70 years ago on September 19, 1944, Canada was forced to face a harsh reality. With the Allies finally pushing back against the Nazi tide, there just weren’t enough volunteer replacement troops reaching Europe to keep up the pressure.
Throwing himself front and center into the personnell crisis was the unlikely figure of Conn Smythe. Some might recognize him as being the original owner of the Toronto Maple Leafs. Some might know him as being the guy responsible for helping to start the New York Rangers.
During WW1, Smythe joined the Canadian Army and became a lieutenant in an Artillery division. He was sent overseas in 1916 and immediately saw action first near Ypres in Belgium and then at the Somme in 1917 where he was awarded a Military Cross. In July of 1917, Smythe joined the Royal Flying Corps. Later that year in October, Smythe was shot down and spent the final year of the war as a POW.
After he returned from Europe, Smythe involved himself in hockey. In the summer of 1926, Smythe was hired by Tex Rickard the owner of Madison Square Garden to recruit hockey players for a new team that Rickard was going to form in New York. New York was already home to the New York Americans but Rickard hated the owner of the Americans and decided that he should form a competing team. The New York media began calling the new team “Tex’s Rangers” and the name “Rangers” soon stuck. Smythe, who had been hired to be the manager, scoured the country looking for players. But before the team took to the ice, Smythe had a falling out with one of Rickard’s managers and left New York.
Smythe purchased the Toronto St. Pats in 1927 and immediately renamed it the Maple Leafs. He would own the team for the next 34 years. But when WW II began, Smythe volunteered at the age of 45 to reenter active service. Smythe was in France in July of 1944 when he was injured in action. While he was recuperating in the hospital Smythe began talking to other wounded soldiers and it was during this period of time when he became incensed over Canada’s policy of only sending volunteers to fight overseas. He came to understand that after 4+ years of fighting, Canada was being forced to send new volunteers to fight in Europe who were completely inexperienced. And while these inexperienced soldiers resulted in excessive casualties, very large numbers of trained French Canadian soldiers were sitting around in Canada doing nothing.
To understand what was going on in Canada at the time, its necessary to explain a bit about the politics surrounding conscription and the politics that separated English and French speaking Canadians.
McKenzie King, Canada’s wartime Prime Minister took the country into WW2 on September 10, 1939. In Quebec, French speaking Canadians were still unhappy as a result of a conscription crisis that had occurred during WW1 when Canadian Prime Minister Robert Borden was forced to conscript French Canadians into the army against their will and send them to fight.
So with the start of WW2, Canada found itself again in a European war and again with a French Canadian population that was dead set against fighting for Canada. In 1940, in order to secure a national electIon victory for his Liberal Party, King had promised French Canadians that there would be no conscription. In fact, King himself had opposed conscription during WW1 when his party was not in power. In 1941 Canada had enough volunteers to operate 5 divisions overseas. By 1942, with the war looking like it was going to last a long time, politicians in King’s Liberal Party as well as the opposition Conservative Party outside Quebec began demanding that King do something to ensure that French Canadians would also fight in this second world war. In anticipation of a huge political fight looming in Quebec over this subject, King persuaded Louis St. Laurent, a key Liberal figure in Quebec politics to join his cabinet as Minister of Justice in early 1942. After this King settled on the idea of holding a national plebiscite on whether to implement conscription. Not surprisingly, overall, Canadians voted 63% in favor. In English Canada, the voting was more than 80% in favor. But in Quebec, French Canadians overwhelmingly voted more than 70% against conscription. A large number of Quebec Liberal Members of Parliament left the party after the plebiscite but Louis St. Laurent remained loyal to King. After the war, King would return the favor and supported St. Laurent in his bid to replace King who retired in 1948. St. Laurent would become Canada’s next Prime Minister. But the plebiscite really solved nothing except to put numbers to a situation that was widely known by everyone.
French Canadians were still being drafted into the army but none of them were deployed overseas. They continued to sit around in Canada while English Canadians were fighting and dying in Europe. In 1943, the Canadian government tried to deploy one of these French Canadian divisions to the Aleutian Islands, to support the US effort to remove the Japanese who had landed there in the opening days of the Battle of Midway. King thought that the French speaking Canadians would go along with this since the Aleutians were at least technically in North America. But it turned into a disaster when large numbers of the Quebec conscripts deserted rather than deploy.
And so it was in 1944 after the D-Day invasion that Canada found itself running out of troops and Conn Smythe entered the picture.
On September 19, In a front page editorial of Toronto’s Globe and Mail Newspaper, Smythe castigated King in public for the Government’s inaction. He wrote,
“The need for trained reinforcements in the Canadian Army is urgent. During my time in France and in the hospitals of France and England, I was able to discuss the reinforcement situation with officers of units representing every section of Canada. I talked to officers from far Eastern Canada, French Canada, Ontario and all the Western Provinces. They agreed that the reinforcements received now are green, inexperienced and poorly trained. Besides this general statement, specific charges are that many have never thrown a grenade. Practically all have little or no knowledge of the Bren gun and finally, most of them have never seen a Piat anti-tank gun, let alone fired one. These officers are unaniminous in stating that large numbers of unnecessary casualties result from this greenness, both to the rookies and to the other soldiers, who have the added task of trying to look after the newcomers as well as themselves. I give these true facts of the reinforcement situation in the hope that:
1. Col Ralston, (Canada’s Defense Minister) if he has other information, will know that his facts are out of date or that he has been misinformed;
2. The taxpayer will insist that no more money be spent on well-trained soldiers in this country except to send them to the battle fronts;
3. The people who voted these men should be used overseas when needeed should insist on the Government carrying out the will of the people; and
4. The relatives of the lads in the fighting zones should ensure no further casualties are caused to their own flesh and blood by the failure to send overseas reinforcements now available in large numbers in Canada.”
Keep in mind, at the time, the First Canadian Army was fighting hard in France after clearing Dieppe, Le Havre and Boulogne on the French coast. They were about to attack the Germans guarding the Scheldt Estuary which was necessary so that deep water ships could offload their cargo at the Port of Antwerp. With all this heavy fighting, Canadian papers were filled with notices of English Canadian soldiers being killed in action. And along came a well known and respected Canadian war hero who was excoriating the Prime Minister over his inability to get French Canadians to fight for Canada.
King finally succumbed to the political pressure and in November of 1944 he ordered more than 17000 French Canadian soldiers to France. The resulting riots in Quebec nearly brought down King’s government but St. Laurent spoke out forcefully to his fellow Quebecers and tried to calm them down. In the end, not many of these conscripts saw action. The Canadian Army would not play any role in fighting during the Battle of the Bulge nor did it participate in any of the major actions in 1945.
It would be unfair to write that not a single French Canadian fought for Canada during WW2. There was one volunteer Regiment, the Royal 22nd Regiment that was filled with French Canadian volunteers. This unit, known as the Van Doos saw action in Italy and in Northwest Europe. However, there were enough French Canadians sitting around in Canada for 6 more Regiments the size of the Van Doos who never left Canada and never fought.
Canadians take great pride in the contribution Canada made in both World Wars. But the sad fact is that the French Canadians in Quebec did very little to help the effort.