After eighteen months in Britain, the men of the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry (the Rileys, as they were affectionately known) were still waiting for something to happen. Since arriving from Canada they had moved from one south-east England base to another, training endlessly and fighting mock battles, preparing to repel an enemy who never came. Sometimes these ‘schemes’ offered a welcome break, like Operation Malcolm in which the Canadians played the role of German paratroopers pitting themselves against the local Home Guard. ‘The operation was thoroughly enjoyed by our men,’ commented the regimental war diary. ‘It gave them the opportunity for unlimited initiative which expressed itself in the form of tear-gas bombs in local dance halls, the disrobing and appropriation of uniforms of policemen and the changing of signals on a small railway line.’1 Colonel Labatt, the CO, had got into the spirit, disguising himself as a vicar to observe the proceedings, only to be arrested as a suspected fifth columnist. Usually these outings were not so entertaining and the novelty of crawling over the South Downs while being bombarded with thunderflashes had long since worn off.
The Rileys were getting bored. They were all volunteers who had signed up for overseas service, driven by a mixture of motives that was often hard to disentangle. There was still a sense of duty to the motherland, and the spirit of adventure was strong in the youth of a young country. Economics also played a part. Soldiering was a job when employment was scarce and the war offered opportunity and excitement.
The Rileys belonged to the 2nd Division of the 1st Canadian Corps and, like most of the units, was a militia regiment. They belonged to a cherished tradition of volunteer citizen soldiers who according to historical tradition had rallied to save the young nation from external threats, notably from the USA. The militias had strong local identities and deep roots in the communities, both English- and French-speaking. The Rileys sprang from Hamilton, a growing port city on Lake Ontario near to Niagara Falls. They were part-time soldiers, serving at weekends and during vacations. But what the militias lacked in strict professionalism they made up for in attitude. ‘They had esprit,’ said William Jemmett Megill, who viewed them from the perspective of a regular force ranker who rose to become a major general, ‘Their officers came from the local elites, and they threw the best parties in Canada at their armouries.’2 For all that, there was less class distinction between officers and other ranks than in British territorial units. Family connections were strong and son often followed father into the ranks. Robert Labatt, the genial, dry-humoured young officer who took over the Rileys in March 1940, was emulating his father who commanded an earlier evolution of the regiment in the First World War.
The Canadians were 4,000 miles from home and unlikely to see their families until the war ended. Homesickness and loneliness were alleviated by the welcome they received from the local population, starting with the royal family. Shortly after the Rileys arrived a party of sixty officers and men visited the grounds of Windsor Castle. ‘The king and queen and the two little princesses were driving in their car and on seeing our chaps they stopped, shook hands with our padre who was in charge of the party and engaged some of the men in conversation for some minutes,’ the regimental diary recorded.3 There were regular reminders that the notion of an imperial family was more than a propaganda conceit. ‘The attitude of the British people was fantastic,’ remembered Ken Curry from Stoney Creek, Ontario and who had lied about his age to join the Rileys. Customers in cafeterias would put money on the soldiers’ trays so they could buy themselves a treat.4 At this stage in the war treats were rare and ‘you couldn’t get a meal like you could in Canada. In most of the restaurants the waitress would tell you it was egg and chips, fish and chips, sausage and chips, beans and chips, bacon and chips.’ It tasted all right though, and the English girls, one of whom Ken married, ‘were exceptional’.
The officers did their best to provide diversion with sports, films and outings. However there were only so many times you could visit Windsor Great Park, walk round HMS Victory at Portsmouth, play cricket against ladies from the local ambulance unit (left-handed to even the odds) or board a bus to a hop at the local church hall to dance to the swing tunes of the Royal Thirteens.
By the end of 1941 there were 177,000 Canadian troops in the country. A decision had been made at the top to keep them in Britain rather than send them to North Africa, where Australian, Indian, New Zealand and South African troops were supporting the British, as Churchill was sensitive to the charge that Britain was relying on empire troops to fight its battles for it.5 This suited the Canadian prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, who was concerned that the resulting casualties would accelerate the need for conscription and a rerun of the political crisis that erupted when it was introduced during the last war.
As they waited, discipline inevitably suffered. In magistrates’ courts in the market towns and seaside resorts of Sussex the dock was frequently occupied by contrite soldiers up on charges of brawling, drunkenness and petty theft. At the West Sussex quarter sessions in April 1942, all but four of the forty-two defendants were Canadians. Among them were four young soldiers charged with stealing an eighteen-gallon barrel of beer from the Bracklesham Bay Hotel, loading it into an army truck and taking it to the house of a woman in East Wittering where they ‘drank until they could not drink any more’.6 The chairman of the bench was sympathetic and they got off with a fine and a warning. ‘We are proud of the Canadians and the assistance they are according us,’ Mr Rowland Burrows KC told them. ‘But you came here to defend the country not to pillage it.’
One display of mass indiscipline would go into legend. In the summer of 1941 Mackenzie King visited Britain and on 23 August came to Aldershot to inspect the troops and attend an athletics competition between the 1st and 2nd Divisions. After watching the contestants run round a cinder track in pouring rain he mounted a stage to make a speech. The men listened for a while in silence. A boo was heard, followed by another, then his words were drowned out in a barrage of whistling and shouting.
The incident was later cited as evidence that Canadian troops were desperate to get into action. This became an established and all but unquestioned element in the Dieppe story, given credence by the official historian Colonel Stacey, who stated that ‘the morale of the forces was suffering because of lack of opportunity for fighting’.7 This was not how it seemed to one Riley veteran, Denis Whitaker, who as an RHLI platoon commander was in a position to know. ‘I don’t believe the morale in the Rileys was suffering, nor was it in any other units I saw or heard about in England,’ he wrote. ‘We believed we were fulfilling a role. Our job was to defend England from enemy invasion. There was always that possibility of a German paratroop attack.’8
Nor was the Aldershot demonstration quite as it was subsequently portrayed. Whitaker remembered ‘a very cold, wet afternoon…we formed up in the open awaiting King’s arrival. The prime minister was delayed by several hours and evidently did not bother to send word ahead. The guard and the bands were kept standing in the belting rain all that time, soaked and cold. This cavalier treatment was what made the men so furious. When King finally arrived, they booed. It was not from sagging morale, not from any fever-pitch for battle – it was just momentary anger at thoughtless treatment of soldiers.’
The image of soldiers actively yearning to get into the fray was a fiction promoted by newspapers, politicians and senior commanders in this war as it had been in the last. The reality, as anyone who really knew soldiers understood, was that few would want to risk death, maiming or incarceration unless they felt there was some point to the gamble they were taking with their lives. It would later be claimed that one of the reasons Dieppe was assigned to the Canadians was to provide a safety valve for their pent-up aggression. Whitaker believed fervently that ‘the propaganda that the media and the government doled out to the Canadians back home in 1941 and 1942 – that we were the ones who wanted action…[was] pure nonsense.’9
The truth was more prosaic. Every man and woman in uniform knew that until the war was over life could not return to normal. As Colonel Labatt explained later, ‘everybody was getting restless’ for the simple reason that they were ‘wanting to get on with the job’.10 They were not pressing for action for its own sake, no matter what operation they were handed. The attitude of their senior commanders, however, was rather different.
The Canadian Expeditionary Force was led by lieutenant generals Andrew McNaughton and Harry Crerar, the nation’s two most eminent soldiers. Their views were listened to reverently by the civilian leadership in Ottawa who tended to follow their advice on how Canadian troops should be used by the British.
Andy McNaughton was tall, lean and volatile. He was born in 1887 in the prairie settlement of Moosomin in what is now southern Saskatchewan where his parents owned a thriving hardware business. Growing up he was fascinated by engineering, conducting his own experiments which included firing projectiles from a copper tube using gunpowder from shotgun shells as a charge.11 He was sent away to an Anglican boarding school in Quebec and then studied electrical engineering at McGill University, Montreal, staying on to take a Masters. By the time the war came he was a leading authority on the high-voltage transmission of electrical power.
He joined the army reserve in 1909, commanding a field-gun battery in Montreal. In early 1915 he went with the Canadian Corps to France, serving in the artillery. This was a gunner’s war and McNaughton applied science to improving battery performance, calculating barometric pressure, ambient temperatures and wind direction to increase accuracy and using flash spotting, the analysis of sound waves and aerial photography to refine range-finding. His techniques made a significant contribution to the great Canadian victory at Vimy Ridge. He returned home with a DSO and the rank of brigadier general. In the words of General Sir Frederick Pile, who commanded Britain’s anti-aircraft defences during the Second World War, ‘McNaughton was probably the best and most scientific gunner in any army in the world.’12 He stayed on in Canada’s tiny and cash-starved professional army after the war, becoming Chief of the General Staff in 1929. He was later head of the primary Canadian scientific agency, the National Research Council, and therefore the country’s top administrative scientist. When the Second World War came he was the natural choice to lead the Expeditionary Force to Britain.
Andy McNaughton’s rangy frame and square jaw made him everyone’s idea of a general. Famous in Canada, he was unknown outside it until in December 1939 his deep brooding eyes stared out of the front cover at millions of American readers of the influential Life magazine. He was popular with his men who appreciated his concern for their welfare and fatherly manner. James Tedlie remembered having to parade a junior officer before him on a charge of passing bad cheques: ‘Andy bawled him out and said, “Remember, young man, no one ever comes before me twice.” “Oh, no, Sir,” replied the guilty party, “you’ve given me a severe reprimand before.” ’ McNaughton ordered Tedlie to march him out, ‘barely closing the door before Andy’s peals of laughter rang out’.13 He did not stand on dignity and ‘would happily get his hands dirty, sometimes scrambling under a vehicle to repair it’. But popularity with the troops was not necessarily a prerequisite of great generalship, and some of those around him wondered about his leadership qualities. According to some of his contemporaries he was ‘not ruthless enough’, there was ‘a sense about him of refighting the Great War’ and he was ‘more of a scientist than a soldier’. There was no consensus. Canadian soldiers were an opinionated bunch and not shy of delivering judgement on their superiors. For every fan like Desmond Smith who thought him ‘a wonderful guy, an intellect with a real brain’ there was a critic like George Pang-man for whom Andy McNaughton was ‘a dud’ who ‘didn’t know the capabilities of the men who had to do the fighting, had never commanded anything, and wasn’t a soldier’.14
Views of Harry Crerar were equally divided. His bald dome and wary eyes seemed more appropriate to ajudge than a warrior and he was seen as an administrator rather than an inspiring battlefield leader. ‘He couldn’t raise any more enthusiasm than a turnip’ was the verdict of William Megill who served on the staff of the 3rd Division.15 He was ‘a first-class brain but a difficult personality’. Although not given to discussion he could ‘write a beautifully organised paper…but he wasn’t a natural commander’. Stanley Todd, who commanded the 3rd Division artillery, on the other hand thought him ‘an excellent officer, 100 per cent sound’.
Crerar was born in Hamilton in 1888. His father was a lawyer who had emigrated from Scotland and his mother a public-spirited society matron. He went to the elite Upper Canada College boarding school in Toronto, going on to the Royal Military College in Kingston favoured by well-heeled anglophones ‘who desired for their sons an education that included moral and physical conditioning as well as discipline and scholarly attainment’.16 He went to France with the artillery in 1915 and fought in the Second Battle of Ypres in April and May. He did not expect to survive and was eloquent about the horrors of the experience, recording in his diary on 15 June 1915: ‘War is so very truly hell and this yard by yard fighting finds it at its worst. The gains are so small when it comes to distance – it just resolves itself into a case of counting corpses, if we have fewer than they, it’s a “victory”.’17 Nonetheless he enjoyed soldiering. He commanded an artillery unit before moving on to the staff, where he worked with McNaughton. He too chose to stay on in the army and his intelligence and application propelled him upwards, encouraged by his old comrade.
In April 1942 McNaughton was the senior Canadian commander in Britain overseeing the formation of the 1st Canadian Army. As yet it comprised one corps with Crerar at its head. Each knew the other’s ways intimately and had boxed and coxed appointments harmoniously in the peacetime years. But Crerar was tiring of playing second fiddle and his ambition would eventually turn him against his former mentor.
Their duties carried heavy political responsibilities. McNaughton and Crerar were well acquainted with the subtleties and complexities of Anglo-Canadian relations. Both worked under British commanders on the Western Front and in the 1920s Crerar spent four years in Britain at the Staff College and War Office. As a result they had long exposure to the curious mixture of admiration tinged with condescension that marked many senior officers’ dealings with their counterparts from the Dominions.
The Canadians’ performance in the First World War was supposed to have altered the relationship between the nations. Canada sent 420,000 men overseas of whom 60,000 did not return. They fought at Ypres, the Somme, Vimy Ridge and Passchendaele. At Vimy in April 1917 all four divisions of the Canadian Corps went into action as one for the first time, capturing the four-mile-long ridge which overlooked the Allied lines. Six months later at Passchendaele the Canadians were brought in to take over from the mangled and exhausted British and secured what counted as a victory in one of the most appalling battles of attrition of the war.
Vimy Ridge became more than simply a victory. Though led by a British general, the battle had been largely a Canadian affair. It showed that Canadian commanders and soldiers were at least as good as their British partners.
In 1936 a tall memorial of two soaring columns of dazzling limestone arose on the battlefield. It was unveiled by King Edward VIII in front of 100,000 spectators. It commemorated sacrifice and achievement but there was more to it than that. ‘There are some ideas, myths and icons that persistently carry the weight of nationhood,’ wrote Canada’s premier contemporary military historian Tim Cook. ‘Vimy is one of them.’18 The battle thus came to be seen as a defining moment when the country moved from adolescence to adulthood, a coming of age that had great implications for its relationship with the mother country. It seemed to signal a waning of deference as confidence mounted and a shift towards independence from the imperial centre.
In Canada as elsewhere the 1914–18 experience had left the population dreading another war. It was reflected in official policy towards the armed forces. Politicians were deeply averse to spending money on anything that suggested the possibility of another traumatic conflict. The army shrank to a vestigial force. In 1931 the permanent strength was 3,688, backed by about 50,000 in the ‘non-permanent active militia’, as territorial units like the Rileys were known. In the general election of 1935 all parties promised to avoid any entanglement in the fresh trouble brewing in Europe, and as late as March 1939 both government and opposition pledged that in the event of war there would be no need for Canada to send a large expeditionary force to Europe.
But when war came, politicians and public rallied somewhat resignedly to the flag. At the parliamentary debate on 7 September to approve the government’s proposal to declare war on Germany, only four members spoke against it. Mackenzie King saw off an attempt by Quebecois French separatists to oppose the war by pledging not to bring in conscription. When an appeal was made in September for volunteers, Canadian men and women came forward in the same numbers as their fathers and uncles had in 1914. By the end of the month nearly 60,000 had enlisted, including many francophones.
In contrast to 1914 the mood was sombre. One report from a recruitment centre in Calgary noted the ‘complete absence of jingoism or war excitement’. A visiting American journalist reported that ‘Canadians are going into the current war with none of the enthusiasm they felt in the last one…instead the traveler finds only a profound conviction that Hitlerism is a menace that must be wiped out however distasteful the job, and a grim, calm determination to see it through.’19
The motives of those who came forward were a jumble of personal and abstract impulses. Someone like Cecil Merritt, a tall young Vancouver lawyer who commanded the South Saskatchewan Regiment, had military service in his blood, and his father had been killed at Ypres in 1915 when Cecil was eight years old. Nobody from the family of John Toney, born on the First Nation Neskonlith Reserve in British Columbia, had ever been a soldier. But he too felt the same compulsion to go to war, serving as a combat engineer.
Mackenzie King was a very reluctant war leader. In March 1939 he had lamented that ‘the idea that every twenty years this country should feel called upon to save a continent that cannot run itself seems to many a nightmare and sheer madness’.20 He wrote to the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain on 3 September emphasising that Canada’s priority was its own defence, yet nonetheless asked for his ‘appreciation of the probable theatre and character of [the] main British and allied military operations, in order that we may consider the policy to be adopted by Canada’.21 The reply came not from Chamberlain but from Anthony Eden, the Dominions Secretary who told him Britain was for the time being more interested in food, raw materials, financial services and aircrew from Canada, though in time it was hoped that the Dominion ‘would exert her full national effort as in [the] last war, even to the extent of the eventual despatch of an expeditionary force’.
Anglophone Canadians harboured fluid identities and the dual loyalties to their own country and their duty to the king were not always aligned, but the call when it came could not be resisted. Just over three months later, on 18 December 1939, the Cunard liner Aquitania steamed into the Clyde at the head of a flotilla of passenger ships carrying 7,448 officers and men of the 1st Canadian Division. Eden was waiting with a message of welcome from King George VI. The following day’s newspapers greeted them like long-lost sons. ‘Singing wartime choruses learned at the knee of their soldier fathers, Canada’s manhood has arrived in Britain to serve as an active service force,’ wrote a special correspondent for the Aberdeen Press and Journal. ‘To quote the words of their commander Major General McNaughton, they came here to report to Lord Gort and say, “at your orders, sir!” ’ He assured the reporter: ‘Canada is with the old country heart and soul.’
The command and control arrangements for Canadian military cooperation with the British were laid out in an agreement reached in 1933. The Visiting Forces (British Commonwealth) Act established that, when assigned to a British-controlled operation or larger British formation, the Canadians were under British higher command. As Colonel Stacey observed, this meant that ‘in field operations…Canada inevitably surrendered a very large measure of operational control over her troops’.22 The situation would create tensions between McNaughton and Crerar and the British high command.
The problems that arose were as much personal as political. The Canadians found themselves in an awkward situation that only the tortured complexities of the British social order could have created. Their service in the last war had given them every right to be treated as equals. Although they were proud Canadians, their loyalty to the empire was unquestionable. Crerar described himself as ‘a British subject and a Canadian national’ and throughout his career had promoted stronger ties with the imperial military establishment. He was outdoorsy, horsey and correct, and on his long stints in England had fitted easily into the military and civilian social whirl. He counted himself a friend of Alan Brooke, a fellow gunner who had joined the staff of the Canadian Corps in 1917 where he organised the colossal artillery barrages that saturated the German defences at Vimy. But even someone as well versed in the ways of the British as Crerar could mistake tolerance for acceptance. For though he might look, behave and sound not unlike an English gentleman, that did not mean he would necessarily be treated as one.
The level of respect that the British were prepared to show to their allies was largely dependent on their usefulness. Their attitude towards the brash, combative Americans was very different to the face they showed to the polite, cooperative Canadians. The Americans might often seem to be naïve and boastful but they held the keys to victory. Almost every major decision had to start with the question: ‘What will the Americans think about this?’ Ultimately it was power and wealth that brought respect. Whatever the top brass of the three services said about their American opposite numbers behind their backs, they flattered and accommodated them and were attentive to the point of obsequiousness.
The Canadians’ contribution was appreciated but it was a tiny fraction of what the Americans brought to the party. The paternalistic habit was hard to shake off, Vimy and Passchendaele notwithstanding, and the high command’s dealings with the Canadians proceeded from the assumption that they would always fall into line with their proposals. When they did push back, they were portrayed as provincials standing on their dignity. In a letter to Bernard Montgomery in early 1942 Brooke warned him of the attitude he could expect from the Canadians under his command. ‘They are grand soldiers, that I realised after spending one and a half years with them in the last war,’ he wrote. ‘But they are very touchy and childlike in many ways. You will therefore have to watch your steps with them far more than you would with British troops.’23
Brooke had worked alongside McNaughton in France and came across him again when they were both students at the Imperial Defence College in 1927.24 Professional differences had arisen which the Canadian felt prejudiced Brooke against him. Certainly Brooke’s verdict on him was not flattering. Looking back to the summer of 1941 when the Canadians were finding their feet he recalled that ‘the more I saw of the Canadian Corps at that time the more convinced I became that Andy McNaughton had not got the required qualities to make a success of commanding…’25 He was ‘a man of exceptional ability where scientific matters were concerned, but lacking the required qualities of command’. He decided then that at some point he would have to be sacked but accepted that this was ‘not a very easy matter, as he had become somewhat of a hero in Canada’.
He thought better of Crerar, perhaps because the Canadian seems to have courted his favour, and was rewarded with regular invitations to lunch and tea, occasions which Crerar would later use to bad-mouth his chief and further undermine him in Brooke’s eyes. Montgomery’s retrospective judgement on both Canadians was characterisically brutal. McNaughton was ‘a useless commander, and was really a scientist’ and Crerar was ‘utterly unfit to lead an army’.26
The Canadians tried their best but the British were hard to please. Little gratitude was shown for the obliging reception McNaughton and Crerar had given to British ideas for the employment of their men. Both stood by the Canadian government’s desire to retain some semblance of autonomy over their troops but they were nonetheless open to any proposal to get Canadians into action, no matter how risky the scheme.
The pattern was established in the spring of 1940. The first Canadian units had undergone only basic drill at home and were to complete their training after arrival in Britain under Canadian control.27 They were still raw when the British War Office approached Crerar, who was at Canadian Military HQ in London, on 16 April 1940 with a request for troops to take part in the hastily organised operation to try to reverse the German invasion of Norway. The plan involved British, French and Norwegian troops and envisaged landings at Narvik inside the Arctic Circle and in the Trondheim area on the central coast, both of which were in German hands.
The intention was to put troops ashore north of Trondheim at Namsos and south at Andalsnes who would close on the city in a pincer movement. Then a third attack was added. This was a bold proposal to sail a heavy naval force into Trondheim fjord and land troops to capture the aerodrome and advance from the north along the railway into the town. The entrance to the fjord was covered by heavy gun batteries. It was imperative that they be put out of action and the British wanted 800 Canadians to do the job.
Crerar immediately informed McNaughton who was at the 1st Canadian Division base at Aldershot. He rushed to London where the pair met the CIGS, General Edmund Ironside. Ironside explained that the plan was still being worked out and it could be that the Canadians were not needed for the attack on the batteries but might be used in the main landings or indeed not at all.
McNaughton accepted the mission on the spot, believing he had the authority to commit to the plan without reference back to Ottawa. He chose two of the best-trained battalions of the 1st Brigade, and on the evening of 18 April they marched to Aldershot station to the pipes of the Seaforth Highlanders of Canada and entrained for Dunfermline. The following day the chiefs of staff suddenly decided a direct amphibious assault was too risky. According to Churchill, who was then at the Admiralty, ‘this change was brought about, first, by increasing realisation of the magnitude of the naval stake in hazarding so many of our finest capital ships, and also by War Office arguments that even if the Fleet got in and got out again, the opposed landing of the troops in the face of the German air power would be perilous.’28
In other words, a frontal assault on a defended shore was judged too costly, in both ships and soldiers’ lives. Thus the Canadians were almost certainly spared the experience of a humiliating early defeat. The ramshackle Trondheim expedition soon foundered and by 3 May all Allied forces had withdrawn.
The episode demonstrated McNaughton’s eagerness to get involved. Both he and Crerar were living in the shadow cast by their illustrious predecessors, and were anxious to prove themselves and their men the equals of the commanders and troops who in the Great War had made the Canadians a byword for toughness and aggression.
As Colonel Stacey noted drily: ‘That the Canadian commander was prepared to commit his force to so desperate a venture is evidence that the [subsequent] long period in which the Canadians took no part in active operations was not the result of any reluctance to embark on dangerous projects.’29
McNaughton’s initiative was not appreciated in Ottawa. The government had not been informed about the operation until the day after McNaughton’s assent and he was told that in future they were to be consulted before Canadians were committed to a big overseas action. The reprimand did nothing to dampen his willingness to respond positively to future British requests for help.
The Norway debacle was soon overshadowed by a greater potential catastrophe. On 10 May, the German onslaught in the West began and had soon breached the Allied lines, leaving them cut off in northern France with their backs to the sea. On 20 May Panzer columns reached Abbeville and prepared to swing north and east up the Channel coast, threatening to cut off Boulogne, Calais and Dunkirk. At least one of these ports would have to stay in Allied hands for there to be any chance of a fightback, or, if the worst came to the worst, to allow the BEF to evacuate. Two battalions of Guards went ashore at Boulogne on 22 May and an infantry brigade supported by tanks landed at Calais the same night.
Early on the morning of 23 May, McNaughton was rung up by the War Office and told that Canadian troops were needed in the fight to keep the BEF’s supply lines open. The 1st Infantry Brigade was put on notice to move while McNaughton set off to assess the situation. That evening he took a destroyer to Calais, arriving to discover that the port was already surrounded. Nonetheless he signalled the CIGS, stressing the importance of holding Calais and recommending that the Canadian force should be sent across the Channel to ‘strengthen the situation’ in the town. When McNaughton returned to Dover the following afternoon the first Canadian units were arriving at the port ready to sail to France. By the time he got to London, Ironside had decided that Calais was doomed and the move was called off.
Once again McNaughton had been apparently willing to throw untrained men into a hopeless situation. Had the War Office followed his original advice the 1st Infantry Brigade would have shared the fate of the Calais garrison, which after a valiant sacrificial stand surrendered on 27 May.
This was not the end of the Canadians’ involvement in the BEF debacle. As Gort fell back on Dunkirk he made a desperate appeal for fresh troops and asked the War Office to send the Canadian brigade. The units who had just been stood down were reactivated. This time McNaughton was careful to inform Ottawa. Their earlier objection to the Norway proposal it seemed had been on a matter of procedural principle rather than any reservations about the wisdom of sending Canadians early into battle, and the response was swift and supportive.
McNaughton and Crerar went to Whitehall to confer with General Sir John Dill, who had just been appointed Vice CIGS, and Major General R. H. Dewing, director of military operations at the War Office. The official history states that all four men agreed that it was useless to send more troops across the Channel. It goes on: ‘McNaughton nevertheless made it clear that he was quite prepared to undertake the operation if it was decided upon, provided only that his artillery could be despatched with the rest of the force.’30 The episode subsequently produced a revealing exchange. Writing to ‘my dear Andy’, Dewing restated the arguments for abandoning the mission. He said he was sure that McNaughton shared his views but that it was ‘much more difficult for you to express that, because you naturally had the feeling that you might be giving the impression that you and the Canadian troops were not ready to undertake a desperate adventure’. He continued: ‘I can assure you that you did not give that impression. We all know you far too well for it to be possible for any of us to entertain that suspicion for one moment…’
The letter brought a grateful response. ‘You have clearly penetrated to the motives and considerations which governed my actions,’ McNaughton wrote, ‘and it is a great comfort to me to know that this is so.’
The Canadians did make it to France before the final withdrawal. Even as the Dunkirk evacuation started, Churchill was already planning to scrape together a new expeditionary force to join two formations which had so far escaped German encirclement. The 51st (Highland) Division was attached to the French army when the fighting began and stationed in front of the Maginot Line opposite the Saarland. It had then fallen back to positions along the Somme. The 1st Armoured Division was sent to France shortly after the start of the German attack but arrived too late to link up with Gort’s force and was now stranded south of the Somme. The units chosen were the 52nd (Lowland) Division and, once again, the Canadian 1st Brigade.
The move was essentially political, aimed at keeping France in the war. Churchill believed that even if Paris was captured the government could retreat to a redoubt on the Brittany Peninsula where the remnants of the British and French armies, reinforced and resupplied by sea from Britain, could continue the struggle. It was a fantasy. By the time the decision was made French morale had collapsed and there was no heart left in most of its military or political leaders to carry on.
McNaughton was to lead the Canadians in the field under the overall command of Alan Brooke. On 8 June the Canadian brigade’s transport set off for Falmouth for passage to Brest. The troops followed by train, to embark at Plymouth. It was the third time in fifteen days that they had gone off to war. No sooner had they got ashore than they were ordered to withdraw again. The retreat was a shambles. The Canadian units were scattered around the French countryside. The artillery, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel John Hamilton Roberts, was at Sablé-sur-Sarthe, west of Le Mans, when the evacuation order came. Arriving at Brest on the morning of 16 June they found no ships available. Loading began the following day in an atmosphere of near panic. Priority was to be given to men over equipment, and all the brigade’s transport had to be left for the Germans. Roberts had a long battle with the British officer in charge of evacuation to save his guns which he eventually won but was forced to abandon limbers and ammunition. The gunners’ war diary recorded that ‘although there was evidently no enemy within 200 miles, the withdrawal was conducted as a rout’ and the steamer which carried them back ‘still had room enough to take everything that was on the docks’.31
There was another episode on the far side of the world which illustrated the need for caution when responding to British appeals. In July 1940 Crerar returned to Canada where he became Chief of the General Staff. In the autumn London asked Ottawa if it would send troops to stiffen the British garrison at Hong Kong in an effort to deter the mounting threat from Japan. It was a forlorn hope but Crerar backed the move strongly. He believed, in the words of his biographer, ‘Canada could not turn aside from potentially dangerous assignments that its allies were willing to undertake’ and also that ‘Canadian troops needed to get into the fight.’32 In November two battalions were despatched. On Christmas Day Hong Kong fell and all the Canadians were killed or captured. By then Crerar was back in Britain having lobbied hard to take up command of the 2nd Canadian Division and was at a safe distance from the political storm that ensued.
The experience did nothing to blunt his enthusiasm for finding battles for the Canadians to fight. This was as much for his own benefit as to blood the troops. Through no fault of his own Crerar had never commanded anything bigger than a battery and ‘wanted seasoning for his untested troops and improvement of his own knowledge of battlefield command’.33 McNaughton was also keen and in September 1941 he met General Paget to press for the inclusion of Canadians in any raids involving Home Forces. He returned to Canada, worn out and ill, for a three-month visit at the end of January 1942 and in his absence Crerar, who took over as acting corps commander, increased the pressure. In February he wrote to Montgomery pointing out the ‘great stimulus’ his men would receive ‘if, in the near future, [the corps] succeeded in making a name for itself for its raiding activities’.34
This was just one move in a long campaign of persuasion during which he bent the ears of those who mattered in the bars, lobbies and restaurants of the capital where the brass gathered to do informal business: the Savoy and Ritz hotels, and clubs like the ‘In and Out’ (Naval and Military Club) on Piccadilly and Boodle’s in St James’s Street. According to Stacey, Crerar ‘took advantage of being in command in McNaughton’s absence…to urge Montgomery, Sir Alan Brooke and Mountbatten to give the Canadians opportunities in raids’.35
By early March Brooke had come round to the idea but there was resistance from Mountbatten who wanted operations at this point to be predominantly commando affairs and resented their ‘dilution’ by army elements. He eventually backed down saying he ‘appreciated the special position of [the] Canadian Corps and was agreeable to making an exception to policy in favour of a largely Canadian enterprise’ providing General Paget agreed.
The immediate fruit of Crerar’s lobbying was the inclusion of a small Canadian force in Operation Abercrombie, a raid on Hardelot, south of Boulogne led by 4 Commando to ‘test the German defences’ and bring back prisoners. After delays, the mission finally went ahead on the night of 21/22 April. The fifty Canadians from 1st Division got stranded and never made it ashore. They did not miss much. To Lord Lovat who led the commandos, it was ‘an overrated affair which achieved limited success…some undeserved awards were handed out’.36
The much greater consequence was that the campaign put the Canadians at the top of the selectors’ list when a big raid beyond the scope of the commandos arose. In the view of Colonel Stacey, Crerar’s advocacy ‘probably influenced the selection of Canadians to execute the raid [on Dieppe]’.37
That McNaughton and Crerar were thoroughly in favour of action as soon as possible is not in doubt. Their record also showed that they were likely to look positively on whatever task the British might give them. What is less clear is how the decision to use the Canadians for Rutter came about. There is little surviving paperwork to reveal the details of the process, and the subsequent accounts of the participants are often unreliable or contradictory.
At the time that their senior commanders were pressing for fighting opportunities, the men of the Canadian Corps were being put through their paces in a series of exercises that Montgomery had ordered since taking over South Eastern Command in November. Though still tasked with repelling an invasion, he was intent on replacing a defensive mentality with a spirit of aggressive counter-attack. His declared aim was to ‘train all ranks up to that stage of mental, physical and professional fitness needed to engage successfully in offensive battle against the Germans’.38 Monty brought a necessary new ruthlessness and application to training at all levels. There were continuous study sessions for commanders at all levels supplemented by field schemes on an ever mounting scale. The troops worked with their commander’s exhortations ringing in their ears. He drove everyone very hard but inspired them too with crisp addresses that explained his vision and gave purpose to all the effort. He seemed to be everywhere, popping up in the middle of exercises in what one British officer felt ‘weren’t visits; they were visitations’. Staff cars would appear and ‘a tough, stringy, bird-like little man would jump out…Striding on ahead, with his staff stumbling behind in the sand dunes, he’d make straight for the nearest private soldier. “Who are you? Where do you come from? What are you doing? Do you know what’s going on? Are you in the picture? Can you see the coast of France today? Good; that’s where the enemy is.” ’39 Criticism was frequent and sometimes rough. Often it was the performance of the Canadians that caught his bright, raptor’s eye.
Nonetheless most accounts agree that when the opportunity first came to ‘engage successfully in offensive battle against the Germans’ it was to the Canadians that Monty turned. One version, apparently supplied by Crerar himself, says that on 28 April he was summoned to South Eastern Command headquarters. There Montgomery told him: ‘You have been wanting action for a long time. Here’s your chance.’ He gave a brief sketch of the mission without revealing the destination. He endorsed the plan which ‘has a lot of possibilities’, then went on: ‘The raid is yours if you want it…Do you want it?’ The fact that Crerar had played no part in making the plan was of no concern, and he replied: ‘You bet we want it.’ Montgomery told him: ‘Then you have it,’ revealing with a flourish, ‘the target is Dieppe.’40
It was two days before Montgomery approached McNaughton, who as 1st Army commander had sole authority in Britain on how Canadian troops should be used. In his official history of the Canadian Army’s war Stacey wrote that on the morning of 30 April, five days after the outline plan had been finalised, Monty visited McNaughton at 1st Canadian Army HQ at Headley Court, a Victorian mansion near Leatherhead in Surrey, and ‘broached the project’.41 Montgomery told him he had been ‘pressed to agree’ to the operation being carried out by a joint British and Canadian force under predominantly British command. However, he disliked the idea of mixing up units and preferred to keep the main body of troops under a unified command. He added, flatteringly, that in his opinion the Canadian troops ‘were the best suited’ and General Headquarters (GHQ) Home Forces, under whose control he operated, had agreed.
He then revealed he had already approached Crerar who had given his approval and even chosen the 2nd Division from his corps for the task. McNaughton seems to have been unperturbed by this breach of protocol. He gave his blessing, ‘subject to details of the plans being satisfactory and receiving his approval’. There was still Ottawa to consider. McNaughton had the authority to commit Canadian troops for minor operations, but Rutter could hardly be classed as a sideshow so he now sought approval to widen the remit to include bigger projects, which was granted by the government’s war committee.
The Canadian version with minor discrepancies is supported by multiple other sources. Jock Hughes-Hallett wrote that the initiative was taken by Montgomery who ‘got the agreement of General Paget [C-in-C Home Forces] and the CIGS [Brooke] for the employment of the 2nd Canadian Division on the raid’. This too was the recollection of Goronwy Rees, one of Monty’s staff officers, who remembered being summoned to his quarters in Reigate and told that Montgomery ‘had been made responsible for the operation, and he had selected the 2nd Canadian Division, which was under his command, to carry it out’.42
Montgomery later maintained that he had nothing to do with the choice, claiming that ‘somebody, I do not know who, decided that the Canadian Army should provide the troops, and the 2nd Canadian Division, under Major General Roberts, was detailed for the task.’43 He went on: ‘And so it was decided to launch against a defended port in the Atlantic Wall a Canadian division which had done no fighting, and which was commanded by a major general who had never commanded a division in battle, not even a battalion.’
When he heard the news from Paget he protested that it was not right to use the inexperienced Canadians for the operation. Paget replied that they were ‘becoming “impatient” and wanted to go fighting; if they were not allowed to, there would be trouble with…General McNaughton’. Montgomery then meekly acquiesced, as ‘to do otherwise would have been to lower the morale of the Canadian troops’. He repeated a similar story to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in an interview for a documentary that aired in 1962, though he admitted that he had no documentation to back up the claim. ‘I did protest verbally,’ he said. ‘I think I should have protested vehemently and in writing. That you mustn’t do it with these troops. Well I didn’t. So I suppose I must bear certain responsibilities because I didn’t do it.’44
Montgomery’s protestations are not very convincing. Humble acceptance was not his way. He was the most forceful senior officer in the British Army, famous for reacting violently to any proposal he disagreed with and for getting his own way. He could not even get his story straight. The authorised biography written by his ‘quasi-godson’ Nigel Hamilton gives a contradictory version that chimes with Crerar’s. In this account the initiative was indeed, as Hughes-Hallett said, Montgomery’s and confirms Stacey’s sequencing, stating that ‘he did not go first to Lieutenant General McNaughton…but made arrangements first with his own subordinate Corps Commander Crerar – even selecting which division would participate…’45 The choice was presented as ‘an honour, and there is little doubt that Bernard intended it to appear as such – a gesture of appeasement to the oversensitive charges who seemed to find his “driving” too fierce and his criticism of Canadian commanders after exercises too humiliating’.
Montgomery’s motive for distancing himself from the decision to use the Canadians can easily be guessed. The thought that his name might be closely linked with a major debacle was an affront to his vanity. The truth was that even though he took little interest in the development of the Dieppe raid he presided over the meeting where the frontal-assault plan was adopted and was present for a later crucial discussion which helped to seal the Canadians’ fate. Even if he did not personally choose the Canadians for the main force, he did nothing to block their selection.
Using the Canadians seemed to jar with several major considerations, both military and political, currently crowding the minds of Churchill and the chiefs. Rutter had taken on a significance which went far beyond that of a mere raid. The pressure from Moscow and Washington gave it a political dimension which meant much more was at stake than simple success or failure. The raid on Dieppe would provide the first major demonstration since Dunkirk of Britain’s ability to wage war on the continent. The eyes of the Americans and the Russians were upon it. If things went wrong, the Germans and their Axis partners would make a propaganda feast of the failure. At home, morale was sagging. The government and armed forces simply could not afford another debacle. With so much riding on the venture it would perhaps have made more sense and carried a greater symbolic charge if British units were used.
Mountbatten always maintained that he proposed a joint force of commandos and marines for the assault but had been overruled by a ‘high-level political decision’.46 On the other hand, the Canadians were as well trained as the British 12 Corps troops in South Eastern Command, who were equally untested as neither of the two divisions had fought in France. In the end the Canadians’ – and in particular Crerar’s – eagerness for their men to see action seems to have been the decisive factor.
Immediately after the 30 April meeting with Montgomery, McNaughton ordered Crerar to make an infantry division, a tank battalion and ancillary units from his corps available for Operation Rutter. The reasons for his choosing the 2nd Division over the 1st Division which arrived in Britain earlier are unclear but it may have been that it had performed particularly well in recent exercises. To provide security cover, all Canadian units were told to prepare for amphibious training. This, it was hoped, would dampen speculation when the 2nd Division went off to get ready for the real thing.
Meanwhile 2nd Division’s commander Major General John Hamilton Roberts was summoned to see Crerar in London with the excuse that ‘we haven’t had a chance for an undisturbed chat for a long time’.47 His exploit saving his guns in France had boosted his reputation and he was regarded as a good trainer of troops. When he arrived at Canadian Military Headquarters in Cockspur Street, just next to Canada House on Trafalgar Square, he discovered the real reason for the meeting. There was little that Crerar could tell him at this point beyond the broadest outlines of the attack and the fact that it was aimed at Dieppe.
Everything about Rutter was swathed in secrecy. The security arrangements the War Office made for Roberts assigned him a curiously passive role in the undertaking ahead. He was checked into the Mayfair Hotel to be on hand if needed by Home Forces or Mountbatten, with instructions to stay in his room as much as possible to avoid the risk of being followed and to keep outgoing telephone calls to a minimum for fear of spies.
Meanwhile the British were also making it clear to McNaughton his place in the proceedings. On 5 and 7 May, the Home Forces chief of staff Lieutenant General John Swayne wrote to him on behalf of Paget. The letters established Montgomery’s position as the ‘General Officer Commanding selected by the commander-in-chief [Paget] to prepare the outline plan’ and the military commander responsible for Rutter. Citing the need for secrecy Swayne said details of the operation would be tightly restricted and proposed ‘to send information to you from time to time personally’, adding that ‘if you desire any amplification of specific points at any time the planning staff at GHQ will be at your disposal’.
The message was that the British were directing the show with a Canadian cast and that his role in the production would be watching from the wings. McNaughton resisted. His counter-proposal was for a chain of command that ran from Paget at GHQ Home Forces to Montgomery at South Eastern Command to Crerar at 1st Canadian Corps HQ to Roberts at 2nd Division. He also wanted his chief of staff Lieutenant Colonel G. P. Henderson to act as a formal liaison officer between himself and Home Forces, COHQ and Crerar. This still left him outside the executive machinery but at least kept him in the bureaucratic loop. It was a meek enough request and the matter was settled – though the command structure would cause problems further down the line.
On 8 May Roberts was called to the War Office for a meeting with Montgomery where he at last got a detailed briefing on the outline plan. When Roberts returned to his division, his senior staff officer Brigadier Clarence Churchill Mann stayed behind in London as his representative leading the Canadian team which now joined the COHQ and army planners. Mann was thirty-eight, tall and good-looking, from a wealthy family who had emigrated from New York to Canada. ‘Church’ Mann charmed everybody including even Montgomery who confided to Goronwy Rees ‘he’s a card, that fellow’. Rees was a Welsh minister’s son from the Valleys who had shaken off his provincial background at Oxford and before the war moved in a well-connected left-wing journalistic milieu in London. He was similarly impressed with the Canadian’s ‘sleek black hair and the long legs of a cavalryman’.48 He was also ‘a brilliant staff officer, but what was more exceptional was that his mind had a wild and incalculable originality, and his contempt for normal military codes and conventions was extreme’. With this attitude he would fit right in with the cool, assured types at Richmond Terrace with their disdain for difficulties and boyish delight in dreaming up warlike schemes.
It was Mann’s job to make the first appraisal of the outline plan. It was a heavy responsibility. The Canadians were coming blind to Rutter having played no part in its genesis or development and it therefore took no account of their concerns. Here was the first, and likely the most effective opportunity to register doubts and objections. Mann approached the task in a positive spirit. In his report to Roberts he made light of the obvious difficulties and accentuated the benefits of boldness. Much of it dwelt on the question of where to land the tanks which he identified as ‘the outstanding feature of the plan’. Mann agreed with the army that the problem of the rivers made putting armour ashore at Quiberville impracticable, though the beach at Pourville might be used to deliver later flights. The main landing would therefore have to go in on the town beaches. It was, he acknowledged ‘on the face of it…almost a fantastical conception of the place most suited to land a strong force of AVFs [armoured fighting vehicles]’. It was nonetheless ‘well worth evaluating with an unbiased mind’.49
The direct approach, he felt, ‘had the advantage of simplicity’. If successful it put the tanks ‘in easy striking distance of the most appropriate objectives for their employment’. It would deliver surprise, resulting in ‘a terrific moral effect on both the Germans and the French’. There were disadvantages in ‘attacking the enemy frontally…at a point where penetration was obstructed and engineer effort was required’ to maintain progress. The rubble resulting from the proposed preliminary bombing raid meant there was a ‘danger of failure to penetrate through Dieppe’. However a similar attack on an English coastal town – something the Canadians had studied in their endless counter-invasion exercises – would have a good chance of succeeding, providing the engineers dealt with obstacles. As for the opposition, the strength of the Dieppe garrison was ‘only two companies of infantry not of the best quality, plus some divisional troops’.
For all its risks, the project seemed to offer ‘a reasonable prospect of success’. In a judgement that was immediately endorsed by Roberts, Mann concluded: ‘I am in favour of adopting the outline plan.’