Embarkation was a nightmare. Some ships arrived loaded down with private cargo and 132,275 bags of flour, a gift from Canada to the British people. Battalions were marched aboard only to be marched off again when there was not enough room, and extra ships had to be chartered to carry the overflow. Units were separated from their baggage and mounted units were separated from their horses. Indeed, the 16th Battalion complained that its horses were put on one ship, their harness on another, the wagons on another, and the wheels on yet another! One ship set sail with the officers and men bearing no relation to one another, while the hold was filled with a miscellaneous collection of unidentified baggage. When the last of thirty-one ships finally cleared the harbor, 863 horses and 4,512 tons of baggage, plus vehicles and ammunition and even a few soldiers, were left behind. Even then, ammunition had to be ferried out to the ships, to comply with a belated order requiring so many rounds per ship.[21] William Price, the businessman who had built Valcartier, was in charge of the docks and the embarkation and must be held responsible for all this, although his biographer places the blame on “inexperienced staff,” “embarkation orders disregarded, congestion in the port of Quebec, and vessels ill-suited to transporting cannons and trucks.”[22]
After waiting off Gaspé for six British cruisers to arrive, the great flotilla finally sailed on September 29, accompanied by a ship carrying the Newfoundland Regiment. Colonel J. A. Currie later claimed, presumably with a straight face, that because of “the moral character and influence” of the men in the first contingent, “never since the days of Cromwell’s New Army did the Empire possess a more athletic, courageous or God-fearing army than the First Canadian Contingent.”[23] If that was pompous and silly, Hughes managed to top it, telling the troops, presumably with a straight face, that “the world regards you as a marvel.”[24]
Meanwhile, Canada’s navy had also mobilized for action. Although it was new, it didn’t amount to much, even though at the time of Confederation the new Dominion possessed the world’s fourth largest merchant marine fleet, and the actual navy was only four years old.
There had never been much interest in naval defense, largely because Canadians expected the Royal Navy to protect them, but also no doubt because the political center of the country was in Ottawa, a long way from the sea. But two things happened in the early years of the new century. Germany decided to build a navy large enough to threaten, or at least challenge, the supremacy of the Royal Navy, and it, in response, redefined its role to focus on capital ships that would concentrate in home waters to protect Britain itself.
As part of this new policy, Britain signed a defense treaty with Japan, effectively entrusting it with the protection of Britain’s Far Eastern interests. At the same time, it reduced the North America and West Indies squadron to a single destroyer based at Bermuda, transferred the naval bases at Halifax and Esquimalt to Canada, and withdrew their garrisons.
What this meant was that Canada’s naval defense now effectively depended on the United States, Canada’s only potential enemy. While no one seriously thought by this time that the United States would ever attack Canada, it was awkward to realize that the nation’s security depended on a neighboring state whose interests could hardly always be expected to coincide with those of Canada. As the Canadian naval historian Roger Sarty has pointed out, the danger was “no longer invasion, but the loss of Canadian sovereignty if Canada were too dependent upon protection supplied by the American fleet.”[25]
What was to be done? The British government pressured Canada and the other Dominions to contribute to the cost of building battleships for the Royal Navy, whose mandate still included the protection of the empire’s vast maritime trade. Laurier knew that this was not possible politically because it would arouse enormous opposition in Quebec and even among many English Canadians. He therefore developed a plan to militarize the existing Fisheries Protection Service, which was operated by the Department of Marine and Fisheries. It was a start.
The Fisheries Protection Service already possessed eight armed cruisers, six icebreakers, and nearly twenty other auxiliary vessels, and in 1904, two high-speed, steel-hulled cruisers, armed with quick-firing guns, were acquired. At the same time, a naval militia was established and plans were announced to create a naval military academy. To carry out these initiatives an effective minister—Louis-Philippe Brodeur—was appointed and Rear Admiral Sir Charles Kingsmill, a Canadian who had enjoyed a distinguished career in the Royal Navy, was appointed Director of Marine Services (later redesignated Director of the Naval Service). The mandate of the naval service was to patrol the country’s coasts, primarily to police the fisheries but also to play a role in coastal defense if necessary. This role was limited, however, by the fact that Canada as a Dominion had jurisdiction only over territorial waters extending three miles from shore.
When the Anglo-German naval armaments race exploded into a crisis with the revelation in March 1909 that Britain was falling seriously behind, the British appealed to the Dominion governments for greater assistance, a call naturally taken up by the Conservative party and many newspapers in English Canada. Laurier, recognizing that his cautious and gradualist approach to the evolution of a Canadian navy was no longer politically acceptable, responded by announcing that Canada would build its own local navy rather than contribute to the costs of the Royal Navy. Australia had already done this, providing a useful precedent.
This compromise initially seemed acceptable to both Quebec Nationalists and English-Canadian imperialists, but not for long. With the British politicians and media panicking at the thought that Germany might actually achieve naval superiority within the next five years—a pot stirred enthusiastically by Winston Churchill—an imperial conference was called in the summer of 1909 to address the problem. The outcome was that Australia and Canada affirmed that they would build navies which would, of course, cooperate with the Royal Navy in time of war, while the smaller Dominions—Newfoundland, New Zealand, and two of the South African colonies—agreed to make financial contributions.
The Admiralty, presumably trying to be helpful, recommended that Canada build five cruisers and six destroyers which could not only patrol the country’s coasts but also assist the Royal Navy in the protection of shipping on the high seas. Rather surprisingly, Laurier agreed to this, immediately provoking the Quebec Nationalists who had accepted the idea of a modest fleet for coastal patrolling but vigorously opposed a more powerful navy whose real purpose in their opinion would be to collaborate with the Royal Navy in foreign wars.
Meanwhile, Laurier had proudly declared that the ships for this navy would be built in Canada, provoking many in English Canada to protest that this would delay their actual construction for years because Canada had no shipyards with the expertise or experience to build modern warships. They argued that, while this should be the long-term goal, in order to meet the immediate crisis, Canada should contribute to the cost of building ships for the Royal Navy at British shipyards. This was the position taken by Borden, the leader of the Conservatives, no doubt because he was under intense pressure from English-Canadian imperialists, but also—to be fair—because he genuinely believed that the German threat was both real and imminent.
Parliament passed the legislation establishing the navy as proposed by Laurier in March 1910, and two ships were purchased from the Royal Navy to be used primarily for training purposes. HMS Niobe, an 11,000-ton cruiser considered obsolete not because of its age—it was only eleven years old—or because its armament was out-of-date but because it lacked a full armored belt, soon arrived in Halifax, and HMS Rainbow, a 3,600-ton light cruiser, was sent to Esquimalt on the west coast.
That same year the Royal Naval College was established at Halifax with ten cadets. Among them were Victor Brodeur, son of the minister, and Percy Nelles, both of whom eventually rose to the rank of admiral. Indeed, as Chief of the Naval Staff from 1933 to 1943, Nelles was “the most important professional leader the navy has ever known.”[26] An
other member of the first class was William Maitland-Dougall, who subsequently transferred into the Royal Navy and commanded a British submarine in the English Channel during the First World War until his vessel was mistakenly destroyed by a French airship in March 1918. He was the first and remains the only Canadian submarine commander ever to have been killed in action.[27]
There were, of course, the inevitable teething pains in developing the navy. The Royal Navy provided training personnel, and the 1911 Imperial Conference agreed that because the new Dominion navies were under the exclusive control of their respective governments, their ships could operate beyond the three-mile territorial limit. The Admiralty insisted, however, that they fly the Royal Navy’s ensign, which they did into the 1960s. The only concessions to Canadian identity—and they were important to Canadians—were that the Canadian Naval Service was redesignated the Royal Canadian Navy and the names of its ships were allowed to be identified as HMCS instead of HMS.[28]
This concession was of little significance in 1911, however, because there weren’t any ships other than Niobe and Rainbow. The government did attempt to move ahead with construction, but it hadn’t made any progress when the 1911 federal election took place. Laurier’s naval policy was one of the major issues in the election, and he was hammered for not providing the necessary support to the Royal Navy while at the same proposing a trade agreement that the Conservatives argued would surely lead sooner or later to Canada’s absorption into the United States. In Quebec, the Nationalists formed what Laurier called an “unholy alliance” with Borden’s Conservatives, and together they defeated the government and made Borden Prime Minister.
Meanwhile, Niobe’s first cruise, from Halifax to Yarmouth in July 1911, turned into a fiasco. The ship ran aground near Cape Sable (off the southwestern coast of Nova Scotia) on its return voyage and had to be towed back to Halifax, where it took sixteen months to repair the damage. Marc Milner, historian of the Royal Canadian Navy, suggests, unkindly but accurately, that “the grounding of the flagship of Laurier’s new navy was a metaphor for his government’s whole naval policy.”[29]
The new Borden government tried valiantly but failed utterly to make any progress on its approach to the naval issue over the next three years. Recruiting for the navy was suspended, although the Royal Naval College was allowed to continue training cadets while Borden tried to pass legislation authorizing the $35 million in aid that Churchill, now First Lord of the Admiralty, said was needed. After the Liberal-dominated Senate vetoed the bill, the naval budget was slashed, and the number of personnel shrank from more than 800 in 1911 to about 350 in 1913, most of them British sailors on loan. Indeed, in the last two years before the war more men deserted from the navy than joined it, and the government made no effort to find them. It did try, in a roundabout way, to provide support for the Royal Navy by establishing the Royal Naval Canadian Volunteer Reserve (RNCVR) in May 1914. Its planned complement of 3,600 men was intended not to serve in the Canadian navy but to augment the personnel of the Royal Navy in wartime.[30]
C. P. Stacey, the eminent Canadian military historian, concluded bluntly that Borden’s naval policy “cannot be considered anything but a national disaster” because it “produced the bitterest of controversies but no ships.” Equally important, it “damaged Canada’s reputation in the Empire and would have done more harm had it not been followed so quickly by the outbreak of war.”[31] Notwithstanding these frustrations, the naval staff in Ottawa did draft a war plan, however, and vessels from the Fisheries Protection Service took part in naval exercises, including practicing minesweeping in the Halifax approaches and functioning as a harbor examination service.[32]
Canada’s only warship capable of going to sea and doing anything at all useful in August 1914 was HMCS Rainbow, although the government did unexpectedly acquire two submarines. Responding to public concerns about the German navy’s Asiatic Squadron that was known to be operating somewhere in the Pacific, British Columbia’s Premier Richard McBride purchased two submarines under construction for the government of Chile at a private shipyard in Seattle. The cost was $1.15 million, and as Milner observes, “it says a great deal about the way naval policy was made, that a provincial government could spend twice the 1914 naval budget in the dark of night on two small submarines.”[33] The federal government quickly purchased them from British Columbia, and naval reservists were mustered to man them.
The Rainbow was the only British or Canadian warship in the entire eastern Pacific when the war broke out, but it had functioned only as a training ship since being acquired by Canada and was “vastly out-gunned, manned by reservists and carrying only target ammunition.”[34] Nevertheless, it was what was available, and its captain, Walter Hose, a former Royal Navy officer now serving in the Royal Canadian Navy, bravely put to sea.
Hose was well aware that the German naval squadron included two modern armored cruisers, Gneisenau and Scharnhorst, whose gunnery was renowned and whose armor could not be penetrated by Rainbow’s guns except at point-blank range, meaning that, as Milner puts it, they “could eat Rainbow for breakfast.”[35] The German squadron also included four modern light cruisers that were newer and faster and had longer-range guns than Rainbow, meaning that they could shell the Canadian vessel from a distance with impunity.
Luckily, Rainbow just narrowly missed encountering the German naval squadron off San Francisco, so just the fact that it was not destroyed may have made Canadians on the west coast think that they were being protected. Meanwhile, the two submarines were put into service protecting the west coast, even though they had no torpedoes, gyroscopes, spare tools, or even manuals![36] In fact, Canada’s west coast was not really being defended by the Rainbow and the two submarines and would have to depend on the Japanese navy, which did send a battleship and two armored cruisers to patrol the west coast of North America as long as Admiral Maximilien von Spee’s German squadron remained in eastern Pacific waters.[37]
The issue came to a head when von Spee’s squadron was intercepted by Rear Admiral Christopher Cradock’s Royal Navy squadron off Coronel, Chile. In the ensuing battle on November 1, the Germans inflicted a sharp victory, destroying two of Cradock’s ships, one of which was his flagship, HMS Good Hope. When it went down, it took with it the cream of the Royal Naval College of Canada’s first cadets, four young men who had joined Cradock’s ship when it visited Halifax in August. Arthur Silver, William Palmer, Malcolm Cann, and John Hatheway were Canada’s first battle casualties in the war.[38]
1. “Kenneth Ford,” speaking in L. M. Montgomery, Rilla of Ingleside (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1921), 47.
2. For an entertaining description of militia training at Petawawa before the war, see Frederic C. Curry, From the St. Lawrence to the Yser with the First Canadian Brigade (Toronto: McClelland, Goodchild & Stewart, 1916), 11–23. Curry described Petawawa as “fifty miles of sandy hills, covered here and there with second growth scrub.” In the summer, when the annual militia camp took place, it was extremely hot and humid, and “other attractions” included “sand fleas, mosquitoes, and black flies, so that after passing through a fortnight in Petewawa [sic] one is versed in all modern methods of warfare, including the subterranean and the aerial.” Curry, 11, 12.
3. Curry, 81.
4. On Price’s complex business career, see Jean Benoit, “Sir William Price,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/price_william_15E.html (accessed March 28, 2014).
5. Arthur Hunt Chute, The Real Front (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1918), 9. The first commander of Valcartier was Colonel Victor Williams, a Canadian cavalry officer who was adjutant general at militia headquarters when the war broke out. When the first contingent sailed for England in October 1914, he went with them and commanded the Eighth Brigade until June 1916, when he was severely wounded and captured at the battle for Mount Sorrel. After the war, he was promoted to Major General and commanded Military District 2 (Toronto), then was Commissioner of the On
tario Provincial Police from 1922 to 1939.
6. Quoted in Vance, Maple Leaf, 29.
7. Zuehlke, Brave Battalion, 8.
8. Cook, At the Sharp End, 33.
9. Baldwin, “Holding the Line,” 4.
10. Morton and Granatstein, Marching to Armageddon, 5.
11. Gwyn, Tapestry of War, 54–57.
12. Jones, Fighting the Hun, 6.
13. Chute, 9.
14. Chute, 11–12.
15. Vance, Maple Leaf, 48.
16. Larry Worthington, Amid the Guns Below: The Story of the Canadian Corps, 1914–1918 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1965), 5.
17. Jones, 16–17.
18. Strictly speaking, No. 2 Stationary Hospital was the first Canadian military unit to go to France, arriving at Boulogne in November 1914. On the 27th, it converted the Hôtel du Golf at Le Touquet into a 300-bed hospital, the first of a series of Canadian base hospitals along the French coast between Boulogne and Dieppe. But the Princess Pats were the first Canadian combat troops to go to France.
19. Jones, 21–22.
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