Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/November 2021/Book reviews


 * By Hawkeye7



Now that most of the generals have biographies, Australian historians have followed up with studies of the battalion commanders. In this book Canadian historian Geoffrey Hayes takes a look at junior officers, the lieutenants and captains. The pre-war Canadian Army was small, so nearly all the junior officers were commissioned during the war, although some were regulars who were commissioned from the ranks. Unlike the Australian Army, the Canadian Army of the Second World War was dominated by Permanent Force (regular) officers, who occupied nearly all the top jobs.

Like their Australian, British and American counterparts, the Canadian Army was soon confronted by two problems: finding officer material for a rapidly expanding army, and then appropriately training them for the task ahead. Canadians naturally compared their Second World War Army with that of the Canadian Expeditionary Force in the First World War, but the latter had much more time to gain experience.

Indeed, the Canadian Army's biggest problem was that it did not really enter combat until the Sicilian campaign in July 1943, and main body of the First Canadian Army was not engaged until a year after that. When combat did begin, losses were very high. The book notes how junior officers were far more likely to become casualties than the enlisted ranks, and in Normandy officers did not even reach the six-week life expectancy of a junior officer in the Great War British Army. The Canadian Army thought it had such a surplus of officers that it could give 673 to the British Army under CANLOAN. These officers faired no better than those in the Canadian Army; 69 per cent became casualties.

The book has weaknesses. The role of class in Canadian society remains elusive. Was Canada a more egalitarian society than the notoriously class-conscious Britain or the United States? Did it aspire to be one, like Australia did? There are hints of this, but nothing explicitly stated, in Harry Crerar's (erroneous) contention that education had levelled the social playing field. (p. 72) As the book points out, tertiary education before 1939 in Canada was still very much the domain of the upper and upper-middle classes.

"Crerar's forced logic", the book informs us, "betrays his background as the wealthy son of a Hamilton lawyer. Social class mattered in the wartime army, just as it did in the rest of Canadian society. The invention of the officer was partly an attempt to reconcile the army's demands with the pervasive expectations of the Canadian middle class." (p. 7) How much it mattered is not detailed. (And we're none the wiser as to whether the reference to Hamilton is significant or not.) It is also noted that Crerar had British staff officer training (at the Staff College, Camberley, and the Imperial Defence College) but the degree of British influence on the Canadian Army is not explored, most likely because it affected the more senior officers.

The book is at it best when it details the efforts to build and improve officer training, and the debate over whether it was better to conduct this in the UK or Canada. And the debate over whether the best officers are ones who are better educated, or those who rose from the ranks, although this is another issue raised and discussed at length but ultimately left unresolved. In many European armies, you have to serve in the ranks first, although often for only a nominal amount of time. This makes no sense at all to a British mind. Interestingly, the Canadian Army trialled but did not adopt the British Army's use of psychological tests to find officers.

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