The forgotten ruthlessness of Canada’s Great War soldiers
"In 1915, it was the Canadian Corps’ first Christmas on the Western Front and in a trench near Ypres their enemy was inviting them over for a party.
The year before had seen the famous Christmas Truce, when thousands of Allied and Entente soldiers had sprung from their trenches to trade gifts and play soccer in no-man’s-land.
“Merry Christmas, Canadians,” said the opposing Germans, poking their heads above the parapet and waving a box of cigars. A Canadian sergeant responded by opening fire, hitting two of the merrymakers.
“When they returned it, one of our lads was shot through the head. That put an end to our Christmas gathering quickly,” Lance Cpl. George D’All wrote in a letter home.
It was a preview of coming developments. Canadian soldiers would emerge from the First World War with a reputation for winning victories that others could not. But even in a war of unparalleled ferocity, enemy and ally alike would remember the Canadians as having been particularly brutal.
British war correspondent Philip Gibbs had a front row seat on four years of Western Front fighting. He would single out the Canadians as having been particularly obsessed with killing Germans, calling their war a kind of vendetta. “The Canadians fought the Germans with a long, enduring, terrible, skilful patience,” he wrote after the war.
The English poet Robert Graves was less charitable. In his 1929 bestseller Good-Bye to All That, he wrote “the troops that had the worst reputation for acts of violence against prisoners were the Canadians.”
Germans developed a special contempt for the Canadian Corps, seeing them as unpredictable savages. In the final weeks of the war, Canadian Fred Hamilton would describe being singled out for a beating by a German colonel after he was taken prisoner. “I don’t care for the English, Scotch, French, Australians or Belgians but damn you Canadians, you take no prisoners and you kill our wounded,” the colonel told him...
[Tim] Cook is clear that modern Canadians cannot condemn the sometimes shocking behaviour of their First World War soldiers without knowing the stress and chaos of battle. “I’m not passing judgment on these guys 90 years later,” he told Postmedia in a 2006 interview. But he did chastise prior historians for sanitizing the brutality of Canada’s war. The message is particularly resonant given that so many veterans themselves were open to having it known and remembered.
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.
There are very few recorded instances of this ever happening with Canadians. As Canadian Corps commander Arthur Currie would often boast after the war, his troops prided themselves on killing the enemy wherever and whenever they could.
“We tried to make his life miserable,” Currie said in 1919.
In one particularly cruel episode, Canadians even exploited the trust of Germans who had apparently become accustomed to fraternizing with allied units. Lieutenant Louis Keene described the practice of lobbing tins of corned beef into a neighbouring German trench. When the Canadians started hearing happy shouts of “More! Give us more!” they then let loose with an armload of grenades.
For those Germans unlucky enough to face a trench full of Canadians, one of their greatest fears was nighttime raids on unsuspecting enemy trenches.
Trench raids were the First World War at its most brutal. Hand to hand fighting in crowded, darkened chaos. Whole dugouts of sleeping Germans burned or buried alive by tossed grenades. Terrified defenders mercilessly stabbed or machine-gunned as they fled for the rear.
“There were screams of German soldiers, terror-shaken by the flash of light in their eyes, and black faces above them, and bayonets already red with blood,” wrote Phillip Gibbs of one Canadian raid. “It was butcher’s work, quick and skilful … Thirty Germans were killed before the Canadians went back.”...
While all Commonwealth units were encouraged to conduct trench raids, Canadians were widely regarded as trench raiding’s most enthusiastic practitioners and innovators.
They wore thick rubber gloves and blackened their faces for maximum stealth. They crafted homemade pipe bombs and grenade catapults to increase their killing power. They continued raiding even while other colonial units abandoned the practice. “Raids are not worth the cost, none of the survivors want to go anymore,” was how one Australian officer described their abandonment of the practice...
Untold numbers of Germans attempt to surrender to Canadians were being met only with bayonets or bullets.
In a detailed 2006 study of Canadian soldiers killing prisoners in the Great War, Cook was surprised to unearth dozens of accounts of Canadians executing surrendering Germans out of rage, vengeance or expediency.
A typical account would involve a Canadian unit losing men while charging an enemy position, and then executing the soldiers in that position when they tried to surrender. “After losing half of my company there, we rushed them and they had the nerve to throw up their hands and cry, ‘Kamerad.’ All the Kam-erad they got was a foot of cold steel thro them” reads an account by Lieutenant R.C. Germain quoted by Cook.
Others were cold-blooded executions. In one case, a Canadian surreptitiously slipped a live grenade into the greatcoat pockets of a German prisoner. In another, infantryman Richard Rogerson went on a killing spree at Vimy Ridge after seeing the death of his friend. “Once I killed my first German with my bayonit my blood was riled, every german I could not reach with my bayonit I shot. I think no more of murdering them than I usted to think of shooting rabbits,” he wrote.
In some cases, Cook found evidence of Canadian commanders explicitly ordering their troops not to take prisoners. He quoted James Owen, a then-16-year-old private, who was told by his commanding officer before a 1916 attack “I don’t want any prisoners.” Before the attack on Vimy Ridge, veteran Archie McWade said he was told, “Remember, no prisoners. They will just eat your rations.”...
Soldier Clifford Rogers bragged “the Germans call us the white Ghurkha,” a reference to famously ruthless Ghurkha soldiers from Nepal who served with the British Indian army.
Canadians did not have a monopoly on Western Front brutality and prisoner execution stories were rife among any First World War army. And Canada, unlike Germany, had a near-spotless record when it came to the treatment of civilians.
The Canadians’ reputation for prisoner-killing may have been exacerbated by the simple fact that they were constantly being placed in the first wave of new attacks, putting them in disproportionate contact with Germans attempting to surrender.
What confused both friend and foe alike was why Canadians were so vicious. The French had seen large swaths of their country destroyed and subjugated. The British had zeppelins bombing their cities and U-boats trying to starve their populace. But Canadians had left behind safe and prosperous homes that wouldn’t see the slightest tinge of German aggression.
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.
Another 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. The Canadian Corps would eventually become the most enthusiastic user of poison gas on the Western Front."
