The Valour and the Horror

Crisis without Conscription, Untrained Volunteers are Sacrificed in Battle, Resentment

"The Allies were suffering far more dead and wounded than they had anticipated. In late July 1944, the Canadians started running out of trained men to use as replacements. For every two men dead or wounded, there was only one trained man to replace them.. The crisis made the army ruthless." ("Valour and Horror" script)

By the summer of 1944, Canada was suffering from a severe manpower crisis. Canada entered the Normandy campaign with a "considerable infantry deficit which was recorded on May 31 as being 3,337 troops". Officials had predicted a certain "wastage" of men and materials, but had vastly underestimated the number of casualties Normandy would take, especially in the infantry division.

Men were dying or being wounded at a terrible rate, and Canada was running out of trained volunteer reinforcements to replace them. There was a surplus of almost 390,000 men available for general service, but most were involved in administration or behind-lines engineering. None of them were trained for infantry duty. (One estimate indicates that it took seven army administrators and labourers to keep one infantryman in the field).

Conversely, there was a strong force of almost 60,000 infantry-trained conscripts at home, but MacKenzie King and his cabinet resisted altering their policy of sending only volunteers abroad for as long as they could. It is commonly believed that this resistance cost Canada many lives.

Between August and October of 1944, Canadian Minister of Defense Ralston resorted to taking volunteers out of other divisions and reappointing them, usually with only very poor training, to the decimated infantry. The politics behind this decision are complex, but it is clear that the policy of putting poorly trained men into battle had disastrous effects.

Initially, the Canadian Military Headquarters (CMHQ) had assumed the British War Office estimates of 'wastage' to be accurate. But they were not. It was not until well after the summer of '44 that they began making their own adjustments.

"Casualties in the infantry arm in Normandy had been much heavier, and those in the other arms lighter, than had been anticipated in Allied planning. All had grossly miscalculated... 'The rates of wastage' used by the British War office... were undoubtedly based mainly on the fighting in North Africa, and they proved inapplicable to Northwest Europe. To state the matter in its simplest and starkest terms, the War Office had predicted that in periods of 'intense' activity 48% of the casualties would be suffered by the infantry, 15% by the armoured corps, and 14% by the artillery...But down to 17 August in Normandy the infantry had 76% of the Canadian casualties, the armoured corps only 7%, and the artillery 8%." (Decision in Normandy pg. 255, Carlo D'Este. First Harper Perennial, 1991)

The tragic effects of these optimistic calculations were compounded by the fact that realistic reports on the waning numbers of trained infantry reinforcements were never sent from CMHQ in London to Ottawa. Lieutenant General Stuart was the Chief of Staff at CMHQ. He had been appointed by Defense Minister Ralston. In the beginning of March 1944, "Stuart issued an order to his staff that no important communication regarding the reinforcement issue was to be submitted to National Defense Headquarters, 21st Army group, or elsewhere that had not been seen and approved by himself...

"Canadian historian Colonel C.P. Stacey writes: 'The actual fact is that, in part at least with Ralston's knowledge, the officer whom he placed in charge in England ...enforced a policy of soft-pedaling on this question and saw to it that communications which he considered "alarmist" were not sent to Ottawa'. From [May 13] onward, Stuart issued, and Ralston received, only the most optimistic of reports on the reinforcement issue.

"Even Field Marshall Montgomery was mislead. In March he had underlined the potential seriousness of the infantry deficiencies to Stuart, pointing out that since the reinforcements would comprise remustered men switching over from other services, 'rigorous training' was essential before they could be 'fit to take the field as [infantry] reinforcements'. Stuart reassured him: 'Action is being taken regarding absorption of surpluses to assist in meeting deficiencies.'" In fact it was not until the end of August that "energetic remustering" began. (Dennis Whitaker and Shelagh Whitaker, Tug of War , pg. 214. Stoddart ,1987)

Crisis without Conscription

Of course, when the crisis peaked in late August, Stuart was forced to announce that there simply were no well trained infantry replacements left. The infantry deficit had reached 4318 men. "In a top secret cable to Ralston on August 26, [Stuart] acknowledged for the first time that he had erred in failing to establish realistic casualty rates for the Canadian troops...he made an emergency proposal that the so-called infantry tradesmen, men such as cooks, shoemakers, lorry drivers and clerks, who had never received training as fighting troops, be transferred to front-line duty on a 'temporary' basis. Ralston, possibly not comprehending or not wanting to comprehend the implications of the request, approved it without referring it to cabinet." (Dennis Whitaker and Shelagh Whitaker, Tug of War , pg. 214. Stoddart ,1987)

Brigadier Harry Foster commented on the situation: "Most of the men we're getting are soft. They have been trained to cook, bake, drive, type and shuffle papers. Everything but kill Germans. The problem's with the bloody politicians in Ottawa, who don't realize that in war, men are wounded and die and have to be replaced." ("Valour and Horror" script)

Untrained Volunteers are Sacrificed in Battle

Dennis Whitaker, a commander in the royal Hamilton Light Infantry describes the reinforcements his company received: "The reinforcements were nearly all men who had been remustered from other arms of the service...Tragically, they did not know how to look after their weapons- or themselves. They didn't, for example know how to load or fire their weapons. As one puzzled sergeant told me later: 'I held up a Piat gun and said, "How many of you guys recognize this?" But nobody had ever seen one. It was crazy! Then I brought up a case of Bren guns, still packed in grease, and explained that their first job was to wash them. But they didn't even know how to take one apart.'"

"A Senior administrative officer at one of the four CITRs (Canadian Infantry training Regiments) near Aldershot, England, reveals that the CITR as a training unit was really a misnomer: 'They were really just transient camps for administration and documentation of the reinforcement stream. There were so many routine administrative jobs the get done, so much paper work, that there really wasn't time for any training. Men were moving in and out all the time; they were only sent there for a matter of weeks- certainly no longer than a month...We also had men posted with us who had been wounded, not just once or even twice. They would be hospitalized, and then returned to active duty- just pushed right back into the mill again.' "

"The [Royal Hamilton Light Infantry] figured that the reinforcements sent them were so badly trained that there was just no sense in putting them in the way they were. 'they didn't know anything, poor fellows,' noted one officer whose company strength was down from over one hundred to a mere forty five men. 'So we had to send them back and train them ourselves. Then we gradually brought them up under fire as they were required. But you couldn't , in a few fast lessons, hope to teach all the tricks.'"

"Those lads are so inexperienced, the cost will be not only their own lives but the lives of many of the older fellows who will inevitably try to guide and protect them." These were the word of a corporal transporting newcomers to the front lines. "He was to experience just how accurate his warning was. In the days to come, he would drive the reinforcements up to the front first thing in the morning and often pick up the same men, dead, that evening." (Dennis Whitaker and Shelagh Whitaker, Tug of War. Stoddart ,1987)

Resentment in the Army, Resentment at Home

Major Joe Pigott expresses what was a commonly held bitter opinion among officers and 'old sweat' soldiers who had to work with these new and untrained volunteers. "We had only feelings of disgust, of contempt for the Prime Minister and the politicians who were not facing the realities of the crisis, and most of all, we felt anger. The feeling was becoming very deep seated in all the troops that they were being used and being sacrificed by their government in order not to face public opinion."

Public scandal in Canada broke out in the fall of 1944 regarding the practice of sending untrained men into battle, and Ottawa suffered. This was largely a result of the efforts of Major Conn Smythe, Maple Leaf Gardens founder, who had been severely injured in France, and discharged from battle. Upon his arrival at home, he risked being court marshaled by inducing the editor of The Globe and Mail to publish his story about the crisis. The headlines read "Untrained Troops Hazard At Front". For most civilians, this was the first indication of mismanagement. Ralston was sent overseas to inspect the situation. He was skeptical that the situation was really so bad. On October 2, in Italy, he announced "No commanding Officer was ever satisfied with the standard of training that reinforcements received". When he arrived back in Ottawa, he made no mention of the quality of training undergone by reinforcements. But he changed his stance on the issue of conscription and began to insist that the infantry-trained draftees in the Home Defense division be sent abroad. His appropriate assessment of the scope of the crisis gave rise to a tumult in Parliament. Soon followed Ralston's own resignation, the appointment of McNaughton as Minister of Defense, the removal of Lieutenant Colonel Stuart, and finally, on November 22, Prime Minister King's belated decision to send the trained conscripts overseas.

(Dennis Whitaker and Shelagh Whitaker, Tug of War. Stoddart ,1987)