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

14. Knowing Enough Not to Interfere: Lieutenant-General Charles Foulkes at the Lamone River, December 1944

317 14 Knowing Enough Not to Interfere Lieutenant-General Charles Foulkes at the Lamone River, December 1944 Douglas E. Delaney It is hard to find anything nice to say about Charles Foulkes as a battlefield commander. He possessed no great technical skill. None of his confidential reports during the interwar period identified him as anything better than an “above average” talent in the Permanent Force,1 and his directing staff at Camberley pegged him as only “[a]verage … a critic rather than a creator.”2 His control of the 2nd Canadian Division in July 1944 was so shaky that his corps commander at the time, Guy Simonds, had to be talked out of firing him.3 Terry Copp agreed with Simonds and quite correctly criticized Foulkes’s performance during Operation Spring (25 July 1944), wondering why Foulkes had not been fired for his foolish tactical decisions in the Forêt de la Londe battle at the end of August 1944.4 His human skills were nothing to brag about either. He had few friends in the army and even fewer admirers, most of his contemporaries believing him to be little more than a master bureaucrat and an accomplished careerist who owed much of his rise in rank to his connection with General H.D.G. Crerar, Commander First Canadian Army.5 He got into shouting matches with brigadiers,6 and some openly questioned his orders. If he did try to secure the loyalty of his subordinates at all, Foulkes usually did it by generating fear rather than affection. He fired enough people to send a potent message that anyone could be next, and he often embarrassed people in public. While acting commander of the 2nd Canadian Corps during the battles of the Scheldt (October–November 1944), 318 Knowing Enough Not to Interfere he made no friends or followers in the corps headquarters. Brigadier Elliot Rodger, the Corps Chief of Staff, stated plainly that he had “no respect” for Foulkes and “simply … blocked out” from memory the period that Foulkes had been in temporary command.7 Foulkes also drank too much on occasion and had several embarrassing incidents because of it. Yet owing to a dearth of senior command talent in the Canadian Army at the time, Foulkes ascended to command the 1st Canadian Corps, both in Italy and in Northwest Europe during 1944–45. Given his ignominious record to that point, one might have expected that his battles as a corps commander would have gone poorly. But that was not really the case, particularly with Operation Chuckle, the so-called Battle of the Rivers in northern Italy during December 1944. Over the course of eighteen miserable and rain-drenched days, the 1st Canadian Corps slogged across fourteen miles of flat farmland, crossing five diked water obstacles and liberating the city of Ravenna in the process, all of this against a determined and well-posted enemy. The Canadians had planned to go farther, but the advance from the Montone bridgehead to the Senio River was a remarkable tactical accomplishment in itself, and it achieved its operational purpose. Chuckle was part of a larger Allied effort to capture Bologna. General Sir Harold Alexander had hoped that a strong thrust by the Left to right: Major-General Charles Foulkes, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, and Major-General Dan Spry, 24 October 1944. [LAC 142115] 319 Douglas E. Delaney British Eighth Army, which included the 1st Canadian Corps, would draw German reserves to the Ravenna sector, leaving Bologna weakened and ripe for attack by the Fifth US Army. In fact, the Canadian attacks caused so much consternation in the German Tenth Army that the German commander committed more than a division to the Canadians’ sector. That the Fifth US Army’s attack never materialized takes nothing away from the Canadian battlefield accomplishments of Operation Chuckle; it just means that they were sadly squandered by strategic-level failures. The Canadians succeeded in the tasks given them, but how much of that success can be credited to Foulkes? A closer look at the battle reveals that Foulkes the corps commander was pretty much the same as Foulkes the division commander. He had experienced no catharsis between Northwest Europe and Italy, had no change of heart or perspective. He did not bring much to the 1st Canadian Corps, which was an experienced and wellfunctioning formation by the autumn of 1944. What he did in Italy that...