Canada and the Second World War: Essays in Honour of Terry Copp

6. Dangerous Curves: Canadian Drivers and Mechanical Transport in Two World Wars

115 6 Dangerous Curves Canadian Drivers and Mechanical Transport inTwoWorldWars Andrew Iarocci Inside the Canadian War Museum there is a cavernous open-concept exhibition space called the LeBreton Gallery. Flanked by floor-to-ceiling windows that look across the LeBreton Flats to Parliament Hill, the gallery has been described as “a lens into the museum.”1 LeBreton is also home to the nationalcollectionofmilitarytransportationandartilleryartifacts.Inaddition to an impressive line of tanks, the heaviest of which weighs well over 50 tons, visitors can inspect a variety of lighter wheeled or tracked transport vehicles dating principally from the Second World War and Cold War periods. The Second World War machines, including variants of the flat-nosed Canadian Military Pattern (CMP) truck and the squat universal carrier, seem quaintly primitive by today’s standards, but in their day they represented the cutting edge of automotive technology and production. Nestled among these trucks and cross-country vehicles is a humbler artifact from an earlier conflict. It is a 1916 general service (GS) horse-drawn wagon, a simple wooden vehicle that took on every kind of burden during the First World War. The museum visitor who compares the nineteenth-century technology of the GS wagon with the modern angular sheet metal of a CMP truck can reasonably conclude that the nature of forward supply and transport underwent a profound shift between the two world wars. Certainly the numbers of mechanized supply and transport vehicles in the field increased dramatically between the First and Second World Wars. 116 Dangerous Curves Draught and pack animals outnumbered mechanical transport (MT) vehicles by a significant margin throughout the First World War. While the number of MT vehicles in service across the British armies grew from fewer than 100 in August 1914 to more than 119,000 four years later, there were still more than six horses for every motor vehicle in British military service in 1918.2 Among Canada’s overseas forces there were about 1,300 lorries, cars, and ambulances operating in England and France in early 1918—a modest fleet compared to the nearly 23,000 draught and pack animals under Canadian control at the time.3 Moving forward to the early years of the Second World War, a Canadian infantry division had not a single horse in its establishment. Moreover, the number of wheeled vehicles on that division’s order of battle approached seven hundred, about three times as many as a First World War division and fully 50 percent of the total MT strength of the entire Canadian Expeditionary Force in 1918.4 These contrasts were profound, but technological transformation does not tell the whole story of people and machines at war. To focus only on improvements in transportation technology or enormous increases in fleets is to overlook threads of continuity that have more to do with people than machines. Closer study of human factors such as manpower allocation, driver training, vehicle maintenance, and approaches to procurement underscores the similarities between the two war experiences. LeBreton Gallery visitors can be forgiven for being unaware of the practical limits to mechanization that we will explore in this chapter. Laid bare in the exhibition space, the artifacts cannot speak for themselves. And during the world wars, they could have done little but break down and rust without the trained hand of a human master at the wheel. The Birth of MT and the First World War With the notable exception of the tank, the important mechanical technology operating on the battlefields of 1918 predated the outbreak of the First World War. Four-wheeled MT vehicles powered by internal combustion engines had been on the roads for ten to fifteen years before 1914. During that last stretch of peace, military theorists appreciated that it was time for mechanical transport to complement, if not fully replace, animal power as a vital link between supply railheads and combat units.5 In practice, British Royal Engineers had employed steam-powered traction engines with limited 117 Andrew Iarocci success during the South African War at the turn of the century. The War Office, meanwhile, established the Mechanical Transport Committee in 1900 to oversee trials for lighter, more capable vehicles. A year later, the British Army hosted competitive trials at Aldershot for special-purpose military trucks of three-ton capacity. Although just one competitor used an internal combustion engine (with the rest driven by steam), officers at the trials recognized “the great...