Chapter Two

1939: Learning to Ride Steel Steeds

At the end of August 1939, New Brunswick Militia District No. 7 asked Lieutenant-Colonel Keltie Kennedy to report the 8th Hussars’ available strength. He responded that twenty-seven officers, 279 other ranks, five attached officers, and one hundred applicants were ready to mobilize. They stood guard at critical infrastructure sites in their area and waited. Prewar plans designated them as 1st Canadian Division’s mechanized cavalry regiment, but the call to serve in that role never came — 1st Canadian Infantry Division mobilized, but the 8th Hussars was not activated with it. For soldiers who had trained so hard and given so much of themselves, being left out was infuriating. Fearing the experience of 1914 would repeat itself, some appealed for transfers to units that had been called up. Then the regiment lost Kennedy, sent to district headquarters to help assemble the army. Harold Gamblin, now promoted to lieutenant-colonel, took his place, with orders to deny all transfer requests and keep the 8th Hussars together. In the fall of 1939, no one knew what for.

The regiment felt the effects of the “Phoney War” that lasted through the winter of 1939-1940. During that time, Ottawa authorized the mobilization of two infantry divisions to form a Canadian Corps overseas. Hussars were torn between wanting to get to Europe and keeping the regiment together. Quartermaster Sergeant Howard Keirstead appealed to higher command that “99 percent of us want to see action and naturally we want to be together. Can you tell us anything that will give us some hope and make us feel better?” Preparations to assemble 1st and 2nd Canadian Infantry Divisions went ahead without them, but such a well-trained and organized body of men was too valuable to ignore. The 8th Hussars contained hundreds of officers and NCOs in waiting who were already schooled in the urgently needed basic skills of modern warfare, and despite Gamblin’s efforts to keep the regiment intact, more than half slipped away or were called up individually for service in the first contingent. Gamblin did his best to keep the remainder together while recruiting new men to fill the ranks.

The fall of France in late spring 1940 changed everything. The German armoured blitzkrieg through the Netherlands, Belgium, and France brought a quick end to the Phoney War and demonstrated the threat posed by a modern mechanized army. The whole world was shocked by the swiftness of France’s defeat and by the British Army’s evacuation of continental Europe in June. 1st Canadian Division had already unloaded on the continent, and promptly had to abandon its equipment to escape becoming prisoners-of-war. In six weeks, German tank columns changed the face of war. This time, no Western Front or French Army would hold off the Germans long enough for Britain and the Commonwealth to assemble their citizen armies.

The 8th Hussars thus went to summer training camp in July 1940 under a cloud of fear, uncertainty, and anxious excitement. At 0600 on July 12, as the unit wrapped up a day’s training in Camp Sussex, a despatch arrived for Lieutenant-Colonel Gamblin. The 8th Princess Louise’s (New Brunswick) Hussars were to mobilize immediately as the 4th Canadian Motorcycle Regiment: the time had come for Saunders’ Horse to meet its destiny.

Hussar troop on parade shortly after mobilization, Camp Sussex, 1940.

8th Hussars Regimental Museum

The decision to mobilize the Hussars as a motorcycle regiment was born of the dark desperation of 1940. The rapid fall of France had caused panic. With France and Belgium out of the war and Britain standing alone, Canada would have to prepare to meet the enemy on home soil. That summer, mobilization began of 3rd and 4th Canadian Infantry Divisions, each of nine infantry battalions and three artillery regiments, along with eight more infantry battalions, to defend key facilities in Canada, including the Port of Saint John. 3rd Division was to assemble in the Maritimes to defend the Atlantic coast. Included in the plan were five cavalry regiments to be mobilized as motorcycle regiments, one assigned to each of three brigades in 3rd Division, one on the west coast, and another in the Niagara region. In principle, they were to be mobile rapid response forces to meet whatever threat presented itself. The Canadian Active Service Force very quickly tripled in strength against the threat of war.

Hussars training for their role as a motorcycle regiment, Camp Sussex, autumn 1940.

8th Hussars Regimental Museum

The motorcycle tasking was a blessing in disguise. The time would come when Keltie Kennedy’s 1930s vision of the 8th Hussars as a central part of Canada’s armoured forces would come true. In the meantime, the Western democracies needed time to catch up to German rearmament programs. Men needed to be trained and assembled to fill the ranks of armies, navies, and air forces, and industry had to mobilize to build the machines to support the effort. Modern tanks could not be designed, tested, redesigned, and put into mass production overnight. Indeed, the 8th Hussars would not receive its first tank for well over a year, and two and a half years would pass before the regiment was fully equipped with tanks. Motorcycles thus gave the Hussars a training tool with which to prepare for modern mobile warfare.

The summer of 1940 saw a flurry of activity in Camp Sussex. New recruits were screened, given medical checkups, and added to the ranks. The camp itself was massively expanded to hold all of 3rd Division. Trained cavalry troopers were sent on leadership courses and motorcycle courses and then promoted to lance-corporals, corporals, and sergeants. Newcomers were instructed on basic soldiering. Troopers were taught how to drive and maintain their steeds before being trained on mobile cavalry tactics. Those who were not fit or capable to handle active service were weeded out. War materials were in short supply and the Hussars learned to improvise. Not until September 2 did enough rifles arrive in Sussex to parade the entire regiment with arms. These were ineffective Ross rifles left over from the previous war, many worn out or faulty, but they proved useful in teaching the rudiments of small-arms handling.

In the fall of 1940, one of the most memorable wartime Hussars joined the ranks. Douglas Everett, the former skipper of the ferry across Passamaquoddy Bay to Robbintown, Maine, and garage owner in St. Andrews, had technical abilities that were a welcome addition to the new motorcycle regiment. Everett brought with him his top mechanic, who later became essential to keeping 8th Hussar vehicles on the road. The new trooper’s name was Motosaku Akagi, a Japanese-Canadian whose father had served aboard a Royal Navy destroyer in the last war. He was short, bowlegged, and spoke thickly accented English. The men of New Brunswick welcomed Trooper Akagi into their regimental family with the nickname of Charlie Motorcycle. Canada of the 1940s was certainly not the multicultural nation it is today, and for many rural New Brunswickers, Trooper Akagi’s acceptance into the unit’s ranks was an exercise in opening minds to matters of racial equality. Akagi’s presence broadened the thinking of those preparing to join in the fight for racial, ethnic, and class equity.

In addition to recruits such as Everett and Akagi, Harold Gamblin needed more officers with prewar militia experience to help expand his training program. With that in mind, he set off to the Fredericton Exhibition Grounds, wartime home of No. 70 Canadian Army Training Camp. There, he found a keen young lieutenant from Rothesay named H.R.S. Ellis, better known to his friends and family as “Tim”. Ellis was second in command of a 250-man training company made up of conscripts for local defence under the National Resources Mobilization Act. Though blind in one eye, Ellis had an impressive military background. In the 1930s, he had trained as a gunner in 15th Battery, Canadian Garrison Artillery, before transferring to The Saint John Fusiliers to take his commission as an infantry officer. When war broke out, he made it into the New Brunswick Rangers, hoping to get overseas with them. When Gamblin found the experienced officer in Fredericton, however, he knew he wanted “Tim” Ellis as part of the Hussar team.

That fall, the Hussars learned to operate the new Bren light machine gun, trained on reconnaissance patrolling and map and compass navigation, were instructed how to camouflage themselves and their vehicles, and sent on route marches to raise fitness and endurance levels. The nearby British Commonwealth Air Training Plan at Pennfield Ridge provided Lieutenant-Colonel Gamblin the opportunity to make his Hussars “air minded” by observing, identifying aircraft types, and recording the numbers and behaviour of the yellow-painted training planes. Finally, the soldiers were trained in entrenching, gas drill, and bayonet fighting, all tactics of the Great War — no one was certain in 1940 what this new war would look like. Though a mounted cavalry unit, the time would come when Hussar squadrons would dismount and fight on foot.

The unit’s reorganization as the 4th Canadian Motorcycle Regiment in the last months of 1940 and the first weeks of 1941 was an essential step in the journey to building a modern armoured regiment. The next one came in the last week of February 1941, when another fateful despatch arrived at Camp Sussex for Lieutenant-Colonel Gamblin: the motorcycles, fully assembled in sufficient quantity only a few months before, were to be turned back in immediately, and the Hussars were to prepare to convert to tanks. They were redesignated the 5th Canadian Armoured Regiment (8th Princess Louise’s (New Brunswick) Hussars), one of three in the newly created 2 Armoured Brigade of 1st Canadian Armoured Division. Among the other units assigned to this division were more cavalry units — the British Columbia Dragoons and Lord Strathcona’s Horse — and infantry battalions such as the Westminster Regiment, from British Columbia, and the Cape Breton Highlanders. The 8th Hussars came to know these units well in the wider divisional family. More changes lay ahead as the armies of the British Commonwealth experimented to find the most effective balance of armoured, artillery, infantry, and engineer units for a modern armoured division.

The regiment then received word that it would ship out shortly to Camp Borden, near Barrie, Ontario, to assemble with the rest of the new armoured division and learn the skills needed to operate tanks. In the late afternoon of March 24, 1941, the regiment marched through the gates at Camp Sussex for the last time. About six hundred parents, brothers, sisters, wives, and sweethearts lined the main street in Sussex as the regiment made its way to the train station. Any hope of keeping the relocation a secret was impossible. When the marching unit reached the platform, Lieutenant-Colonel Gamblin had no choice but to fall the parade out for twenty minutes so the Hussars could bid farewell to their family and friends. With a mixture of tears and excitement they boarded the train bound for Ontario. They rode all night and through most of March 25, arriving at Camp Borden in a little over twenty-four hours. There, they joined the powerful new instrument of war being assembled under Major-General Ernest Sansom, a native of Stanley, New Brunswick. New tank soldiers from across Canada were bound together by cavalry tradition, and before long 1st Canadian Armoured Division became known as “Sansom’s Roughriders.”

But assigning units and soldiers to a newly named armoured division did not mean one actually existed. Indeed, in early 1941, the few armoured divisions in the Commonwealth armies were experimental in organization, equipment, and the methods by which they intended to wage war, and all remained in a constant state of evolution for some time. The Anglo-Canadian armies were still three years away from determining the form their armoured divisions would take in the decisive campaigns of 1944. The necessary tools had yet to be built to equip something as revolutionary as an armoured division. The division needed enough vehicles to move a small city of more than fifteen thousand soldiers at a moment’s notice. War correspondent and 8th Hussars historian Douglas How wrote that merely equipping this new kind of division for a new kind of war was a “complicated and expensive proposition, far surpassing anything mankind had yet encountered.”

At Borden, the men of the 8th Hussars separated into various courses designed to teach them to be tank crewmen. To fill this new role, though, the 8th Hussars needed more officers and men. Lieutenant-Colonel Gamblin went back to New Brunswick to find several hundred new recruits to bring the regiment up to its new War Establishment. The new men no longer came just from the Sussex area or from Kings and Westmorland counties but from all over the province, giving the 8th Hussars a new sense of itself as New Brunswick’s provincial armoured unit. Recruits from other provinces also joined the ranks, swelling the parade strength to 588 in July 1941.

The 8th Hussars’ entry into the elite company of “black hat” veterans of the North African desert campaigns coincided with orders to head overseas. In late August 1941, the regiment boarded trains for Debert, Nova Scotia. After a short embarkation leave, the men assembled at the end of September and made their way to Halifax, where they boarded the converted passenger liner Monarch of Bermuda. On October 9, the regiment set sail with the rest of their division. Regimental Sergeant-Major George Lawrence, himself a Great War veteran, remembered his second trip across the Atlantic very differently from the first:

After the first couple of days those that didn’t get seasick got homesick, at least the younger ones. Most of them had hardly ever been away from home and it began to dawn on them that this was a long, tough journey they had taken on. You could tell how they were really feeling from the way they tried to put on a show. Having gone through it yourself years ago, it wasn’t hard to tell. But after a couple of days they began speculating about what England would be like and the bad phase was over.

The 8th Hussars on board was a collection of partially trained soldiers bonded by regimental spirit and an armoured regiment in name only. They unloaded at Liverpool on October 20, ready for the next step in their transformation into a trained and battle-ready unit. The next two years in England were spent at a number of locations, all south of London. Their first home-away-from home was Ogbourne St. George, near Marlborough, in Wiltshire. Here they combined individual skills as drivers, gunners, wireless operators, and commanders to make tank crews that moved and fought as one. But first they needed tanks. Needs were partly met by despatching individual Hussars to what, by late 1941, was a well-established British system of armoured training schools and establishments. They learned how to crew the latest armoured vehicles and brought their knowledge back to spread through the regiment. But the Hussars needed tanks of their own. Canadian armoured forces were low on the list to receive any tanks at all. At that moment, British armoured units in the Western Desert facing Rommel’s Afrika Korps were the main priority.

The 8th Hussars’ first tank finally appeared in November 1941. The regimental history colourfully records the event: “It arrived late on Armistice Day, Nov. 11, a severe, bony and obsolete thing bearing the mysterious title of an M2A4. Hundreds of Hussar eyes came to feast on it for it was a precious thing. And at night it was covered with a tarpaulin and tucked away with all the care that would be given to a bride, for it was a precious thing after all these tankless years.” It was an American-built Christie “Combat Car,” forerunner of the Sherman. Lieutenant-Colonel Gamblin himself crew commanded it for a road test. Unfortunately, the Christie needed a major mechanical overhaul, the tools and parts for which the regiment did not have. They gave it back with sullen reluctance.

At the end of November, two US M3 Light “General Stuart” tanks arrived. They were small and very fast, powered by a radial aircraft engine. Captain P.M. “Frenchy” Blanchet learned they were tough, too. He was in the commander’s seat inside the turret on a test run around the driver training course he was designing when he and his test crew drove onto an incline. The bank gave way and rolled the precious new Stuart. Fortunately, no one was hurt and there was little damage to the vehicle. Nerves, in contrast, were badly frayed for nearly everyone in the regiment.

By December 1941, the regiment had received fifteen tanks of various types, including the M3 Medium “General Lee,” ten scout cars to serve both for general training and particularly to kit out the Reconnaissance Troop in Headquarters Squadron, and qualified British Royal Armoured Corps instructors to run courses. It was now possible to train tank crews. The regimental War Diary recorded in December that “personnel are very enthusiastic and now seem to think they are getting something really worthwhile done.”

Nineteen forty-two dawned dark and foreboding as Japanese forces swept over the Pacific and powerful German and Italian armies stood poised to do more damage in Russia and North Africa. Global events inspired earnest training in the 8th Hussars. The winter and spring were spent qualifying all hands on the tanks and acquiring more and new equipment. In February, the Hussars gained an important new element of their supporting echelon: the 72nd Light Aid Detachment, consisting of an officer and nineteen mechanics and weapons technicians of the Royal Canadian Ordnance Corps, would give the Hussars new ability to keep their growing fleet of machines and weapons on the move.

One of the regiment’s first M3 Medium “General Lee” tanks in England, 1942.

8th Hussars Regimental Museum

That spring, drivers cycled through courses on handling and maintaining their new steel steeds. Wireless operators got to take their skills to the next level when No. 19 wireless sets were installed in three of the Stuart tanks. Powerful new purpose-built tank radios that the troopers would use in action, they included a three-part communications system with a range of fifteen kilometres and a vehicle intercom for the crew. Wireless operators, crew commanders, and their crews could now practise communicating a three-tank troop completely by radio. “Tim” Ellis remembers that, in case of radio malfunction Lieutenant-Colonel Robinson had crews practise backup hand and signal flag methods, just as they had in the 1930s when Keltie Kennedy directed Hussar cars in the hills surrounding Sussex Vale. Keeping those skills alive proved invaluable in action — when radios failed and, more important, when radio silence was vital to surprise.

Canadian-built Ram I tanks started arriving at the end of March 1942, equipped with 2-pounder (37mm) guns. Unlike the Stuarts and Lees that could be roughed up on driver training courses, these tanks, Gamblin was informed by Division, were the ones in which “they would meet the enemy.” With the new Canadian tanks came further reorganization as the structure of Canada’s armoured divisions changed. British experience in North Africa proved tank units attacking alone without close infantry and artillery support suffered needless losses and could not hold captured terrain. Therefore, the Hussars’ parent division traded one of its two armoured brigades for a motorized infantry brigade and extra artillery. It was also renumbered, becoming the 5th Canadian Armoured Division reflecting Canada’s total of five divisions raised for First Canadian Army overseas. Hussars breathed a grateful sigh of relief when they learned that their armoured brigade was not being eliminated and they would keep their status as a tank regiment. For ease of identification, 2 Canadian Armoured Brigade was renumbered as 5 Canadian Armoured Brigade, identifying it as the armoured brigade in 5th Division. New infantry units assigned to the division were grouped into 11 Canadian Infantry Brigade. When completed, the new 5th Division possessed equal numbers of armoured, motorized infantry, and artillery units, including anti-tank and anti-aircraft artillery.

“B” Squadron crew posing in regimental running kit in front of their Canadian-built Ram I tank.

8th Hussars Regimental Museum

New formation status meant new insignia. Harkening back to divisional patches of the Great War, all units in the 5th Canadian Armoured Division received a maroon-coloured rectangular felt patch to wear on their sleeves, further identifying them with this elite club. Hussar maroon patches came with “8NBH” embroidered in scarlet.

Lieutenant-Colonel Harold Gamblin was not destined to wear his patch into action, though. On May 14, 1942, the regiment assembled for an informal parade at which he bade farewell. The dedicated old Hussar, who had helped Keltie Kennedy keep the regiment ready through the 1920s and 1930s, had been in poor health since mobilization. His leadership had brought the 8th Hussars this far, but he knew that a younger, fitter man must now take over as the regiment entered into an advanced stage of collective training.

The new man arrived three days later. Although not from New Brunswick, he was a fellow Hussar. Lieutenant-Colonel George W. Robinson, of the 1st Hussars from London, Ontario, was an active prewar militia officer with much to offer. He also brought management ability and interpersonal skills from his civilian experience in the insurance business. In the past year, he had served ably as second-in-command of the 1st Hussars. Robinson was even tempered and never seemed to get in a flap, although he was well equipped to bark when the occasion demanded it. In a matter of days, he won the respect and loyalty of his new regimental family. He needed that loyalty as much the 8th Hussars needed Robinson’s ability: he was the man who was to take them into action.

When George Robinson took command, the 8th Hussars were in the final stages of crew training. The unit was scheduled to move to the field in June, first on Exercise Ram III and then to the Linney Head tank gunnery ranges to test how each crew was proceeding on the path to functioning as one. After that, it was time to start training by troops and squadrons. The spotlight was soon put on junior leaders, especially the lieutenants serving as troop leaders. Many of the best Hussar lieutenants first appointed in 1940 had already risen in rank to captain and major and taken key appointments in the leadership of the three fighting squadrons. Corporals and sergeants who demonstrated potential as officers were despatched back to Canada for officer training. By May 1942, there were not enough fit, sharp, armour-trained lieutenants in the regiment to fill all the leadership posts, so Lieutenant-Colonel Robinson set off to No. 3 Canadian Armoured Corps Reinforcement Unit to find some that suited him. Lieutenant Hunter Dunn of Montreal heard he was coming to interview prospective candidates but wanted no part of the Maritime tank unit. When Dunn saw the officer walking toward the house in which the interviews were to take place, with earnest confidence, he changed his mind. Dunn remembers that Robinson “so impressed me that I recall saying to myself ‘he looks pretty good, I think I’ll hitch my wagon to his star.’ I ran over to my quarters, got properly dressed, Sam Browne and all, and joined the end of the interview line.” Robinson told Dunn he did not want all his officers from New Brunswick; the 8th Hussars was part of a 5th Armoured Division all-arms team from across Canada, and there was no room for regional bickering. In the end, Robinson chose Dunn for the Hussars and Dunn chose the Hussars to be his regimental family. Another 8th Hussar legend had joined the ranks, just in time to roll out to Linney Head.

In the summer of 1942, the North African campaign against Rommel’s Afrika Korps was peak-and-thundering toward the El Alamein climax. The science and method of employing armoured forces was evolving all the way. So, too, were the methods of training. Time spent on convoy moves was precious, and so the whole move to the Linney Head ranges became Exercise Ram III. It was the first time the 8th Hussars had assembled all its men and equipment into vehicles and left camp together. The War Diary records that there was much “order, counter-order and confusion,” which all lead to “valuable administration lessons learned.” Overall, the regiment took a major step forward in learning how to pack up everything it needed to live and fight onto vehicles and roll great distances. At Linney Head, Robinson and his officers put the 8th Hussars through the paces of living and working as three-tank troops, though the squadrons drilled only one or two troops at a time because there were not enough tanks to go around. The emphasis that summer was troop teamwork under the troop leader. It was no small achievement to make three tanks behave as one on the battlefield, directed by common drills, radio waves, hand signals, and a tremendous amount of personal trust. The 8th Hussars reached the highest standard for gunnery and troop tank tactics in the brigade that summer. Harold Gamblin had built a solid team, and now George Robinson had honed it to perfection.

In September, it was time to advance to the next level by fielding five troops in full squadrons. Pooling all its tanks, the regiment had enough for a single squadron. The three fighting squadrons each then took a turn exercising and living together in the field. They practised “march” discipline, squadron formations, and tactics, setting up defensible tank “harbours” at night, how to live out of their tanks, and how to cook in the field. They also learned the art of the laager, an Afrikaner word for wagon-forts picked up in Anglo-Canadian military parlance during the South African War. In terms of a modern armoured regiment, laagering meant forming the squadron into a hasty close formation so it could be refuelled and rearmed. The supply and fuel trucks formed part of the Headquarters Squadron A-1 support echelon. Lastly, both by accident and by design, crews practised maintenance in field conditions, away from the comfort of the warm, dry garage in camp. Observers from brigade and divisional headquarters were impressed by the 8th Hussars’ performance. In October, Lieutenant-Colonel Robinson happily informed the assembled unit that it was the top regiment in the brigade.

Of all the skills acquired by the regiment as a whole in 1942, perhaps the most important was navigation. Officers and men had trained with map and compass since before the war, but navigating the tremendously dense road and track network of southwest England added many new layers of complexity. Signposts were removed for anti-invasion protection, as they would likely be wherever the regiment fought in Europe. The road system was dotted with small villages and tiny farm hamlets, scattered across rolling hills that all looked similar. It was a far different world than Sussex Vale, New Brunswick, and more akin to the country they would fight in. Thus, they practised the art of moving fifty or more vehicles long distances through unfamiliar country at night on approach marches, arriving in time to deliver an attack at dawn. The protection of darkness was precious for armour on the move. The 8th Hussars soon would learn that no collective skill was more important than being able to deliver a regiment of fifty tanks to the right point on the map at the critical time in a battle.

That autumn and winter, the regiment bounced around Sussex between Brighton and Hove on the coast and Crowborough inland. This put them as close to harm’s way as they had yet been in the war, as German bombers made regular visits to Britain’s coastal cities. Each night at Brighton, one troop was assigned to provide anti-aircraft watch with Bren light machine guns on turret deck mounts. That winter also saw two important developments in the building of the armoured regiment. One was tanks, and plenty of them. Ram IIs had trickled in since the summer but at a very slow rate. In November, Robinson ordered that every new Ram II was to have a permanent crew assigned to it, and in December and January they flowed in five and ten at a time. As new Rams arrived, the training-worn Lees, Stuarts, and underarmed Ram Is were sent back to depots. On January 15, 1943, the year they were destined to meet the enemy on the battlefield for the first time, the Hussars took delivery of fourteen Ram IIs. At fifty-four tanks in total, the 8th New Brunswick Hussars was finally up to War Establishment — every crew in every squadron now had its own tank.

In March, the 8th Hussars participated in Exercise Spartan, the largest Canadian Army wartime manoeuvres ever conducted. The War Diary and reports reveal that Exercise Spartan was integral to Hussar development. On Spartan, for the first time, the 8th Hussars practised working in close cooperation with infantry, coping with simulated anti-tank mine strikes, and traffic delays imposed by blown bridges. They experienced what it meant for fifty tanks to be stuck out in front of the rest of the army, alone in the dark without infantry. They learned how to keep the vehicles of “A” support echelon close enough to ensure the regiment was fuelled and resupplied and tanks maintained. Regimental headquarters and 70 Light Aid Detachment (renumbered from 72 L.A.D.) learned how to keep track of tanks that were broken down or stuck in mud and spread over a hundred kilometres so they could be recovered during pauses in the action. Most important of all, they learned how critical it was in the heat of battle to pass information up and down the radio network efficiently, so that commanders knew where units were and had the clearest possible picture of where the enemy was. No matter how good the tanks, crews, and weapons, an army that could not keep track of itself or find the enemy was doomed to failure. For the 8th Hussars, the rest of 5th Division and the entire First Canadian Army, Spartan was not so much an exercise as an experiment in how to operate this new type of division as it was anticipated to be used in war.

Then-Lieutenant Ray Neil (right) in his Ram hatch on exercise in England, April 16, 1942.

LAC PA-112701

The manoeuvres were full of the misadventures that make soldiers grumble, officers squirm, and sergeant-majors bark. On the very first day, “B” Squadron encountered a British unit dressed in the uniforms of the “enemy” and took them all prisoner despite “vehement protests.” The “enemy” soldiers turned out to be a British unit running its own scheme separate from Spartan. The British Isles could barely contain the multinational force that was gathering from around the globe to train and make war on Germany. A few days later, the Hussars found that the area selected for their tanks to harbour in for the night was flush with rabbits. The War Diary records that this proved “a temptation to the crews in possession of the full scale of [Thompson submachine-gun ammunition].” On another evening inside a protected deer reserve, Trooper Hazen Golden used his Thompson to acquire a supplement to field rations of hard tack and bully beef.

The weeks afterward saw time scheduled for reflection and discussion about the grand Spartan experiment. Arguably, the experience had been vital in shaping the exercises, drills, and procedures worked out during the rest of the spring and into summer. The Hussars and the whole division had a much clearer sense of what they needed to work on to move into a steady state of high readiness for war. The warm months of 1943 saw of flurry of intense and sophisticated collective training in the aftermath of Spartan. German-speaking soldiers were kitted out as enemy soldiers to demonstrate German tactics. Hussars practised, with the divisional engineer squadrons, the art of coping with anti-tank mines, and Lieutenant C.F.A. “Kit” Graham put every member of the regiment through a training day on German booby traps — improvised explosive devices to a later generation, and the Germans made ample use of them.

During the spring and summer gunnery camps, crews got to try out a new weapon on a new tank, as a number of American M4 Sherman tanks found their way to the 8th Hussars. At the time, Ram II 6-pounder guns fired only armour-piercing ammunition intended for use against enemy tanks. The Sherman, however, had a much larger 75mm gun that fired both armour-piercing and excellent high-explosive shells, well suited against fortified houses, pillboxes, and other types of posts as the tanks operated in close support of infantry. That new ability led to exercises to refine infantry-armour combined tactics. Indeed, every exercise held in those still-early days of Allied armoured development was one part exercise and one part experiment, greatly supported in the 8th Hussars’ case after Captain Cliff McEwen and Sergeant Lovely returned, bringing their battle experience from attached postings to British regiments in North Africa.

As summer turned to autumn, the 8th Hussars was as well trained and ready for war as any armoured regiment in Britain. Then, on October 16, Lieutenant-Colonel Robinson told the squadrons they would be leaving southern England to participate in Exercise Timberwolf in Northern Ireland, where they would join a US formation and re-equip with Shermans and other American gear. No one was to speak of the move, and all mail would be censored. Nonetheless, the rumour mill cranked into overdrive as Hussars guessed where they might be headed — most thought it was no exercise, but that they were heading into an active theatre. Over the next four weeks, they anxiously carried on with training, packing, and preparing to hand back equipment they would no longer be using. On November 14, they were back at Liverpool, where they had disembarked from Canada just over two years earlier. Two days later, they set sail aboard the former Cunard liner Samaria, the unit War Diary recording that, “the bow of our ship nosed out into the Mersey for where?”