World: The Canadians

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McNaughton is not one to fret about the supreme command, whether it falls to him, to the U.S. Army's General George C. Marshall, or to any one of several others: General Brooke, or Lord Louis Mountbatten (TIME, June 8), who at invasion time will probably have his hands full with his Commandos; Lieut. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the interim U.S. commander in Europe; or to the aggressive, hard-driving commander of Britain's Home Forces, Lieut. General Bernard Paget, whom U.S. officers in Britain admire.

The Canadians are enough for McNaughton. His handful of professional soldiers from Canada's tiny, pre-war regular army; his French-Canadians, anxious to prove their worth in combat; a U.S. Negro from Alabama, many another war-hearted American who crossed the border to join the Canadian forces before Dec. 7; lawyers, laborers, Newfies, townsmen and farmers, fishermen and frontiersmen wait with him in his Canadian Army Overseas for the time to attack. With him they hope that they can reclaim the Canadian graves in France.* Said General McNaughton last March, when he visited President Roosevelt in Washington:

"I have never done anything else but talk of an offensive in Europe. . . . We intend to give it to the Hun—right in the belly."

*Of 418,052 Canadians overseas, 218,433 were casualties (including 48,121 dead, 155,839 wounded). Proportionately the Canadian losses in four years of war were four times as heavy as the U.S. losses in 17 months. *Rundstedt's presence in western Europe is evidence enough that Hitler is preparing for anything there. Rundstedt directed the break through the Sedan salient and on into France in 1940; he led the Nazi push through Russia's Ukraine last year. Cold-eyed, 66-year-old Rundstedt is a professional Prussian soldier, the only ranking commander in Hitler's armies who was also high in the Kaiser's armies in the last war (Army Corps Chief of Staff).

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