World: The Canadians

• Share

(3 of 4)

Men on Offense. The Canadian Army Overseas in 1942 is a different army. Training and discipline have greatly improved. So has the quality of officers in all ranks; like the U.S., Canada was gravely short of competent officers at the start. British-Canadian relations are also better. Some 4,000 English girls have married Canadian soldiers, to the considerable irritation of Canadian girls at home.

But the greatest factor has been the recent change in the army's role. It has shifted from defense to offense. Canadians in England no longer feel that they are garrison troops. They know, with their commander, that they are going places. Last month the public got its first inkling of this change, with the news that Canadians were training for amphibious invasion on a huge scale.

First by companies, then by battalions and divisions, the Canadians have been going to sea with the Royal Navy, returning to practice coastal landings under R.A.F. cover. The training in withdrawal after these landings has been as intensive as the actual invasion practice; it may be that the Canadians will make many a hit-&-run stab at the Nazi coasts, on a super-Commando scale, before they are ordered to all-out invasion.

McNaughton himself has no great use for Commando training or tactics as such. Nor has he shown much interest in paratroops: only last April did the Canadian army at home begin to train parachute and airborne troops. Many Canadians -tax him or the General Staff in Ottawa for laxity in this respect, but he has his own ideas. His main idea is that his overseas army should be highly armored and highly gunned, a compact hitting force designed to function as a unit once it invades enemy country, regardless of how it gets there.

Canadians say their overseas army is the most heavily armored unit in existence. It is not and never will be a big army: Canada with its 11,315,000 population had by late 1941 sent about no.ooo men to England, but many more are there now. In England, and training at home for immediate dispatch abroad, are three infantry divisions, two armored divisions and two tank brigades (which function with the infantry). The three infantry divisions and the tank brigades are set up in an army corps under smart, 54-year-old Lieut. General Henry Duncan Graham Crerar, onetime Chief of the Canadian General Staff. The two tank divisions will make up an armored corps, presumably under General Worthington or tough, lime-tongued Major General E. W. Sansome, who now commands the Fifth (armored) Division in England. General Worthington is now in Canada training another armored division.

McNaughton for Canada. Now that the onetime Canadian Corps in England has the status of an army, McNaughton is soon to become a full general. Then, as never before, Canadians will argue that he ought to be the supreme Allied commander in Europe.

If that ever happens, it will complete a revolution in the British Empire and in the British army. Although he commands his own army, and is primarily responsible to Ottawa, McNaughton in London is by no means independent. In a vague way which nobody can define, but which nobody forgets, he is also responsible to Britain's General Sir Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, in the large sense the Canadian army is part of the British army.