The forgotten ruthlessness of Canada’s Great War soldiers (2018)
nationalpost.com
nationalpost.com
https://kottke.org/18/12/against-peter-jacksons-they-shall-n...
Davis, Into the Silence, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest (2012)[3]
[1] http://www.gutenberg.org/files/30285/30285-h/30285-h.htm
[2] https://librivox.org/how-i-filmed-the-war-by-geoffrey-h-mali...
[3] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11602442-into-the-silenc...
Read this a few times, and then return to the rest my comment...
... execution of wounded prisoners did not even warrant a whole sentence. That’s literally all Tolstoy wrote about it.
I don’t think he was callous, I think at the time it was the norm and didn’t warrant a mention except in this case the unpleasant task was delaying the transport.
^ citing from memory
^^ this is the Napoleonic war of 1812. At least 100 years later the brutality deserved mention.
There was no one coming to heal them. Modern medicine wasn't invented. They were spared hours of slow death.
But even if you’re right, don’t you think it deserved more than half-sentence?
For your purposes, it would be more useful to recognize when you're doing this kind of probably-wrong analysis and make the relevant qualifying announcements in your post. It's useful to do, it's even more useful when done in a self-aware fashion.
Particularly, it makes it easier for the person with the correct understanding to share it without feeling like they're pissing into the wind. My new favorite phrase is, "correct me if I'm wrong here, but..."
It would have been very unlikely that common men would have ever been taken prisoner. They'd have just been slaughtered on the battlefield, if they did not run away.
At any rate the breaking the conventions of the times is the thing that draws a mention, in the same way that a man biting a dog does.
Why don't the history teachers drop these snippets during classes?
In all probability the callousness in tone was the point. It’s also a common device in Russian literature of the time to gloss over such brutality and hardship. It’s a bit of a trope at how commonplace suffering was made to seem in stories and other writing by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and other contemporaries. See also: God Sees the Truth, But Waits
> The Marine Corps had always recruited a disproportionate number of men from the South, where the military traditions of the early 1860s had never died. Later I met many Raiders like that, and Coffey was typical: tall, lanky, and fair haired, with a mad grin and dancing, rain-colored eyes full of shattered light. They were born killers; in the Raider battalions, in violation of orders, they would penetrate deep behind Japanese lines at night, looking for two Nips sacked out together. Then they would cut the throat of one and leave the other to find the corpse in the morning. This was brilliant psychological warfare, but it was also, of course, extremely dangerous. In combat these Southerners would charge fearlessly with the shrill rebel yell of their great-grandfathers, and they loved the bayonet. How my father's side defeated my mother's side in the Civil War will always mystify me.
Strategy, logistics, own warriors who were not actually cowardly either and did actually fought and killed too. Also, military discipline is an advantage overall I heard. Soldiers eager to break it in order to get to few kills are oftentimes less of an advantage.
I've been wondering how the story of Sleeping Beauty would play out if she'd gone to sleep in, say, 1846 or so, waking up just after the end of WW2. Imagine a royal family held in a time capsule emerging to demand their kingdom back from people who've just gone through the absolute hell raised by the collapse of the old monarchies, twice. What would that fairy tale look like?
They Shall Not Grow Old sheds some visceral light on this — soldiers are very intentionally funneled through a process taking them from normal life to the front line in a way that makes the next step the natural, logical thing to do in that situation, and by the time the full gore of the front line fighting is realized, they are partially acclimated to it, and partially pushed from behind into the melee. It’s a calculated psychological trip.
Now instead of a smartphone, it's an automatic belt fed gun being aimed at your collective imaginary ancestor - someone who's fired a bolt operated gun at best and who has only written accounts(if they can read) or verbal rumors of the effect of such weaponry. Even if they were firing it, all you would see is your gun spitting bullets out steadily and people charging at you dropping on their faces like puppets with their strings cut. It would be hard to process in the moment.
I saw similar items at the RCR museum in London, Ontario years ago. Definitely worth a visit.
I think Canada was in a "littlest brother of the commonwealth with a lot to prove" position. Confederation was in 1867 but we weren't really a country until much later. We couldn't even declare war on our own. Just went wherever England went.
That’s not what the article says.
> Throughout the war, stretches of the Western Front observed an unofficial “live and let live” policy between Germans and their French or British enemies. By mutual agreement, both sides agreed not to attack the other unless ordered — and would even schedule truces for meals and bathroom breaks.
The German that shot him was probably just messing around, you're right.
It's far worse to uncritically examine our ancestors behaviour.
Your link also states "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation"
Both their parent and GP were talking about reading conflicting things. Reading around to get a better sense of the truth of the matter would seem, reasonable.
Of course a less pithy comment, where the meaning was clear would be best of all.
It’s likely your grandfather was a good man with no desire to kill Germans. It’s likely whoever shot him felt the same.
No doubt they were. But we do tend to forget that large swathes of them had originally volunteered, often with enthusiasm.
The comment I responded to describes Canadian history extremely inaccurately ('littlest brother of the commonwealth'), that this is wildly incorrect should be obvious to anyone educated in Canada. I like many others was taught all about Canadian exploits in WW1 and WW2, including their excellence at trench raiding, improvised weapons and feared reputation as 'shock troops.' Could be that's just Ontario (or my school district) but I'm fairly certain it's a well known part of Canadian history (at least for Canadians).
Even the author of the article says we should not pass judgment given the circumstances. Have a good morning.
Mentioning the Suez crisis is actually relevant to this discussion. The architect of the Suez peace, Canadian foreign affairs minister Lester Pearson, had spent his First World War career (and nearly the entire duration of that war) as a volunteer field medic. He spent his formative young-adult years seeing the immediate aftermath of modern battles that result when leaders fail to engage in good-faith diplomacy.
- at times non-American Generals were in charge of the UN forces. So what did they do? They moved their country forces to the rear, and sent "coalition" forces into battle. The reason was that any casualties (even 2 or 3 dead) would be a political crisis at home (true across most European nations.)
- the Albanian underground had to import a 50 cal AA gun from the US. What for? To shoot at UN helicopters attacking their citizens. And guess what ... it worked - the UN stopped flying helicopters after their ground search for it failed. (Think about it for a second - who else had helicopters to shoot down besides the UN?)
- the US did an airstrike on the Chinese Embassy ... because they were relaying radio signal traffic to local forces fighting the UN. This caused a major international incident, but nobody seriously denies ... that the Chinese were involved in radio signal intercepts for locals.
- The UN agreed to cease-fires with enemy forces and allowed them to enter refugee camps and hospitals. Guess what happened next. Good on the Swedes ... there wasn't much courage going around at the time.
I'm trying to parse this.
Did the US knowingly export this AA gun? Why were the UN attacking the citizens.
Are you referring to this? It doesn't seem to bear much resemblance to what you're describing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Alba
Still can't find a reference to ethnic Albanians shooting down a UN helicopter, or UN helicopters attacking ethnic Albanians.
https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2017/09/20/trigger...
TL;DR: The Swedish military doctrine created a military culture of highly autonomous units that were expected to make task completion and decisive action their top priority, even if it meant disobeying orders. Consequently, NORDBAT 2 was highly effective in achieving their objectives, some of which they themselves decided, but you have to wonder where you draw the line between taking appropriate action based on local knowledge and simply going rogue.
This especially in the context of a UN peacekeeping mission - such missions depend on consent from the belligerents, and if UN troops are seen to become participants in a war, it is likely to make future operations harder.
But then this isnt classic colonialism either, the Dutch Boers weren't exactly there first. This is one set of colonisers fighting another, so on one level, singling it out as immoral betrays a certain kind of bias. Yes the British invented the concentration camp to lock up the Boers, but what were they doing to the Zulus when they were at war with them?
Proving that guns beat spears, no matter how many spearmen you have.
it took 2 goes, though
Are you making reference to Roukes Drift? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Rorke%27s_Drift
That's what the film Zulu is based on. They followed on from one another, and on the same day, they're generally considered to be 2 separate actions though.
Also on the subject of British defeats, there's Gate Pah in New Zealand https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tauranga_campaign
And the 1st Afghan War. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Anglo-Afghan_War
Anyway I wasn't even thinking about what they did in battle, I was think about how they treated the civilians, how they treated them after the war, how they treated prisoners. The Boers got off lightly, they got some (all?) of their land back after a relatively short period, the Zulus didn't.
Yes, that's point that it "took 2 goes".
The Afrikaaners (Dutch-descended colonists) already had their own states (Transvaal, Orange Free state), so it wasn't quite an "uprising".
However there was a gold rush happening in the Transvaal in the late 1800s, and the problem was that it wasn't British-controlled, so that had to be fixed.
"Canadians were drawn from the Empire’s outer reaches and viewed as rugged northern warriors, if ill-disciplined."
"The Canadians did, however, earn their fierce battlefield reputation on the Western Front."
"the Canadians were viewed by their allies and enemies as shock troops to be thrown into the fiercest battles to deliver victory."
https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/the-canadi...
I also remember being taught the British sent Canadians into battles the British didn't want to do - the worst battles where casualties were expected to be high.
I know that American soldiers only showed up at the end of the war, but did they have a similar reaction to the Canadians?
When WW2 rolled around, the point was moot, with offensive forces literally on the doorstep - Darwin was bombed, and there were submarines inside Sydney’s harbour.
[1] Illustration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Hong_Kong_(1959–1997)#...
[2] During Protests: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Hong_Kong_(1959–1997)#...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Canada#/media/File:Can...
> One theory was that Canadians were perpetually avenging the “Crucified Canadian,” a battlefield rumour of a captured Canadian officer that Germans had supposedly crucified to a barn door near Ypres. The crucifixion was almost certainly fabricated.
This is perhaps a better explanation than the Crucified Canadian: Another (theory) was that Canadians had never forgiven the Germans’ first use of poison gas in 1915, of which Canadian units had been some of the hardest hit.
I imagine their soldiers had just as tough a time of it as others. Life was cheap, WW1 was brutal in the extreme.
Consider a man lugging around a 35lb anti tank rifle, ammunition, and gear would have loved to have a horse. That can apply to just about any heavy but still man portable weapon.
PS: Horses where still useful outside of battle in WWII. Hell, America was occasionally using donkey’s in Afghanistan.
Horses were used as transport, and lugging around field guns throughout the war - they were more capable than vehicles in the conditions. Those were supplemented with the narrow gauge trench railways. Internal combustion wasn't yet up to replacing all those uses.
You seem to be describing mounted infantry rather than cavalry.
Mounted infantry fought on foot, they didn't charge into battle. They also equipped soldiers with bicycles when would have had a similar effect.
Mounted infantry are typically about speed of movement, similar to bicycles. Each still has slightly different trade-offs
They were still useful in battle in WW2. My regiment fought on horseback during WW2. And the US still trains soldiers to fight on horseback to this day.
> Consider a man lugging around a 35lb anti tank rifle, ammunition, and gear would have loved to have a horse.
Yes but that’s not cavalry is it - that’s just an infanteer on a horse.
man + 30 kg of gear (standard for US) is already approaching the upper limit of what a horse can carry. Horses are easy to spook and hurt. Donkeys are total badasses in comparison.
The ones I know of:
https://ww100.govt.nz/surafend-incident
https://i.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/84221541/editorial-claim...
Most Canadians stayed home during WWI. Most recently-arrived Brits went to Europe to fight for their country.
Boyles is a screenwriter who was involved in writing in the movies like Apollo 13, Cast Away, Jarhead, and Saving Private Ryan.
In an alternate universe...
Everyone is polite, and "bloodthirsty" at different times.
The Swiss, the French, the Kenyans, the Mauritians, the Indonesians, the Chileans, literally everyone on earth. Every nation and every human is faced with that dichotomous state of being.
British are no more polite, or bloodthirsty than Americans. Japanese are no more polite, or bloodthirsty than Canadians or Koreans. What you allude to is a very human failure, and is present in every society on earth.
Everything makes logical sense with details. Native populations through treaties have the right to hunt. Canada wanting to manage populations sets limits. This creates a lotto system. Winners sell them to big game US hunters and the tribe gets the profit.
The asbesto mines are in the French part of Canada which makes shutting them down politically difficult.
Canada is a collectiom of different people who figured out how to get along.
That said, I imagine neither country has a monopoly on such.
https://www.thestar.com/calgary/2019/07/19/a-canadian-couple...
I do not see the harm in controlling the population via hunting instead of letting the populations teether wildly between the carnivores and herbivores as one of them gain dominance in the biosphere...
Also banning something outright just drives the people who want to do it underground where they can't be controlled.
Canadians are polite. But they're not apologetic. Your comment misses the mark.
> a country big on marketing itself but ironic in its realities
Add up all the clubbed seals and exported asbestos, and a single ICE automobile is worse.
It seems like anybody can have an extreme opinion with no supporting logic.
That’s not polite. That’s an internalized response to avoid interacting with others.