Mobilize!: Why Canada Was Unprepared for the Second World War

This book is for

Michael Kevin Brennan, MD, FRCPC

History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days.

— Winston Churchill, 1940

Contents

Foreword by J. L. Granatstein

Acknowledgements

Chapter One — War Stations

Chapter Two — Close to the Vanishing Point

Chapter Three — The Dazzling Ballistician

and the Unspectacular Sailor

Chapter Four — The Fat Little Conjuror

Chapter Five — Canada in a Mad World

Chapter Six — Expanding Torrents, Huff Duff,

and the First Letter of Obscene Words

Chapter Seven — Right Up There with Joan of Arc

Chapter Eight — Bren Gun Misfire

Chapter Nine — A Total and Unmitigated Defeat

Chapter Ten — Who Can Hope to Appease a Boa Constrictor?

Chapter Eleven — Fixing to Chaw the Goddam Nazis to Death

Chapter Twelve — Ugly Surprises, Awful Miscalculations

Chapter Thirteen — Pull Down the Blinds and Hide Under the Bed

Appendix — Military Enlistments by Province

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Foreword

The Second World War was unquestionably the greatest national effort of the Canadian people. With a population of only 11 million, Canada put 1.1 million men and women in uniform, fielding the third largest air force and the fourth largest navy in the world, and a powerful overseas army of two corps with five divisions and two additional armoured brigades. The casualties were terrible, but significantly lower than in the Great War, and there was better care at every level than in the first conflict.

At the same time, Canadian industry produced the goods, churning out trucks and tanks, aircraft and ships, and armaments, shells, and bombs of every type. Farmers, miners, and forestry workers did their mighty bit too, and Canada supplied its own people with food — and much of the Allied world too. Moreover, the nation became so wealthy it could give away billions of dollars to its allies. The Gross Domestic Product doubled between 1939 and 1945, reaching some $11.5 billion, there was full employment, as much overtime work as everyone could handle, and families actually ate better than in the Thirties, despite food rationing. It was an exceptional period, the years when Canada altered almost completely.

No one could have predicted this turnaround in the 1930s. The Great Depression had sucked the life out of the nation. Unemployment in some years reached 25 percent, there was no state system of welfare, and men roamed the country, hitching rides on boxcars in search of work that could earn them enough for a meal. Provinces defaulted on their bonds, political parties peddled fanciful nostrums, and the nation’s leaders had no real answers to offer to the crisis, most cutting government spending and hoping for an economic miracle that never seemed to arrive.

In such straitened circumstances, it was not surprising that Canada’s military sank into utter irrelevance. The great host that had emerged from the Great War in 1919 was no more, though much of its equipment, now obsolete, still filled militia armouries. The regular army numbered only a few thousand, the navy and air force together adding another 5,000 to 6,000, and the reserve forces were completely untrained. There was literally no modern equipment — no tanks, no light machine guns or anti-aircraft weapons, and the Royal Canadian Air Force still flew biplanes. The Royal Canadian Navy did have a few modern destroyers, but few was the operative word.

None of this would have mattered if the world had been peaceful. But the 1930s was the heyday of dictatorships. In the Soviet Union, Josef Stalin ruthlessly killed his opponents, spread subversion around the globe, and built a huge army. In Italy, Il Duce, Benito Mussolini, attacked Ethiopia, and postured on the world stage. In Spain, the fascist leader General Francisco Franco crushed the legitimate government’s forces and wreaked vengeance on trade unionists and democrats. In Japan, the army attacked China and made its plans to conquer Asia. And in Berlin, Adolf Hitler, the Fuhrer, was making Nazi Germany, allegedly disarmed after its defeat in the Great War, into the most formidable military power in world history.

Canada preferred not to look. The nation and its leaders, nominally independent of Britain since the Statute of Westminster in 1931, turned their eyes away from developments abroad and looked inward. There was no money to prepare for war, and even if there had been, Canadians were sadly divided. French-speaking Canadians still smarted from the wounds of conscription in 1917 and 1918, and the idea of going to war again had no support from the Church, business, the young, or the provincial government. Indeed, many young Quebecois looked to fascist Italy as a model worthy of emulation — in Rome, at least, there was order and support for traditional values. In English Canada, opinion also was divided. Conservative imperialists still looked to Britain for a lead, but London was more than slightly uncertain of its course. Farmers worried more about the persistent drought than overseas adventures, students preferred peace to war, and voted for this in university debates. Few in Canada studied international affairs, many in the churches were outright pacifists, and hope for the League of Nations as a panacea still existed, despite all the evidence to the contrary of its ineffectiveness.

Curiously, few scholars have looked deeply at opinion and attitudes in Canada in the Depression years. They have studied politics and parties, but not ventured into analyzing why there was so little public pressure on government to make an effort to prepare the Canadian forces for the conflict that many could see approaching. It is time to lift the veil.

Larry Rose is not a scholar, not a trained historian. He worked in television news for many years and, puzzled by the country’s lassitude before 1939, he found himself drawn to Canada’s interwar years. Why were we so unprepared? Why did no one realize that if we went to war, men would die unnecessarily because of the lack of numbers, training, and equipment? Why?

Rose set out to read the documents and memoirs, to interview the (few) survivors, and to put together his narrative account. As readers will discover, he brings a fresh eye to the story, always finding the apposite phrase and the right quotations to bring the past alive. But for all his skill, he cannot bring back the dead, those who fell at Hong Kong and Dieppe, those lost at sea, those shot down over Britain in the first years of the Second World War. The moral of Larry Rose’s story is that unpreparedness exacts its price in blood, and that lesson regrettably is one that Canadians never seem to learn.

J.L. Granatstein

Dr. Granatstein is a distinguished research fellow of the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute and author of many books, including The Oxford Companion to Canadian Military History and Canada’s Army: Waging War and Keeping the Peace.

Acknowledgements

Many people and organizations have assisted in the preparation of this book. Thanks to Dr. Jack Granatstein who has responded to queries and offered encouragement and advice over several years, read the manuscript, and written the foreword. Thanks also to David Archer and the 48th Highlanders Regiment Museum in Toronto; Bruce Barbeau and the Royal Regiment of Canada Museum; Duncan Bell; Dan Bjarnason; John Boileau; Angus Brown; Michael Carr-Harris (son of W/C Brian Carr-Harris); Leah Cross of CTV Atlantic; Lieutenant Commander Bill Dziadyk; the University of Victoria Library and staff members John Frederick and Chris Petter; Dr. William Glover; Charles Groos; Dr. Stephen Harris of the Directorate of History and Heritage, who responded to queries and offered advice while the Directorate helpfully provided photos; Michael Hayes (son of Captain G.H. Skinny Hayes); Roland Klein; Elizabeth Klinck; Master Corporal Mark Kowalovski at the Royal Canadian Dragoons Photo Archive; Penny Lipman and the Royal Canadian Military Institute Library; Dr. Wilf Lund; Colonel Brian MacDonald; Jean Matheson and Library and Archives Canada; Dennis McIntosh for support, advice, and reading the manuscript; Jonathan MacInnis of CTV Atlantic; Fraser McKee for reading the manuscript; Ross McKenzie and the Royal Military College Museum; editor Jennifer McKnight and the Dundurn team; Eleisha McNeil; Colonel Allan Methven; Lieutenant Colonel Leo Morin; Earl Wotten and the Ontario Regiment Museum; Bruce O’Connor; Robin Rowland for encouragement and for assistance with files on Sutherland Brown; Peter Moon for reading the manuscript; John Packman; Fred and Stella Price; the Royal Canadian Air Force Memorial Museum at CFB Trenton; Justice Grant Radley-Walters; Alain Rivet, who read the manuscript; Lieutenant Colonel Archie Steacy; Al and Grace Stapleton; Randy Smye; Ray Soucie of CNMT/HMCS Sackville — Canada’s Naval Memorial Trust; Brigadier General Garry Thomson; the excellent Toronto Reference Library and Toronto Public Library; Maxine Weber; the late Rear Admiral Robert Welland, who offered generous advice and assistance; and the late Peter Worthington (son of Major-General F.F. Worthington), who responded to numerous questions.

Finally, thanks go to my amazing partner, Michael. Any errors are mine.

Chapter One

War Stations

It was Friday evening at the start of the long Labour Day weekend. Even so the 48th Highlanders of Canada, part of Canada’s reserve army, had soldiers on duty at the towered and turreted University Avenue Armoury in Toronto. [1] A good thing, too. The phone rang and Captain Eddie Ganong Jr., the orderly officer, reached for the receiver and heard an electrifying, once-in-a-lifetime message: MOBILIZE!

Ganong called the Highlanders’ commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel John Chipman, and the two began a telephone fan out, ordering key members of the regiment to report to the armoury first thing the next morning. Chipman and Ganong, quickly joined by several others, worked into the early morning hours to complete the job. To their enormous frustration, many people could not be reached because they had tried to squeeze in a weekend getaway and were out of town. One officer on the phone list had his plans thrown into turmoil. Trum Warren was going to be married in a few days and he was getting ready for his stag party. When Warren was phoned, his company commander ordered, I want you down at the armouries at eight sharp tomorrow morning. Warren was there, among the first of thousands of young Canadians to find out that personal hopes and plans were in for a shake up.[2]

The 48th Highlanders mobilized on a history-making day: September 1, 1939. Early that morning the Luftwaffe had bombed the Polish town of Wielun, and minutes later the old German battleship Schleswig-Holstein opened fire on the city of Danzig on the Baltic. They were the opening shots of the Second World War. Eleven German tank divisions, forty infantry divisions, and one cavalry brigade — 1.8 million troops in all — swarmed across the Polish border. It was called Operation White, an attack from the north, west, and south. Blitzkrieg.

Only hours after the attack began the Canadian Press news agency in Ottawa telephoned Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King’s duty officer to report the news. It was the middle of the night Ottawa time so aides decided it was useless to wake the prime minister. There was nothing he could do. Oscar Skelton, under secretary of state for external affairs, called him sometime after six a.m. to pass on the latest information. It was received in silence.[3]

The cabinet met at nine that morning and quickly declared a state of apprehended condition of war, giving the government powers to meet any emergency.[4] An order was sent out that provided blanket approval for steps that had already been taken by the armed forces, which included cancelling leaves for regular soldiers and authorizing the call up of reserves.[5] Parliament would be recalled.

While most things went smoothly, there was at least one big bureaucratic snarl. Reserve soldiers mobilized on September 1 were actually just on temporary duty. If they wanted to do wartime service, reserve and regular soldiers all had to re-enlist in a new army organization to be called the Canadian Field Force. The whole idea was to avoid anyone being conscripted. However, at the last possible moment the cabinet changed the name to the the Canadian Active Service Force (CASF). Hundreds of pre-printed forms and templates with Canadian Field Force on them — $65,000 worth — had to be chucked out and new ones printed.[6]

Among the 300 infantry, artillery, signals, cavalry, engineer, and support formations mobilized that day was a reserve unit from the eastern shores of Lake Ontario, the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment (the Hasty Pees for short). One member of the Hasty Pees was Howard Graham, a company commander and in civilian life a prominent lawyer. When he was phoned by the regiment’s commander, Lieutenant Colonel Sherman Young, Graham hadn’t heard the news from Poland. Hello, Sherman, what’s new? Graham asked. We are mobilized as of one minute past midnight tonight. Get into your uniform.[7] Celebrated writer Farley Mowat was at that time a pint-sized second lieutenant in the Hasty Pees. He said the regimental armoury had been an empty and dusty vault, but the new message set off a detonation.

In Marmora, Trenton, Madoc and a half dozen other towns, [men] … threw down their shop aprons or stripped off their mechanic’s overalls and rushed to their local company armouries … in pool rooms and beer parlours men were silent for one long instant, and then they crowded to the doors.[8]

In Listowel, in south-western Ontario, one man in the 100th Battery, an artillery reserve unit, was Gunner George MacDonell, who had joined the reserves about a year before.[9] He was phoned and went right to the armoury. Within days he had decided to join the Canadian Active Service Force. Talk about an exciting time! No more high school for me — I was employed on more serious business. MacDonell had been living with his uncle and aunt after his parents’ separation and then his mother’s death. It was a difficult time for his relatives in the midst of a depression to cope with the addition of another family member. It would be the perfect time for MacDonell to get out on his own. But the young man’s plans were derailed, at least temporarily. He may have been a strapping six feet but he was still only seventeen years and three weeks old and his uncle said he was too young to join the army as a full-time soldier. MacDonell then ran away from home to London, Ontario, lied about his age, and enlisted successfully in the Royal Canadian Army Service Corps, even though he did not know what the service corps did.

In the Permanent Force, with all leaves cancelled and training courses terminated, instructors and everyone else hurried back to their units. One regular, Donald Parrott, was due to leave the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry in a few days to return to civilian life at the Madsen Lake gold mines. When he heard of the attack on Poland he returned to the Fort Osborne barracks, put his uniform back on and applied to join the CASF.[10] Officer Cadet Ned Amy returned to the Royal Military College (RMC) in Kingston, Ontario, as soon as he heard what happened. Amy had finished up his first year of studies at the college the previous spring. Everybody was gung-ho to get out of college and get into the army or the air force or the navy.[11] He was a long way from finishing his education at RMC, but before long cadets like him were given early commissions and he suddenly became Second Lieutenant Edward Alfred Charles Amy, posted to the Armoured Fighting Vehicle School at Camp Borden, Ontario. The young man from Newcastle, New Brunswick, who described himself as five-foot-two and three-quarters knew boom all about tanks, but he was about to learn.

Alberta Provincial Archives

The army mobilization was part of an enormous and meticulously crafted plan called Defence Scheme No. 3 meant for just such an occasion. All details were put into a War Book, which provided for mobilizing a force that combined units from both the tiny regular army and the much larger army reserve. Not all the reserve units would be mobilized, only the best ones. After that it was up to the government in Ottawa to give its approval, but the plan was for two entire divisions to be formed, each with about 16,000 members and, in addition, a Canadian Corps headquarters to command them.

The plan called for the only three regular infantry battalions in the army — the Royal Canadian Regiment (RCR), the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry (PPCLI), and the Royal 22e Regiment — to be distributed one to each brigade in the First Canadian Infantry Division. Reserve units filled out the remaining six infantry battalions. Among the reserve units selected were the 48th Highlanders and the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment from Ontario, the Seaforth Highlanders from Vancouver, the Edmonton Regiment (later the Loyal Edmonton Regiment), the Carleton and York Regiment from New Brunswick, and the West Nova Scotia Regiment. The division included the First, Second, and Third Field Regiments and the Royal Canadian Horse Artillery (RCHA), along with medium and anti-tank artillery units. There were signals troops, three field companies of engineers, and service corps members. One group — No. 1 Provost Company in Ottawa — was made up entirely of RCMP volunteers. Though they were going to be part of the Canadian Active Service Force, all units would keep their names, badges, and traditions. That was in sharp contrast to the mobilization during the First World War in which each unit was set up from scratch — a plan that turned into a colossal mess.

The First Division reservists included some outstanding individuals, among them Bert Hoffmeister and Cec Merritt of the Seaforths, and Graham of the Hasty Pees. In 1939 Hoffmeister was a major and in civilian life a lumber company sales manager. Eventually he became a major general and commander of the Fifth Canadian Armoured Division. Merritt, a six footer who appeared to have been assembled from concrete blocks, was an RMC graduate and lawyer.[12] He would win the Victoria Cross at Dieppe. Major Graham after the war became a lieutenant general and chief of the general staff (CGS). However, the vast majority of volunteers were simply ordinary Canadians. George MacDonell was a high-school student, Graham Chatterley of Toronto owned a barbershop, while another volunteer, Hugh Caldwell of the Seaforths, was a milkman.

Conspicuously absent from the mobilization and from the First Division were the Royal Canadian Dragoons and the Lord Strathcona’s Horse, the two regular army cavalry regiments. An earlier version of Defence Scheme No. 3 had called for an entire cavalry division to be mobilized, but a few months before the war the reality had finally sunk in that the cavalry would have no place on the battlefield. If anyone had hoped for tanks in place of the cavalry, they would have been disappointed. In the Canadian army in 1939 there were tank regiments, but none of them had any tanks. Two tanks had arrived in Canada in 1938 and by late summer 1939 there were fourteen in all but they were only for training.[13] As for radio sets there were only a few and they were mostly obsolete. The tanks mostly used signal flags.

The mobilization order sent out to Captain Ganong and all the others may have been a shock, but it was not really a surprise because the Polish crisis had been building for months. There was, however, one completely unexpected turn of events on August 23, when German Fuhrer Adolf Hitler signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Treaty with the Soviet Union. The very idea was mind boggling. Hitler had been a vituperative enemy of communism while anti-fascist propaganda gushed out of Moscow. The treaty said that if war came the Germans and the Soviets would not attack each other and the two would carve up Poland. It meant there would not be a two-front war for Hitler.

While thousands of soldiers were sent scrambling into operation on September 1, they were not actually the first troops to be called out. Earlier in August the government had issued General Order 124, the Precautionary State of the Defence Scheme, which summoned detachments of soldiers to protect vital installations. The Vancouver Sun noted on August 26 that west coast units had been activated. LOCAL MILITIA VOLUNTEERS GO INTO UNIFORM, it reported. Members of the reserves included two artillery units, the 15th (Vancouver) Coast Brigade and the 1st Anti-Aircraft Regiment. Suddenly Vancouver residents passing along Burrard Street near the downtown saw guards posted around the Seaforth Armoury.

Coast artillery batteries were also manned and ready for action at Esquimalt outside Victoria.[14] They were meant to protect against the unlikely prospect of a bolt from the blue attack by a German cruiser. On August 26 the small Royal Canadian Navy minesweeper Comox made its way to the north end of Vancouver Island to protect the northern entrance of the Inside Passage. The prospect of a 470-ton minesweeper facing a 10,000-ton German cruiser must have been sobering for the crew of Comox.

Those called out to duty on August 26 numbered about 10,000 in all, stationed outside armouries, power plants, and airports across the country. It seems hard to imagine Nazi saboteurs wreaking havoc on Regina, but the Regina Rifles had a guard of four officers and forty-four other ranks at the city’s airport, just in case.[15]

In reality, the vision of saboteurs stalking the Canadian heartland at night was not completely ridiculous. In the last week of August a group of 700 German-Canadians rallied in Maple, Ontario, to support the German cause, waving swastikas and singing the Horst Wessel Song, the anthem of the Nazi Party.[16] One day later a brawl broke out at a Toronto industrial plant, leaving a German-Canadian employee injured. Shop workers threatened to quit en masse if five Germans working there were not fired. A scene at the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto revealed the anger of many ordinary Canadians.

Germany’s pavilion… was quietly taken down on September first as a crowd of onlookers watched. Posters proclaiming Germany’s virtues and statues symbolizing its growing power were consigned to the trash bin. No one in the strangely quiet crowd of over a thousand citizens moved to stop the workers. Inside the International Building, however, citizens were more boisterous, cheering a CNE employee who had climbed a ladder to pull down the letters spelling out Germany.[17]

By September 3 sweeping provisions of the government’s Defence of Canada Regulations were put into effect. They included waiving the right to trial, bans on some political and religious groups, and some publications, all aimed at rounding up fascists, communists, and potential subversives. Many men were picked up by local police in the next eighteen months, including more than 1,300 arrested by the RCMP.[18] They included 586 Italians (105 released) and 763 German immigrants (127 released), along with known Communists (87 released) and members of other ethnic groups, including Ukrainians and Poles.[19] The most famous person arrested later on was Montreal mayor Camilien Houde, who spent most of the war in detention in Petawawa, Ontario.[20] The Communist party was banned in 1941 but the ban was lifted a year after Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union.[21]

The Royal Canadian Navy and the Royal Canadian Air Force had also been part of the emergency plan, but the two services were covered by different legislation than the army. The Naval Service Act required Parliament to meet within fifteen days of the reserves being called out.[22] Both services took urgent steps toward war readiness without the legislation being enacted immediately. Leaves for regular force members were cancelled. The air force dispatched a senior officer on an urgent mission to Washington to buy aircraft from the United States. Also, a licensing deal was signed to have what became an iconic training plane, the Harvard, built by Noorduyn Aircraft in Montreal.[23]

For the navy, Halifax was an urgent priority because of the possibility of German cruisers or submarines appearing on the east coast. Several German warships, including two pocket battleships, were already lurking somewhere in the Atlantic. The obsolescent coast artillery guns protecting Halifax could fire only about 10,000 yards to seaward. Newer and better guns had been ordered from Britain but there were interminable delays and they had not been delivered.[24]

The Halifax Rifles, a regiment in the Non-Permanent Active Militia (the formal title of the army reserve), organized guards at eight separate locations including the airport, the Joint Services Magazine, the Halifax shipyard, the Imperial Oil Refinery, and the water supply reservoir.[25] The regiment had been creative in using telephones, messengers, the local radio station, and even alerts flashed on theatre screens to call members for duty.

In New Brunswick, brothers Fred and Harold Price and their father, Irvine, were among those called out on August 26. The members of the New Brunswick Rangers were sent to the waterfront in Saint John to patrol the boundaries of the largest floating dry dock in the British Empire and one of the few existing in Canada.[26] Along with the military, civilian agencies responded to the crisis. Within a few days and without instructions from anyone, municipal officials in Saint John started a voluntary partial blackout at night, directed by local police and 100 special air raid wardens appointed by the mayor.[27] In Halifax, Eaton’s store began advertising special green blackout curtains.

The RCN had some coastal minesweepers on the east coast, but just one major warship was available — the 1,300 ton destroyer HMCS Skeena. The only other destroyer in the Atlantic, HMCS Saguenay, was undergoing a refit that included installing new anti-submarine gear. Reinforcements were needed so two ships were summoned urgently from the west coast. The ships got the message while they and two other destroyers were visiting the Pacific National Exhibition in Vancouver. Suddenly there were whispered conversations and guests were ushered ashore. The ships had been on short notice to leave, but it didn’t take more than a few minutes to get going. Aboard HMCS Fraser and HMCS St. Laurent smoke immediately poured from the funnels, awnings were furled, boats hoisted, and booms and gangways secured.[28] Family, clothing, and unpaid bills were left behind. St. Laurent and Fraser were soon cracking along at twenty-five knots toward the Panama Canal en route to Halifax.[29]

The picture of Fred Price looks as if it was taken in 1918, but it is actually from September 1939. Little had changed in the army in uniforms and equipment in the interwar years. Three members of the Price family, all in the New Brunswick Rangers, were mobilized in 1939.

Fred and Stella Price

Supermarine Stranraer. The coastal patrol aircraft was described by pilots as a Gentleman’s aircraft. It did what you wanted, but in its own good time.

Terry Higgins, Copyright 2013

As part of its east coast defenses the Royal Canadian Air Force had No. 5 Squadron, a regular force unit based at Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. No. 5 Squadron’s crest was emblazoned with the motto Volando vincimus (By Flying We Conquer), but conquering with the aircraft it used, the Stranraer flying boat, was going to be a tall order. The biplane presented little threat to any maritime intruder, its short range limiting it to scouting the approaches to Halifax harbour. Like the RCN, the air force started moving in reinforcements, such as they were. A squadron of near-useless Northrop Deltas was moved from Ottawa to Sydney, Nova Scotia.

On September 1 the Naval Service Headquarters (NSHQ) in Ottawa finally dispatched a warning signal to RCN destroyers and coastal commanders: Ship warheads and be in all respects ready for action. Do not start an engagement until ordered from NSHQ but be prepared to defend yourselves in case of attack.[30]

On Saturday, September 2, people in Ottawa opened the newspaper to read BRITAIN AND FRANCE MOBILIZE, POLAND SEEKS AID AGAINST FULL GERMAN ATTACK. The whole front page and many inside pages were plastered with stories.[31] On an inside page of the Citizen, Ontario Conservative leader George Drew said Canadians are offered a choice between barbarism and civilization. Another headline read: BRITAIN SENDS WARNING — HITLER MUST WITHDRAW OR FRANCE AND ENGLAND ARE AT WAR. One story said, The Canadian government … rushed with all possible speed its preparations for war. It added, The Dominion of Canada will march with Great Britain. Despite that the prime minister had said emphatically and repeatedly that only Parliament would decide whether Canada would go to war or not. Canada was not at war, at least not yet. On an inside page was the news that Parliament would not meet until September 7.

In Toronto on September 2, a rain-soaked and humid day, the 48th Highlanders held their first parade since mobilization. The priority was to get all members who wanted to be in the Canadian Active Service Force signed up and given a medical exam. The medical officer was among those who had been out of town on Friday night but still by the next day, September 3, a temporary medical board was set up at Grace Hospital in downtown Toronto. The first thirty-eight volunteers were examined, including Captain Ganong, a long-time Highlander, a lawyer, and, if the name sounds familiar, a member of the famous chocolate-making Ganong family.* The signing up routine was repeated at dozens of armouries across the country.

On Sunday, September 3, Britain and France declared war. The news was telegraphed to Canada early that morning when most people were still in their beds. In several cities, including Toronto, newspapers printed special editions.

The streets were only just beginning to come to life when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s words were cabled to newspaper offices … Many people learned of the declaration [of war] as they passed by newspaper offices where extras were displayed. Street car drivers stopped their buses to allow travelers to read the latest bulletins.[32]

That afternoon thousands of Canadians across the country heard a message from King George VI on the radio.

In this grave hour, perhaps the most fateful in our history,

I send to every household of my peoples, both at home and overseas, this message, spoken as if I were able to cross your threshold and speak to you myself. For the second time in the lives of most of us, we are at war … I ask you to stand calm, firm and united in this time of trial. There may be dark days ahead … but we can only do the right as we see the right and … with God’s help we shall prevail.

Among those listening to the message were young Jim Edwards, his brother, two sisters, and their parents in Battleford, Saskatchewan. For weeks Jim had been following the crisis in Europe and, that day, Britain’s war declaration. He immediately wanted to join the air force and become a pilot, but he hadn’t finished high school. His pals thought he would be a good fighter pilot. For one thing, there was a kind of joke, a trick of Jim’s. He would stand on a rise outside Battleford and look at the post office tower with its large clock face a mile away and read the time on it. Jim was a crack shot, too.[33]

On that same day the government in Ottawa declared a state of emergency, back dated to August 25. It already had extensive powers but now new regulations were put in place for the control of exports, shipping and prices, postal censorship, and calling out of naval and air force units. The minister of national defence approved a new warning to the navy and air force and army coastal units. It said, You can fire on any blinking German who came within range of our guns, but he added, we are not at war.[34]

Only hours after German forces began their attack on Poland, off the north-west coast of Ireland, the German submarine U-30 sighted a ship zigzagging in an area off the normal transatlantic shipping route. The boat commander, Oberleutnant Fritz-Julius Lemp, had been informed by radio about midday that Germany was at war so his patrol immediately took on a new urgency. Lemp attacked, scoring a direct hit amidships with at least one torpedo. U-30 dived for safety, but later in the fading light Lemp decided to try to identify the vessel, finding that it was the 13,000-ton British passenger ship, Athenia. Commanded by the historically named Captain James Cook, Athenia was en route from Britain to Canada and the attack was a tragic mistake. Lemp had been under strict orders not to attack civilian ships because at that point Hitler was still hoping for a deal with Britain and France to bring a quick end to the war.[35] Britain assumed the attack meant a return to unrestricted submarine warfare.

A distress call from Athenia alerted several nearby ships, including the British destroyer Fame, which rushed to the scene. One officer on board was a Canadian, Sub-Lieutenant Robert Welland from Oxbow, Saskatchewan.[36] Welland had joined the Royal Canadian Navy in 1936 at the age of eighteen, but because the RCN had no officer training program, he had spent the entire time since then seconded to the Royal Navy. HMS Fame could not locate the sub in an anti-submarine sweep but then joined several other ships in rescuing survivors. Fortunately, the seas were calm and the ship remained afloat for several hours.

The submarine attack marked the start of the longest battle of the war, the Battle of the Atlantic. With the sub chase and rescue operation Sub-Lieutenant Welland became the first Canadian to get at least a brief taste of action in the Second World War. Of those aboard, 981 were rescued, but among the 117 who died was Hannah Baird, a waitress from Montreal.[37] At least sixty-six passengers were from Toronto, including Mrs. Elizabeth Turner who