THE WAR AGAINST HITLER
The Second World War casts a dark shadow across the twentieth century. The enormous battles that raged from continents to oceans, and in the skies, continue to fascinate and horrify us. Entire societies were transformed into enormous war machines to meet the needs of Allied and Axis air, land, and sea forces. Civilians became as much a part of the war effort as the men and women in uniform and consequently they were, in the minds of all political and military leaders, legitimate targets. Willing war workers and hapless civilians alike were killed by ordnance and weapons that made no distinctions between classes and genders, between the firing line and the home front. The combined death toll of combatants and bystanders was nothing short of staggering: in round terms, some sixty million people were killed. Hundreds of millions more were scarred forever—either physically maimed or psychologically traumatized—by the conflict.
The Second World War was not just one war but a series of campaigns and battles around the world. These campaigns brought together millions of men and women to fight the so-called Thousand Year Reich that Adolf Hitler had created to unleash war and genocide on Europe. The war pitted the Axis powers of Germany, Italy, Japan, and a number of less influential nations against the Allied powers of Britain, its dominions and colonies—primarily Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Newfoundland, South Africa, and India—along with France, the Soviet Union (an antagonist turned unlikely ally in the summer of 1941), the United States (after December 1941), and other nations. It began, arguably, in the Far East, when Japan went to war against China in 1937, and it didn’t end until Japan capitulated in August 1945, a few months after Germany was defeated. This worldwide conflagration caused the massive dislocation of populations, set the stage for the postwar decolonization of Asia and Africa, and remade the international order through the toppling of Nazi Germany, the reduction in status of Britain and France, and the creation of two new world leaders: the United States and the Soviet Union. At war’s end, with Europe exhausted, those two ideologically opposed superpowers almost immediately plunged into the Cold War, which lasted five decades and brought the divided world to the brink of nuclear annihilation.
The Allied victory was no foregone conclusion. Many people believe that brute force wins wars, that the enemy is driven into defeat by the side with more guns, tanks, planes, and warships. But history is replete with examples of battles, campaigns, and wars in which smaller forces drove their larger, lumbering foes from the field. Achieving victory requires more than blindly battering the enemy into submission. Numerous factors affect the combat performance of armies (and navies and air forces); these range from superior command, to the application of strength against weakness, to the coherence, motivation, and endurance of combatants in battle. Technological advances and new weapon systems can even the odds, reverse defeat, or deliver victory.
Nevertheless, for several decades, most historians have been guided by the belief that the Allied military forces smashed Germany and its co-belligerents into submission by simply overwhelming the opposition’s fighting formations. Some raw numbers support this thesis: the Axis powers’ gross population of 191 million was dwarfed by the Allies’ 345 million, who were further backed by hundreds of millions more citizens in colonies and dominions throughout the British Empire. Similarly, the Allies’ production advantage—especially after the industrial and economic might of the United States was added to that of Britain and the dominions—suggests that no outcome was possible except an Allied victory.1 The Axis powers, according to this argument, were out-produced to death.
And yet, it is one thing to mobilize the industrial capacity of a nation and fully another to apply that might on the battlefield. Material superiority is never decisive in itself. How warriors and weapons systems are wielded in battle through coherent doctrine, ethos, and tactics is crucial. Long wars allow for a constant appreciation of technology and weapons by scientists. War-fighting skills evolve constantly and frequently to make the difference between winning and losing. In this regard, the Allies proved to be more effective than the Axis during the Second World War. In writing this book, rather than embracing the brute force thesis, I have chosen to show how soldiers, airmen, and sailors fought, focusing on the evolving tactics, doctrines, weapons, logistics, and technology they employed. The Canadians, in particular, had to find ways to fight effectively against a skilled enemy in conditions that ranged from the sweltering heat of Sicily to the frigid waters of the North Atlantic, and from the narrow streets of Ortona to the dark skies over Germany. At the same time, I have examined the equally important factors of morale, discipline, and fortitude of the Canadian citizen-soldiers, sailors, and airmen, and have tried to show how these young men coped while under fire. These Canadians would surely have scoffed at the notion that their victory was preordained, especially as they witnessed the death and destruction that was visited upon their comrades and friends.
While the carnage overseas was relentless, Canada was almost entirely spared from the war’s ruin. Nevertheless, the country, with its modest population of fewer than 12 million, embraced its role as an arsenal of democracy, exporting war supplies, feeding its allies, and raising a million-strong armed force that served and fought in nearly every theatre of war. Under the steady, if slippery, hand of Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, the governing Liberal Party kept the national interest as its guiding star in navigating Canada through the Allied war effort. Above all, King sought to avoid a cleavage between English and French Canada. The nation was mobilized as never before in the fight to preserve the liberal, democratic order. At the same time, the six-year-long exertion had lasting effects: it caused widespread disruption to almost everyone’s way of life, promoted nation-wide industrialization, ushered in changes to gender roles, exacerbated the tension between English and French, and forged a new sense of Canadian identity. The war led to a decisive break in English Canada’s deep and almost sacred economic bond with Britain when the Dominion irrevocably embraced the United States as its largest trading partner. The emotional bond between Canada and Britain lasted longer, though Canada’s independent role during the war weakened these intangible links over time, and strengthened the nation’s resolve to set off on an increasingly independent course. Shrouding all of these changes was the blood sacrifice of close to 44,000 dead and almost 55,000 wounded that brought an endless grief to families and communities across Canada.2
The Second World War changed Canadians forever. Sergeant Barney Danson of the Queen’s Own Rifles, who was severely wounded during the war and then came back to Canada to make a successful career in public life, remembered how his experiences in uniform broadened his outlook:
The Second World War was a defining event for me, as it was for many of my age. For most of us, the war represented our first time away from home and family. It gave us our first experience of travel across Canada and overseas, and our first exposure to a broad cross-section of society: farmers, miners, lumberjacks, rootless “hoboes,” ex-convicts who generally kept their status secret but were known to the other former “cons” among us, “old guys,” in their late twenties, or the still older ones we called “Pop,” many of whom were trying to disengage themselves from family responsibilities, or failed marriages, or who found in the military something that eluded them in the Depression—the job they needed to support their families. Many of us also encountered, for the first time, the full diversity of Canada’s population. We met francophone Canadians, individually and in their regiments, aboriginal Canadians, who were adjusting to us as we were adjusting to them and each of them we almost always called “chief,” and others from the whole range of ethnic groups which made Canada their home even in those times.3
THE MEN AND WOMEN WHO WENT OVERSEAS endured sometimes horrifying and often miserable conditions, but their letters home mostly played down the danger. Flight Lieutenant Bill Bell, a Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) navigator, wrote to his family in July 1942 after harrowing months of front-line service:
I can’t remember when I wrote last, but it must have been awhile back. I’m a lazy devil. And rather busy in spots as you’ve found out from the local paper. I was doing very well in keeping deep dark secrets too. I’ve been trying to keep you people from worrying. But it isn’t much use now…. It is rather exciting in spots. But mostly you’re too damn busy to think about anything but your work at hand. There isn’t much to it tho: you go over there—they shoot at you, you drop bombs on them—then everyone goes back to bed. Terrific isn’t it. I haven’t developed any operational twitch yet but I suspect my hair is falling out a bit. But anyways, don’t worry about me.4
Of course his family agonized, and only a month later he had a brush with death when his two-engine Hampden bomber was pounced on by a night fighter and raked with cannon fire, smashing the tail fin, holing the fuselage, riddling the fuel tanks, and shooting away the hydraulics. The crew brought the damaged plane back to England, and Bell and the pilot received the Distinguished Flying Medal. Bill Bell was like most of the warriors in the Canadian forces: he was desperate to keep the uncertainty and terror of combat from his family at home, even as he hinted at the strain as revealed through the likelihood of stress-related tics and falling-out hair. Seventy years later, it is the historian who needs to probe these words and push past the jauntiness of letters to piece together the experience of battle. At times it was, as Bell wrote, terrific and exciting; at other times, it was monotonous and banal. There was no shortage of fear and death.
What was it like to sail in the merchant navy across the Atlantic in ships encrusted with ice while U-boats lurked below? Where did the surgeons and nurses of the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps find the courage to operate on or ease the pain of broken, twisted bodies of twenty-year-olds who had been mangled by steel and fire? Was it immoral to fly 18,000 feet above German cities and bomb their inhabitants with high explosive and incendiary bombs? How did Canadian infantrymen deal with the grim requirements of close-quarters combat, where the choice was to either kill or be killed? Where did these combatants find the courage and fortitude to face the storm, day after day, through long and costly campaigns? These are some of the questions that must be posed in order to recreate the Canadian combat experience.
The vast majority of Canada’s men and women in uniform were not professional soldiers but civilians who put down their ploughs and pens, leaving behind their factories and schools to serve their King and country. They were ordinary men and women thrust into extraordinary circumstances. They sought simple pleasures, they chafed against the military system, and they felt anxiety. On the battlefield, some chose self-preservation over completing the mission, by dropping bomb loads short to deliberately avoid anti-aircraft (flak) fire, or by diving for cover in a shell crater and staying there, head down, until the battle was over. Body-immobilizing terror and even cowardice are part of the Canadian war effort, no less than jaw-dropping heroics and tear-inducing sacrifice. This book, then, is an intimate history of Canadians in combat, set against the backdrop of the national war effort and mapped against a worldwide war.
CANADIAN WOMEN PLAYED AN ENORMOUS PART in winning the war. Tens of thousands filled the jobs left vacant when men enlisted and were sent overseas, and thousands more were themselves enlisted in newly created branches of the three services. Their work helped the war effort. It also had a lasting effect on women themselves, both on what was expected of them and how they saw themselves.
On July 31, 1942, the navy established the Women’s Royal Canadian Naval Service, and the women who served in uniform were widely and affectionately known as Wrens. “Carry On! Carry On! Sailor boys must sail!” went the Wrens’ song, and 6,781 women served in shore stations during the course of the war. The Wrens constituted a service within a service, but they generally worked in mixed-gendered environments. The systemic inequality of the civilian workplace was replicated in the naval service, with female service personnel being paid 60 percent of what a male would be paid. Audrey Hill remarked, “At no time did I think of myself as a second class citizen in the Navy…. I was glad to be able to be there, doing whatever I could to help, which was what most of us were seeking. There was never any discussion about only being paid three-quarters [sic] of what the sailor got. We didn’t go to sea, so it just never entered our discussions…. We were so fired up that we could do something to help end the terrible war that had been going on forever by 1943.”5 Other service women were not so sanguine and complained about the unfairness. In July 1943, pay was raised to 80 percent of a male service salary.6
The other two services also created women’s formations. On July 2, 1941, the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force was established—a formation later redesignated as the RCAF’s Women’s Division (WD). Some 17,000 Canadian women would eventually serve as WDs. The first designated positions were an extension of traditionally female jobs, such as cooking and secretarial work, but wartime trades were added as of early 1942, when the WDs arrived at RCAF stations and at air training schools. Women in uniform served as meteorological observers, radio operators, and cypher clerks, and later that year, jobs were opened up as pharmacists, parachute riggers, and lab assistants. The first women went overseas in the summer of 1942, and two years later about 1,500 served in RCAF commands and headquarters.
The Canadian Women’s Army Corps was established in August 1941 to free up male volunteers for overseas service, and it was incorporated into the army in March 1942. The CWACs, as they were known, adopted army rank structures and served in all manner of trades, although not in combat roles.7 Its 21,264 members wore collar badges bearing an image of Athena, the Greek goddess of war, along with a uniform of khaki that included four-buckle cloth overshoes that quickly became known, with thick sarcasm, as “glamour boots.”
Women enlisted for a number of reasons. Many were driven by a patriotic urge, or else they sought adventure or something different to do. Yvonne Jukes served overseas with the Women’s Division, working in intelligence and studying the aerial photographs from bomber raids to assess accuracy and damage. She enlisted because of the Nazi threat: “You looked at what was going on, a blitzkrieg going through Europe, just going into every country and menacing people that stood in your way. How could you sit back?”8
Serving in bases and commands across the Dominion and overseas, women in uniform had a chance to see their own country and meet other Canadians. As one CWAC officer remembered, she trained with a French-Canadian comrade and her bigotry did not stand the test of meeting the smart, personable, and patriotic Quebecker: “That’s where I gained respect for the French Canadians … it was from her.”9 These women were brought together during the war years and were exposed to new experiences.
One of the cruel ironies of the war was that, despite their important work, many of the tens of thousands of patriotic women in uniform were subject to a meanspirited rumour campaign. These sexist attacks—“malicious propaganda, gossip and careless talk,” in the words of one male RCAF officer—made no sense: after all, the armed forces had turned to women for their assistance. Nevertheless, early in the war, these female service personnel were sometimes labelled degenerates or prostitutes, occasionally spat on and intimidated in the streets, and accused of having sacrificed their femininity for military service.10 To some civilian onlookers, seeing women in uniform came as a shock. Margaret Fleming recounted one of her first parades as a WD: “I can remember people booing us because they thought that women who joined up [had] loose morals.”11
Fleming believed that the prejudice lessened as the forces recruited more women. Kitty Hawker enlisted in the WDs after seeing men and women “crying openly” in the streets of Windsor after the disaster of the Canadian raid on Dieppe in August 1942. Hawker’s family was proud of her decision to serve, but “some of my mother’s friends were horrified, because there were many false stories going around about the ‘looseness’ of women in the services.”12 Her mother thought that such talk was nonsense, and so did Hawker. She served during the war and then took advantage of the benefits of the Veterans Charter after the cessation of hostilities to go to university. In looking back on her experience, she testified, “Though we were young and inexperienced, we gained a confidence in ourselves which, I am proud to say, has stayed with us.”13 The rumours and accusations became more muted with time. The status of the women’s corps was enhanced by the release of official posters and National Film Board documentaries with titles such as Proudly She Marches and Wings on Her Shoulders. Advertisements that showed women in uniform with taglines such as “This is our battle too!” or proclaimed that women were needed to “Back the Attack” helped as well.
Another 4,400 Canadian women served as nurses during the war, with the rank of lieutenant or higher. Military nurses had long proved their important role in saving lives and comforting the wounded, and their service did much to reverse the trend of the Depression years that had seen female nurses suffer wage cuts and attacks to their professionalism.14 While some critics suggest that women made no progress in accruing significant rights in Canadian society through their war service, there were very few women who served in uniform who did not look back positively on their challenging and satisfying work in supporting the Canadian war effort.15 Almost none of them set out to be feminist trail-blazers, but nearly all were content in having served their country and were enriched by their experiences. One wonders about how many of these proud women passed on the stories of their service and pride in achievements to their daughters, who, as part of the next generation that came of age in the 1960s, demanded substantial change to society and the equality of women within it. Important though these stories are, this is a book about combat. Canadian women in uniform were not in combat and their contributions to victory must be told, for the most part, elsewhere.
BATTLES ARE COMPLEX AND CONFUSING. They involve thousands of individuals, and are conducted with limited communication and with both sides reacting to shifting circumstances. Canadian infantryman Stanley Scislowski of the Perth Regiment described the difficulty of remembering the sequence of events in a military confrontation: “You could talk to five men who were in a certain battle and invariably you would hear five different versions of what happened…. Everyone sees a battle in a different way and from a different perspective, depending on the ferocity of what is going on around them.”16 Battle involves men, in close contact, attempting to kill other men while finding ways to keep themselves alive. Warriors who have been under fire provide the most vivid narratives, even if they often have little understanding of the wider battle or campaign. Official records such as maps, intelligence reports, summaries of action, and casualty compilations contextualize the eyewitness accounts. The historian tries to draw together these multiple perspectives, with the benefit, in this case, of generations of studies. The historian’s task is always undertaken after the fact, sometimes years or decades later, and one must guard against the unwitting clarity of hindsight. Views and opinions that have developed over decades and in countless books were not available to the combatants at the front, or even to their commanders in the rear echelons. We must remember that all decisions made before battle or in the heat of it were based on partial appreciations of the enemy and limited intelligence, and conducted while under tremendous pressure. The past we read about today, from the soldiers, sailors, nurses, and airmen, was once the participants’ uncertain present. To understand their decisions, we need to try to put ourselves in their place and judge them on the basis of what they could conceivably know, rather than through the lens of our more complete knowledge. This does not mean we cannot pass critical judgment—only that the context surrounding a battle is as important as what may have occurred in the conflict itself.
Battle is a lunatic landscape seen only by the dead, the damned, and the survivors. It changes forever those who pass through it. We cannot experience what the Canadian combatants went through during the Second World War, but their recollections, in the form of memoirs and oral histories, illuminate what would otherwise remain obscure. In this book, new stories have been dug out of the archives. But this is also a work that builds upon three generations of scholarship. I am indebted to those who cleared the terrain first, and to those who continue to do so now. This book and its successor to follow are works of synthesis, and the endnotes draw upon hundreds of published and unpublished sources that provide evidence of claims and point to further reading on the subject. To meet the challenge of telling the story of Canadians fighting across the world, I have delved into the newest scholarship and the oldest archives, and I remain guided by the voices of Canadians who were there.
This is a collective biography of more than a million Canadians at war. It is weighted towards the fighting arms and those who took part in combat rather than those in logistical or administrative positions. The tens of thousands of Canadians who served with units other than Canadian ones, usually in British formations, sometimes fall outside the scope of this book. In this global war, Canadians fought in worldwide campaigns, but the emphasis is on those battlegrounds where the majority of Canadians served: the Atlantic rather than the Pacific Ocean, the Sicilian and Italian campaign rather than the Middle East or Burma, and Northwest Europe rather than the Eastern Front.
THE SECOND WORLD WAR was a war of good against evil. It has been called, perhaps accurately, the last “good war.” It was fought against a repulsive tyranny, among the worst ever to inflict a violent ideology on oppressed peoples. It was a war of immense savagery that included the unspeakable horror of the Holocaust; remorseless and bestial cruelty both on the Eastern Front and in the Pacific campaign; and the killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians through relentless bombing campaigns. The war demanded that the desperate Western nations, including Canada, make an alliance with Stalin—a figure as repulsive as Hitler, and the murderer of millions in the Soviet Union, Poland, and the Ukraine. Allied leaders were forced to make horrible choices. There was no easy way to win. The “good war” epithet may be too self-congratulatory in the face of such trauma, villainy, and violence. If that is the case, the war was, without a doubt, a war of necessity. Hitler and his malevolent Nazi regime had to be stopped. Most Canadians believed that at the time, and they made the coalition war effort against Hitler Canada’s war too. In this necessary war, Canadians were willing to bear almost any burden and pay the ultimate price in the pursuit of victory. This is their epic story of heroism and horror, of loss and longing, and of sacrifice and endurance.