Zombie Army: The Canadian Army and Conscription in the Second World War by Daniel Byers (review)

Historians have usually agreed that one of the main reasons that conscription for overseas service became necessary after D-Day is that, in a lot of ways, Canada had overextended itself. By creating the nine divisions strong ‘Big Army’, that is, an army much larger that it could sustain once serious battle attrition would start, the Army’s high command in effect made conscription for overseas service ultimately unavoidable.

While not entirely rejecting this thesis, Daniel Byers asserts quite convincingly that we can get a much better understanding of the political crisis of 1944 by first understanding the complete dynamic of the mobilisation of forces introduced by the National Resources Mobilisation Act (NRMA) and especially the experience of those men who came to be derided as ‘Zombies’ (those that served under the NRMA but refused to volunteer for overseas service). For Byers, the conscription crisis of 1944 can better be explained as a derailment in the steady stream of voluntary recruits that were first introduced to army life through compulsion for home defence. Byers shows compellingly that for the first part of the war, through 1943, the NRMA served as a gateway to general service, either because men eventually decided for themselves to join or because of the many pressures that were put on the soldiers to do so. But, by 1944, the well had dried up and thus compulsion came to appear as the only option to fulfil the needs of the overseas army.

Byers provides us with an impeccably researched look at the daily grind of these soldiers, the way they were perceived by the local populations, their ethnic composition, or where and how they served. His objective is partly to debunk the myth that NRMA men were mostly French Canadians and he does so persuasively, showing that the men of the NRMA largely reflected the make-up of the general Canadian population. This is of course true, but one may lose sight, as one tends to by reading this book, that by and large, most English Canadians that wanted to impose conscription for overseas service in 1944 did so in large part for one reason: to make Quebec share an equal burden of the war. Our current knowledge that NRMA men were not all French Canadian does not change the fact that this was very much the impression at the time, as a simple glance at the letters to the editors published in any newspaper at the time would amply demonstrate. Unfortunately, because the author makes very little use of newspapers as a source material, this fact is somewhat lost in understanding why the pressure on the Mackenzie King government was so intense, fuelled by both ethnic and political resentment. If one must commend the author for stellar research in debunking the myth, one should not forget the role the myth itself played in shaping events.