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."

General Sir Arthur William Currie, who commanded the Canadians in World War I, called McNaughton the finest gunner in the British Empire. Soon after McNaughton returned to England to fight in World War II, he visited an artillery school and spotted a gun which was in one of his batteries at Amiens in 1918 Said he, patting the muzzle: "I can tell you I got some grand shooting out o: that one."

People never forget his eyes. They are dark. They stab and they brood. But he is not a forbidding man, nor a distant one. His grey mustache, his whitened temples, the perpetual cock in his left eyebrow set off a face that has the deep touch of thought, the marks of 55 full years; but it is a face that can be warm and friendly. His friends and officers call him Andy.

Men on Defense. The Canadian overseas army was not a happy army during the first two years in England. The causes and the symptoms of its discontent gave General McNaughton many a bad hour and probably had something to do with the physical breakdown which interrupted his command late last year.

Britons in 1940 and 1941 said that the Canadians "took a bit of getting used to." Some of them took a good deal more than that, including tough handling from the top, before they settled down to their often dreary role in England.

Canada is not yet conscripting for overseas service (although Ottawa now has the power to do so), and all Canadians on duty abroad are volunteers. Many of the early volunteers in the ist Canadian Division were very tough cookies. They went over full of zest and fight, and some of their outfits were sadly short on discipline. They ran into one frustration after another. One brigade was ordered to relieve the British at Dunkirk, then the orders were countermanded. Another actually got to France, after Dunkirk, then had to return without firing a shot.

In the post-Dunkirk period, when Britain was rebuilding its shattered armies, the Canadians took over the defense of southern England. It was hard work, and it was vitally necessary. But it was not exciting. Morale sagged. Officers got appalling bills for damage to barracks.

In the Canadian view, the British also took some getting used to. One of Canada's finest regiments was quartered in a swamp where a local farmer grazed his pigs. The regiment proposed to clear the thick underbrush in the swamp. The farmer was delighted. When the regiment moved on, the farmer suddenly presented a $75,000 bill for damages; he said that the soldiers had ruined his pig run. The claim was settled for $85.

Last year Brigadier (now Major General) F. F. Worthington, Canada's famed tank expert, recognized this mutual irritation in an order of the day. All else having failed to induce a proper solicitude among his men for the fences, fields, roads and crops of rural England, Brigadier Worthington tried satire. He reminded his brigade that it was going on maneuvers in a countryside whose residents were neutral in the war, but generally friendly to the Allied cause. The brigade behaved very well.

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.

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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