| INDEX → 1. First People → 2. Explorers → 3. New France → 4. BNA → 5. Conflict → → 6. Confederation → 7. The West → 8. Changing Nation → 9. World War I →→ TERMS OF USE © Northern Blue Publishing. A licence is required for institutional or commercial use of any material in these pages. Please read the Terms of Use. |
B. Mobilization for War
From HCO Jr
| Mobilization for War - Gallery | Stories & Texts | Web Links | Vocab | Student Activities | Student Projects |
Sam Hughes
Contents |
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. The port city of Halifax had a long history of shipping, trade, and the navy. It was blessed with a fine natural harbor. However, the history of the city was forever changed on the morning of December 6, 1917.
At 8:45 am, a French munitions freighter, the Mont Blanc, was coming through the Narrows carrying 2,300 tons of picric acid, 200 tons of TNT, 35 tons of high octane gasoline, and 10 tons of gun cotton, when it collided with the Belgium steamship Imo, outbound to New York City. The collisions propelled the Mont Blanc towards the shore, its picric acid ablaze. The crew abandoned ship, failing to alert the harbour of the peril. Minutes later the blazing ship brushed by a pier, setting it ablaze, while spectators gathered along the waterfront to witness the spectacle. The Halifax Fire Department responded quickly, and were just positioning their engine up to the nearest hydrant when the Mont Blanc exploded at 9:05 am in a blinding white flash.
The blast, the most devastating man-made explosion before the atomic bomb, levelled downtown Halifax, causing $50 million in damage. The shock wave shattered windows at Truro, 100 km away, and the sound could be heard in Charlottetown. Crewmen were not the only ones killed as knives of broken glass and falling buildings killed 2,000, injured over 8,000, and left 10,000 homeless. 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.
| Mobilization for War - Gallery | Stories & Texts | Web Links | Vocab | Student Activities | Student Projects |
del.icio.us
digg
facebook
googlebookmark
reddit
stumbleupon
yahoo
