World: The Canadians

(See Cover)

Canadians are going into battle again. When & where is one facet of the Great Secret (see p. 29). But the news that Canadians will be in the vanguard of invasion is freshening and heartening to a world which needs good news.

The world's memory of Canadians in battle is a bright memory. The Canadians of World War I seemed to shine out of the blood and muck, the dreary panorama of trench warfare. They seemed to kill and to die with a special dash and lavishness. In a war and at a time when glory had almost lost its meaning, when the word was a travesty upon the heaping millions of the dead, the Canadians in France kept the sheen of glory.

The man who commands the Canadians in World War II was a soldier in World War I, and he is determined to lead Canadians back to France. Lieut. General Andrew George Latta McNaughton says often and in many ways that his Canadian Army Overseas is a dagger pointed at the heart of Berlin. He knows where he wants to thrust the dagger. His ideas may or may not coincide with those of the Allied high command, and with its plans for the Canadians. But wherever he is, at the British War Office or at U.S. headquarters in London, General McNaughton always has with him a portfolio of thumb-worn maps. They are maps of the coast of northern France, where Hitler's Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt waits with his guns.*

The past calls McNaughton. He remembers Ypres, where he was wounded in 1915, and Soissons, where he was wounded in 1918. He remembers the many battlefields, the towns, trenches and hills that seemed so important then, where the Canadians of 1914-18 left their dead.

Scientist in Khaki. McNaughton is both a scientist and a soldier, and many Canadians today consider him their leading technician, patriot and planner. He is in this respect a rare citizen of his country and his time, a soldier whose sense of life and democracy is formed and rounded, a man of learning and conscience who knows for what he fights.

He first won military distinction by applying his science on the battlefield. At McGill University, after boyhood on the Saskatchewan frontier, he studied for a commission in Canada's small peacetime army while he also distinguished himself as a student of electricity. In 1914 he was a major in a battery of field artillery; he left his job in a McGill laboratory to go to France. In 1918 he was a brigadier general, commanding the Canadian Corps' heavy artillery.

McNaughton applied his genius for analysis to the theory and practice of artillery fire, and artillerymen of all armies recognize his contributions to their art. He brought centralized fire control to a new point of efficiency (see p. 72). He worked his men as though they were his pupils in a laboratory. Said one of them last week: "McNaughton had us on hilltops, in trees, day and night, clocking the enemy firing, until he had located every enemy battery on our front. He had us out digging craters for shell fragments until he knew the exact size of every enemy battery and the caliber of every gun."