by Mark Zuehlke
Crerar left the meeting convinced that Simonds had become too British for his own good. That Simonds had always had great affection for all things English was well known throughout Canadian military circles. Eighth Army’s informality promoted cohesion of divisions without regard for national distinctions. This sat well with Simonds but was anathema to Crerar, who was not only charged with creating a distinct Canadian corps but was determined that its character and operational style would conform to the doctrine accepted by Canadian army regulations. In Italy, Crerar was surrounded by young Canadian officers who had been battle-seasoned in a hard campaign fought in a tactical landscape that bore no resemblance to his World War I terrain. Crerar quickly understood that his subordinates resented the prospect of being ordered about by an officer lacking infantry or armoured combat experience who could only hark back to service as an artillery officer to guide his field decisions. Bringing these young Turks to heel, Crerar decided, was going to be an essential task that he must fulfill quickly if his corps were to be clearly and distinctly Canadian.10
It was soon evident that Crerar faced an uphill struggle. Montgomery did little to hide his lack of faith in Crerar. The seeds of his negativity had been sown long before, when Crerar was among a group of officers attending a study week led by Montgomery in Tripoli in February 1943. The purpose of the week had been for senior generals to analyze traditional Allied battle doctrine in light of the experiences learned in the desert battles of North Africa. Montgomery had been disappointed with almost all of the commanders who attended, but singled Crerar out for specific criticism in a letter to the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke. “Harry Crerar told me he had never handled an Armoured Division,” Montgomery wrote. “It is probably one of the first things he will have to do in battle; he should learn how to handle armour in peace training. My Corps Commanders have to be able to handle any types of formations.”11 He added, “I am really very fond of him, [but] I don’t think he has any idea of how to handle a Corps in battle.”12
Montgomery’s opinion of Crerar remained unchanged and he was acutely aware that the Canadian general had never commanded even a regiment or brigade in the field. Montgomery suggested Crerar take over command of 1st Canadian Infantry Division for a few weeks. This would serve two useful purposes. First, it would give Crerar badly needed combat experience. Second, Major General Chris Vokes, who had been leading 1 CID in Simonds’s absence and had not had any leave since the invasion of Sicily, could get a few weeks’ rest and recreation in Cairo. Meanwhile, I Canadian Corps headquarters could assemble in Sicily to sort out its operational structure and 5th Canadian Armoured Division could carry out some training exercises near Naples before being moved into an operational role. After a few weeks commanding 1 CID, Crerar could assume command of his corps, which would be temporarily composed of the Canadian infantry division and one or two experienced British divisions, until he was comfortable in the role of corps commander. At that time, 5th Canadian Armoured Division could come under Crerar’s command in exchange for the British units.13
Crerar rejected the proposal out of hand, insisting that Vokes needed no time off and that his job was to bring all Canadian units in Italy together under a Canadian corps command. He established a corps headquarters in the sumptuous San Domenico Palace Hotel in the northeastern Sicilian resort town of Taormina and signalled Montgomery early in November that he would fly into Foggia airfield, some forty miles east of Campobasso, to see him at Eighth Army headquarters in the nearby village of Lucera. Montgomery’s temper snapped and he called to his office Canadian Liaison Officer Major Richard Malone, who was assigned to Eighth Army HQ to ensure smooth relations between the British command and the Canadians. Malone, Montgomery said, was to go to Foggia and tell Crerar that he would meet with the corps commander when it was his desire to do so and not before. Meanwhile, Crerar was to remain in Taormina until summoned.
Malone, caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place, set off for Foggia. Having served under Crerar when he was Chief of the Canadian General Staff, Malone knew the lieutenant general was fixated on administrative detail and observance of correct military procedure and protocol. Being rebuffed on the edge of a broken-down airstrip by a mere major was going to infuriate Crerar. As he approached Crerar’s airplane, Malone was still trying to find some diplomatic way to communicate Montgomery’s directive.
Crerar barely acknowledged Malone’s formal salute. “Where is the staff car?” he snapped. Malone signalled the driver to bring it forward. Crerar jumped into the back and slammed the door. Realizing he was relegated to sitting beside the driver, Malone walked around to the front and got in. Crerar stiffly directed Malone to take him to Montgomery. A few minutes after they cleared the airfield, Malone told the driver to pull over and go for a stroll and cigarette. Then he turned slowly to Crerar and said, “Harry, Monty says he won’t see you and I don’t know how to tell you any other way.” Obviously stunned at this news, Crerar sat silent for several minutes. Finally, he said, “Well, what do I do now?”
Malone advised him to forget Montgomery and instead informally visit Vokes at 1 CID, so he would still have some legitimate justification for making the flight from Sicily. Then he should return to Taormina and await a summons from Montgomery. Crerar agreed and Malone hoped the integration of I Canadian Corps into Eighth Army’s operational structure would proceed more smoothly.14
His hopes were dashed when Crerar, a stickler for proper dress and protocol, expressed his disapproval of Eighth Army’s dress codes. Here too, the Canadian officers took their cues from Montgomery and the veteran officers of the North African campaign, who favoured sweaters worn over bush shirts or under open-neck battle dress. Their men were even less given to formality, cobbling together whatever manner of dress proved most comfortable in current weather and battle conditions. In Sicily, they wore shorts. At Ortona they wore whatever might keep them warm and somewhat dry in the unending torrents of rain. Canadian drivers had also picked up the British custom of painting names of girlfriends and satiric slogans on trucks and tanks. Some tanks sported paintings of well-endowed, mostly naked women.
This was all too much for Crerar. He issued a directive in late November to all Canadian commanders, whether yet under his command or not, that as senior Canadian officer he did not approve of any of this and everyone was now to be correctly dressed and all the artwork was to be stripped from vehicles. Malone thought the directive absurd. He was amused to see that Crerar ended the directive with the statement that the soldiers “were to remember that they must uphold the reputation of the Canadian Army in appearance.”15 Soon the directive became a source of jokes throughout Eighth Army and few Canadian commanders made any attempt to implement the orders while Crerar was still in Sicily.
Crerar quickly exacerbated matters by issuing a sixteen-page movement order that was to be implemented to bring I Canadian Corps from Sicily to the mainland. The order contained map traces, start lines for each movement phase, a detailed order of march for each unit, provost marshalling points and feeding arrangements en route, and other details that complied perfectly with Staff College requirements. Unfortunately for Crerar, rather than confining the order’s distribution to his officers in the corps, he distributed it to virtually everyone of higher level rank in the Eighth Army for information purposes. The order, Malone noted, was soon “almost a collector’s item, passed around in amazement that so much paper was required by the new corps to move a few HQ vehicles about.”16
Meanwhile, Simonds had relinquished command of 1 CID permanently to Vokes and moved to Naples to meet 5th Canadian Armoured Division. While Vokes had led 1 CID and 1st Canadian Armoured Brigade into the December battle for the Moro River and Ortona, Simonds had spent the remainder of 1943 consolidating his armoured division and trying to conduct various training schemes.
The problem of properly equipping the division plagued Simonds’s efforts. As he had predicted, most of the equipm
ent left behind by 7th Armoured Division needed to be replaced. Worsening the situation was the fact that the British division had swapped what decent equipment it had in its inventory for wrecks cast off by other veteran British divisions. There was also a chronic shortage of parts and tools.17
Like most of 5 CAD, the Westminster Regiment had expected that in Italy they would eventually reunite with the shiny new equipment they had been given in Britain, but they never saw any of it again. Nobody had bothered to tell anyone in the lower ranks that the equipment had been left behind as part of the price of the division’s admission to the Mediterranean theatre. The regiment’s transport ship landed first in Algiers, where the men transferred to a train and trundled over to Philippeville. Here, heavily weighed down with packs holding all their kit, they had to board another boat by clambering like monkeys up huge rope-net ladders strung along its sides. The ship sailed into Naples the next day, where the men disembarked and, as no transport was in sight, marched uphill from the noisy and bomb-battered port area through the squalid slums into the countryside. Eventually, some trucks showed up and carried them to a fig orchard, where they slept outside for two days until moving to the village of Avellino and barracking in a school. It was in Avellino that Private Dan Nikiforuk and the regiment’s other drivers were introduced to their armoured cars and Bren carriers courtesy of the Desert Rats. The men were told their own vehicles had been lost at sea when the enemy had sunk the ship carrying them.18
When the Lord Strathcona’s Horse Regiment was finally consolidated near Naples in mid-December, it still lacked any tanks with which to equip its squadrons.19 Simonds had taken one look at his ramshackle collection of diesel-powered Sherman tanks that mounted ineffectual six- or even two-pounder British-made guns and decided to accept a proposal that the Canadians be equipped with new tanks. These were scheduled to arrive soon in North Africa and were fitted with Chrysler gasoline engines and 75-millimetre guns. This would necessitate a serious delay in equipping his armoured regiments and training them for combat conditions in Italy, but he had to accept that. The regiments were also desperately short of trucks, Bren carriers, and Jeeps. Mechanics started cannibalizing two or three trucks of different makes for sufficient parts to create one functioning vehicle.20
The Westminsters’ Nikiforuk was allotted a White scout car that was perforated with bullet and rust holes. When he started the vehicle — a lightly armoured truck capable of carrying about twelve infantrymen — it sputtered and coughed, as if running out of fuel, despite having full tanks. He finally pulled the fuel tanks and discovered a large quantity of sand sloshing around and fouling the gas lines. That difficulty repaired, the armoured car proved serviceable, but it was still subject to a variety of haphazard and unexpected mechanical problems that Nikiforuk knew were symptomatic of a vehicle that had long outrun its serviceable life. He worried about how the machine would perform when the regiment moved into the rigorous world of combat.
Nikiforuk knew trucks. The twenty-one-year-old had been driving heavy trucks over the rough roads of Saskatchewan for years, eking out a living through the Depression. He hauled mostly fuel then. When war broke out and construction of airports began under the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan scheme, Nikiforuk shifted gravel for runways to the bases going up at Estevan, North Battleford, and other small Saskatchewan towns. On February 10, 1942, he drove into Saskatoon and enlisted, stating his specialization as a driver. Motorized vehicles were still enough of a novelty in Canada before the war that the army was chronically short of men who arrived already trained and experienced in driving anything, but truck drivers were particularly in demand.
Nikiforuk reasonably expected to be assigned in this capacity to the Army Service Corps, but the army decided he should be an infantryman instead. It sent him off to the Westminster Regiment in Britain, where he slogged about on foot until the Westminsters were designated as a motorized unit shortly before being shipped to Italy. Such regiments used White scout cars or Bren carriers to advance into the thick of an engagement, jumped out, and then fought on foot as regular infantry. Nikiforuk was the driver for No. 4 Platoon of ‘A’ Company. He would drive the vehicle into battle, then get out and fight alongside everyone else.
The cars offered dubious protection to the soldiers during the advance. Their fronts had relatively heavy steel plates set on an angle to deflect enemy shot, and dropdown shields to protect the driver while providing a narrow slot for him to see through. This front armour could repel most small-arms fire, but the sides and rear of the vehicles offered no protection against even a rifle slug. The men assigned to the armoured cars were no more impressed with them than were those Westminsters in the scout platoons who were given Bren carriers for transport. These tracked vehicles carried six men and their equipment. They were open-topped and the sides came up only to about waist height, leaving the men inside exposed to enemy fire. The scouts quickly learned that the Bren was best utilized as a motorized mule. It usually carried their equipment while they walked alongside, rather than clustering inside its exposed interior.
Simonds, wondering how any of the stuff he had been allotted would hold up in battle, was determined to get better equipment first. Learning that I Canadian Corps in Sicily was to receive a shipment of 3,350 Canadian-built vehicles fresh from the factory, Simonds asked that these all be allotted to his combat troops. Crerar shot back that this was impossible, for it would provide the British with an excuse to delay formation of the corps due to lack of vehicles.
The sniping between Crerar and Simonds escalated throughout December. Matters soon took on the appearance of the ridiculous as Crerar sent a major to measure Simonds’s caravan in detail so that he could have a replica constructed for his own use. Simonds gave the major fifteen minutes to clear off. When the major reported back, Crerar fired off a letter to Simonds accusing him of committing “an indirect act, on your part, of personal discourtesy to me.” The letter went on to say that “the much more important effect of this episode is that it tends to indicate that your nerves are over-stretched and that impulse, rather than considered judgement, may begin to affect your decisions. Should this, indeed, be the situation, I would be extremely worried, for you are now reaching a position in the Army when balance is becoming even more important to your future than brilliance.”21
Simonds was technically not even under Crerar’s command yet, for 5 CAD was drawing on 2nd Echelon headquarters in Naples for equipment and supply and was to take direction from its commander. Simonds was also receiving orders directly from Montgomery. But Crerar kept issuing vast barrages of written orders to both Simonds and Vokes that called for immediate responses. Directed by Crerar to submit copies of virtually all reports and orders the division issued, Simonds responded frostily with a signal to Crerar that 5 CAD was not under his command. Montgomery, hearing of the conflict, backed him by sending Malone to Taormina to deliver instructions that Crerar leave Simonds alone.
When Malone entered the corps’s anteroom outside the officers’ mess, he was delighted to meet an old friend who was serving as a brigadier in the Medical Corps. Dr. Fred Van Nostrand told Malone he now acted as the chief psychiatric advisor to the Canadian Army. Asked what brought him to Sicily, the doctor whispered that Crerar had summoned him from London to certify that Simonds was insane. The next day, he was to travel to Naples and examine Simonds. Over dinner, Crerar insisted that Simonds was suffering a nervous breakdown and responding to Crerar’s signals with insane replies. When Malone delivered Montgomery’s message to Crerar after dinner, the general offered no reply.
Malone gave Van Nostrand a lift in his plane to Simonds’s HQ the next morning and it was arranged that the three of them should dine together that evening. During dinner, Malone found Simonds “his usual alert, rather crisp and formal self.” After discussing the state of the division’s training, he told the doctor and Malone frankly that Crerar was “quite bonkers.” He added that the corps commander belonged in an institution a
nd had lately taken to “sending insane signals all over the place.”
Before turning in for the night, Malone asked Van Nostrand what he planned to do now that each commander was certain the other was mad. Van Nostrand smiled and threw his hands up in the air. “I am going back to London as fast as I can get there. This isn’t a problem for me.”22
Crerar was not done. In a long letter to Montgomery on December 17, he extolled Simonds’s military brilliance and said he had “a first-class military mind.” Having offered praise, Crerar proceeded to write that Simonds was “highly ‘tensed up’” and “resents any control or direction on my part — a responsibility which is now mine concerning certain ‘Canadian business’ and later, when the Canadian Corps is functioning operationally, in the widest possible manner.” While Simonds, he said, “has all the military brilliance for higher command in the field, with his tense mentality, under further strain through increased rank and responsibility, he might go ‘off the deep end’ very disastrously indeed.”23