Conscription Crisis of 1944 - Background

Background

Canada declared war against Nazi Germany on September 10, 1939 and sent one division to Europe, which had no chance for combat before France was overrun by Germany. In 1940, Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King pledged to limit Canada's direct military involvement in the war. Many Canadians supported Mackenzie King's pledge, even as it became obvious the war would not be quickly resolved.

As in the First World War, young French-Canadians joined the few traditional French-speaking regiments of the Canadian army, such as the Regular-Army Royal 22e Régiment, and several Militia regiments that were mobilized. In the Infantry, barracks life and most training was in French and only the command and radio language was in English.

In the rest of the military, however, similar French-speaking units were not created. Among the justifications for this policy were the predominance of the radio, and the fact that the technical instruction was only available in English. The 12th Armoured Regiment (Three Rivers Regiment), originally mobilized by the francophone militia unit the Three Rivers Regiment (Tank), was reorganized and fought as an English-speaking unit. Many French-speaking soldiers were sidetracked in this process. One of the most famous was Jean-Victor Allard who demanded a transfer from the Three Rivers Regiment to the Infantry; he went on to become a brigade commander in Northwest Europe and then in Korea, command a British Division in NATO and subsequently become Chief of the Defence Staff of the Canadian Armed Forces (where he took pleasure in creating the first French-speaking brigade).

While units such as the Royal 22e Régiment, Les Fusiliers Mont-Royal, the Régiment de la Chaudière and the Régiment de Maisonneuve all had outstanding records during World War II, some feel that if they had been concentrated into the same brigade (as French-Canadians requested and as currently exists in the Canadian Armed Forces), it could have become a focus of pride for French-Canada, encouraging the war effort and political support in Quebec. These units were, however, distributed among the various English-speaking divisions of the Canadian Army overseas. Jack Granatstein in his book The Generals (1995 - ISBN 0-7737-2730-2), suggests that a shortage of French-speaking staff trained officers meant that any attempt to create an entire Francophone brigade would have likely ended in failure. However, the brigade could well have used English-speaking staff at the Brigade HQ; it would have been no different from the situation whereby these French-speaking units had to deal with English higher HQs in their various dispersed divisions.

Acceptance of French-speaking units was greater in Canada from the start of the Second World War in comparison to the first. While the creation of the 22nd Infantry Battalion (French-Canadian) required large rallies of French-Canadians in 1914, accompanied by political pressure, to overcome Minister Sam Hughes' abhorrence of the idea, this greater acceptance of French-Canadian units, as well as informal use of their language, diminished the ferocity of Quebec's resistance to the war effort.

In June 1940 the government adopted conscription for home service in the National Resources Mobilization Act (NRMA), which allowed the government to register men and women and move them into jobs considered necessary for wartime production, but did not allow them to be conscripted for overseas service.

By the late summer of 1944, the numbers of new recruits were insufficient to replace war casualties in Europe, particularly among the infantry.

Conversely, the United States, which did not enter the war until December 7, 1941, following the Attack on Pearl Harbor, instituted the Selective Service Act on September 14, 1940 and extended it by a single vote the following year. The law was not controversial during the war, however, and draftees served under the same conditions as enlistees.