
The forgotten ruthlessness of Canada’s Great War soldiers (2018) - curtis
https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/the-forgotten-ferocity-of-canadas-soldiers-in-the-great-war
======
ericd
A bit off topic, but I recommend that anyone interested in this watch _They
Shall Not Grow Old_
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrabKK9Bhds](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrabKK9Bhds))
- it's an excellent documentary, a bit of a passion project by Peter Jackson
to polish up a lot of old WW1 footage (normalized the frame rate, since it was
hand cranked, colorize, and add sound - he hired lip readers and voice actors
from the same regions as the filmed soldiers). It makes it seem much more
relatable and real, in a way that comically-fast black and white footage
really doesn't.

~~~
macintux
An interesting look at the film and Jackson’s selectivity:

[https://kottke.org/18/12/against-peter-jacksons-they-
shall-n...](https://kottke.org/18/12/against-peter-jacksons-they-shall-not-
grow-old)

------
DenisM
In the “War and Peace” there is a passage reading “having quickly finished off
the injured, soldiers cleared out the gate so the [transport] could pass
unimpeded”.

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.

~~~
bryanrasmussen
When Henry ordered all the prisoners killed because he needed every man to
fight and could spare none to watch it warranted a mention
[http://www.shakespeare-
online.com/plays/henryv_4_7.html](http://www.shakespeare-
online.com/plays/henryv_4_7.html)

~~~
MarcScott
At Agincourt the prisoners that were executed were all noblemen or landed
knights. The custom was for these prisoners to be taken, because they could be
ransomed back to their wealthy families. It was a shocking event because it
broke the conventions of the times.

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.

~~~
bryanrasmussen
operative term being if they did not run away I think.

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.

------
AlexCoventry
In _Goodbye Darkness_ , William Manchester tells similar stories of
Southerners:

> _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._

~~~
watwut
> 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.

------
rebuilder
WW1 just boggles the mind. The sheer slaughter that came from armies trying to
adapt to the new reality of mass warfare and new weaponry seems
incomprehensible, maybe because of how coldly logical it was. You read these
accounts of charges on fortified machine gun positions across flat fields, the
only cover being the mounds of bodies that eventually piled up, and you wonder
how anyone could go into that.

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?

~~~
trevyn
> _you wonder how anyone could go into that_

 _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.

~~~
lostlogin
The podcast Blueprint for Armageddon by Dan Carlin is fantastic too. I thought
I had a general idea of what happened in WW1, I was very wrong.

------
jt2190
> At the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, visitors can see a case filled with
> the fearsome homemade weapons that Canadians trench raiders plunged into the
> faces and chests of their enemy: Meat cleavers, push daggers and spiked
> clubs.

I saw similar items at the RCR museum in London, Ontario years ago. Definitely
worth a visit.

[http://www.thercrmuseum.ca/en-ca/](http://www.thercrmuseum.ca/en-ca/)

------
Waterluvian
Didn't learn about this in school. Pretty pissed at how sanitized war history
was.

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.

~~~
DKnoll
They did teach it, they just weren't callous enough to teach the moral
judgement you've just made about the conduct of your anscestors while entire
nations were trying to kill them.

~~~
macintux
> ...entire nations were trying to kill them.

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.

~~~
DKnoll
That's not what my great-great-grandfathers service record says, or the
extremely long list of Canadians killed or injured in WW1.

The German that shot him was probably just messing around, you're right.

~~~
macintux
There are no simple situations in war. The soldiers on all sides of this one
were, by and large, eager to be anywhere else. It was a stupid war that
accomplished little besides the pointless bloodshed.

It’s likely your grandfather was a good man with no desire to kill Germans.
It’s likely whoever shot him felt the same.

~~~
interfixus
> _The soldiers on all sides of this one were, by and large, eager to be
> anywhere else_

No doubt they were. But we do tend to forget that large swathes of them had
originally volunteered, often with enthusiasm.

~~~
hef19898
Back than that was normal thing. Just watch, or read, All Quite in the West.
Especially the scene right before the boys graduate highschool. Also, the war
was supposed to be over by Christmas. And once reality hit it was too late.

~~~
interfixus
I am well aware of that, and have read _Im Westen Nichts Neues_ a number of
times. This doesn't affect my point: Huge numbers volunteered for slaughtering
and being slaughtered, many with gusto and in great haste.

------
rexarex
Canadian here, I never learnt this in class. What a shame.

~~~
hackermailman
They also don't teach where Can soldiers fought Croatia during the Balkans
mess of the 1990s because both sides denied it happened
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Medak_Pocket](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Medak_Pocket)

~~~
jacobush
Other downplayed and denied stuff happened in the Balkans during these times.
I know of for instance Swedish officers having "telecommunications problems"
when ordered by home command to stand down and let a hospital be taken. They
"never received" that order and stood their ground.

~~~
redis_mlc
For those who don't know what a mess it was in the Balkans in the 90s, this
should give you some idea:

\- 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.

~~~
benj111
"the Albanian underground had to import a 50 cal AA gun from the US. What for?
To shoot at UN helicopters attacking their citizens"

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](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Alba)

~~~
nradov
Kosovar Albanian rebel representatives living in the US at the time legally
purchased a small number of .50 BMG rifles on the civilian market. Those were
bolt-action or semi-automatic, not actual anti-aircraft guns. Then they
illegally smuggled those rifles to Kosovo.

~~~
benj111
Ok, not Albania then.

Still can't find a reference to ethnic Albanians shooting down a UN
helicopter, or UN helicopters attacking ethnic Albanians.

------
nerdponx
I wonder why this came to be. At first my theory was that they were upset at
being dragged across the ocean to fight a war they had nothing to do with,
leading to a kind of personal vendetta against Germany for starting it. But
that doesn't make much sense, because evidently the Australians didn't have
the same reaction, and as I understand it the average German soldier was not
much invested in their cause.

I know that American soldiers only showed up at the end of the war, but did
they have a similar reaction to the Canadians?

~~~
NeedMoreTea
From what I've read America went through a compressed repeat of all the
mistakes and what the other allies had learnt 1914-1916. Were it not for the
brief excursion into Mexico in the years preceding, they'd have opened with
cavalry. Even so they still formed a cavalry division in 1917. Learning to
deal with the arrival of machine guns, gas and the stagnancy of trench warfare
before proper mechanisation was challenging to the generals and tactics of the
day.

I imagine their soldiers had just as tough a time of it as others. Life was
cheap, WW1 was brutal in the extreme.

~~~
Retric
Cavalry actually was used very effectively in WWI, for example the Battle of
Mons. It was still quite devastating outside of trench warfare, which was why
there where still some cavalry units at the start of WWII.

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.

~~~
rangibaby
> Consider a man lugging around a 35lb anti tank rifle, ammunition, and gear
> would have loved to have 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.

~~~
b_tterc_p
Are they badasses or just immovably tame?

------
visiblink
It's a little odd to characterize these volunteers as 'Canadians,' and Cook
should know it. The majority of the recruits were first-generation immigrants
from the British Isles. Few native-born Canadians volunteered. So whatever was
going on over there was the product of that recent immigrant experience.
That's interesting in itself, but puts a different gloss on this than we might
get from those who would like to say something about Canadians, the Canadian
mentality, and Canadian nationality from this.

Most Canadians stayed home during WWI. Most recently-arrived Brits went to
Europe to fight for their country.

------
nabla9
It's a classic piece written by a Vietnam War veteran: Why Men Love War (1984)
By William Broyles, Jr. [https://www.esquire.com/news-
politics/news/a28718/why-men-lo...](https://www.esquire.com/news-
politics/news/a28718/why-men-love-war/)

Boyles is a screenwriter who was involved in writing in the movies like Apollo
13, Cast Away, Jarhead, and Saving Private Ryan.

------
staticautomatic
My German grandfather was born in an internment camp on Vancouver Island, not
unlike what the Americans did to the Japanese in WWII.

~~~
ncphillips
IIRC Canada also had Japanese internment camps on the west coast

~~~
goodcanadian
There was some interment of Germans during WWI, and of Japanese during WWII.

------
jasonhansel
> Tim Cook, the First World War historian at the Canadian War Museum.

In an alternate universe...

------
carrozo
Is the ‘polite Canadian’ (“Sorry!”) trope perhaps an overcompensation for
this? Or am I creating an urban legend?

~~~
redis_mlc
> Is the ‘polite Canadian’ (“Sorry!”) trope

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.

~~~
asveikau
I think the "sorry" thing comes from the the fact that many Canadians
pronounce the first vowel of "sorry" differently from the rest of North
America. So it becomes a default "quaint Canadianism" joke.

