by Gwynne Dyer
Pickersgill managed to make his way from Paris to Vichy France, the part of the country run by a collaborationist regime but free of German soldiers, and it took him another four months to make his way to neutral Portugal and from there to England. But he arrived in London a changed man. He was angry about what he had seen in France: “I’m feeling too belligerent to be happy 4,000 miles away from the Nazis,” he wrote to a friend in Winnipeg. He was too sophisticated an observer to be taken in by the war propaganda about a crusade for freedom, but he may also have shared Escott Reid’s belief that the balance of power was now in danger of shifting seriously to Canada’s disadvantage. Finally (and perhaps decisively), he was swept up in the excitement of great events.
I’ve been in a permanent state of exhilaration since March 8 last (the date when I made my get-away) on the crest of a wave which kept getting higher and higher as each frontier was crossed, and which now, instead of subsiding, seems to be going on up. I don’t know where it’s going to land me, but it’s damned good while it lasts.
Frank Pickersgill, January 1943
Frank Pickersgill’s brother Jack, Prime Minister King’s private secretary, telegraphed for him to come home, but he refused. On arrival in England, Pickersgill enlisted in the Canadian army, and immediately volunteered for service in the British “Special Operations Executive,” which controlled a network of undercover agents in France. “I’m afraid I’m in the war up to my neck,” he said. “There are certain jobs I can do better than others.” The wave broke in June 1943: Pickersgill was arrested almost immediately after he parachuted into France.
At the time when Frank Pickersgill finally got into the war, the Canadian army was still mostly sitting in England or at home. Only a few thousand Canadian soldiers had seen any fighting, and only for a few days, in the disaster at Hong Kong in early 1942 and on the Dieppe raid in August of the same year. But the Royal Canadian Air Force was in battle every day, and by now most of its pilots were flying bombers over Germany.
When you first join a squadron, nobody talks to you because they don’t expect you to be around very long. If you got through your first five trips then you became more or less an accepted fact. There was a bit of hope for you, so somebody would begin to take you on—not with close friendship, but at least they would talk to you. And then after a month or so you would get into the mess with a group that had probably ten trips in, and you stayed with these people and they’re the only ones you remember. You never knew the new guys coming in, because it wasn’t worth your effort to get to know them. And then as you got up to the end of your tour you became known to all those new fellows, but you didn’t know them.
It was a peculiar society: mess life went on around them, rather than with them. You never bought one a beer. The odd guy coming back on a second tour that you had known, the boys would buy him a beer and then guess how many trips he’d do before he went down, just to see how he’d take it. But it was a rather sad society.
George Laing, RCAF bomber pilot
Beginning in 1942 the British committed themselves fully to a campaign of mass bomber raids whose purpose was to destroy the German economy. It was known as “strategic” bombing, and it was the quintessential weapon of total war. If a country’s industrial strength was now the main source of its military strength, then it was also the logical target of a war-winning strategy. Both the British and American air forces had believed in this strategy for many years, and Canadian airmen (insofar as they dabbled in strategic doctrine) followed suit. Initially, the idea was to hit factories, railway yards and the like: civilians would obviously be killed in the process, but they were not the primary target. However, the bombers had to fly at night in order to have any chance of survival at all, and analysis of photographs eventually showed that most bombs were not falling within miles of their targets.
So Sir Arthur Harris, known as “Bomber” Harris to civilians and as “Butch” (short for “butcher”) to the aircrew, changed the policy. Instead of trying to hit pinpoint targets they could not find, the aircrew would mass-bomb large areas—working-class suburbs, mostly—in an attempt to kill the people who worked in the factories. The heavy bombers were typically loaded with one 4,000-lb high-explosive bomb and hundreds of large and small incendiary bombs. The high explosives smashed water mains and blew in doors and windows over a wide area, creating suitable conditions for the spread of the thousands of fires set by the incendiaries. The ideal result was a firestorm, where all the separate fires joined together into an inferno that incinerated a huge area of the city and almost everybody in it:
Most of the times it didn’t work, but it was supposed to work as it did in Darmstadt and in Dresden and in Hamburg—burn them down.
We were not after the town of Darmstadt, we were after the chemical works between Darmstadt and Frankfurt, and they smoked us out, so we marked Darmstadt, and I don’t think that was incorrect. That was the RAF’s opinion: if you can’t get the factory, get the people. But that was a terrible night. I watched that place and it.… There weren’t too many burners, you know.
George Laing
Moral considerations aside, the strategy made sense in principle: the main objective in total war is the enemy’s economy, and an economy is mostly people. It just wasn’t very cost-effective in practice, because the bombers couldn’t do enough damage to justify the terrible loss rate they suffered. On average, each sortie by a seven-man bomber crew produced (if that’s the right word) three dead Germans, of whom maybe one was a production worker—the rest being mainly women and children. And after an average of only fourteen sorties, the crew themselves were dead or prisoners-of-war.
By 1943 fully one-third of British war production was being devoted to the bomber offensive against Germany—and around a fifth of all the aircrew in Bomber Command were Canadians. The Commonwealth Air Training Plan turned them out, and Bomber Command ate them up: out of one group of fifty navigators who trained together, five completed their first tour (about thirty missions), ten were shot down and taken prisoner, and the rest were killed.
Q. What’s it actually feel like when you’re getting flak?
Rather a lonely feeling. You wish someone else would come over and share it with you—and if you could get someone else to get it, then you’d get away from it. The same with searchlights: somebody would get caught in the cone, and then you’d go in beside him. He’s in big, deep trouble, so you get in beside him and try not to share it, try and get through. It worked quite successfully, especially in searchlights, because [after the bomber the searchlights were tracking was shot down] they’d move back and try to pick someone up a bit further back in the target area.
Preferably if you could drag back a little or speed up a little, and use the other chap. I wasn’t above doing that: get to the target, get your picture and get out.… Just survival.
Q. Nasty business.
It was. And frightening.
George Laing
It was a nasty business—and making it more efficient would just make it nastier. (There was already a group of physicists working secretly in the New Mexico desert to find a way to destroy a whole city with only one plane carrying one bomb.) But the bomber crews couldn’t be blamed for the strategy, and in 1943 their odds of dying were still far higher than those faced by the civilians they were trying to kill. Two-thirds of Canada’s dead in the war up to 1943 were from the air force.
They say ten percent got through their first tour, and ten percent through their second.
Q. That makes you one in a hundred.
Yeah, there’s not too many two-tour guys kicking around.
Q. You knew those figures, didn’t you?
Not really. We didn’t play.… I had a friend from Saskatchewan, Yellow Grass, and he played with numbers. He said it was impossible to do a tour. But he was shot down on his first trip—they proved him right.
George Laing
On the whole, Mackenzie King’s strategy of limiting Canada’s commitment
s and casualties had been a brilliant success: in the first four years of the Second World War, Canada lost only eleven thousand men killed—less than a fifth of its losses in the same period in the First World War. The army’s turn was coming, though, and when it finally did, it would destroy King’s strategy. He had got away with it for so long principally because the Allies had not been involved in major ground combat on the continent since mid-1940. When armies fight, however, they use up men in huge numbers, and by 1943 the Canadian army in England was getting itchy. So were its generals in Ottawa: as General Ken Stuart, the chief of the general staff, told the prime minister, they felt they had a good army now, but it wasn’t being used.
Q. What did you think about the attitude that simply wanted to get some troops “blooded,” to be crude about it?
Well, “blooded” makes it rather crude, but the troops that were in England had to have experience of actual warfare. There was the feeling that we hadn’t really been taking part in the war. I wasn’t going around taking a poll of the opinions of the rank and file, but I think they all felt: “Well, we’re here. We were told we were coming to the war, let’s go and get some fighting. And we should not be subject to the jeers of the Americans who said, “Well, you’ve been over here for four years now. Instead of telling us what to do, why don’t you go and do something yourself?”
General “Tommy” Burns, Canadian commander in Italy
General McNaughton, the commander of the Canadian forces in England, had resisted all proposals to commit his divisions piecemeal to various peripheral theatres of the war. His policy was that the Canadian army should fight as a national unit, as it had in the First World War. Morale would be better, supply problems would be eased, and there would be less chance of Canadian divisions being sacrificed by non-Canadian commanders. But the long-awaited invasion of northwest Europe was still many months away, and the Allied armies, having cleared the Germans and Italians out of North Africa, were scheduled to attack Italy in July 1943. A lot of Canadian soldiers wanted to be in on it. McNaughton lost what was essentially a political battle to the eagerness of his subordinates and to the enthusiasm of the minister of national defence, and resigned at the end of the year.
Mackenzie King finally accepted the plan to send a Canadian Army Corps to Italy because General Stuart convinced him that battle experience in Italy would help to reduce Canadian casualties when the main assault against the Germans took place. If King had ever been a soldier, he would have known the only appropriate response: “There’s no need to practice bleeding.”
Even in Sicily the Canadians suffered 2,310 casualties—over five hundred of them fatal. The rest of the Italian campaign was arduous and bloody: so much for the “soft underbelly of Europe.” It was also acrimonious, for General “Tommy” Burns, who had lost all his illusions about glory in the trenches of the First World War, took a cautious, methodical approach to the fighting that concentrated on keeping as many Canadian soldiers alive as possible. This did not sit well with his British superiors, who saw themselves as being in some sort of race with the Americans to enter Rome first, or with some of his more fiery subordinates.
We were going forward pretty well all the time, even if not very fast, or as fast as some of the British Command thought that we ought to. But we were winning operations and not suffering too great casualties, compared to what the previous experience [First World War] had been.…
General “Tommy” Burns
Burns was ultimately relieved of his command in late 1944 for being insufficiently “aggressive,” but even in later life, he was totally unrepentant:
When I went out there with some other generals and Canadian officers after the war, I counted up through the cemeteries we visited, and during the period I was out there, there were three thousand fatal casualties in the Canadian forces out of seventy-eight thousand total numbers. Better they should come home alive than have a monument in Italy.
General “Tommy” Burns
The Italian campaign went on until the end of the war, and included the brutal battle in the small city of Ortona in December 1943, where 1,345 Canadian troops died in eight days. But the high point of the campaign was the liberation of Rome on June 4, 1944. Two days later the Allied armies finally landed in northern France, and everybody forgot about Italy.
By the latter part of 1944, the public was starting to forget about the Battle of the Atlantic, too, but it was still taking its toll. It was relatively quiet on the western side of the Atlantic, however, and there were few mines around Halifax, so the RCN’s Bangor-class minesweepers doubled as “understudy” corvettes, escorting ships on the “milk run” between St. John’s, Halifax, Boston and New York. Occasionally, though, they were asked to do some minesweeping.
I was in Chester and Captain (D) phoned and said: “Get here immediately. There’s a flap on.” And I took a cab and went to Halifax and two-thirds of the ship’s company were on Christmas leave. So I phoned the Peregrine, the base with all the poor miserable sailors that hadn’t been to sea, and they sent me a bunch of sailors, and we got to sea about three in the morning.
We had to go across the harbour and get all this minesweeping gear which we knew nothing about, and I found a manual in the confidential books and we went minesweeping. I remember having a manual on the bridge.
Craig Campbell
Two-thirds of the sailors who boarded HMCS Clayoquot that evening had never been to sea before, so perhaps they did not notice the captain hurriedly mugging up on minesweeping. It turned out not to be necessary. Campbell’s ship had been sent out because a merchant vessel had run aground off Halifax the previous day after an explosion thought to have been caused by a mine. But it was soon realized that it had been torpedoed: there was a submarine in the vicinity. So Clayoquot and two other escorts were ordered to conduct an anti-submarine sweep fifteen miles ahead of a troopship that was passing through the area. It was a purely routine operation: Campbell didn’t know, as he waited for the executive order to take up his position on the screen, that in turning onto that course he would be heading straight for U-806.
As a matter of fact I was in my cabin reading an “interesting” book, and I told the Officer of the Watch: “When you get the executive signal, give me a shout.” I had a voice-pipe above my bunk, and he called me and said:
“Sir, we’ve got the executive signal.” I said: “Well, away you go, full ahead both, I’ll be up in a moment.”
So I finished, you know, the paragraph—it was a rather exciting part—jumped into my sea-boots, went up to the bridge and took over the watch. And the next thing I knew, the ship disintegrated.
Craig Campbell
The German submarine (whose officers Campbell met after the war) had been attempting to get into position to sink one of the merchant ships in the area, but suddenly Clayoquot was heading straight for it. Convinced that he was under attack, the U-boat’s captain turned his stern toward the ship and fired an acoustic homing torpedo, then dove to fifty metres to escape his own weapon. The powerful Gnat torpedo homed in on the noise from Clayoquot’s screws, and sixty-nine seconds later the submariners heard it strike.
If you’re going sixteen knots and the stern’s blown off, you’re dead in your tracks, flat on your back.…
Everything is flying in all directions. I remember a depth charge landed alongside me on the bridge, and half the minesweeping winch went over the mast and landed on the fo’c’sle. There was a terrible racket because all the steam was escaping, and you couldn’t hear very much.
Then she started to list to starboard rather rapidly—and this is all in a matter of seconds—so I thought of my drill. You’re not allowed to say “abandon ship,” so I said in a loud voice: “Stand by boats and floats.” Nobody could hear me anyway—but they were busily cutting floats away.
Then the ship capsized. I was sitting on the bilge-keel, actually, on the bottom, and then I reckoned it was time to leave: I was in no rush, it was cold. The sailors were waving at
me, and I swam for it.
Craig Campbell
When Kapitänleutnant Klaus Hornbostel brought U-806 to periscope depth, all he saw was “a corvette sinking quickly with only the aft superstructure towering out of the water.… But Clayoquot was actually fairly lucky: most of the crew had mustered up forward for the forenoon rum issue, and only the eight who had been aft when the torpedo struck were killed. The twenty-seven-year-old captain, Craig Campbell, was the last to leave the ship. As he swam across to the rafts and debris the rest of the crew were clinging to—remembering to roll over on his back when the ship went down, so as to avoid serious internal injuries from the shock waves when the depth charges went off at their pre-set depth—a sailor shouted out an imaginary news bulletin: “Flash! Canadian Minesweeper Destroys German Torpedo!” They were all picked up by HMCS Fennel soon after, and so did not have to endure the cold Atlantic for very long. More than one hundred depth charges were dropped in the subsequent hunt for U-508, which lay on the bottom of the main shipping channel off Halifax Harbour for almost twelve hours before creeping away, but it survived unscathed.
Pick and Mac [Lieutenant Ken Macalister, Pickersgill’s radio operator] were given the usual beating up, rubber truncheons, electric shocks, kicks in the genitals and what have you. They were in possession of names, addresses and codes that the Germans badly wanted, but neither of them squealed.