“No Lack of Rational Speed”: 1st Canadian Army Operations, September 1944

HNo Lack ofRational Speed": lst Canadian Army Operations, September 1944 TERRY COPP and ROBERT VOGEL One of the major characteristics of a victorious army is that its units advance with all their baggage pursuing an enemy who has lost much of his equipment in battle. In modern warfare where living off the land is rarely possible, the pursuing army expends great energy on creating long lines of communication along which the desired amounts of fuel, ammunition and supplies may flow. The retreating army, forced by circumstance to distinguish between the essential and the desirable, just keeps going: without transportation, it marches; without food, it does not eat. The pursuit of the German Armies irt France after the breakout from Normandy was a contest. between a largely motorized Allied Army and a horse or foot-powered German Army, "horsepower against horses'' 1 as one intelligence report put it. Yet the Allies failed to trap and destroy large remnants of the German Army which were able to re-establish themselves on the borders of their homeland. Despite losses, estimated as in excess of 600,000 men, despite the reduction of German armour in the west to 100 battle-worthy tanks,2 the fact remains that elements of all five German Armies escaped without leaving huge gaps in their defensive perimeter, or at least no gaps that the Allies were able to exploit.3 The leading participants in the direction of the Allied campaign and the historians have long debated the reasons for the recovery of the German Army in the west after its apparently devastating defeat in Normandy. A good deal of criticism has been directed at 1st Canadian Army operations after the breakout, for it was in their sector that the Germans enjoyed their greatest success in withdrawing large bodies of organized troops while effectively delaying Allied use of the vital Channel ports and Antwerp. British historians have long echoed Montgomery 's complaint that the Canadian Army was Journal ofCanadian Studies Vol. 16, Nos. 3&4 (Automne-Hiver 1981 Fall-Winter) "badly handled and very slow."4 Major-General H. Essame put the British case most bluntly in his The Battle For Germany: That the. operations of First Canadian Army during September were slower than they need have been is an unavoidable conclusion. Le Havre did not fall to 1 British Corps until 12 September; Boulogne held out till the 22nd; the Calais area was not cleared until the end of the month; Dunkirk remained in enemy hands; on 1 October the Germans still held a lengthy stretch .of the south bank of the Scheidt, the northern suburbs of Antwerp, Walcheren Island and the approaches to the South Beveland peninsula.5 All of this was in contrast to the rapid progress of the British 2nd Army during September. The British official history is, of course, more cautious and Major Ellis far more aware of logistical and administrative considerations, but even he suggests that Crerar did not ''seem to have recognized any great need for haste"6 in dealing with the Channel ports. Ellis is also critical of the length of time required to bring lst British Corps to the Antwerp7 area to relieve 2nd Army forces needed for the thru~t to the Rhine. Two Canadian authors have picked up on these themes and concluded that Canadian Army activities were so deficient that had Crerar been a British Army Commander he would have been sacked.8 Montgomery's most recent biographer goes one step further, claiming that Crerar was dismissed by Montgomery in September of 1944 and that Crerar's ill-health was just a convenient story!9 C. P. Stacey's official history of the Canadian Army, The Victory Campaign, is quite critical of operations in Normandy but avoids direct censure of the conduct of the pursuit. Stacey also avoids any favorable comment and General H. G. "Harry '' Crerar was moved to suggest to Stacey that he wondered whether the official historian had brought out sufficiently ...the difficulties of the coastal terrain, from a tactical and administrative point of view. It seemed to those of us in First 145 Canadian Army that we always had "ten more rivers to cross" and many...