RELUCTANTLY TO WAR
Adolf Hitler wanted war. He made no secret of his plan to attack his neighbours in Europe and then to take on the world. Both his bellicosity and his virulent racism were evident in his speeches and publications. He did exactly what he set out to do. The origins of the Great War may be mired in controversy, but the cause of the Second World War is clear.1 This was Hitler’s war.
The German dictator’s career was a long one. It began in the early 1920s when he met with other disaffected outsiders in Munich’s beer halls, and ended a quarter century later in a bunker in Berlin. As a young man who had served in the trenches of the Western Front during the Great War, he had grown up in war. And it had damaged him. Germany’s defeat left him reeling and searching for the enemies who had defeated his country and his comrades. Even as Hitler aged, he had a feral, frenzied look about him, with his black hair parted sharply to one side and his bared teeth flashing white in contrast to his toothbrush moustache. But it was his oratory that set him apart. It was the rage and rapture of his speeches that inspired his listeners, convincing them to rise up against multiple imagined enemies of the German state.
The German people were anxious to reverse the humiliations of the Great War of 1914 to 1918. During those four long years, Germany had been strangled by a naval blockade and crushed on the battlefield. In defeat, the German people had been forced to pay billions in reparations, and on top of all this, they were made to accept blame for starting the conflict. The punishments inflicted by France, Britain, the United States, and their allies through the 1919 Treaty of Versailles were seen by most Germans as a victor’s vindictive revenge, even though Germany itself had invoked harsher penalties on Russia in early 1918 when it had driven that revolution-riven Communist state to defeat. The Great War’s sickening battlefield toll of nine million dead worldwide had left few opportunities for reconciliation or a lasting peace.
The fledgling democratic Weimar Republic, set in place after the German emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, was forced to abdicate in 1918, was bankrupt and broken from the beginning. The wanton printing of money to pay Germany’s crippling debts drastically devalued the Reichsmark (RM). In October 1923, for example, hyperinflation had escalated to the point that one US dollar cost 25 billion RM.2 The German state could no longer afford to pay for veterans’ medical treatment or pensions, leaving millions of demobilized men disillusioned and abandoned.3 Hitler’s National Socialist Party fed off the veterans’ resentment, and then channelled this anger into wider components of society. A fringe party through the 1920s, it slowly clawed its way into power as the economically devastating Depression of the early 1930s left one third of all Germans out of work.
As a consummate and charismatic manipulator, Adolf Hitler was able to conjure up imagined enemies within the state to mobilize support for his cause. He claimed that Communist agitators and Jewish socialists had stabbed the nation’s army in the back during the Great War, with their active undermining of the economy through exploitation, leading to Germany’s unwarranted defeat. Even in the aftermath of war, he contended, these alien elements conspired to keep the nation down through nefarious means, even though Jews made up less than 1 percent of the population.4 It did not matter that the conspiracy was a dark fantasy conjured up in Hitler’s mind: these Jewish and Communist elements would be made to pay for their treachery. Hitler’s thundering, furious speeches resonated with many Germans and when the forty-three-year-old Austrian-born Hitler was democratically elected as Germany’s chancellor in January 1933, he quickly consolidated his gains through trickery, intimidation, and the murder of his opponents.5 The Weimar Republic’s unhappy existence became history that March as Hitler took power in an increasingly totalitarian state. Opposition went to ground and was soon wiped out by the National Socialists, known widely as the Nazis. The cheering German people marched behind Hitler into the waiting abyss.
Once his position was secure, Hitler set out to restore Germany’s status within Europe, regain lost territory, and eradicate the Jews and other “undesirables” who had no place in his conception of an Aryan society; his was a vision where whites were the masters and all others were to be removed or enslaved. To these ends, the German dictator first circumvented and then openly flouted the terms of the Versailles treaty.
Bred to believe that military might was the only way to restore what was lost, Hitler rebuilt the German military that had been all but banned since 1919. He also encouraged its leaders to find ways to win a new war. From 1914 to 1916, the deep trench systems of the Western Front—protected by barbed wire, defended by nearly limitless reinforcements, and backed by shattering firepower in the form of machine guns and artillery—had blunted most attacks. By 1917, thousands of heavy artillery pieces firing millions of shells could blast a hole through a trench line, but no army could follow through with an infantry attack because the advancing riflemen soon outdistanced their fire and logistical support, and were forced to face the enemy guns without artillery cover or adequate ammunition.6 The Germans nearly broke the stalemate in early 1918 with aggressive infantry tactics that saw them attacking around Allied strongpoints, but the offensive was unsustainable and led to crippling casualties. With the Germans spent, the Allies were on the verge of a breakthrough in the final months of the war, employing a sophisticated combined-arms doctrine of infantry, tanks, and artillery, but the Kaiser’s armies capitulated before the Allied victory was realized. When the war ground to halt with the armistice on November 11, 1918, the civilian armies were demobilized and the men returned to their now impoverished nations. The German military, much reduced in the postwar years, nonetheless studied its defeat, sought new tactics and weapons, and developed doctrines (the means of wielding tactics and weapons together) to avoid a repetition of its humiliating loss. The remaining small cadre of professional soldiers would find the answer in the application of surprise, speed, and shock.
The German dictator Adolf Hitler was responsible for starting the Second World War in Europe. This signed portrait by Hitler was given to Canadian prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King during his June 1937 visit to Berlin, when he unsuccessfully attempted to convince the Führer to pursue peaceful diplomacy rather than mount aggressive manoeuvres against his neighbours.
Throughout the 1930s, Hitler positioned Germany for war. Rebuilding the military was the first imperative, but he was also driven by his obsessions with racial purity, the restoration of lost territory, and the desire for revenge. The issue of racial purity led him to systematically hunt down Jews and other supposedly inferior peoples. The territory he coveted was to the east, in the Soviet Union, which he planned to exploit for Germany’s economic renewal and expansion. Revenge would come with retaliation against all those powers, real and imagined, who had subjugated Germany. By the mid-1930s, Hitler’s Fascist regime had the prosecution of war as its reason for being.
Nazi soldiers displaying force, might, and willpower at the annual Nuremburg Rally.
Hitler gambled that neither the Soviet Union nor the West would resist his aggressive actions. France and Britain had been badly traumatized by the Great War, with their millions of dead and maimed veterans, and during the 1930s they had within them vocal antiwar factions that demanded peace at almost any cost. The United States, meanwhile, had embraced a policy of isolation and was, in any case, far away, across the Atlantic Ocean. The Soviet Union was even less interested in a war. The paranoid and psychotic Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was implementing his own genocidal vision within this sphere of influence—ultimately murdering about four million citizens, largely in the Ukraine, through starvation, execution, and widespread imprisonment in gulags. Stalin preferred to see the Western allies in disarray, as it left him a free hand to put in place the structures to export Communism throughout Europe.7
The League of Nations, an international organization set up in the aftermath of the Great War with the goal of preventing future conflicts, was no more effective than any individual state at imposing limits on the dictators’ ambitions. Lacking any military backing to enforce its resolutions, the League’s successive diplomatic failures led to a growing sense of impotence and despair among Western observers. In East Asia, the Japanese incursion into Manchuria in 1931 was followed in Africa by the brazen invasion by Fascist Italy of Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) in late 1935. In both cases, the League was little better than a talking shop. The major powers did nothing. Canada, at best a minor player, chose to back away from any commitment.8 Though few cared what Canada thought or did, when France and Britain abandoned Abyssinia and refused to go to war to save its people, both the Italian leader, Benito Mussolini, and Hitler were emboldened. The German dictator continued to consolidate power, rebuild his military, and persecute the Jews. The Fascist states were embarked upon a steady march to a wider European war.
IN REBUILDING HIS MILITARY, Hitler paid particular attention to the development of an effective air force and armoured corps.9 Despite massive rearmament, however, the German military was not ready for war in 1936. But in March of that year, Hitler engaged in an act of naked provocation by ordering the remilitarization of the Rhineland, a buffer zone the Versailles treaty had created between Germany and France. The German high command waited uncertainly, knowing it likely could not withstand a joint Franco-British assault. France quivered at Germany’s brazen action, but did little more than bark impotently. Britain found excuses not to act. The democratic Western powers folded again.
For Hitler, every aggressive action on Germany’s part was a defensive and pre-emptive manoeuvre against the vast, international, and shadowy Jewish conspiracy that controlled world markets, or else it was intended to fend off the future war that was to be unleashed by the Communists in the Soviet Union. Diplomacy, he was convinced, would never be enough to hold back his enemies. And, indeed, neither Hitler nor the leaders of rising totalitarian regimes in Italy and Japan were intimidated by diplomatic initiatives meant to curb their aggression. They saw it rather as weakness to be exploited through threats and war. Hitler calculated that with German rearmament in full swing, and the Allies stymied by apathy, pacifism, and fear, he must attack sooner rather than later.
By the late 1930s, “the war to end all wars”—the phrase used to describe the Great War—had become a cruel joke. The Fascists had spent much of the decade honing new weapons and tactics, and benefited from an opportunity to test them in the Spanish Civil War, which raged from 1936 to 1939. In particular, they experimented with the use of light bombers in supporting ground troops.10 The Spanish conflict also served to distract the Allies from Hitler’s aggression closer to home. After menacing Austria, and forcing its political leaders to accede to a union with Germany, he annexed that country in early 1938. Hitler then looked for new victims, turning his sights on the Sudetenland, a predominately German-speaking enclave within Czechoslovakia. France and Britain lurched from bellicosity to appeasement. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, as anxious to avoid war as most of his fellow citizens, conceded to Hitler the part of Czechoslovakia he claimed as his due during the Munich Crisis of September 1938. Even as Austrian, and soon Czechoslovakian, factories were turning out weapons of war for their new Nazi masters, the appeasers hoped that Hitler’s appetite for new conquests would be satiated. It was not. What remained of Czechoslovakia and all of Poland, a historic enemy of Germany, trembled as they appeared to be next on Hitler’s hit list.
Europe’s nations gulped at the thought of war, but slowly began to revitalize their military forces, aware in this eleventh hour that conflict was almost certainly unavoidable. There was never any doubt that “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe” remained Hitler’s underlying objective.11 He had harassed, persecuted, and murdered Jews in Germany since 1933, but his plan to eliminate European Jewry could only be achieved by conquering and occupying all those nations where Jews lived. In the process, he intended also to enslave Slavic peoples, wipe out Communism, and remake the world order.
In March 1939, Hitler broke his promise to Britain and France that he was done threatening his neighbours when the German army marched on Czechoslovakia, occupying the nation, seizing its resources, and plundering its military. The booty included 4,000 field guns, 57,000 machine guns, 810 tanks, and more than 1,200 aircraft.12 With this massive addition to Germany’s arsenal, few in the West could doubt that a new war was imminent. Nonetheless, when Hitler and his ideological arch-enemy, Stalin, signed a non-aggression pact on August 23, 1939, the world was stunned, and only too aware that the agreement cleared the way for Germany to invade Poland.
The attack was launched on September 1. In preparing for the campaign, Hitler urged his generals to “kill without mercy men, women and children of the Polish race or language.”13 This was to be warfare unlike anything Europe had witnessed for centuries. The Polish military, despite appearing strong on paper, were quickly overrun by the rapidly moving Wehrmacht, sixty divisions strong, which knifed through their country with tanks, tactical bombers, and infantry. Chamberlain’s government, having guaranteed to protect Poland in a last-ditch effort to dissuade Germany from carrying out its invasion, declared war on September 3. France, too, realized the time to fight had finally come. Unfortunately, neither of the Great Powers had an effective means of coming to Poland’s aid, and France made only a few half-hearted probing attacks along Germany’s western frontier before retreating. As Europe went to war for the second time in as many generations, Poland died alone.
“THE FIRST HORRORS OF HUN WARFARE were brought home less than 24 hours after Great Britain’s declaration of war,” lamented one Canadian newspaper, the Hamilton Spectator.14 On the first day of Britain’s war with Germany, September 3, 1939, the unescorted British passenger liner, Athenia, was on a westward route to Montreal. Hitler and Admiral Karl Dönitz, commander of the U-boat arm, well remembered the international outrage provoked by unrestricted submarine warfare in the Great War, which had seen U-boats sink any and all ships on the high seas, including neutral and hospital ships, and so they had ordered their U-boats to avoid attacking civilian ships. But the captain of submarine U-30 mistook the defenceless Athenia for an armed merchant cruiser and torpedoed it without warning. Hit northwest of Ireland, Athenia took 118 of its 1,000 passengers, including several Canadians, to their doom. The attack, mounted only a few hours after the declaration of war, stoked the fires of fear and anger in the Western world. The sinking of Athenia surely was clear evidence of Hitler’s mad desire to take war to a new level of savagery. However, this outrage soon gave way to the alarming realization that the war would be fought without restraint.
Survivors of Athenia, the unescorted passenger liner sunk by German U-boat U-30 on September 3, 1939. The shock of the attack on civilians seemed to signal to the Western Allies that Hitler planned an unrestrained war against women and children as well as combatants.
Poland was lost, Britain committed, and a civilian ship had been sunk. Canada, witnessing these events from afar, again had to make a gut-wrenching decision: whether or not to enter a European war. As unpalatable as this prospect was, however, few Canadians could stomach the idea of abandoning Britain in its time of need. The Dominion girded itself for the coming struggle. Canada had been bloodied by its exertions during the Great War, when the nation of 8 million had put an astonishing 630,000 citizens into uniform, and had grieved for more than 66,000 dead.15 That war had created a pantheon of heroes, from Corps Commander Sir Arthur Currie to air ace Billy Bishop. It also had allowed Canada to distinguish itself within the British war effort, and its wartime exertions were regarded by many as the crucible within which the young nation had been forged. But the Great War also left deep divisions in Canadian society. Young men had been conscripted for military service against their will; Ukrainian and German Canadians deemed a threat to internal security had been locked up; city dwellers had accused farmers of raking in profits while they paid high prices for food; workers had felt exploited by owners who shared few of the wartime profits.16 Most significantly, perhaps, relations between English and French Canada had been strained nearly to the breaking point over the conscription crisis. The country was forever changed, and the spectre of war, with its legions of dead and its legacy of disunity, loomed large in Canadians’ memory.
Canada’s prime minister in 1939, William Lyon Mackenzie King, had also been scarred by the war in which he did not fight. King was a political survivor. Now sixty-four years old, his once handsome features had run to fat, but he had lost none of his shrewdness. He abhorred war but, like most Canadians, believed in the British Empire, revelling in its culture, its political institutions, and its history, even as he struggled to guide Canada along its own independent path. Prime minister since 1921, save for a five-year sojourn out of power during the worst of the Depression, King had acquired the habit of going slowly, weighing his options, and calculating his every move. In his mind, Canada could not avoid supporting Britain in a major European war, and he had written a year earlier that it was a “self-evident national duty” to stand by the Empire, a conviction he had formed as early as 1923.17 At the same time, King believed that Canada could not endure another slaughter like the Great War. And he especially intended to avoid another divisive debate over conscription, such as the one that had erupted in 1917. He planned for a modest war effort, which others have since labelled a war of limited liability. His nation of fewer than twelve million Canadians would be suppliers of munitions and food, sustaining Canada’s allies so that they might better bear the brunt of the Nazi attack. War on the cheap, in terms of lives expended, was King’s goal. This inglorious if practical objective was in line with the limitations of his poor and dispirited country, which was still in the throes of the decade-long Depression. It was a policy that accurately reflected Canada’s national interests, but, as King was soon to find, not that of Canadians.
King had tried to walk a fine line throughout the late 1930s, seemingly providing contradictory statements—offering support for Britain on the one hand while claiming the right for independent action on the other—to the point that the British hardly knew where Canada stood. The Canadian prime minister knew that in the event of war, English Canada, with its close ties to the British Empire, was bound to demand that an expeditionary force be sent overseas, and King was determined to dampen that urge. As every major nation had rearmed in the late 1930s, and with war all but assured because of Hitler’s ravenous desire for land and conquest, it was folly not to prepare for the worst. And yet King had refused to join the rush to remilitarization for fear of alienating Quebec, which formed a vital part of his political power base and which would construe any such policy as a commitment to engage in another European war. It wasn’t that Quebec was pro-Hitler, only that it was not particularly pro-British Empire. Although a distressingly significant segment of the French-Canadian elite admired the Nazis, the province for the most part opposed them. But going to war was another matter. War led inexorably to conscription, or such was the unshakeable belief among many Quebeckers. Besides, hadn’t the popular US president, Franklin Roosevelt, promised as recently as 1938 in a speech in Kingston, that the United States would never allow Canada to be threatened?18
William Lyon Mackenzie King had been prime minister for most of the period since 1921. He would be Canada’s war leader throughout the Second World War.
A pacifist sentiment also held sway among many Canadians, both English and French, and this sizable faction wanted nothing to do with another war among European states. This element opposed spending the nation’s limited wealth on arms and munitions, especially when the widespread effects of the Depression were still hurting so many industries, communities, and families. F.R. Scott, an influential Montreal poet and lawyer, and the son of a Canadian Great War veteran, summed up succinctly, if viciously, another point of view: “Elderly sadists of the last war are emerging from their obscurity to join the war-dance again, their eyes glistening and their mouths watering as they think of the young men whom they will send to the slaughter.”19 And so King allowed only a pittance for rearmament in the late 1930s, and that only in the cause of defending Canada. That much he could sell to Quebec while, at the same time, holding off the English-Canadian imperialists by making increasingly firm promises that Canada would not let Britain face the enemy alone.
From 1936 onward, defences and naval guns on the country’s east and west coasts were upgraded and the Royal Canadian Navy was allowed to purchase a handful of modern destroyers.20 But even as late as 1938, when King admitted to himself and told his cabinet that war was unavoidable, the nation’s coffers were opened only with much hesitation.21 It was not enough. All branches of the Canadian military were woefully under-equipped. The roughly 3,000 Royal Canadian Air Force members were left flying ludicrously obsolete machines—a hotchpotch of 270 aircraft, of which fewer than 20 were modern Hurricane fighters. The army was even worse off, with little to show in any category of weapon, from mortar to anti-aircraft gun. Across the entire Dominion, the army possessed only a handful of machine guns and sixteen outdated tanks (or machines that resembled a tank).22 And so, in September 1939, King was probably right to plan for a limited war, since the nation’s desiccated armed forces would never stand a chance on the modern battlefield.
IN AUGUST 1914, Canadians had no influence over the decisions made in London. They were, in international affairs, little more than an appendage of the Empire. The situation was different twenty-five years later, partially as a result of the autonomy won on the killing fields of Europe during the Great War. The 1931 Statute of Westminster made Canada a self-governing nation in the British Commonwealth, empowered to decide its own foreign policy and matters of war and peace. While King hated war, and felt trapped by the “sheer madness” of being dragged into another conflagration, he guided Canada into this new conflict as Britain’s ally, skilfully urging on his cabinet while calming the Quebec wing of his party.23 It was unthinkable to him that Canada would not support Britain in a major war, but he understood the need for political cover: his mantra, accordingly, was that “Parliament would decide.” The King government recalled Parliament on September 7, 1939.
Canada would never have gone to war unless Britain was threatened; nor was it able—even with control over its foreign policy—to stay out of the conflict, so deep were its ties to the British Empire. Yet many Canadians also saw the defence of Western values and liberal democracy as part of their wider duty beyond the Dominion’s shores. In this sense, Member of Parliament H.S. Hamilton, a Great War veteran, seemed correct when he claimed in the House that Hitler threatened more than just Europe, declaring, “This is Canada’s war. The effective defence of Canada consists in the utilization of the organized and united power and strength of this Dominion however, wherever and whenever it can best be used to defeat Germany’s armed forces and to destroy the philosophy on which they are based.”24 The Canadian Parliament, led by King and his Quebec lieutenant, Ernest Lapointe, brought Canada into the war on September 10. To calm Quebec, the uncommitted, and the fearful, they promised faithfully that this would be a voluntary war.25 There would be no conscription.
Everyone remembered or had heard stories of the crowds that enthusiastically cheered the declaration of war in 1914. Canadians in the major cities, and to a lesser extent in the countryside, had greeted the news with wild, naive excitement. The reaction was different this time. A grim stoicism prevailed among Canadians who did not relish the thought of hurling themselves headlong into harm’s way. Nonetheless, tens of thousands of young men queued up at recruiting centres and armouries to enlist in the ill-prepared army, air force, and navy. They recognized that Hitler represented a malignant force that had to be stopped and were motivated mainly by the military threat he posed to Britain and Europe. Indeed, few Canadians paid much attention to the plight of European Jews under the Nazis. Canada’s record with respect to Jews was hardly a noble one: the country had even turned away asylum-seeking Jewish refugees in the 1930s.26 It was not abhorrence of racial persecution that prompted many Canadians to act. Nor can it be said that it was a principled defence of democracy, at least in the case of supporting Poland, which was no bastion of democratic values. Moreover, many Canadians, including King, believed that Polish intransigence was partly responsible for provoking the war. The suspicion was unfounded: both Germany and the Soviet Union sought to annihilate the state of Poland—which had been formed largely out of their territory after the Great War—and in the process to annex its land and people. But Poland’s relative innocence was irrelevant as far as Canada was concerned. It was, above all, because Britain was threatened that Parliament voted for war and Canadians volunteered to fight. In the eyes of most Canadians, Britain was the liberal democracy that had to be defended. J.K. Chapman, a married New Brunswicker who enlisted in November 1940 at age twenty, summed up the feelings of many when he wrote that he and his friends were “proud of being Canadians, [but] we were prouder still to belong to something greater: The British Empire upon which the sun never set.”27
New recruits of the Black Watch of Canada marching in Montreal in 1939.
Note the mixture of civilian clothing and military uniforms.
Other factors were at play as well. There can be no doubt that the brutal Depression compelled some men to join the forces. Canadians had been savaged during the locust years, as jobs disappeared, crops dried up and blew away, and desperate families were reduced to seeking social assistance, meagre as it then was. The very foundations of capitalist society were shaken, and some Canadians naturally drifted to socialism and Communism, although they did not grasp the horror of its implementation in the Soviet Union. Robert Crozier, who had graduated from Queen’s University in 1940 and served with the Irish Regiment of Canada during the war, wrote that “The Depression was a total preoccupation for most people—those who had jobs feared losing them, and those who had no jobs watched helplessly while their families slowly starved, their homes were taken from them, their children went unclothed and uneducated, their hopes ground into dust…. During that ten-year period, life for millions of people was a struggle simply to survive.”28 In uniform, a man received regular meals, $1.30 a day for privates and $35 a month for his wife, plus another $12 per child (to a maximum of two).29 It was enough money to support a family, and much more than most Canadians had lived on in the past few years.
Though the Depression’s effects pushed some men into uniform, of those who enlisted in the first three months, 89 percent left jobs.30 Even if some might have lied about having an occupation in order to better their chances of being taken on, “hungerscription” was not the driving force for most. There was, of course, the lure of adventure. Issues of masculinity—serving in uniform and impressing girls— motivated others.31 Some drifted into the service, inspired by a speech, urged on by mates, or fortified by drink. Others sought escape from a bad job, a dull life on the farm, or an unhappy marriage. The air force and the navy—although not the army—had exclusionary racial policies, denying enlistment to most identifiable minorities, although the occasional Japanese, black, or Chinese Canadian was accepted. The formal racist policy was rescinded in March 1942.32 First Nations recruits, as in the Great War, were embraced for their supposed warrior skills. Some 4,300 First Nations men enlisted during the Second World War, serving with more rights in the overseas forces than those who stayed in Canada enjoyed. These soldiers served largely in the army, though the numbers were not high: the percentage of the total indigenous male population was about half of that derived from white Canada, which may have betrayed hidden prejudices in the recruitment process or lack of interest on the part of First Nations.33 Tommy Prince, from the Ojibwe Nation, volunteered early in the war, and would later be decorated for his service both during the war and later in Korea. He enlisted, he said, to show that First Nations recruits “were as good as any white man.”34
Underage soldiers were turned away and told to come back when they were eighteen. Many adolescents returned within days with lies on their lips or forged papers in their hands. Multiple attempts usually brought success.35 Six-foot, four-inches-tall George MacDonell, who enlisted in September 1939 at age fifteen by claiming to be eighteen, wrote later that he took pride in being able to “strike out on my own … and serve my country at the same time … in this vital struggle with the forces of darkness.”36 Thousands of greybeards, many of them Great War veterans, also sought service, some sneaking through the rather cursory inspection with gruff and growl— and not a little bit of black shoe polish in their hair. Others who were refused left in tears. Initially, the rate of rejection for medical ailments was high, and rotting teeth kept many men from the army, few scarcely believing that modern warfare required a working set of chompers.37
One Princess Patricia Canadian Light Infantry recruiting officer reported a “complete absence of jingoism and war excitement” among the long lines of recruits. He said these men were enlisting with a “full realization of their responsibilities.”38 The recruits had a strong desire to stop Hitler, no matter if it was mixed with a feeling of duty to defend Britain, a patriotic feeling for Canada, or some other motivation. One French Canadian, Lieutenant Claude Chatillon, remembered that even though he felt no kinship with England and had experienced prejudice in Canada, “Something is happening over there [in Europe] that has profoundly touched me, my convictions and my principles…. Above all, it’s a war of ideas … of freedom, of rights.”39 Both public pronouncements and private decisions demonstrated that this was Canada’s war.
THE PERMANENT FORCE (the army) had a strength of 4,261 officers and men in the summer of 1939. They were backed by around 46,500 militia soldiers who trained part-time at night and on weekends across the Dominion.40 While the total permanent and militia force of 50,000 or so consisted of military-minded men and boys, they had never trained together en masse. At the higher ranks, only a few dozen officers, nearly all Permanent Force members, had attended the two-year British Army Staff College course that exposed them to issues of strategy, logistics, and mechanization and so prepared them for a senior command position.41 There had been some intellectual debates in the service journal, Canadian Defence Quarterly, about how to fight on the modern battlefield—especially about the proper use of the tank in the attack—but all of this was academic due to the chronic shortage of equipment. The infantry soon found that they would be issued the Lee-Enfield No. 4 Mk I rifle and the Lewis machine gun, similar weapons, with minor variations, to those used by their fathers in the Great War. Even battle dress, webbing, and boots were in embarrassingly limited supply. Entrepreneurial units went shopping for equipment at department stores such as Eaton’s to clothe the new recruits. However, no off-the-shelf solution could alleviate the shortage of artillery, mortars, light machine guns, and vehicles. The army, virtually naked and unarmed, would have to beg for assistance from the British.
A Canadian war poster that proclaims “IT’S OUR WAR.”
Despite these setbacks, the army high command was pleased to find in September 1939 that more than 58,000 men had enlisted, about half of them drawn from the Permanent Force and militia. The number included about 4,000 Great War veterans as well as several thousand French Canadians—which eased the fears of those who suspected that Quebec was ambivalent about the war.42 This new army, initially called the Canadian Active Service Force, and later the Canadian Army Overseas, would be the basis for a large expeditionary force that the senior army command had secretly planned for in the form of a corps of two divisions and supporting troops.
King’s cabinet was horrified by the plan. Outfitting and paying for such a large overseas force flew in the face of the government’s policy of limited engagement and home defence. In late September 1939, King and his minister of finance, the Great War veteran J.L. Ralston, cut in half the military’s request for $500 million in funds, but it was evident to the politicians that Canadians still wished to see an overseas division.43 The government relented.
Andrew McNaughton, Canada’s most respected soldier, was given command of the 1st Canadian Infantry Division, which sailed for Britain late in 1939.
The 1st Canadian Infantry Division, 18,376 strong, would go to England under the command of the charismatic Major-General Andrew McNaughton. The fifty-two-year-old soldier and scientist had proven himself as an innovative leader in the previous war, had been chief of defence staff in the early 1930s, and had served as head of the National Research Council. “Andy” was a powerful orator and undeniably brilliant, but it had been close to five years since he had commanded Canadians in uniform. Such was the threadbare nature of the Canadian army. It would take time to train a division for overseas service (and a second division to defend the Dominion), and so initially Canada’s primary contribution would be its navy, a few RCAF squadrons, and Canadians flying in the British Royal Air Force.