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2. Mobilization for War
From Canadian History Portal - HCO
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Sam Hughes
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Borden responded quickly to the pressing need to raise troops by appointing Sam Hughes as his Minister of Militia. He gave Hughes wide powers to recruit, train and mobilize troops, and procure equipment. Hughes had been a general in the army reserve and took up his new task with enthusiasm. On July 31, he sent out orders to the 226 individual units of the Militia to send volunteers directly to Valcartier, north west of Quebec City, the major training and embarkation base, where tens of thousands of raw recruits received essential instruction and preparation.
On August 18, the first volunteers for overseas service started arriving at Valcartier, and by September 8, Hughes had collected over 32,000 men.
Hughes proved to be an effective organizer but a stubborn and dubious decision-maker. Even during the first recruitment drive, he got into trouble. Hughes was suspicious of the committment of French Canadians. He felt that they might repeat in WW I their halfhearted effort of the Boer War. He was openly racist when it came to black and aboriginal soldiers, refusing demands for separate regiments. However, he was highly successful in obtaining badly needed recruits. Eventually more than 600 000 Canadians would fight overseas.
The most disastrous of Hughes' decisions came in his choice of equipment. He chose to furnish the soldiers with the Canadian-made Ross rifle, a highly accurate and reliable weapon in training. However, that was only under camp conditions. The conditions along the trenches of the Western Front were to prove to be anything but ideal. The gun jammed in mud, overheated when fired in quick succession, and was notoriously badly calibrated for anything but ideal conditions.
Thousands of Canadian soldiers died trying to use the Ross Rifle, as Hughes stubbornly refused to replace his choice of weapon, even the face of mounting evidence. It was only after many needless deaths and a storm of opposition back home that in 1915 Hughes reluctantly changed his mind and replaced the Ross with the new battle tested British Lee-Enfield rifle. The Ross continued to be used as the training rifle in Canada and England.
Hughes was similarly insistent - and wrong - when he chose the MacAdam shovel. The Minister of Militia thought that the shovel, having a hole in the middle, would let a soldier safely fire his rifle from behind the protective cover of the shovel. The problem was that the shovel was far too small for the soldiers to see over without exposing themselves to enemy fire, which destroyed the whole purpose. Added to that was the fact that, not surprisingly, the hole in the middle of the shovel made it useless for digging trenches.
Leaving Camp Valcartier
The First Canadian Division, sailing in an huge convoy of 31 transports, left Gaspé Basin on October 3 and entered Plymouth Sound in England eleven days later. It was the largest convoy ever to cross the Atlantic. A contingent of nurses, called "bluebirds, accompanied the force, serving as medical staff, ambulance drivers, and clerks. They were given intensive training to prepare them for battlefield conditions.
The Canadian Expeditionary Force arrived in Britain on October 14, and shortly afterward the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry (PPCLI) were sent to France. The "Princess Pats", formed at the outbreak of war entirely from ex-British army regular soldiers, joined the British 27th Division in December 1914, and saw Canada's first action of the war. They engaged German troops dug in near St. Eloi and at Polygon Wood in the Ypres Salient.
The remaining Canadians, including The Royal Twenty-Second (the Vandoos), spent the next four months training on Salisbury Plain in southwestern England. It rained endlessly, and the Plain turned to a muddy quagmire, flooding the tents and leaving the troops bored and disgruntled.
Finally, early in February, 1915, the 1st Canadian Division was sent France to learn trench warfare from veteran British troops. Then they took over a section of the line in the Armentières sector in French Flanders, and waited for the real war to begin.
The War Measures Act, Hysteria & Sabotage
As the Canadian contingent was preparing for battle in Europe, much was being done back at home to ready the nation for war. Already in 1914, Prime Minister Borden attempted to build up the fledgling Canadian Navy. That Navy had been created four years earlier with the passage of then-Prime Minister Laurier's Naval Service Bill which led to Canada acquiring two aged British cruisers. But Borden's attempt to pass a Naval Aid Bill failed. The government proposed paying $35 million to Britain for the construction of three dreadnoughts as well as creating shipbuilding facilities in Canada and significantly expanding the existing Canadian Navy. The bill was defeated in the Liberal-dominated Senate.
The nation had to get on an immediate wartime footing. The War Measures Act was passed giving the government wide-ranging powers to arrest and detain any suspected subversives. In fact, it permitted the government to do virtually anything it deemed necessary "for the security, defense, peace, order, and welfare of Canada." By war's end, over 8,500 'enemy aliens' living within Canada had been imprisoned under the Act.
Wartime hysteria would reach ridiculous excesses. German composers, such as Beethoven, Brahms, and Bach, were banned. The name of Berlin, Ontario was changed to Kitchener in honour of the British war hero and in response to anti-German hysteria. Rumours abounded that an enemy invasion emanating from the United States was imminent. All enemy aliens were ordered to register with the police and turn over any weapons they owned. Almost 6 000 Ukrainian Canadians and over 2 000 German Canadians were interned during the war and used as forced labour in logging camps in Ontario and the coal mines of Nova Scotia.
At 8:50 pm on February 3, 1916, fire broke out in the Centre Block of the Parliament Buildings during a debate; by midnight, the main tower was ablaze, yet the clock was still able to strike 12. The gothic Parliamentary Library was saved by a quick thinking clerk, who closed the iron doors. But seven people died in the blaze, and the tragedy was widely blamed on German wartime saboteurs. The government sent 1,200 soldiers to guard Parliament Hill, and police arrested a 28 year old Belgian musician, but nothing was proven. Parliament moved to the Victoria Memorial Museum. The Commons held its sessions in the lecture hall, and the Senate, according to a report, was "accommodated in the apartment set apart for fossils and extinct leviathans."
The Halifax Explosion
Another disaster blamed on enemy sabotage was the Halifax explosion 22 months later.
While World War I raged in Europe, Halifax bustled with energy as the main base of the new Canadian Navy. The harbour was crowded with warships, troop transports and supply ships preparing to head for Europe. But all that changed on the morning of Dec. 6, 1917, when much of the city was blown to pieces, in the largest man-made non-nuclear explosion in history.
Coming into the harbour was a Belgium relief vessel Imo, outbound to New York City. The Imo was a much larger and faster ship. She was travelling fast, and too close to Dartmouth when the Mont Blanc first spotted her. The signalled that she was in her correct channel, but the Imo signalled that she was intending to bear even further to port and into the Mont Blanc's channel. The Mont Blanc signalled again that she was still intending to pass to starboard. By this time she was travelling "dead slow" close to the Dartmouth shore, expecting the Imo to swing towards Halifax, but she didn't, and the Mont Blanc made the fateful decision to swing to port, towards Halifax, across the bows of the Imo. Just as this happened, the Imo pilot panicked, and signalled "full speed astern." So did the Mont Blanc, but it was too late, and the Imo cut into the Mont Blanc's side, striking deadly sparks, igniting the benzol and picric acid, and propelling the blazing ship towards the piers of Halifax.
The terrified crew took to the lifeboats, screaming warnings that no one heeded, and rowed for their lives to Dartmouth, where most of them survived. Soon the drifting ship brushed by Pier 6, setting the wooden pilings on fire, while spectators, including many children, ran down to the waterfront to watch the billowing smoke and sparks from the deck of the vessel. Many just watched the fireworks from their windows, while crews from nearby ships raced to put out the blaze. The Halifax Fire Department responded quickly, and were just positioning their engine up to the nearest hydrant when the Mont Blanc exploded at 9:04:35 am in a blinding white flash.
Water around the ship vaporized, and a huge wave flooded up the streets of Halifax and Dartmouth, sweeping many people back into the harbour where they drowned. The blast levelled downtown Halifax, flattening everything within 800 metres, destroying 1600 buildings and killing over 1,900 people instantly. Hundreds more died of their wounds in the weeks and months that followed.
What was not immediately levelled by the blast burned to the ground, aided by winter stockpiles of coal in cellars. In all, 12,000 houses were badly damaged, leaving 10,000 people homeless and 25,000 without adequate housing. The damage amounted to over $50 million.
The boom was big enough to ring church bells 100 km away. The shock wave shattered windows at Truro, and the sound could be heard in Charlottetown and Sydney. A recent theory suggests that this, the most devastating man-made explosion before the atomic bomb, may have been due to enemy sabotage.
The suffering and hardship were intensified when Halifax was hit by a severe winter storm. Thankfully, relief, which was limited given the wartime conditions, came in from far and wide. However, it would be many years before the city fully repaired the physical, emotional, and psychological damage of the Halifax Explosion.
A local court found Captain Le Medec of the Mont Blanc and other defendants guilty of the collision. The Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the captains of both ships were equally to blame, but the Privy Council in London later ruled that Le Medec had done nothing illegal.
Word of the disaster took a long time to get out. The telegraph lines were all cut, and that afternoon, with the North End of the city devastated and hundreds still trapped in burning rubble, a blizzard roared into Halifax, dumping 16 inches of snow over the sooty, oil-soaked ruins. But the news that something disastrous had happened in Halifax started to reach the outside world through ships radio. The Boston Red Cross and the Massachusetts Public Safety Committee were among the first to act, sending trainloads of medical supplies, blankets, and food. Today, a grateful province still donates a giant Nova Scotia Christmas fir tree to stand in the Boston Common.
Robert Oppenheimer, head of the U.S Manhattan Project that created the atomic bomb, studied the devastation of the Halifax explosion in order to visualize what destructive powers would be unleashed by his monstrous new weapon.
Sidelight: Ukranian Canadians Interned Under War Measures Act Ukrainian internees at the Spirit Lake Internment Camp, Lac Beauchamp, Abitibi, Quebec; LAC/BAC PA-170620 After Britain entered the First World War in August of 1914, Canadian Prime Minister Robert Borden introduced the War Measures Act. Under the Act, the Cabinet passed an Order In Council that resulted in the internment of 8,579 "enemy aliens" in 24 "concentration camps" and work sites in British Columbia, Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, and based like the Beauport Armoury and CFB Valcartier . The internment did not include Canadian-born, Canadian citizens, or citizens of the Russian Empire. But Austro-Hungarians were singled out as aliens. Most were ethnic Ukrainians who had emigrated to Canada from territories under the control of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Canada was aligned with Britain against Austria-Hungary, an ally of Germany. In total, the Canadian Government interned 8,579 males, including 5,954 Austro-Hungarians. Most internees were poor or unemployed single men, although 81 women and 156 children (of all nationalities) voluntarily accompanied men at two of the camps, even those who were born in Canada. The Act also obliged an additional 80,000 individuals (of whom about 70,000 from Austria-Hungary were Ukrainians) to register as "enemy aliens", and required them to carry identity papers and report to local authorities on a regular basis. The Act also denied them citizenship rights, including the ability to vote.  Infoukes logo The internment ended in 1920, although most Ukrainians were paroled into jobs for private companies by 1917. But some were held in camps for 18 months after the war because their labour was so cheap. Before they were interned, many young men had been fired from jobs for "patriotic reasons" and were left homeless. Some of the detainees were forced to turn over money and property. According to McGill University historian J. H. Thompson, the Canadian government later auctioned the property for 10 cents on the dollar or kept. Some of that wealth is still in federal coffers. In 2005, Prime Minister Paul Martin recognized the Ukrainian-Canadian internment as a "dark chapter in the history of Canada", and pledged $2.5 million to fund memorials and educational exhibits.
References
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