New Book About Canadian Army in World War II

[Jim O]

Cinderella Army:

The Canadians in Northwest Europe 1944-45

By Terry Copp

University of Toronto Press


How did we do? The performance of Canada's army in the Second World War is sparkled with controversy, a scholarly debate dosed with rancour. Stakes are high. To read the bloody, terrible history of gorgeously named infantry and armoured battalions (the Manitoba Dragoons, the Regina Rifles, les Fusiliers de Mont Royal, the Black Watch et al.) is, apparently, to scan the tea leaves of national identity. Are Canadians natural, untutored fighters, capable of overcoming native squabbles and disunion to serve the cause of humanity? Or are we amateurs on the world stage, permanent understudies who, handed a leading role through temporary illness or incapacity of a principle, muff the chance?

Terry Copp has become the pre-eminent historian of the Canadian army in northwest Europe during the Second World War. His approach, thankfully, is to let go the baggage of disjunctive nationalism and latent hysteria. Through scholarship and legwork, he aims to do the First Canadian Army the honour and justice of detailed, close-to-the-ground study.

In a previous work, Fields of Fire, Copp assessed Canadian operations in Normandy during the summer of 1944, a performance that had been called mediocre and sometimes fatally incompetent by historians such as C. P. Stacey (The Victory Campaign), John English (The Canadian Army and the Normandy Campaign: A Study of Failure in High Command) and Max Hastings (Overlord: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy), not to mention filmmaker Brian McKenna (The Valour and the Pity).

Were the Canadian battalions in northwest Europe "a weak and flawed instrument," as Hastings has insisted, and no match for the Germans? The perceived problem -- apart from unfocused training and the tactical clumsiness common to all the Allied "civilian armies" -- was a chronic manpower crisis due to the unavailability of Canadian conscripts. The conscript shortage was due to Quebec's reluctance to participate fully in the war effort. By this analysis, Canadian "failure" is thus traceable to a primal disunity at the flawed heart of Canadian nationhood.

Really?

The problems in accounting for Canadian and Allied failures in Normandy are many, starting with the fact that Canadians and their allies were, of course, victorious. We won, the Germans didn't. We must have been doing something right.

After detailed study -- often at the tactical, battalion level -- Copp delivered, in Fields, a cool and nuanced summary of Canadian performance. His conclusion, inescapable and quite properly Canadian in its reasonableness and lucidity, was that our troops, like all others engaged in Normandy, even the renowned Wehrmacht, fought sometimes poorly, sometimes superbly. Performance and combat effectiveness varied from day to day, brigade to brigade, battalion to battalion, fight to fight.

In Cinderella Army: The Canadians in Northwest Europe 1944-45, Copp extends his enquiry from the conclusion of the Normandy campaign in August, 1944, to the end of the war. He covers the dash to the Seine; the siege and clearing of the Channel ports; the bitter, soggy battles for the Scheldt estuary, and the nasty, costly fighting in the German Hochswald. Once again, he finds that generalizations about performance of units are meaningful only for those who don't understand the fluid and slippery nature of combat, and the constancy of change and turnover within Canadian corps, divisions and battalions, due to a heartbreaking level of casualties.

The officers and men of the Black Watch in February, 1945, for example, were not the soldiers who had filled the ranks in July, 1944. Most of those were dead, or wounded, or suffering "battle exhaustion."

There were good days, there were terrible days: This was war, and First Canadian Army continued to experience success and failure at all levels. By early 1945, the Canadians were as good-to-go and combat-effective as any others in the Allied armies. Despite high casualties, and partly thanks to a transfer of First Canadian Division troops from Italy, the army maintained effective fighting strength right up to the end of the war, during a phase when the British and Americans were suffering serious replacement shortages.

At the strategic level, the Canadians were of course subject to British and U.S. decision makers, who did not exactly keep the interests of Canada closest and dearest to their hearts. General Bernard Law Montgomery, commander of (British and Canadian) 21st Army Group, was capable of clear and aggressive thinking, had a professional's grasp of strategy and was a superb motivator of (some) troops -- but had an unquenchable ego that did not allow him to listen to his subordinates. Especially when they were colonial amateurs.

The battles to seize the approaches to the port of Antwerp are really the unknown story of the Second World War combat, and Copp knows his (muddy) ground here. Montgomery, obsessed with his "single thrust to the Ruhr," was unwilling to assign priority to clearing the logistically essential Scheldt estuary, and reluctant to give credit to the Canadians (and British) who fought and, too often, died in the sodden Dutch polders.

It was some of the most gruelling fighting of the war, comparable only to winter battles in Russia, with troops freezing in waterlogged ground and fighting house-by-house: 1,418 -- mostly young -- Canadians were killed in action along the Scheldt in autumn, 1944; 4,954 were wounded.

Copp's analysis shows the Canadian army operating as an effective combat power capable of complex operations and (sometimes) dreadful mistakes, led by officers who were frequently excellent and occasionally dense. He suggests the Germans were not always the superbly efficient, embattled fighting machine some historians describe. The Wehrmacht and SS suffered from a habit of rigid loyalty to doctrines like "immediate counterattack," thereby squandering resources in operations that became as predictable to their opponents as cold Dutch rain.

The Canadians were willing to learn from mistakes, and consistently applied the lessons of hard-won tactical experience against a fanatical opponent, whose determined resistance only brought more bombing, death and destruction to their own civilian population.

By the end of 1944, 3rd Canadian Division had suffered the highest number of casualties of any British or Canadian division in Northwest Europe, with 2nd Canadian Division ranking a close second. Overall Canadian casualties were 20 per cent higher than in comparable British formations, because of the much greater number of days the Canadians were involved in close combat. Third Canadian Division was, in Copp's assessment, the most effective division in 21st Army Group.

The Allied war effort was sometimes garbled by poor leadership at the highest levels. Copp suggests that Eisenhower, as overall commander of the Allied armies, had trouble asserting authority over the brilliant, insubordinate and sometimes strategically out-to-lunch Monty. General Guy Simonds of Canadian II Corps, despite flaws, was "the outstanding corps commander" of 21st Army Group. General Chris Vokes of 4th Canadian Armoured Division was "unfit to command."

Copp's method has weaknesses as well as strengths. A revisionist, operating on the sharp end of enquiry, he has walked the battlegrounds, accumulated and assessed the data, and knows how to interpret a fight. He has the information at his fingertips, but he is not much interested in telling a broader story. Readers who have reason to hope for a masterful and authoritative summary of the fighting in northwest Europe from a uniquely Canadian perspective will have to look elsewhere.

Or wait until Terry Copp decides that sufficient groundwork has been done, and it is time to step back and give us an equally nuanced and argumentative, but wider, account of Canada's war-making. Such a book, encompassing personalities, politics and strategy at the highest and lowest civilian and military levels, would complement this powerfully detailed picture of determination, squalor and heroism at the sharp end.


Source: globeandmail.com : Home

[Whiterook]

Good grief, how did I miss this one? Thanks Jim!!! Hard to find good Canadian Army books. Even in Canada, go figure, on my trips there, I found very few. I'll check this one out!!!