps commander in June 1917 by saying, ‘It is an imperative and urgent necessity that steps be immediately taken to ensure that sufficient drafts of officers and men are sent from Canada to keep the Corps at its full strength.’12 This message, something that Currie believed to be true, had been read in Parliament during the debate on the Military Service Bill, where it annoyed anti-conscriptionists. But during the 1917 election campaign, when the government asked Currie (who many Conservatives knew to have been a Liberal) to issue a message to the troops endorsing the Union Government and conscription, he refused, seeing this request as blatant political interference with his command.
By this point, Currie thought it more important to break up the 21,000-strong 5th Canadian Division, sitting in England under Sam Hughes’s son, Major General Garnet Hughes, than to impose conscription, which would take months to produce results. Hughes’s division was untouchable so long as his father was minister; after Sam’s ouster on 11 November 1916, the government, still fearing his wrath, refused to act to use its men for reinforcements for the four divisions fighting in France. To Currie, it was all politics, damn politics. There were enough men in England to replace the Corps’s losses at Passchendaele, add to the strength of infantry battalions, and help to create new machine-gun battalions if only the government had the courage to confront Sam Hughes’s malign influence. It did not, so Currie refused the government’s request.13 Arthur Currie was a tough, principled man, and he eventually secured the break-up of Hughes’s division and its use as reinforcements for his hard-pressed infantry in February 1918.
Whatever Currie thought of the government and however he himself voted, like English-speaking Canadians at home, his men overwhelmingly cast their ballots for the Union Government and conscription. There was pressure applied to soldiers to vote the right way by some conscriptionist commanding officers, and there were stories of political skullduggery galore. It was nonetheless inescapable that 92 per cent of the military vote went to the victorious Borden, enough to switch fourteen seats from the Liberals to the Union Government.14
Conscription duly came into force, and the first 20,000 conscripts began to report for training on 3 January 1918, after the election. Only 1,500 francophones would form part of the first batch of reportees, the government was told, ‘owing to the fact that there were very few reports for service there; that the claims for exemption have been generally allowed. And that very few of the appeals, which are very numerous, have been disposed of.’15 More than nine out of every ten men called for service across the country had sought exemption, and many of those who were refused took to the hills. Many of the exemptions that were granted, not least to farmers who had been guaranteed exemptions just prior to the December 1917 election, were cancelled on 19 April 1918 as the great German offensive terrified the Allies. Borden told a delegation of protesting farmers that the war situation was critical and that the Canadian Corps needed reinforcements. He rejected the argument that he had broken a solemn covenant made during the election: ‘Do you imagine for one moment we have not a solemn covenant and a pledge to those men?’16 In Quebec, where evasion of the Military Service Act (MSA) was greatest, with 18,827 defaulters as against only 27,557 French-speaking men who were taken on strength of the Canadian Expeditionary Force,17 there were contrary (and foredoomed to failure) pressures to create a francophone brigade out of conscripts and volunteers. Asked his views, Currie duly consulted his commanding officers and then vetoed the idea. None of his battalions would accept so much as a company of French Canadians. ‘My own opinion is that they should not be kept separate,’ Currie said privately; ‘they are Canadians the same as everybody else, and the sooner it is so regarded the better it will be.’18 The minister of militia and defence, now General S.C. Mewburn, urged the overseas minister to encourage good treatment of francophones in the army. ‘I honestly think it would be a good policy to have your officers go out of their way to treat them decently,’ he wrote to Sir Edward Kemp in London. ‘It will make all the difference in the world.’19 The 22e Battalion would remain the only French-speaking unit at the front.20
Soldiers and conscription graffiti (City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1244, Item 726)
At the end of the day, Borden had hoped to generate 100,000 recruits by his conscription legislation, and he achieved this result. Of the 401,000 men called up for service, 99,651 were on strength of the CEF on 11 November 1918, the date of the armistice. Of that number, 47,500 had already proceeded overseas and 24,132 had been taken on strength of units in France.21
After almost three years in the trenches, the Canadian Corps was a veteran formation that had benefited greatly from its status as a national contingent, a position helped by the independence Currie had carved out for himself and his men. He saw to it that the Corps stayed together, fought together, and worked together, divisions and brigades learning from each others’ successes and the failures of the other formations. Ordinarily, British corps were administrative groupings from which divisions could be plucked at will and assigned to another corps or army. The esprit and nationalism of the Canadians came in substantial part from being together. Very simply, the men of Currie’s Corps had come to believe themselves unbeatable. Vimy, Hill 70, and the hell of Passchendaele, terrible in cost though they were, had persuaded the Canadian soldiers that they were special. Most of the men at the front might have been British born, but the war turned them into Canadians, and they genuinely believed they could do what other armies could not, and they were right. That they had more resources was a critical bonus, an extra boost that reinforced the Corps’s elan.
The Canadian Corps operated its own training schools and found and organized its own reinforcements by geographical area. British formations, by comparison, had no such independence, their schools being run in common and their casualty replacements drawn from a nation-wide and ever diminishing pool. Faced with a serious manpower shortage after the disastrous Passchendaele battles in the autumn of 1916, the War Office ordered a major reorganization: British divisions were to lose three battalions each, their men being parcelled out to bring the remaining battalions up to strength. British divisional organization by the beginning of 1918, therefore, consisted of three brigades, each with three infantry battalions, a 25 per cent reduction in fighting strength.
In early 1918 the British suggested that the Canadian Corps follow suit. The War Office wanted the Canadian Expeditionary Force to be reshaped into a two-corps army of six divisions. The men could be found, the brass hats suggested, by using the units of the 5th Canadian Division and the three battalions from each of the Corps’s four divisions. This reorganization would have given Currie a promotion from lieutenant general to general and many of his officers a jump in rank.
With some difficulty, Currie persuaded the new minister of overseas military forces, Sir A.E. Kemp, to decline the suggestion of a Canadian army. There would be scant gain in fighting effectiveness, he argued, and the ‘overhead’ – the extra brigade and division staffs plus the additional rear area units an army required to operate in the field – would be high. Moreover, there was the practical problem of a shortage of trained staff officers, a category of officer that took time and experience to produce.22 The brigadier general, General Staff, at Corps headquarters, Currie’s senior operational planner, was British, as were the two next senior staff officers, and the first Canadian GSO I, a divisional senior operational planner, did not take up position until November 1917.23 ‘Unbusinesslike,’ Currie called it, cleverly finding precisely the right word to squelch the idea with Kemp, an industrialist at home.
Currie’s refusal to countenance an expansion of his force – and his own promotion – led Stephen Harris to write, quite properly, that ‘there was no finer demonstration of the professional ethos that requires loyalty to service before self.’24 Under Currie, in fact, the Canadian Corps had become a thoroughly professional army, a fighting force with expertise, a culture of its own, and a sense of responsibility to the nation. As its leader, Currie exemplified the professional nature of his Corps. This professionalism shaped all his actions.
At the same time as Currie flatly refused to conform to the War Office’s request that he adopt the British Expeditionary Force’s weakening of its own divisions, he insisted on maintaining his four divisions at their strength of almost 22,000 men each. Currie wanted to retain three brigades, each of four battalions, in each of his divisions because he realized that stronger divisions were more effective. In addition, this organization offered a substantial benefit in a brigade attack. The usual two battalions up / two in reserve system meant that the follow-on or counter-attack force in the Canadian Corps was always strong. The reorganized British now had to employ two battalions up / one in reserve, which would weaken every brigade’s second effort on the offensive and almost invariably produce higher casualties.
Added to the extra battalion in each Canadian brigade was the simple, but critical, fact that Canadian battalions in early 1918 also had, and continued to have, more men than British battalions, thanks to the reinforcements from the breakup of the 5th Canadian Division in England on 9 February 1918. On that date, Headquarters of the Overseas Military Forces of Canada ordered that eleven battalions of the division provide 100 men each to the Corps’s reinforcement pool. The divisional artillery had already been sent to France, two field brigades and four mortar batteries arriving in August 1917. Currie used this extra increment of guns as a floater, serving wherever the situation required. Similarly, the three machine-gun companies and the three companies of divisional engineers went to the front before the breakup of the division. But the 5th Canadian Division’s twelve battalions and almost 12,000 infantry were the key. The infantrymen reinforced the units in France; indeed, they permitted an extra 100 men to be added surplus to establishment for each battalion. This increased the fighting strength of the Corps’s infantry units by 10 per cent, and it provided enough men to keep most battalions at or near full strength until the heavy casualties of the opening battles of the ‘Hundred Days,’ which began on 8 August 1918.
Thereafter, a ruthless scouring of men in Britain, rear area units, and hospitals for infantry reinforcements had to suffice until sufficient conscripts from Canada – ‘drafted men,’ the army preferred to call them – began to arrive in quantity. By the beginning of August and certainly by the Drocourt-Quéant battles at the beginning of September, MSA conscripts provided the great bulk of reinforcements for the Corps at the time it suffered its highest casualties of the war. The 24,132 conscripts who reached the front by 11 November amounted to more men than the 5th Canadian Division had provided – and fortunately they arrived just in time to let the Corps fight its most extraordinary actions and garner its greatest successes of the war. The four divisions in France had averaged just under 22,000 men each at the start of the Hundred Days. By its end, thanks to the Military Service Act conscripts and despite terrifyingly heavy casualties, they still averaged almost 21,000 all ranks, a diminution, but a relatively slight one.
The Canadians’ comparatively satisfactory reinforcement situation also meant that the other arms and services of the Corps could have more men, more punch than British formations. British divisions had three engineer field companies and a battalion of pioneers; Canadian divisions had nine field companies and additional pontoon bridging specialists. British divisions had a machine-gun battalion of three companies; Canadian divisions could draw on a machine-gun battalion three times the size, thus providing one automatic weapon for every thirteen men compared with one for every sixty-one men in British divisions. What this meant was that a Canadian division was vastly more potent than a British division and had 50 per cent more infantry.25 A Canadian division was almost the equivalent in fighting power of a two-division British corps; the Canadian Corps was likely the equivalent of a middle-sized British army in power.
The Canadian Corps headquarters similarly controlled more resources that any British corps: 100 more trucks and a more efficient supply and transport organization, more and better signallers, a better maintenance organization to keep heavy equipment functioning, and, because Currie had kept the 5th Division’s field artillery brigades intact, the Corps had an extra artillery increment. Moreover, the general officer commanding the Royal Artillery in the Canadian Corps could control all his artillery, unlike his British counterpart, who was more of an adviser. As a result, Canadian guns could be concentrated more easily, faster, and more effectively. The Canadians also had one heavy trench mortar battery per division; British corps had one battery under command.26 In effect, the Canadian Corps, with its four large divisions and its extra punch, was easily the most powerful self-contained formation in France. The 5th Canadian Division’s men and the MSA conscripts had provided the extra manpower that allowed the Corps this strength, and the luxury of additional firepower and units that were up to establishment allowed the Corps to score the victories that made its role so critical in the last three months of the war.
However, it was a very near thing. The Corps’ Hundred Days from 8 August to the Armistice cost 45,835 casualties, almost 20 per cent of the casualties sustained by the Canadian Expeditionary Force over the entire war and, extraordinarily, more than 50 per cent of the strength of the Corps’s four divisions and 45 per cent of the Corps’s total strength on the opening day of battle. To put these totals in perspective, the casualties of the last hundred days were more than First Canadian Army suffered in the entire campaign in northwest Europe from 6 June 1944 to VE Day eleven months later.27 Open warfare had proved even more costly than the bloody trench warfare that had preceded it, and by 11 November the Corps’s units were almost literally on their last legs.
The MSA conscripts played their part in the final battles. Precisely how many conscripted men saw action remains unclear, and we have no firm sense of whether these unwilling soldiers performed well in action. What we do know is that if the war had continued into 1919, as most Allied government and military leaders expected, the 100,000 conscripts Borden’s Military Service Act had raised would certainly have been sufficient to keep the Canadian Corps’s divisions up to strength for that year. Politically divisive it most certainly was for a generation and more afterwards, but compulsory service had generated reinforcements when the voluntary system had broken down. Those reinforcements kept units up to strength, allowed the Canadian Corps to function with great effectiveness and efficiency in the final, decisive battles of the Great War, and helped to minimize casualties.
1 J.L. Granatstein and J.M. Hitsman, Broken Promises: A History of Conscription in Canada (Toronto, 1977), 269.
2 Public Record Office (London) (PRO), Cabinet Records, Cab 32/1, War Cabinet, 23 January 1917, appendix 1.
3 At least this was Newton Rowell’s view as late as June 1918. See National Archives of Canada (NAC), Robert Borden Papers, Rowell to Borden, 8 June 1918, ff. 53626ff.
4 PRO, Cabinet Records, Cab 32/1, War Cabinet, 23 January 1917, appendix 1.
5 J.L. Granatstein, The Ottawa Men: The Civil Service Mandarins, 1935–1957 (Toronto, 1998), 113.
6 J.A. Boudreau, ‘Western Canada’s “Enemy Aliens” in World War I,’ Alberta History 12 (Winter 1964), 1.
7 Cited in Michael Boyko, ‘The First World War and the Threat of Invasion,’ York University, undergraduate paper, 1969, 17.
8 NAC, A.E. Kemp Papers, vol. 71, ‘Statement Showing Greatest Number of Guards Employed,’ 10 February 1917; vol. 115, ‘CEF Strength in Canada.’
9 The Canadian Annual Review 1917 (Toronto, 1918), 309.
10 Granatstein and Hitsman, Broken Promises, 49ff.
11 G.W.L. Nicholson, Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914–1919 (Ottawa, 1962), 546.
12 Daniel Dancocks, Sir Arthur Currie: A Biography (Toronto, 1985), 122.
13 NAC, Arthur Currie Papers, vol. 2, telegram, 3 December 1917; A.M.J. Hyatt, ‘Sir Arthur Currie and Conscription,’ Canadian Historical Review 50 (September 1969), 292–3.
14 See Granatstein and Hitsman, Broken Promises, 80–1; Desmond Morton, ‘Polling the Soldier Vote: The Overseas Campaign in the Canadian General Election of 1917,’ Journal of Canadian Studies 10 (November 1975), 39ff.
15 NAC, Borden Papers, Newcombe to Borden, 19 December 1917, f.53483.
16 Barbara Wilson, ed., Ontario and the First World War, 1914–1918 (Toronto, 1977), lxiv.
17 NAC, Militia and Defence Records, file GAQ 10–473, Assistant Director of Records to District Officer Commanding, Military District No. 12, 9 March 1928.
18 D.P. Morton, ‘The Limits of Loyalty: French Canadian Officers and the First World War,’ in E. Denton, ed., Limits of Loyalty (Waterloo, 1980), 95–6.
19 NAC, Gen. R.E.W. Turner Papers, Kemp to Turner, 17 June 1918, f. 7051.
20 The 60th Battalion, raised in Quebec and with a substantial proportion of francophones, was in the 9th Brigade until early 1917. Then, because it was having difficulty maintaining its strength, the 60th was dropped from the order of battle and replaced by the 116th, whose commanding officer was a Conservative member of Parliament. See the official explanation in Nicholson, Canadian Expeditionary Force, 225.
21 In all, 470,224 soldiers served overseas of which 47 per cent were Canadian born; 194,869 never left Canada of which 61.1 per cent were Canadian-born, a figure that reflects the impact of conscription. See Desmond Morton, When Your Number’s Up: The Canadian Soldier in the First World War (Toronto, 1993), 278–9.
22 Report of the Ministry: Overseas Military Forces of Canada 1918 (London, n.d.), 333–4.
23 John A. English, The Canadian Army and the Normandy Campaign: A Study of Failure in High Command (New York, 1991), 15.
24 Stephen Harris, Canadian Brass: The Making of a Professional Army 1860–1939 (Toronto, 1988), 138; Desmond Morton, A Peculiar Kind of Politics: Canada’s Overseas Ministry in the First World War (Toronto, 1982), 152ff.
25 Nicholson, Canadian Expeditionary Force, 382ff.
26 This description is based on the able account in Shane Schreiber, Shock Army of the British Empire: The Canadian Corps in the Last 100 Days of the Great War (Westport, Conn., 1997), 19ff.
27 John A. English, Marching through Chaos: The Descent of Armies in Theory and Practice (Westport, Conn., 1998), 62–3.
