THE END OF THE BEGINNING
The Battle of Ortona, wrote a Canadian corporal of the 48th Highlanders of Canada, “was like a raving madhouse.”1 The same could be said of the multiple night battles fought by the bomber crews who took their war birds over the burning German cities, evading the flak curling upward from the guns below; or of the Hurricane and Spitfire fighter pilots who held off the screaming Fw 190s; or of the weather-blasted sailors and merchant mariners who sailed through the U-boat gauntlet of the North Atlantic. Canadians in combat bore the pressure and paid the price in the worldwide war against Hitler and his forces.
The Western Allied strategy involved several interrelated but cascading campaigns that needed to be won before an Anglo-American invasion of Europe would be possible. The U-boats had to be defeated along the sea lanes to allow the uninterrupted movement of war supplies, food, and reinforcements to reach Britain and then, eventually, to support the Second Front in Europe. All other campaigns flowed from the victory at sea, and the Allies could not, for example, invade German-occupied France if the U-boats were mauling their ships in the Atlantic. Churchill and Roosevelt seemed to grasp this reality, but resources remained scarce for the naval and coastal air forces, due to competing demands for other strategic objectives, and this was never as apparent as it was when the warlords failed to allocate four-engine VLR bombers to close the Air Gap in the Atlantic. And so it fell to the navies to fight their desperate battles against the submarines from the first day of the war, until they finally turned the tide in May 1943, and then beyond, as they drove the U-boats back into European waters. The Canadian navy, which expanded more than thirty-three-fold during the course of the war to counter the threat posed by its enemies and meet the needs of its friends, played a heroic and at times desperate role in winning the Battle of the Atlantic. The U-boats did extraordinary damage and scored high-profile sinkings against them, but the Canadian navy never faltered in its unglamorous work. The litany of destruction obscured the reality that, even when the U-boat wolf packs were at their most pernicious, the vast majority of merchant navy vessels arrived safely at their destination. This steady infusion of goods kept Britain in the war and would allow, in 1944, for the cross-Channel invasion.
The second major strategic objective of the Western allies was to relieve the pressure on Stalin’s beleaguered armies in the east. The battle on the Russian steppes was fought with unparalleled ferocity and savagery, as Hitler’s forces carried out the Führer’s genocidal policy of annihilation. Behind the deep Nazi military advances of 1941 came the Einsatzgruppen, death squads that targeted and murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews, Communists, and others they looked upon as undesirable or merely expendable. Stalin’s forces barely survived the onslaught, yet counterattacked at Moscow in late 1941. A year later, at Stalingrad, they stopped the Germans for good. The tragic raid against Dieppe was a direct result of the need to relieve pressure on the east, although the operation was incompetently planned and revealed a disheartening degree of inter-service rivalry. The Canadians on the beaches, like their comrades in Hong Kong, were committed to battle to fulfill higher strategic objectives in the global war.
A critical component of the Second Front strategy was the bomber offensive against German cities. The survival of Britain had hinged on the fighters, the integrated radar system, and the dedicated expertise of ground crews during the Battle of Britain, but it was the bombers that allowed the Allies to take the war to the Nazi heartland. While the German economy was ill-prepared for an intensive war of attrition in 1941, productivity was steadily improved, industry was enlarged and made more effective, and slave labour was incorporated to feed the war machine. German production rose steadily in 1942 and the first half of 1943, but then all but flat-lined in the second half of the year. It was the full weight of the bomber offensive in 1943 that slowed production and undermined the German war effort. The modest high explosive payloads of the two-engine bombers in 1941 and 1942 were superseded in 1943 by hundreds of howling, death-dealing Lancasters and Halifaxes. For the civilians, war workers, and armed combatants on the ground, the terror was inescapable, and morale in the totalitarian state plummeted. The bomber crews paid for their nightly operations with crippling casualties, but they stood the course and the German cities and civilians that fed the Nazi armed forces suffered an appalling blitz that was unique in the history of human warfare.
But Germany was too strong to be defeated by anything less than continuous attacks across continents. The war in the air was one way to wear down the Nazi war effort, but it could not succeed on its own. Direct engagement with the German land forces was required. Although the war in the Soviet Union made the difference between victory and defeat, in the Middle East, the Eighth Army won and lost in see-saw battles until, by late 1942, the Germans were on their back heel and, with the assistance of American forces, were driven to capitulation in early 1943. While the Americans ached to begin their assault on Europe, even as they continued their victorious and relentless campaign in the Pacific to close in on Japan, Churchill held off his brash allies and succeeded in convincing them of the importance of first invading Sicily, and then undermining Germany’s Fascist ally, Italy. It was on the inhospitable island of Sicily that the Canadian army fought in its first sustained operations of the war, save for the two battalions lost at Hong Kong. Brutal heat, clouds of dust, and malaria-carrying mosquitoes made for a cruel battlefield, and casualties were run up against a fierce and dedicated enemy. In every engagement the Germans held the best ground, but time and time again the Canadians bested them, killing, capturing, and driving them back. General Simonds’s division made a name for itself in Sicily, and the Canadians continued to carry the battle to the enemy in Italy, their efforts culminating in the mud and misery of the Moro and the bloodstained streets of Ortona.
At home, by 1941 the Canadian economy was geared for the war effort. Full employment had been achieved as the nation supported its allies by turning out thousands of trucks, tanks, bombers, and weapons of war. Tens of thousands of Commonwealth flyers were trained across the Dominion, preparing them for the air battles over Europe. At the helm of the state was the unwarlike William Lyon Mackenzie King, guiding his nation to greater exertions to support those on the battle front.
WAR IS ABOUT COMBAT AND DEATH. The warriors’ first encounter with dead bodies led to a morbid fascination with the things that were once men and then a grim understanding that combat left the living broken, traumatized, and motionless forever. Death came in many ways. High explosive shells and bullets eviscerated bodies and tore off limbs. The frigid waters of the Atlantic killed men silently and left almost no trace. Death came in the dark sky, when fighters and bombers disappeared without warning. However it struck Canadians from 1939 to 1943, death came too often, decimating the young and shattering the hopes of the old. Despite the gathering losses, which numbered in the thousands—killed at sea, on land, and in the air—Canadians refused to be cowed. They fought on. And their fighting forces steadily improved. In war, amateurism kills soldiers, sailors, and airmen. Dieppe was a bungled mess. On the Atlantic, the merchant ships were hopeless victims if they did not sail in the complicated convoys, and even then it took years of training before the protective screen of warships could fight in a coordinated matter to hold off the U-boats. In the air war, sprog crews died on the first sortie—cannon fodder for the night fighters and flak. The Germans had a head start in established doctrine, tactics, and technology, and they proved to be extraordinarily good at fighting, whether on the offensive or in orderly retreat. They too had learned through failure, although earlier in the war. But the Canadians honed their combat skills and, by 1943, consistently drove the Axis formations back in battle.
The Canadians made their mark as an identifiable force, just as Prime Minister King had demanded at the beginning of the war. The corvettes, the cheap and nasties of the Atlantic, had been thrown against the U-boats in a lopsided battle. The destroyers were better suited for sub-hunting, but it was the corvettes that guided the merchant ships to safety, and the battered little corvettes best epitomized Canada’s naval effort. Above the convoys were the Canso flying boats. Bloated, impossibly slow, but with enormous endurance, they helped the hard-pressed sailors hold off the wolf packs. Overseas, RCAF fighters and bombers defended Britain and took the war to Germany. In all services, the maple leaf and other Canadian badges were worn with pride. Ships’ names and bombers’ nose art reflected the connection of Canadians to their home cities and symbols. The culmination of Canada’s growing status in the Allied air war was the creation of RCAF’s 6 Group in January 1943. It is no small achievement that eventually a third of all of Bomber Command personnel were Canadians.2 On land, the Canadians fought as identifiable units at Hong Kong, Dieppe, Sicily, and Italy, and by 1942 the First Canadian Army was the largest land formation ever raised in the Dominion’s history. While Canadian service personnel were less interested in waving the flag than they were in simply surviving, over time an identity was hammered out, pride was forged, and a nation showed its mettle under duress.
How Canadians fought in battle has been the focus of much of this book. Picking through the entrails of combat is a bloody business. The Canadians faltered at times, but they were learning their grim art and finding ways to meet and defeat their opponents. “The Tommies will have to chew their way through us inch by inch and we will surely make hard chewing for them”—such was the determined sentiment of a German paratrooper killed at Salerno, his resilience captured in a letter found on his corpse.3 His tough outlook epitomized the attitude of many German troops during the war. The Tommies, GIs, and Canucks, as well as all the other Allied fighting forces and men, were indeed chewing through the Germans on multiple fronts, and were no less determined in battle. There were few easy victories. While the full industrial might of the United States, Britain, and Canada was out-producing Germany by 1943, these material advantages still required the proper application of force on the battlefield and the intangible human spirit in combat. The tide had turned at sea and on some battlefields in the Mediterranean and the Soviet Union, but only the foolhardy or the naive were predicting an early victory. Many long and costly battles would be fought before Hitler’s forces were driven back from the lands they had overrun. Sacrifices were demanded of all Canadians, but few doubted the justice of their cause as they sought to free millions of oppressed peoples and to end the horrific slaughter in a war of utter necessity.