World Wars I and II, Canada and Germany in

The Great War cost the Dominion of Canada nearly 52,000 battle deaths and another 138,000 wounded or gassed, a fearful price for a population of just 8 million (Nicholson 1964, Appendices C and D, 548).

That the vast majority of these losses were borne by the 5 million of British descent only served to magnify these losses for the dominant community. Most of the volunteers—the government only resorted to conscription during the final year of the war—were military novices who at most possessed some limited militia experience. With time, the Canadian Corps developed into a superb force of shock troops, winning a string of victories during 1917-1918. But their training was mostly combat itself, and the early bloody battles of Second Ypres, St. Eloi, Mount Sorrel, and the Somme exacted a heavy toll on the enthusiastic but painfully inexperienced army.

As the war progressed, the Canadians reveled in their reputation as peerless attackers. Where the Canadians entered the line, any “live and let live” arrangements previously in place were promptly discarded. Time and battle also hardened attitudes toward their enemy. The Dominion men would only return home when the war was won, and most realized that this could only be expedited by killing Germans. As Canadian fighter ace Donald MacLaren bluntly put it in a letter home: “We are here for one purpose only—to kill the Hun” (Bashow 2000, 71). Furthermore, Canadian soldiers were incessantly exposed to the worst of the anti-German atrocity propaganda by their officers and government, including the universally believed (but false) account of a Canadian prisoner crucified by his German captors. Such propaganda more than compensated for the respect the soldiers developed for their opponents’ fighting qualities. Finally, as English-speaking Canada took ownership of the war—and soldiers’ motives changed from fighting for king and empire to fighting for Canada itself—hatred of the “Hun” predictably intensified.

In the victorious “Last Hundred Days” campaign, during which a defeated but still belligerent German army inflicted on the Canadian Corps one-fifth of its entire wartime losses, Canadian fighting men confirmed the merciless reputation they had already earned among ordinary German soldiers. The Canadian Corps’ password for the attack on Amiens in early August 1918 was “Llandovery Castle,” a reference to the torpedoing of a hospital ship of that name earlier in the year after which many of the surviving Canadian nurses, crew, and wounded had been machine-gunned in their lifeboats. Canadian novelist Charles Harrison, a veteran of Amiens, later vividly described in his novel Generals Die in Bed the bloody toll that his comrades, inflamed by accounts of the U-boat atrocity, took of German soldiers attempting to surrender during the battle. The breakthrough that followed the victory at Amiens brought ordinary Canadian soldiers into contact with French civilians who had endured a harsh German occupation, and their stories seemed to confirm the worst propaganda accounts of “Hun” barbarism. As Lieutenant General Arthur Currie calmly noted in his diary: “our fellows... have become more bitter than ever against the Boche” (Dancocks 1985, 170—171). In the last days of fighting as the Canadian advance guard neared Mons, the adjutant of the 50th Battalion proudly noted of one day’s work that while too many prisoners had been taken “some very useful killing was also achieved” (Dancocks 1985, 170). If anything, the army’s shortlived participation in the occupation of the Rhine bridgeheads hardened Canadian attitudes toward the vanquished, and on occasion it was all the officers could do to keep the men in check when the latter perceived slights from the sullen, unrepentant (and starving) German populace. In its imagery of German cruelty and Germany’s complete responsibility for the war and the destruction it had wrought, English Canadians’ collective memory of the conflict in the years following the end of hostilities deviated little from the perception that had been forged by wartime passions.

During the late 1930s, as war clouds gathered in Europe, Canadians generally distrusted the “new” Germany and despised Adolf Hitler, but were not prepared to fight unless forced to do so. When war finally came—a now-sovereign Canada officially declared war on September 10, 1939, a week after Britain—the public approached the conflict with a grim determination that the Nazi evil must be confronted but none of the illusions of 1914 about a short, relatively bloodless war. Ravaged by Depression-inspired retrenchment and the pervasive isolationism of the population, Canada’s armed forces numbered only about 10,000 men, supplemented by perhaps 40,000 militia and reservists, and were even more ill-equipped for modern war than a generation earlier (Bercuson 1995, 7—14). In a war of “limited liabilities,” as the government’s initial policy phrased it, such shortcomings would matter little because Canada’s principal contribution to the Allied cause would be economic production, not expeditionary forces. With the fall of France in June 1940, Canada’s war quickly became total, a decision that launched a desperate effort to build a modern army, navy, and air force in wartime while simultaneously mobilizing the Dominion’s considerable economic potential. With the exception of 2,000 soldiers dispatched to assist in the futile defense of Hong Kong in 1941, Canada’s war was entirely European in its focus. The government, largely to keep passions against the large German Canadian population in check, declared that the enemy was not Germans but Nazis, and by and large, public opinion was so persuaded.

Predictably, mounting a war effort as an ally of Great Britain again tested national unity, though the strains were less pronounced than during the Great War thanks to the fact that Ottawa did not have to introduce even a limited form of conscription for overseas service until late 1944. Although both francophone and immigrant (that is, continental European immigrant) Canadians proved more supportive than in 1914-1918, volunteer enlistments once again drew disproportionately from those Canadians of British descent.

Altogether 1.1 million served, and Canadian military units were present in all major campaigns—in the air, at sea, and on land. Total battle fatalities reached 42,000, over 41,000 of them dying in the European theater, killed by Germans.

The British Commonwealth/Empire Air Training Plan, which primarily operated in Canada, trained over 130,000 air crew members—half of them for the Royal Canadian Air Force. The great majority of these young men found their way into British Bomber Command and participated in the increasingly devastating “area bombing” attacks on German cities. From their perch 20,000 feet above the fires, most of the young Canadians contemplated that the slim likelihood of their own survival—nearly 10,000 would die—was probably greater than the odds faced by the German civilians below. At home, Canadian public opinion had little sympathy for the victims of Anglo-Canadian air power, whether the label was “Nazi” or “German.”

The Royal Canadian Navy’s (RCN) war focused almost entirely on the battle of the Atlantic. Expanding fiftyfold within three years, the RCN faced an almost impossible task through 1942 as the Royal Navy’s chief ally in the antisubmarine war. There was no lack of courage, but proper equipment and training were in desperately short supply. The Nazi menace beneath the waves brought the war as close to Canadian shores as it would get, and the October 1942 torpedoing of the ferry SS Caribou in the Gulf of St. Lawrence with heavy loss of life served as a sort of rerun of the Llandovery Castle incident. As Naval Minister Angus Macdonald reminded a national radio audience, if “there were any... who did not realize that we are up against a ruthless and remorseless enemy, there can be no such Canadians now” (Hadley 1985, 142). The naval war, while pitiless in its own way, nonetheless only rarely brought Canadian sailors face to face with their enemy, and the RCN’s own losses were only 2,000 men (a comparable number of Canadian merchant seamen also perished in the icy waters of the North Atlantic).

Thus, most Canadian sailors at least gave the Germans in their “iron coffins” grudging respect for their undeniable courage, especially after the tide in the battle shifted in the Allies’ favor.

The Canadian army, built up in England to a force of five and a half divisions by 1942, spent the first four years of the war training first to defend the British Isles and then to participate in the promised invasion of France. The lone excursion was the disastrous raid on Dieppe staged on August 19, 1942. In a matter of hours, the 5,000 Canadian soldiers who comprised the bulk of the 6,000-man attacking force were decimated—with more than 900 killed and another 2,000 taken prisoner, most of them wounded, more prisoners than the Canadian army would suffer in the entire ten-month-long Northwest Europe campaign. As a further indignity, having captured a British order compelling the shackling of German prisoners to prevent their destruction of documents, German authorities singled out the hapless Canadian prisoners for similar treatment. At Britain’s request, Ottawa promptly retaliated against the many German prisoners held in Canada. Eventually, the intervention of the Red Cross led both sides to abandon shackling, but not before several German prisoner revolts had to be put down in Canada. The slaughter at Dieppe steeled Canadian soldiers and the public alike—if any steeling had been necessary— to assume the worst from their opponent.

Canadian soldiers participated in the invasion of Sicily and subsequent liberation of Italy beginning in 1943. During the Christmas 1943 Battle of Ortona—“Little Stalingrad” as the exhausted Canadian infantry ruefully named it—vicious house- to-house fighting against fanatic German paratroopers won the enemy more respect than hatred. This perception generally held throughout the Italian campaign where the miserable weather of “sunny Italy,” chronic shortages of supplies and reinforcements, and especially the disinterest of the home front in the fate of the “D-Day Dodgers” were a greater focus of resentment among Canadian soldiers than the stubborn defense offered by the German army.

It would be different in Normandy, however. When the Canadian 3rd Division was savagely counterattacked at Juno Beach in the days immediately following their landing on D-Day, 156 Canadian prisoners, many of them wounded and all disarmed, were slaughtered in cold blood by members of the 12 th Waffen SS Panzer Division Hitler Jugend. Word quickly spread along the lines, and during the ensuing three months as the Canadians fought their way toward Caen and then Falaise, they gave no quarter in all but exterminating the SS unit. Canadian soldiers did, however, generally distinguish between the German army— professional, brave, and generally fighting by the accepted rules of civilized warfare— and the “criminal” Waffen SS.

Liberating grateful French, Belgian, and Dutch civilians from the yoke of Nazi occupation had offered some consolation to Canadian soldiers daily risking their lives in a war won but not yet over. When

they crossed into Germany in early 1945, attitudes noticeably hardened. Nonfraternization rules needed little enforcing, and few of the men felt any compassion for the long columns of bedraggled German civilian refugees who, as soldiers’ correspondence home widely conveyed, were just getting a taste of the misery they had handed so many others. Among those who could remember an earlier conflict, the bitterness often ran very deep. General Harry Crerar, commander of the 1st Canadian Army, refused even to show up at the surrender of German troops in Holland. Offering that he had spent his adult life fighting German militarism and had no stomach to shake hands with the enemy, he seconded a Corps commander to preside over the ceremonies in his place. Still, that one of his divisions was ably commanded by a Canadian named Hoffmeister said much about an antipathy toward “Germans” that was more appropriately focused than had been the case twenty-seven years earlier.

Wartime animosity did not last, not the least because the onset of the cold war raised new enemies. To its credit, Canada would play a leading role in feeding hungry Germans during the desperate postwar years, and by 1950 German immigration was allowed to resume, with relatively little domestic opposition in evidence.

Patrick H. Brennan

World Wars I and II, Canada and Germany in

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