Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014 (32 page)
Read Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014 Online
Authors: Gwynne Dyer
It was a dreadful battle because the Germans had flooded large parts of the so-called Pocket. They were fighting desperately with their backs to the sea. They had nowhere to go … and they fought very well, very professionally. And the trouble was that the weather was against us.
There were many days when we couldn’t get air support because of cloud and rain. It seemed to me it was raining all the time, which added to the flooding, and the result was that the dyke roads were all sitting up anything from a foot to ten feet above water, and the fighting had to take place along these exposed roads. That was a dangerous place to be, and the poor infantry had one hell of a time.
It was a dreadful, dreadful battle, and it was a slow battle because you could only commit so many people at a time down one road. We found it useless trying to fight across these polders, because the troops would just sink in to their armpits in mud and, in fact, drown in some cases.
So it was a slow, painful, bloody, muddy battle, and it wasn’t helped by the fact we were short of reinforcements, and in many cases the reinforcements we were getting were not adequately trained.
Brigadier General Dan Spry
The Canadian infantry were fighting in conditions that resembled those of the First World War, as far as mud and sheer misery were concerned. But there were no trenches: the Germans were dug in along canals, or in bunkers in farmyards and villages, or embedded in the suburbs of Antwerp, Ghent and Bruges. So not only was it confused, vicious fighting, but civilians were often mixed up in it.
The Breskens Pocket, like much of the area around the Scheldt
Estuary, is land reclaimed from the sea. Even now it is flat from horizon to horizon, the only features being the built-up dykes, most of them with tree-lined roads running along the top. The “polders” that the soldiers had to cross are now fields, but in 1944 they were swamps or lakes. There was little cover, and much of the fighting was at very close quarters: there was virtually no possibility of using tanks in the flooded terrain. Even the battle-hardened veterans of Normandy found it hard to cope.
How we ever got through the war, I don’t know, because it’s impossible to hide in Holland, especially on the flats.… We ran through water one day when I was wounded, with some of my friends, till it was up to my shoulders. If they couldn’t shoot you, they tried to drown you—one way or the other.
Private “Hap” Hawken, Highland Light Infantry
When the reinforcements came in, there was a kind of reluctance to get to know them right away. You make ’em do as they’re told, you put them with someone, and you tell them: “you do exactly what that person tells you. If he tells you go to the bathroom, you go to the bathroom. If he tells you to load that rifle, you load that rifle. You do everything he tells you, and with a little bit of luck you’ll make it through. Now, if you don’t, just don’t blame him, or me. Blame yourself, because it’s a war of survival.”
Specially through this area, because you were so close, and it was mean. It could have been a lot easier, had you had more space to work in, but in this area you were confined, so your casualties were greater in a very short period of time.
Sergeant Al Clavette, Canadian Scottish Regiment
I was on the flame-throwers. Up in Holland we ran into a bunch of Germans, a couple of hundred Germans one night. We were
out on a recce, and I used a flame-thrower on them, and that made me sick. I was crying like a baby when I came back afterwards. I used a flame-thrower on these Germans in the open, in an open field at night. And that was too much.…
Serres Sadler, Calgary Highlanders
When you think back about some of the things you did, and they did to you, it was totally frightening. You were petrified every day. Every time you could find some cognac or something, you drank it, because you didn’t know if tomorrow would ever come or not. You were just petrified. We were only kids.
Private “Hap” Hawken, Highland Light Infantry
The kids were dying off by the day: both the kids who had become veterans in the three or four months since Normandy, and the greener kids who trickled up the reinforcement pipeline (many of them not trained infantry at all, but hastily “converted” gunners, supply clerks and cooks). It was clear to them that there was little hope of reprieve, even if the Canadian government started sending reinforcements over from Canada at once: either they would be dead before their replacements arrived, or the war would have ended. There was some bitterness toward Mackenzie King and his government, but it was curiously muted: they were not living in the same world.
The reinforcement situation was pretty grim and we were putting up young officers who really didn’t know how to handle themselves in those circumstances. I’d sit around the mess at night with the older guys trying to buoy the spirits of the new recruits. It was a very touching period, because these were kids of nineteen and twenty. And they’d go out the next day and probably get killed.
Ross Munro, war correspondent
We were volunteers. We were the only volunteer army there was in Europe. It’s something to be proud of, in a way. And we had a job to do—and children in Canada whom we didn’t know. We were in a hurry to finish the war. And when our commander told us “Go there” we said “On our way.”
I was in the Sluis sector and he said: “Clausson, take your platoon, go to such-and-such a place, and dig the Germans out right away.” I said: “But Colonel, I have only nine soldiers left in my platoon.” “Well then,” he said, “take your section and go get the Germans.” So off we went.
Gilles Clausson, Régiment de la Chaudière
Finally, after over a month of painfully winkling the Germans out of their positions, the Canadians cleared the Scheldt Estuary. On November 1, General Knut Eberding, the commander of the German forces in the Breskens Pocket, surrendered to the North Nova Scotia Highlanders. On that date, the government in Ottawa had still not decided on conscription.
Well, the scheme worked, but not as quickly as I’d been told it was going to work. I remember General Foulkes had told me that there were only a handful of Germans over there—you know, five or six thousand—you should be able to clean it up in four, five or six days.
Well, of course, it took us a month, and a lot of casualties. But when it was all over, and I went to report personally that that piece of battle was over, I said to General Foulkes: “Remember those five or six thousand Germans you said were on the other side of the Canal?”
He said: “Yes, what about it?” I said: “Well, we’ve just taken twelve thousand of them prisoner.” And he said: “Don’t you talk to me like that.” He didn’t think it was funny.
Major General Dan Spry
It wasn’t actually very funny, and Colonel Ralston, the defence minister, having talked to the generals and visited the troops and the hospitals, returned to Canada in very much the same frame of mind as Prime Minister Borden in 1917. He wanted conscription for overseas service to be applied immediately. Mackenzie King could hardly believe what he was hearing. For five years he had managed to avoid conscription, and now the war was clearly nearing its end. (The German surrender came only six months later.) And now, of all times, his soldiers and his defence minister were telling him he had to do what he most feared and bring in conscription for overseas service. It would “undo much of the good which our war effort up to the present time had effected.” There would be “a repetition of what occurred after the last war when Borden returned and demanded conscription, only the situation will be worse.”
Finally I said to Ralston that it seemed to me that what we had to consider was … the probability, if not the certainty of civil war … in consequence of any attempt at conscription. That I could understand, for reasons of pride, the desire of the army to be kept up to full strength to the last.
MacKenzie King Record
, vol. 2
King was understandably furious with his generals. There were plenty of volunteers in the military who could have been filling the gaps in the infantry’s ranks, but they were all in the wrong places: in the two parallel administrative and supply chains serving the Canadian armies in Italy and in France; in the hypertrophied air force, which had a superabundance of aircrew; in the army’s non-infantry trades, because the military planners, making their decisions back in the days when the German air force could still attack the rear areas of the Allied armies, had trained too many men as replacements for casualties among the artillery, engineers and cooks. But the only (allegedly) trained infantrymen available as replacements were the NRMA conscripts still sitting in Canada.
Every time the army had expanded or taken on a new role, King had asked his generals if this commitment could be maintained without resorting to conscription; they had always said yes. Nevertheless, it was clear to King that if he now refused to send NRMA men overseas his cabinet would split, and that before long he would be forced into an election which the Liberals would lose. Moreover, if recent by-elections were any guide, it was quite possible that the winner in such an election would be the CCF. (It was only a few months later that British voters threw Churchill out and elected a Labour government.) Clutching at straws, King made one last effort to wriggle off the hook of conscription: in November 1944 he forced Ralston to resign, and appointed General Andrew McNaughton as defence minister in his place.
McNaughton, who had also always opposed conscription, spent the next three weeks trying to convince NRMA men to
volunteer
for overseas service. He was wasting his breath.
[King] thought use could be made of the great popularity that McNaughton had achieved as Commander of Canadian forces and that this would do the trick. Well, it didn’t do the trick at all, of course … and during that three weeks the resistance in the Department of Defence … developed.
The senior officers were going to resign. They weren’t going to try to establish a military government or a coup d’état or anything of that sort, but the fact of the matter is that the government could not have survived … a vote in parliament on maintaining the opposition to conscription.
The night of November 22, when he was having the Cabinet at eight to announce (his decision) to the Ministers, most of them didn’t know up to that time that he had changed his mind at all.
Jack Pickersgill
By November 22, 1944 McNaughton had been told by the chiefs of staff that voluntary enlistment would not get them enough men. The commanding officer in Winnipeg had already resigned, and it looked as if others might follow him. McNaughton was worried that the whole military machine might disintegrate. The Army Council believed conscription was the only solution, and told McNaughton they would resign as a group if their recommendation was not implemented. King, the great political survivor, announced that NRMA conscripts would be sent overseas at once. There was an outcry in French Canada and among the sections of English-speaking Canada traditionally most opposed to conscription: the farmers and the central and Eastern European communities in the Prairie provinces. There were even a few outbreaks of resistance in NRMA camps when Zombies were ordered overseas. But on the whole, conscription, when it finally came, caused far less uproar than it had in the First World War.
I feel, in a way, that we had bored the country with it. It had been delayed long enough, and it had been evident enough that Mackenzie King was doing everything he could to minimise it, that the resistance didn’t develop really.
Jack Pickersgill, secretary to Prime Minister King, 1937–48
King was lucky to the end. There was not time for the resentment in French Canada to build up to an explosion as it had in 1918; the war was over less than six months after conscription was brought in. Fewer than 2,500 Zombies ever got to the front, and only sixty-nine were killed, so there were hardly any unwilling French Canadian “martyrs of British imperialism” to serve as the kindling for an eventual open rift in the country, let alone the civil war King feared.
Just at the very end of the war we had a few zombies come in as reinforcements. They didn’t see much action, but I’m afraid they got pretty bad treatment from the soldiers that had been fighting. I was really ashamed of the way the cooks treated them.
Serres Sadler
Canada lost 42,000 dead in the Second World War—only half its loss ratio in the First World War, allowing for the intervening growth in its population—and by 1945 it was a fully industrialized country. King was a devious and deeply unlovable man, but he brought the country through the war more or less united. A week before the German surrender on May 8, 1945, preparing to depart for San Francisco where the leaders and diplomats of fifty nations would discuss what was to become the Charter of the United Nations, King indulged in a little gloating in his diary. He had outlasted almost all the other leaders.
Apart from Stalin, I would be the only original left on either side. I have, of course, led my party longer than Stalin has his.
Mackenzie King Record
, April 30, 1945
General Dan Spry was one of the last Canadian soldiers to return from Europe after the war, having supervised the rather chaotic business of getting all the troops embarked on homeward-bound ships. Hitler was gone—but the sovereign state was still a thriving reality:
My wife and two very small children and I were the lone Canadians on the
Queen Mary
with 17,000 American paratroopers. The paratroopers thought I was an odd bod, with a funny uniform and a red band on my cap. I think they thought I was Salvation Army, but they were very good to the kids.
But as we were getting ready to disembark, I was given a form to fill out for the U.S. Immigration Authorities. One question,
I think question 31 or 32, asked me whether I was entering the United States to overthrow the government by force, or to assassinate the President. I said that I didn’t think so really because I was in transit to Canada and I wouldn’t have time.
Well, you should never try to be funny with a foreign immigration authority. They separated me from my family, and put me in a wire cage, like a monkey, on Pier 90. And my wife and two kids and fourteen pieces of baggage were stacked up outside, and here were the kids saying, “Mommy, why is Daddy locked up in the cage?” I thought that was really quite a way to come home. The conquering hero, and I end up in a wire cage on Pier 90.
