The+War+on+the+Land

**The War on Land**
By June 1940, Britain was the only major power in Europe that Germany did not control. This meant that its overseas Commonwealth allies - such as Canada and Australia - had an especially important role to play.

Although Canada had a fairly small population, it was able to assemble a strong fighting force. Among those who signed up early on was 21-year-old Charlie Martin. Like Frank Curry, he'd heard the radio reports from Europe through the 1930s. Now, Hitler had most of Europe in his power, and Britain was in desperate need. In June 1940, Martin left the family farm to join the infantry, and was assigned to the Queen's Own Rifles. A little more than a year later, the battalion was shipped out to Britain. Losses occurred in both winning and losing campaigns. Here are just some of the major battles that Canadians participated in.

**The Dieppe Raid, 1942**
The first major mission for Canadian soldiers stationed in Britain was to raid the German forces at the French coastal town of Dieppe. Their goal was to make a quick landing, assess the strength of the German defences, and leave again.

The Canadians crossed the English Channel by boat on August 19, 1942. John Mellor of Kitchener, Ontario, was among those who fought at Dieppe. Here's how he described the landing:

As soon as [the Canadians] dropped into the water from their landing craft they ran into this murderous barrage of gunfire. Many died before they took even one step forward. Those that followed had to step over their bodies...

If they managed to get on the beach at all, they found it totally strung with entanglements of barbed wire... and sown with mines. Even if they got across that, they came face to face with the actual sea wall itself, which was [about 2.5 metres] high. That was covered with rolls of barbed wire too, on the top, and there were machine-gun posts all the way along.

The whole front itself, [1.6 km] long and crescent shaped, had boarding houses and hotels that were filled with hundreds of Germans with machine-guns and mortars zeroing in on the main beach. //Voices of a War Remembered//, pp. 269-70

Human Cost to Canadians of Dieppe Raid, 1942. Use these numbers to explain why the Canadian forces were so devastated by the Dieppe Raid.

Canadian Soldiers in Dieppe Raid: 1. Total number of Canadians involved Number: 4963 Percentage: 100.0

Canadian Soldiers in Dieppe Raid: 2. Killed Number: 907 <span style="font: 150% 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px;">Percentage: 18.3

<span style="font: 150% 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px;">Canadian Soldiers in Dieppe Raid: 3. Wounded <span style="font: 150% 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px;">Number: 586 <span style="font: 150% 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px;">Percentage: 11.8

<span style="font: 150% 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px;">Canadian Soldiers in Dieppe Raid: 4. Captured as prisoners of war <span style="font: 150% 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px;">Number: 1874 <span style="font: 150% 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px;">Percentage: 37.7

<span style="font: 150% 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px;">Canadian Soldiers in Dieppe Raid: 5. Returned to England <span style="font: 150% 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px;">Number: 2210 <span style="font: 150% 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px;">Percentage: 44.5 <span style="font: 150% 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px;">Source: Adapted from Gerald Hallowell, ed., //The Oxford Companion to Canadian History// (Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 180.

<span style="font: 150% 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px;">The Allies' light tanks proved useless on the stony beach as rocks jammed their caterpillar tracks. German airplanes finished off the job by bombing the beach. Miraculously, John Mellor survived all this, but he didn't get off easily. A fragment of metal knocked his eye out.

<span style="font: 150% 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px;">Charlie Martin was not at Dieppe, but he benefited from the lessons learned there. Just two years later, he and the Queen's Own Rifles were part of another beach landing not far from Dieppe. As you will see, in 1944, the generals would deliberately select sandy beaches where there were no cliffs. The tanks and trucks could be driven straight out of the landing craft without getting jammed on the stony beach, and there was nowhere for defenders to hide. But there were people who wondered - John Mellor among them - why so many soldiers had to die at Dieppe in order to learn these lessons. Some felt that the military made excuses for a badly planned mission, and that the planners should have foreseen these problems before the raid.

<span style="font: 150% 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px;">**Question**
<span style="background-color: #e2dada; font: 150% 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px;">1. a)What reasons did the Allies give for the failure of the Dieppe Raid?

<span style="background-color: #e2dada; font: 150% 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px;">b) Do you think the Allies' explanation seems reasonable or whether they were making excuses for their mistakes?


 * <span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">Soldiers in the Pacific **

<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">So far we've looked at World War 11 in Europe. But Japan had been at war with its neighbours, especially China, since 1937. In 1939, Japan joined the Axis nations and continued its military operations in the Pacific. It was decided to send Canadian and other Allied soldiers to Hong Kong - a British colony at the time - to try to keep it from falling to Japan.

<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">The Canadian troops saw little action there until late in 1941. At that time the British expected Japan to attack, so they urgently requested more troops. In October 1941, 1975 Canadian soldiers were shipped from Vancouver, arriving in Hong Kong in mid-November. They formed part of a total defence force of 14 000 troops.

<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">On December 8, Japan attacked. It captured Hong Kong in only 17 days. By the time Hong Kong surrendered on Christmas Day, 290 Canadians had been killed and 493 injured. This was a total casualty rate of almost 40 percent. The survivors spent the rest of the war as prisoners of war (POWs).

<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">The POWs in Japanese camps were badly treated. Many were not given enough food, were forced to do hard labour or to march long distances to new locations. POWs found to have broken camp rules were brutally punished. Certainly the conditions that the Canadians met in the Japanese POW camps were among the very worst in the war.


 * <span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">TIMELINE: Key Events In the Pacific War **

<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">1937: War between Japan and China begins

<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">1940: Japanese troops occupy Malaya, Vietnam, and other countries in Southeast Asia

<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">1941: Japanese troops capture Hong Kong, taking Canadian troops prisoner

<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">1941: Japanese air force attacks American base in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii; United States declares war on Japan and Germany

<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">1943: American forces begin to push back Japanese occupiers and liberate captured territory

<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">1945: American planes drop nuclear bombs on Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Japan surrenders

<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 1.5;">John Ford, from Port-aux-Basques, Newfoundland, became a POW after being captured in Java in 1942. He was first held in Singapore, and then taken to Nagasaki, where he was put to work building ships.

<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">It was slave labour... You'd have your breakfast (a small tin of rice) in the morning. You'd take your lunch with you, a little rice can. Then, when you'd go back to the camp again at night, the same thing, a little bit of rice. Occasionally, probably once a month or once every two months, you'd get a bit of cabbage stew. Nothing, only water. <span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">Danette Dooley, "A-Bomb Survivor Wants Recognition," //St. John's Evening Telegram//, 20 August 2005 = Question =

<span style="background-color: #e2dada; font: 150% 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px;">2. Imagine that you were a prisoner of war in a Japanese POW camp. Outline three ways you would have tried to cope with the mistreatment.

<span style="font: 150% 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px;">**The Italian Campaign, 1943-45**
<span style="font: 150% 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px;">One of Canada's successful campaigns was fought in Italy. In 1943 the Canadians made their way up the country's east coast, fighting battles at Ortona and Ravenna. This involved house-to-house fighting as the Canadians slowly pushed back the German occupiers. House-to-house can be a most vicious method of fighting because enemy troops are at close quarters and can quickly surprise and kill one another. In the Battle of Ortona, many troops were killed on both sides within only a few days. But by the spring of 1945 the Allies had liberated all of Italy, and a successful campaign came to an end.

<span style="font: 150% 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px;">**D-Day and Beyond, 1944 to 1945**
<span style="font: 150% 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px;">In the early morning of June 6, 1944, Charlie Martin and the Queen's Own Rifles were on a landing craft heading for a strip of sandy beach in the Normandy region of France. The seas were rough, but Charlie, who was by now sergeant-major of A Company, felt calm. He and his men had been training for two years - and this was their chance to put what they had learned into practice.

<span style="font: 150% 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px;">Martin was about to take part in one of the most important battles of the war: the D-Day landing. The total Allied invasion force numbered 150 000 troops, of whom about 30 000 were Canadian. Their mission was to capture the beaches of Normandy, then push inland. Charlie's boat was the first to hit shore.

<span style="font: 150% 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px;">The order rang out "Down ramp." The moment the ramp came down, heavy machine-gun fire broke out from somewhere back of the seawall. Mortars were dropping all over the beach... <span style="font: 150% 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px;">Charles Martin, //Battle Diary: From D-Day and Normandy to the Zuider Zee and Ve// (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1994), pp. 6-7

<span style="font: 150% 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px;">By the end of the first day, A Company had advanced seven miles (11 km) and achieved their objective - but at a huge cost. Half the Company's members had been killed or wounded.

<span style="font: 150% 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px;">About 715 Canadians were injured and 358 lost their lives on D-Day, but the invasion was a huge success. From Normandy, the Allies worked their way north and east. The Germans gradually surrendered or fell back, and by early 1945 the Canadians had entered the Netherlands. Starving Dutch citizens welcomed their liberators, who brought much-needed food supplies.

<span style="font: 150% 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px;">Some Canadian soldiers married Dutch women, who came to Canada as "war brides." To this day, a special relationship exists between the Netherlands and Canada.

<span style="font: 150% 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px;">**Liberating Concentration Camps**
<span style="font: 150% 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px;">Not all the liberation duties were pleasant ones. Some Canadian soldiers were assigned to liberate prisoners from concentration camps. Jim Anderson, from Ancaster, Ontario, described what he saw.

<span style="font: 150% 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px;">There were great piles of bodies in several locations and, as you can imagine, an overwhelming stench. To this day I feel bad about the revulsion I felt towards some who came forward and put their arms out to hug and embrace us. Most of them were filthy, wasted, scabby, and toothless... <span style="font: 150% 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px;">//Voices of a War Remembered//, pp. 210-211

<span style="font: 150% 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px;">Liberating the concentration camps was difficult for the liberators and prisoners alike. Although they were being freed, many of the prisoners had nowhere to turn.

<span style="font: 150% 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px;">... Many of them were so anxious to get away from there that they were walking and crawling towards the gates and the holes in the barbed wire. We were trying to convince them to wait for the Red Cross and the other help that would be coming but it did no good. They just wanted to get away. <span style="font: 150% 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px;">//Voices of a War Remembered//, pp. 21-211

<span style="font: 150% 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px;">**Question**
<span style="background-color: #e2dada; font: 150% 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px;">3. Look back at the quotations from John Mellor, Charlie Martin, and Jim Anderson. Outline the challenges that each of these soldiers describes. Whose challenges do you think were the most difficult to face? Explain why you made this choice.