More than 100,000 men had enlisted in 1914 and the first half of 1915, but more were clearly needed. The authorized size of the CEF was raised to 150,000, then in October 1915 to 250,000. On New Year’s Day 1916, without consulting his Cabinet, caucus, or even General Gwatkin, Borden announced that Canada would raise 500,000 men, a huge number in view of the fact that the entire population of Canada was less than 8 million, half of whom were women, and many of the male half were boys or men too old to fight. Besides, not all men of fighting age could join the army even if they wanted to because that would bring the economy to its knees.[2]
But even if the country could spare 500,000 men to go overseas, were that many men willing to go? It was apparent by 1916 that more and more of them were not. By the middle of the year, enlistments were barely keeping pace with the casualty rate despite the social and media pressure on young men to enlist. Canadian churches contributed to this pressure, arguing that Christians had a responsibility to do their duty in a just war. This was especially true of the Methodist Church, the largest Protestant denomination in the country, but it was also true of the Anglican and Presbyterian churches as well. The Roman Catholic Church, while providing chaplains to the troops, was less outspoken, presumably because the majority of its members were French Canadians.
The government, and Sam Hughes especially, have been criticized for recruiting only one French Canadian battalion—the 22nd—but in fact thirteen others were also authorized—the 41st, 57th, 69th, 150th, 163rd, 165th (New Brunswick), 167th, 178th, 189th, 206th, 230th (Eastern Ontario), 233rd (Winnipeg), and 258th—mostly in Quebec, but also in other areas containing significant francophone populations. None of them were able to recruit enough men, so they, like most other battalions, were disbanded in England and their men used to reinforce the battalions in the field. Philippe Panneton did not exaggerate by very much when he claimed in his 1938 novel, Trente Arpents, that “the peace-loving people of Quebec were not in the least interested in the Great European Madness.”[3]
Recruitment drives were held all over the country, at which politicians—including Laurier—and clergymen spoke, while recruiting leagues around the country lobbied the government to establish a national registration system and even conscription. One recruitment rally in Toronto’s Riverdale Park in August 1915 reportedly attracted 100,000 people—in a city of 400,000—who listened to military bands and were dazzled by a fireworks display, although they were spared the jingoistic oratory. About 400 men did volunteer that evening, some of them perhaps shamed into doing so by the women who circulated through the crowd placing white feathers on the lapels of apparently healthy young men not in uniform.[4]
It might seem odd that at least some women worked actively to pressure men into enlisting. Doubtless they succumbed to public pressure, such as that created by prominent activists like Emmeline Pankhurst, who toured Canada urging Canadian women to pressure their men into enlisting. “How will you like to think,” the famous suffragette asked a Vancouver audience, “that the man you love has allowed other men to do his duty for him while he sheltered himself behind the sacrifice of other men?”[5] But many women had a more practical motivation: if they had a father, brother, or son overseas, they understood the importance of there being enough recruits to reinforce them.
Even the annual exhibition of paintings by the Ontario Society of Artists in Toronto in March 1916 provided an opportunity to denounce “slackers”. In his review in the Daily Star of the exhibition, which included the first presentation of paintings by artists like Tom Thomson, Arthur Lismer, A. Y. Jackson, Lawren Harris, and J. E. H. MacDonald—who would become known and revered as the Group of Seven—the traditional painter Carl Ahrens not only attacked the shocking new post-impressionist style and vivid colors but accused these young men of being cowards because they had not enlisted. In fact, Jackson had by this time landed in France with his battalion, and Harris was only weeks away from going overseas as an officer in the Royal Grenadiers, while Lismer served as an official war artist during the war. MacDonald, who was forty-two, was rather old for overseas service, but it was undeniably true that Thomson, who was a pacifist, had not enlisted.[6]
Meanwhile, by 1916 the government was trying to enlarge the pool of men who would be accepted into the army. First to go was the minimum height requirement, but there weren’t enough under-sized men interested in enlisting, and many of those who did actually transferred from other existing battalions into the 143rd and 216th “bantam” battalions. Similarly, Japanese Canadians, who had been rejected because this was a “white man’s war,” were now accepted even though they still weren’t allowed to vote.
More significantly, Aboriginal men, whom the government had rejected for the same reason, were now welcomed, although Ottawa declined a private offer to recruit and fund a battalion comprised entirely of Six Nations (Iroquois) warriors. The reason, it seems, was that the Six Nations considered themselves a separate nation and wanted to deal with the government on a nation-to-nation basis, a complication that Ottawa did not need in 1916.
Even so, more than 4,000 Aboriginals—approximately 35% percent of all status Aboriginal males of military age—enlisted, and this figure does not include non-status Aboriginals, Métis, or Inuit for whom there are no records. The Six Nations reserves in Ontario provided 300 men, most of whom enlisted in the 114th (Brock’s Rangers) Battalion. Two of them were Tom Longboat, the famous long-distance runner, and Cameron Brant, great-great-grandson of Joseph Brant, the famous Mohawk chief who supported the British forces in New York during the American Revolution.
The 107th (Timber Wolf) Battalion, recruited in Manitoba, included more than 500 Aboriginal men, and the 52nd (Bull Moose) Battalion, recruited in northwestern Ontario, included more than 100 Anishnawbe (Ojibwa) men. Nearly half of all eligible Mi’kmaq and Maliseet men in the Maritime provinces, including every eligible male from the Mi’kmaq reserve near Sydney, Nova Scotia, enlisted. Similarly, all but three eligible men from the Algonquin reserve at Golden Lake, Ontario, enlisted, and more than half of the eligible adult males on the Cote Reserve in Saskatchewan served overseas. In British Columbia, every man between the ages of twenty and thirty-five of the Head of the Lake band enlisted. From the far north, John Campbell travelled 3,000 miles by trail, canoe, and steamer to enlist in Vancouver. These numbers were remarkable, but they are even more impressive when we bear in mind that many Aboriginal men, especially those living in remote parts of the country, spoke little or no English and knew little of the outside world.[7]
The government even agreed in 1916 to accept African Canadians, who had been volunteering from the outset of the war but in almost all cases were rejected. The Militia Department had no actual policy on the matter, but racial discrimination was normal in Canadian society at the time, and black immigrants, whether from the United States or the Caribbean, had long been discouraged. The department left the decision on which volunteers to accept or not to accept with the commanding officers of the various units. When Gwatkin, the Chief of the General Staff, was consulted, his response was to ask: “Would Canadian Negroes make good fighting men?” His answer: “I do not think so.”[8]
The 104th (New Brunswick) Battalion took the first step when it accepted twenty African Canadian volunteers, but when they reported to camp, they were rejected by the battalion’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel George Fowler. He explained to W. E. Hodgins, the Acting Adjutant General for Military District 6, that he had “been fortunate to have secured a very fine class of recruits and I did not think it fair to these men that they should have to mingle with Negroes.”[9] His view was shared by other senior officers. Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Ogilvie, who commanded Military District 11 (Victoria, British Columbia), advised the government that “white men here will not serve in the same ranks with negros [sic] or colored persons.”[10] Appeals to Hughes were in vain. In other words, despite the serious and growing shortage of volunteers, African Canadians were unwelcome.
B
rigadier General E. A. Cruikshank, commanding Military District 13 (Alberta), came up with a solution when he recommended the creation of a separate battalion for African Canadians. Gwatkin gratefully seized upon this suggestion, although stipulating that it should be a labor battalion, not an infantry battalion. At the same time, African Canadians could continue to enlist in battalions that would accept them.
The result was the formation on July 5, 1916, of the 2nd Construction Battalion, the only African Canadian battalion in Canadian history, with headquarters at Pictou, Nova Scotia. All of its officers, including Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Sutherland, were white, with the lone exception of the chaplain, the Rev. William White, a Baptist minister originally from Williamsburg, Virginia, but now living in Truro, Nova Scotia. An exception could be made for White because all chaplains were given the honorific title of captain, so that in a sense they were not “real” officers. Nonetheless, White became the only commissioned officer of African descent in any of the British Empire’s armed forces during the war.[11]
The 2nd Construction Battalion had great difficulty raising enough men, however, and after its arrival in England in March 1917, it was reduced to company status and spent the rest of the war attached to the Canadian Forestry Corps. Winston Ruck, its historian, claims that “some of the men” were eventually transferred into infantry battalions. Oddly, when the 106th Battalion was authorized at about the same time as the 2nd Construction Battalion with headquarters also in Truro, it was ordered to accept African Canadian volunteers, and it did accept about sixteen. Like all other new battalions, it was broken up in England to provide reinforcements for the battalions already in the field.
This change in policy at Militia Headquarters doubtless reflected the magnitude of the manpower crisis because, when the government introduced conscription a couple of months later, it applied to African Canadian men as well as European Canadians. The government was, however, dealing with an undeniably difficult issue in view of the racial prejudice prevalent in Canadian society at this time. Some European Canadian men objected to serving alongside African Canadians, regardless of government policy. Isaac Phills, a native of St. Vincent in the Caribbean who had immigrated to Sydney, Nova Scotia, later recalled that, after training and living in integrated quarters in Canada, he and other African Canadian soldiers were placed in a segregated unit and assigned to fatigue and labor duties when they got overseas.[12]
Danielle Pittman, who has examined the experience of the 2nd Construction Company in the war, concluded that African Canadian soldiers “were usually treated as equals in France, and the majority of European Canadians seem to have had no issue with them.”[13] There was a riot among the Canadian troops that many thought was a race riot at the Kinmel Park demobilization camp in Wales on January 7, 1919. Two days later, however, several European Canadian soldiers at Witley Camp stormed the local police station to free a decorated African Canadian soldier who had been arrested, in their view unfairly.[14]
Meanwhile, the manpower situation became more critical in 1917 because Russia’s withdrawal from the war meant that Germany could transfer large numbers of troops from the Eastern Front to the Western Front. Aside from the measures already taken, as described above, there was another one which Sam Hughes had thought up even before there was a manpower problem. It was to recruit Americans living in Canada or the border states. Several thousand Americans, some of whom were already in Canada for various reasons, had already enlisted in the army, and others had deliberately crossed the border in order to enlist, so it was clear that there was a pool of potential recruits, at least until the United States entered the war.
Foreign recruiting violated U.S. neutrality laws, of course, and Canada’s Militia Act clearly stated that recruits had to be British subjects. Hughes was not the sort of man to be deterred by such considerations, however, and this problem had been evaded from the outset by having Americans who enlisted in Canada falsely declare their place of enlistment as their place of residence. Hughes now ambitiously authorized the creation of five battalions—the 97th, 211th, 212th, 213th, and 237th—which he proposed to organize into a brigade to be known as the American Legion.
Americans living in Canada were encouraged to join one of these battalions, and agents were sent into the United States to recruit men there as well. It was not long before American consuls in various Canadian cities were complaining of public displays of American emblems at the Legion’s recruiting offices. Indeed, the 97th Battalion’s colors actually included the American flag. Secretary of State Robert Lansing protested to the British ambassador, who passed his complaint along to the governor general, who ordered Hughes to stop recruiting in the United States. Typically, Hughes ignored him and expanded the campaign. More complaints came from newspapers in various American cities, and an official of the Department of Agriculture in St. Louis even warned men that a Canadian labor recruiting program then being promoted in the area was actually a conspiracy to lure U.S. citizens into the Canadian army.[15] Nonetheless, some 2,700 American men did enlist, one of whom was Charles Botsford of Ogdensburg, New York, who travelled to Halifax in May 1916 and joined the 237th Battalion as a lieutenant.
The American recruiting scheme was a failure, however. The 2,700 men enlisted in the five “American” battalions but that only averaged about 540 men each. As well, the desertion rate was high, discipline was poor, and there was more than one instance of officers misappropriating regimental funds. If this wasn’t enough, at least one of the battalion commanders appointed by Hughes was totally unqualified. The Rev. C. S. Bullock, a Unitarian minister in Toronto, despite having no military experience of any kind, was given command of the 237th Battalion.
The problems came to a head in March 1916 when Hughes ordered the 97th Battalion to be sent to England. The Colonial Secretary, Andrew Bonar Law, appealed to Borden not to allow this because of American sensitivities, and Borden, who seems not to have been aware of Hughes’s project, cancelled the order. He also now investigated, only to discover that Gwatkin, the Chief of the General Staff, had opposed the scheme from the outset and was particularly appalled by Bullock’s appointment. Borden was not unhappy to have the American volunteers, but he definitely did not want to upset or embarrass President Wilson, especially as 1916 was a presidential election year.
In the course of the next twelve months, the American Legion project was terminated. The 212th and 237th Battalions were merged into the 97th. Charles Botsford subsequently served in the 254th Battalion, and when it too was disbanded in July 1917, he transferred into the U.S. army, rising to the rank of captain. Between 1918 and 1921, he published four volumes giving a fictionalized account of the experiences of the American army in the war.[16]
The 97th, 211th, and 213th Battalions did go to England, but all three were then broken up and the men transferred into existing battalions. At least one of the commanding officers, Lieutenant Colonel Warren Sage of the 211th, pleaded for its survival, arguing that Americans serving in other battalions could be transferred into it. “It would seem but fair,” he argued, “that at least one of the American battalions be kept together in view of the large number of Americans enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, and if, as it looks at present [February 1917], the United States of America should go to war with Germany all ranks would feel that they were fighting for their own country as well as for Britain.”[17]
It was in vain because, as Ronald Haycock, the historian of the American Legion, concluded, the scheme had been a “military, political, and diplomatic embarrassment to all concerned.”[18] It was more than that: there was an element of hoax about the whole affair, perhaps not intended, because by 1916 all new battalions were being broken up in England to supply reinforcements for the battalions already in the field.
Recruiting in the United States did not stop, however. After the United States went into the war, the British Recruiting Mission—later renamed the British-Canadian Recruiting Mission—was established and began operati
ons in New York City in June 1917. While it was getting organized, U.S. army recruiting offices cooperated by receiving applications, conducting medical examinations, providing subsistence allowances, and forwarding men to the nearest Canadian army depot in Canada or, in the case of Britons and Australians, to the Imperial Recruits Depot at Halifax, Nova Scotia.
The Mission also assisted the British army to raise recruits for its Jewish Legion, a unit founded in August 1917 to serve with British forces in the Middle East. It began with the 38th Battalion, Royal Fusiliers, but expanded to include the 39th and 40th Battalions as well. Although part of the British army, it was organized and trained in Canada at Fort Edward, near Windsor, Nova Scotia. The reason for this was that, while it welcomed Jewish men from Britain and elsewhere, its primary goal was to recruit men in Canada and the United States. It had strong backing from Zionist organizations, which wanted to help liberate Palestine from the Ottomans. The issuance by the British government of the Balfour Declaration in November 1917, promising the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine after the war, proved to be a powerful stimulant to recruiting.
By the end of the war, about 10,000 men had enlisted in the Jewish Legion, about 5,000 of them from the United States,[19] and about 300 from Canada. All of them were recent immigrants from Eastern Europe. Typical of them were Aaron Bay, who was born in Jerusalem but had moved to Canada with his parents before the war; Joseph Birnbaum, who was born in Poland in 1896 but emigrated to Toronto in 1910; Moishe Caiserman, who was born in Romania in 1897 but emigrated to Montreal in 1910 and was a founder of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union; and Sam Finkelstein, who was born in Russia in 1897 and emigrated to Canada in 1911.[20] The rest of the recruits came from Palestine and other parts of the Ottoman Empire, England, and Argentina. Some went on to become important figures in Israel, such as David Ben-Gurion and Levi Eshkol, its first and third Prime Ministers, and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, the nation’s second President.
Canada's Great War, 1914-1918 Page 18