Canada began mobilizing for war even before the Germans marched into Poland and her 1st Division arrived in Britain before the end of 1939. In the years which followed, the force in England grew to a complete field army of three infantry and two armoured divisions, two independent armoured brigades and groups of medium and anti-aircraft artillery, organized into two army corps with an appropriate mix of Army and Corps Troops. With base and reinforcement units its strength was 232,000 soldiers of all ranks. All were volunteers.
The 1st Division went to France in 1940, after the evacuation of the BEF at Dunkirk, but was withdrawn by the British War Office before it met the enemy. There followed the raid on Spitzbergen, then three years of training, punctuated only by the 2nd Division’s disastrous raid on Dieppe in August, 1942. The time soon came when the troops had learned everything that peacetime training could teach. Discipline was good, the men hard and fit. Staleness and boredom became the Army’s greatest problems. As time went by it became obvious that First Canadian Army’s purpose in life was to defeat the German army in North-West Europe. Lt-Gen A.G.L. McNaughton, its commander, once described his force as ‘a dagger pointed at the heart of Berlin.’
In April, 1943, when it was decided that the 1st Canadian Division and the 1st Armoured Brigade would be sent to the Mediterranean to take part in the landings in Sicily, it was understood by both the Canadian and British authorities that they would return to the United Kingdom in time to take part in cross-channel operations, presumably in 1944. Apart from a wish to take a more active part in the War, the primary purpose of the operation was for Canadians to gain battle experience.
Within little more than a month of their departure from Scotland, Colonel J.L. Ralston, the Minister of National Defence, began persuading the British to agree to the force being increased to a full corps, including another division. Given the commitments of the Allies to operations in many parts of the world, there was at first no shipping available and the Allied command in the Mediterranean was not convinced that the additional forces were needed. Eventually it was agreed that HQ 1st Canadian Corps, its Corps troops and the 5th Armoured Division would replace HQ 30 Corps, its Corps troops and the 7th British Armoured Division in Italy which would then return to Britain to bolster the invasion force. The two corps would exchange their heavy equipment — tanks, guns and transport — so reducing the shipping requirement.
The insistence of the Canadian Government in sending 1st Corps to Italy against the wishes of her Allies was perhaps commendable in that it brought more of their troops into battle against the enemy. The part which public opinion in Canada played in the Government’s thinking was probably not great. To most people it made little difference whether Canada had one division or two in Italy. Of more consequence was the Cabinet’s perception of American opinion. As more and more United States forces were brought into action, it seemed important to Canada’s relations with her neighbour that she be seen to be shouldering a relatively larger share of the offensives against the Axis.1
Political motives, not military imperatives, lay behind the Government’s actions which unfortunately resulted in no veteran division from Italy rejoining the Army before the invasion of Normandy. There the Canadians had to earn their battle experience the hard way, by trial and error — by benefiting from the mistakes of their dead comrades.
In common with every army, some were inadequate to the harshness of the task, others died through inexperience or the failures of others. Casualties were very heavy. But at the end of the Normandy campaign, in every understrength unit was a hard core of battle-tried veterans who now had the experience to put to full use the skills they had polished for so long in Britain.