The Necessary War, Volume 1: Canadians Fighting The Second World War:1939-1943

474 Pages·2014·8.32 MB·English

by  Cook

For Dr. Terry Cook,
who taught me how to be
an historian and a man
(1947–2014)
Also by Tim Cook No Place to Run
Clio’s Warriors
At the Sharp End: Canadians Fighting the Great War, 1914–1916, Volume One
Shock Troops:
Canadians Fighting the Great War, 1917–1918, Volume Two The Madman and
the Butcher: The Sensational Wars of Sam Hughes and General Arthur Currie
Warlords: Borden, Mackenzie King, and Canada’s World Wars
C
ONTENTS
Introduction: The War Against Hitler
CHAPTER 1 Reluctantly to War
CHAPTER 2 The Fall of France
CHAPTER 3 The Battle of Britain
CHAPTER 4 The War in the Far East
CHAPTER 5 The War at Sea
CHAPTER 6 Life on a Corvette
CHAPTER 7 Bomber Command
CHAPTER 8 The Struggle to Survive
CHAPTER 9 Striking Back
CHAPTER 10 A Sortie Against a City
CHAPTER 11 Day of Destruction
CHAPTER 12 Backs to the Wall
CHAPTER 13 Making an Impact
CHAPTER 14 Test of Battle
CHAPTER 15 The Italian Campaign
Conclusion: The End of the Beginning
Endnotes
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Index
Credits

MAPS AND DIAGRAMS
Hong Kong, December 18–25, 1941
The North Atlantic Air Cover, May 1941–February 1942
Typical Convoy
Usual Sequence of Pilot Training in the BCATP
The North Atlantic, 1939–1945
The Dieppe Operation, August 19, 1942
Sicily, 1943
The Adriatic Sector: November 28, 1943– January 4, 1944
The Crossing of the Moro and the Battle of Ortona: December 6,
1943–January 4, 1944
I
NTRODUCTION
THE WAR AGAINST HITLER
The Second World War casts a dark shadow across the twentieth century. The
enormous battles that raged from continents to oceans, and in the skies, continue
to fascinate and horrify us. Entire societies were transformed into enormous war
machines to meet the needs of Allied and Axis air, land, and sea forces. Civilians
became as much a part of the war effort as the men and women in uniform and
consequently they were, in the minds of all political and military leaders,
legitimate targets. Willing war workers and hapless civilians alike were killed by
ordnance and weapons that made no distinctions between classes and genders,
between the firing line and the home front. The combined death toll of
combatants and bystanders was nothing short of staggering: in round terms,
some sixty million people were killed. Hundreds of millions more were scarred
forever—either physically maimed or psychologically traumatized—by the
conflict.
The Second World War was not just one war but a series of campaigns and
battles around the world. These campaigns brought together millions of men and
women to fight the so-called Thousand Year Reich that Adolf Hitler had created
to unleash war and genocide on Europe. The war pitted the Axis powers of
Germany, Italy, Japan, and a number of less influential nations against the Allied
powers of Britain, its dominions and colonies—primarily Canada, Australia,
New Zealand, Newfoundland, South Africa, and India—along with France, the
Soviet Union (an antagonist turned unlikely ally in the summer of 1941), the
United States (after December 1941), and other nations. It began, arguably, in
the Far East, when Japan went to war against China in 1937, and it didn’t end
until Japan capitulated in August 1945, a few months after Germany was
defeated. This worldwide conflagration caused the massive dislocation of
populations, set the stage for the postwar decolonization of Asia and Africa, and
remade the international order through the toppling of Nazi Germany, the
reduction in status of Britain and France, and the creation of two new world
leaders: the United States and the Soviet Union. At war’s end, with Europe
exhausted, those two ideologically opposed superpowers almost immediately
plunged into the Cold War, which lasted five decades and brought the divided
world to the brink of nuclear annihilation.
The Allied victory was no foregone conclusion. Many people believe that
brute force wins wars, that the enemy is driven into defeat by the side with more
guns, tanks, planes, and warships. But history is replete with examples of battles,
campaigns, and wars in which smaller forces drove their larger, lumbering foes
from the field. Achieving victory requires more than blindly battering the enemy
into submission. Numerous factors affect the combat performance of armies (and
navies and air forces); these range from superior command, to the application of
strength against weakness, to the coherence, motivation, and endurance of
combatants in battle. Technological advances and new weapon systems can even
the odds, reverse defeat, or deliver victory.
Nevertheless, for several decades, most historians have been guided by the
belief that the Allied military forces smashed Germany and its co-belligerents
into submission by simply overwhelming the opposition’s fighting formations.
Some raw numbers support this thesis: the Axis powers’ gross population of 191
million was dwarfed by the Allies’ 345 million, who were further backed by
hundreds of millions more citizens in colonies and dominions throughout the
British Empire. Similarly, the Allies’ production advantage—especially after the
industrial and economic might of the United States was added to that of Britain
and the dominions—suggests that no outcome was possible except an Allied
victory.1 The Axis powers, according to this argument, were out-produced to
death.
And yet, it is one thing to mobilize the industrial capacity of a nation and
fully another to apply that might on the battlefield. Material superiority is never
decisive in itself. How warriors and weapons systems are wielded in battle
through coherent doctrine, ethos, and tactics is crucial. Long wars allow for a
constant appreciation of technology and weapons by scientists. War-fighting
skills evolve constantly and frequently to make the difference between winning
and losing. In this regard, the Allies proved to be more effective than the Axis
during the Second World War. In writing this book, rather than embracing the
brute force thesis, I have chosen to show how soldiers, airmen, and sailors
fought, focusing on the evolving tactics, doctrines, weapons, logistics, and
technology they employed. The Canadians, in particular, had to find ways to
fight effectively against a skilled enemy in conditions that ranged from the
sweltering heat of Sicily to the frigid waters of the North Atlantic, and from the
narrow streets of Ortona to the dark skies over Germany. At the same time, I
have examined the equally important factors of morale, discipline, and fortitude
of the Canadian citizen-soldiers, sailors, and airmen, and have tried to show how
these young men coped while under fire. These Canadians would surely have
scoffed at the notion that their victory was preordained, especially as they
witnessed the death and destruction that was visited upon their comrades and
friends.
While the carnage overseas was relentless, Canada was almost entirely
spared from the war’s ruin. Nevertheless, the country, with its modest population
of fewer than 12 million, embraced its role as an arsenal of democracy,
exporting war supplies, feeding its allies, and raising a million-strong armed
force that served and fought in nearly every theatre of war. Under the steady, if
slippery, hand of Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, the governing
Liberal Party kept the national interest as its guiding star in navigating Canada
through the Allied war effort. Above all, King sought to avoid a cleavage
between English and French Canada. The nation was mobilized as never before
in the fight to preserve the liberal, democratic order. At the same time, the six-
year-long exertion had lasting effects: it caused widespread disruption to almost
everyone’s way of life, promoted nation-wide industrialization, ushered in
changes to gender roles, exacerbated the tension between English and French,
and forged a new sense of Canadian identity. The war led to a decisive break in
English Canada’s deep and almost sacred economic bond with Britain when the
Dominion irrevocably embraced the United States as its largest trading partner.
The emotional bond between Canada and Britain lasted longer, though Canada’s
independent role during the war weakened these intangible links over time, and
strengthened the nation’s resolve to set off on an increasingly independent
course. Shrouding all of these changes was the blood sacrifice of close to 44,000
dead and almost 55,000 wounded that brought an endless grief to families and
communities across Canada.2
The Second World War changed Canadians forever. Sergeant Barney
Danson of the Queen’s Own Rifles, who was severely wounded during the war
and then came back to Canada to make a successful career in public life,
remembered how his experiences in uniform broadened his outlook:
The Second World War was a defining event for me, as it was for many of my
age. For most of us, the war represented our first time away from home and
family. It gave us our first experience of travel across Canada and overseas,
and our first exposure to a broad cross-section of society: farmers, miners,
lumberjacks, rootless “hoboes,” ex-convicts who generally kept their status
secret but were known to the other former “cons” among us, “old guys,” in
their late twenties, or the still older ones we called “Pop,” many of whom
were trying to disengage themselves from family responsibilities, or failed
marriages, or who found in the military something that eluded them in the
Depression—the job they needed to support their families. Many of us also
encountered, for the first time, the full diversity of Canada’s population. We
met francophone Canadians, individually and in their regiments, aboriginal
Canadians, who were adjusting to us as we were adjusting to them and each of
them we almost always called “chief,” and others from the whole range of
ethnic groups which made Canada their home even in those times.3
THE MEN AND WOMEN WHO WENT OVERSEAS endured sometimes horrifying and
often miserable conditions, but their letters home mostly played down the
danger. Flight Lieutenant Bill Bell, a Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF)
navigator, wrote to his family in July 1942 after harrowing months of front-line
service:
I can’t remember when I wrote last, but it must have been awhile back. I’m a
lazy devil. And rather busy in spots as you’ve found out from the local paper.
I was doing very well in keeping deep dark secrets too. I’ve been trying to
keep you people from worrying. But it isn’t much use now…. It is rather
exciting in spots. But mostly you’re too damn busy to think about anything
but your work at hand. There isn’t much to it tho: you go over there—they
shoot at you, you drop bombs on them—then everyone goes back to bed.
Terrific isn’t it. I haven’t developed any operational twitch yet but I suspect
my hair is falling out a bit. But anyways, don’t worry about me.4
Of course his family agonized, and only a month later he had a brush with death
when his two-engine Hampden bomber was pounced on by a night fighter and
raked with cannon fire, smashing the tail fin, holing the fuselage, riddling the
fuel tanks, and shooting away the hydraulics. The crew brought the damaged
plane back to England, and Bell and the pilot received the Distinguished Flying
Medal. Bill Bell was like most of the warriors in the Canadian forces: he was
desperate to keep the uncertainty and terror of combat from his family at home,
even as he hinted at the strain as revealed through the likelihood of stress-related
tics and falling-out hair. Seventy years later, it is the historian who needs to
probe these words and push past the jauntiness of letters to piece together the
experience of battle. At times it was, as Bell wrote, terrific and exciting; at other
times, it was monotonous and banal. There was no shortage of fear and death.
What was it like to sail in the merchant navy across the Atlantic in ships
encrusted with ice while U-boats lurked below? Where did the surgeons and
nurses of the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps find the courage to operate
on or ease the pain of broken, twisted bodies of twenty-year-olds who had been
mangled by steel and fire? Was it immoral to fly 18,000 feet above German