Canada's Great War, 1914-1918

by Brian Douglas Tennyson

  A French geologist, Brutinel had emigrated to Alberta before the war and quickly became a millionaire. He had long been interested in the significance of the machine gun in modern warfare, which he was one of the few to grasp, but he also recognized the importance of mechanized mobility. Combining the two, he conceived the idea of mobile machine gun units and when war broke out convinced Sir Clifton Sifton, the influential publisher and former politician, of their importance. Together, they solicited funds from several other wealthy men and in September 1914 offered to raise and equip an automobile machine gun unit, an offer which Sam Hughes had the good sense to readily accept.

  The first Canadian Automobile Machine Gun Brigade (soon renamed the First Canadian Motor Machine Gun Brigade), consisting of two batteries with twenty machine guns and eight armored automobiles, sailed with the first contingent in October 1914. It was the first fully mechanized unit in the British army, and Brutinel commanded it. He also organized machine gun companies to be attached to each division in the Corps, which eventually became the Canadian Machine Gun Corps, comprising four battalions with Brutinel as brigadier general. At the same time, he also continued to command the Motor Machine Gun Brigade, which remained a separate unit because of its mobility and was known as the Canadian Independent Force.

  Neither the cavalry nor the machine gun brigade had found a very useful role during the years of trench warfare, although both had deployed their forces as infantry to support the Corps. Now, however, they finally got their opportunity in the open mobile fighting of the last months of the war. When the German offensive began, the Motor Machine Gun Brigade drove the ninety-three miles north from Vimy to provide critical firepower covering the British withdrawal.

  Meanwhile, the cavalry was ordered on the morning of March 30 to support the British troops at Moreuil Wood, south of Amiens. It proved to be an interesting experience. The Royal Canadian Dragoons attacked first but in the face of heavy fire dismounted and charged on foot. Then “C” Squadron of Lord Strathcona’s Horse, commanded by Lieutenant Gordon Flowerdew, circled around the woods and launched a 300-yard charge with swords drawn in the finest tradition of nineteenth-century cavalry.

  The stunned Germans naturally responded with withering machine gun fire, and the slaughter was terrible. Even so, the audacity of the attack unnerved the Germans, and when the remnants of the squadron wheeled around for a second charge, they broke and ran. Of the seventy-five men who participated in this extraordinary affair reminiscent of the famous charge of the Light Brigade, thirty-nine were killed, including Flowerdew, and most of the rest were wounded. Flowerdew was awarded the Victoria Cross, posthumously, for his courageous but foolhardy leadership. Cook offers some defense of the action, arguing that the cavalry “had stabilized the front and had, with their lives, purchased precious time for the retreating British forces to establish a new defensive line to the rear.”[6]

  Meanwhile, Haig had transferred the First and Second Divisions to Byng’s Third Army to help defend the area southeast of Arras. On March 26 he seized the Third and Fourth Divisions as well, leaving Currie in the unusual position of being a corps commander without a corps. To be fair, Haig was facing a desperate situation and was short of men because the British line had been extended to make up for the weakness of the French. As well, it was normal practice in the British army for divisions to be moved about as necessary. But Haig had guaranteed the integrity of the Canadian Corps, and, crisis or no crisis, Currie was not having it. The Canadian Corps had fought as a unit since its creation and was virtually a separate Canadian army, albeit within the overall structure of the British army.

  Currie protested to Haig, which was a waste of time, but he also went over his head to Sir Edward Kemp, the former minister of militia and defence who had replaced Perley as minister of overseas military forces in London. Kemp intervened with the War Office, which ordered Haig to restore the Canadian Corps. By then the German attack on the morning of March 30 had failed badly, eliminating the threat to Arras and re-establishing the front.

  Haig was understandably annoyed by this political interference, something that he had had to contend with since Lloyd George had become Prime Minister, but this time his contempt was aimed at the Canadians. “I could not help feeling,” he commented, “that some people in Canada regard themselves rather as allies than as fellow citizens of the Empire.” He was out of touch. The more realistic Lord Derby, Lloyd George’s secretary of state for war, had wisely advised the prime minister some months earlier that “we must look upon them [the Canadians] in the light in which they wish to be looked upon rather than in the light in which we would wish to do so.”[7] Indeed.

  Currie did regard himself more as the leader of an Allied army than just a corps commander in the British army because the reality was that the Canadian Corps had not only a unique identity but also an esprit de corps that it had earned the hard way. Currie was convinced, and made no secret of the fact, that on the whole he thought Canadian troops were superior to the British, and he had reservations about the competence and judgment of many senior British officers. Borden agreed, declaring in June 1918 that the Canadian Corps was not only “the most formidable striking force in the Allied armies” but “probably it is the best organized and most effective unit of its size in the world today.”[8]

  Currie was especially enraged by Haig’s decision to abandon Passchendaele Ridge in the spring offensive because a year earlier, and against Currie’s better judgment, the Canadians had suffered 16,000 casualties capturing it after Haig had insisted that it must be taken at all costs. When Borden arrived in London for Imperial War Cabinet meetings, Currie vented his frustrations to a very sympathetic listener, and on June 15 Borden cabled Sir Thomas White that he was “convinced that the present situation is due to lack of organization, lack of system, lack of preparation, lack of foresight and incompetent leadership.”[9]

  Meanwhile, Kemp had wasted no time after his arrival in London in reorganizing the management of Canadian military forces, partly to increase efficiency but partly also to mark Canada’s transition from subordinate to ally. He began by establishing the Overseas Military Council, which he chaired, and made clear that all Canadian generals except Currie answered to him. He also abolished the position of general officer commanding in England, replacing it with a chief of general staff. Currie did not report to Kemp because he necessarily reported to Haig, but Currie did not command the large number of Canadians serving in France who were not part of the Canadian Corps. These included the 19,000 Canadian Railway Troops, who played a major role in building and operating the British army’s railways, the 12,000 men in the Canadian Forestry Corps, as well as tunneling companies and field hospitals, and troops training in England. At the same time, Kemp persuaded the War Office to establish a Canadian Section at General Headquarters in France to oversee the troops not serving under Currie and to serve as the link between the Overseas Ministry and the Canadian Corps.

  The Canadian Corps was being reorganized as well. A Canadian tank battalion was established, and Currie expanded the new machine gun battalions in each division from sixty-four to ninety-six guns. He also used his pioneer battalions and men from the aborted Fifth Division to give each division a brigade of three battalions of engineers and a bridging company because he anticipated—rightly—that engineers would be essential as the fighting shifted to more mobile, open warfare.

  The spring offensive ran out of steam by summer. While the Germans had overrun the Allied lines in places, they had suffered 800,000 casualties and failed to break through in any significant way. The Allies had nearly as many casualties, it is true, but the Americans were now arriving to replace them. By August there were a million U.S. troops in France, and 300,000 more were arriving each month. The war, in reality, was over, although it pointlessly dragged on into November.

  Germany’s desperation by now was demonstrated by its attacks on unprotected hospitals. On May 19 German aircraft bombed No. 1 Canadian General Hos
pital at Étaples, causing fifty-six fatalities, including four nurses. Ten days later, on the 29th, No. 3 Canadian Stationary Hospital at Doullens was bombed, killing two more nurses. It will be recalled that a month later, on June 27, the Canadian hospital ship Llandovery Castle was torpedoed and sunk, killing all fourteen nursing sisters on board.

  The Allies went on the offensive in July at the Marne, where fifty-seven British, French, and American divisions, led by 225 tanks, began pushing the Germans back. To their credit, the Germans put up a fierce resistance, losing 168,000 men in two weeks. On August 8 Foch launched the Amiens offensive, the opening battle of what came to be known as the Last Hundred Days—so-called after Napoleon’s hundred-day resurrection in 1814–15—during which the Allies steadily pushed the Germans back toward their homeland.

  Canadians at the time referred to this period as “Canada’s Hundred Days.” It was also the Canadian Corps’ “finest hour” because, while four divisions “cannot determine the outcome of a great war,” it “unquestionably played a disproportionate role.”[10] Some Canadian soldiers thought it played too prominent a role because of its high cost: 45,835 casualties, equivalent to 20% of all the Canadian casualties suffered during the war and 45% of the Corps’ strength on August 8.[11]

  The Allied campaign began on August 8 with an attack on Amiens. In an effort to surprise the Germans, the 900-gun artillery barrage was delayed until the troops were leaving their trenches. Another surprise was that most of the Canadian Corps managed to move up to take part in this battle without being detected by the Germans. Some 580 tanks participated as well, making this the first battle in which they played a major role. Even so, the hard work was done, as usual, by the infantry.

  It was a typically brutal affair in which the Canadian Machine Gun Brigade shored up the crumbling British Fifth Army, at heavy cost, and all three regiments of the Canadian Cavalry Brigade helped drive the Germans back from the city. Robert Clements later recalled that “it was momentarily a wonderful sight to watch the squadrons coming up from the rear on the trot, then break into smaller groups and finally roaring into a charge at full gallop.” Wonderful to watch, no doubt, but suicidal, and the cavalry was “cut to pieces.”[12] As well, battalions of Canadian railway troops, caught in the offensive, fought and died as infantry.

  After three days of hard fighting, the city was taken, at a cost of 40,000 casualties, including nearly 12,000 Canadians, but the Germans had sustained almost double that number. More significantly, some 15,000 Germans were taken prisoner and 400 German guns were captured. Ludendorff rightly called August 8 the blackest day of the war. Byng told Currie that Canada’s attack at Amiens was “the finest operation of the war,” an assessment shared by historian Denis Winter.[13] Ludendorff sensibly decided that the war must be ended, and the Kaiser agreed.

  Robert Clements of the 25th Battalion later said that, while the men had never doubted that they would win the war, they now “sensed the kill. The whole Canadian army was eager to get on with it and clean up the whole bloody mess once and for all.”[14] Remarkably, ten Canadians earned Victoria Crosses at Amiens. One of them was Thomas Dinesen, a Dane who had only come to Canada to enlist in the 42nd Battalion.[15]

  With Amiens behind them, the Allies now had to break through the Hindenburg Line, which Currie described as “without doubt one of the strongest defenses on the Western Front.”[16] While Byng’s Third Army advanced on Bapaume and Cambrai, the Canadian Corps joined Sir Henry Horne’s First Army to advance up the Scarpe River and attack the Drocourt-Quéant section of the Hindenburg Line, which would open up the rolling country behind Cambrai. This was familiar territory, of course. The British had previously lost 158,000 men, including huge numbers in the Royal Newfoundland Regiment at Monchy-le-Preux in 1917, trying to force their way up the Scarpe from Arras.

  The attack by the Second and Third Canadian Divisions, supported by the Fifty-First British Highland Division, took place early on the morning of August 26 and went well, a highlight being the extraordinary action of Lieutenant Charles Rutherford, who single-handedly persuaded a German officer and his eighty men to surrender to him. A dairy farmer from southern Ontario, Rutherford later said he simply said to the German officer, “you fellows are my prisoners,” and they surrendered. It was a courageous act that might have been suicidal, but many German soldiers, whether Rutherford knew this or not, were more than ready to end their war. Rutherford was awarded the VC.

  The next day, fighting in heavy rain and mud, was harder and little progress was made. The struggle continued on the 28th, when Major Georges Vanier—a later governor general of Canada—who was commanding the 22nd Battalion, lost a leg, while Lieutenant Colonel William Clark-Kennedy was badly wounded and earned the VC while leading the 24th Battalion. Lieutenant Colonel A. E. G. Mackenzie of the 26th Battalion and most of his officers were killed. Currie sent in three fresh divisions—the First and Fourth, supported by the British Fourth—on September 2, and they finally succeeded in establishing a bridgehead in the Drocourt-Quéant Line.

  During the fierce fighting, Lance Corporal Bill Metcalf, a barber in Waite, Maine, who had gone to Valcartier to enlist in September 1914, actually walked in front of a tank with a signal flag, directing it along a trench to a German machine gun post, and survived to tell the tale. He too was awarded the Victoria Cross, one of only six given to Americans in the War. Cyrus “Cy” Peck, his colonel in the 16th (Canadian Scottish) Battalion, also received the Victoria Cross for his extraordinary cool-headed bravery and leadership during the battle. Born in 1871, he was the oldest recipient of the VC in the war.[17] Three more Canadians earned the VC in the battle as well.

  Metcalf was not the only American contributing to the gains made in August. American battalions had participated in the fighting throughout August, and Borden, writing in his diary that “the victories of the last four weeks would have been impossible but for the Americans.”[18] It was undoubtedly true, but the raw American troops, who had not received adequate training after their arrival in France, endured a costly initiation into modern warfare.

  This was true throughout the Hundred Days period, when the inexperienced Americans suffered an average of 2,170 casualties per German division defeated, compared to 975 for the Canadians. Similarly, the Americans advanced thiry-four miles and captured 16,000 prisoners, while the Canadians advanced eighty-six miles and captured 31,537 prisoners.[19] Indeed, Ryan Goldsworthy claims that, despite the fact that the American Expeditionary Force was six times the size of the Canadian Corps, Currie “outstripped the AEF on every single tactical level.”[20] None of this implies that the American troops were inferior; they were just inexperienced compared to the Canadians, which made all the difference, especially at the command level.

  The battle finally ended when the Germans withdrew across the Canal du Nord, which, because it had not yet been completed, was in effect a huge, partly flooded ditch. After a break to rest and bring in reinforcements—many of them conscripts—preparations were made for the attack across the canal. While this was being done, the Germans kept up a steady fire on the Canadians. Brigadier General Odlum and Lieutenant Colonel Pearkes, senior officials of the 116th Battalion, were wounded, again disproving the oft-repeated cliché that generals kept well out of danger, and General Lipsett was shifted to command the British Fourth Division. (He was killed at Cambrai only weeks later.)[21] When he was replaced by Major General F. O. W. Loomis,[22] Canadians now finally commanded all four divisions in the Canadian Corps.

  Currie was reluctant to launch a frontal assault that involved crossing the canal with the Germans entrenched on the other side, so he moved two divisions to the south where they could more easily cross a dry section. The plan was to seize a narrow bridgehead, then expand outward and get behind the German defenses on the canal, while the other two divisions attacked in the north. It was a complicated plan, which Byng called “the most difficult operation of the war.”

  The attack began on September 27 beh
ind a heavy artillery barrage that included 17,000 gas shells. As Granatstein notes, the Canadian Corps had become “the major user of gas shells on the Western Front.”[23] After fierce fighting, ending on October 1, the canal was secured and the Canadian and British divisions got across. As usual, casualties were heavy—2,089 men, including the First Division’s beloved senior chaplain, Canon Frederick Scott, the best-known Canadian chaplain of the war, who was wounded.[24]

  The battle for the Canal du Nord has been described as “arguably the single greatest achievement of the Canadian Corps. An all but impregnable position had been taken.”[25] It was also the most savage and sustained battle in the history of the Corps, and some soldiers were beginning to wonder if Currie was taking on the toughest jobs in order to promote his own career. Certainly, the bitter Sam Hughes and his followers were making this accusation at home, but the reality was that Currie did not believe that massive casualties must always be the price of achieving battlefield victories. Because he was always painfully aware of the price being paid by his men, he refused to send them into battle until he was satisfied that thorough planning had been done and all necessary logistical support was in place. At the Canal du Nord, he had delayed the assault until there was overwhelming artillery support, thereby saving hundreds if not thousands of lives. As Schreiber puts it, the Corps “paid the price of victory in shells, not in life.”[26]

  The next objective was Cambrai itself, the main German rail center in northern France. The British and Canadians attacked again from both the south and northeast on October 8, as the Germans were withdrawing from the city, and took it by the end of a long difficult day, but casualties were light. That same day, the Canadian Cavalry Brigade took part in its last and most successful operation of the war, southeast of Cambrai. This was cavalry country, and the brigade swept through, liberating enemy-held villages in the Le Cateau region and capturing 400 prisoners. It was the last cavalry charge of the war for the Canadians and, although many may not have realized it at the time, the end of cavalry as a meaningful component of modern armies.