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

18. A History of Lieutenant Jones

413 18 A History of Lieutenant Jones Geoffrey Hayes The first volume of the Official History of the Canadian Army in the Second World War contains The History of Private Jones.1 He was an anonymous soldier whose service offered a glimpse into how the Army selected, trained, treated, and finally discharged Canadians who volunteered for wartime military service. But what do we know about Lieutenant Jones? The Army’s official historian, Colonel C.P. Stacey, understood the challenge of finding the army’s 46,000 commissioned officers, but he only briefly summarized how they were selected and trained.2 This chapter draws upon the personnel records of an anonymous young Canadian to consider his selection, training, and brief time in battle as an army reinforcement officer. In 1945 a British officer defined the “officer quality” as a balance between the “technical equipment to lead” and the “moral equipment to inspire.”3 That army planners and trainers stressed an officer’s technical training made sense in a war they anticipated would be won by those with scientific training and expertise. The moral side of the “officer quality” was more difficult to measure. While aging generals and politicians spoke of character, manliness, and a kind of noblesse oblige inspired by memories of the First World War, social scientists struggled to inventory the qualities of leadership. Within these discussions lay assumptions about the kind of leadership these young men were expected to give. As we will see, the case of Lieutenant Jones suggests that idealized notions of middle-class education and appearance offered only limited guidance to the leadership that young Canadians were expected to provide on the battlefields of Northwest Europe. 414 A History of Lieutenant Jones Lieutenant Jones was born in a small town south of Sherbrooke, Quebec, in late 1921.4 There is little reason to think that his background and military training were all that different from those of thousands of other young Canadian men. Sickness kept him out of school for two years, but he remained robust enough to list rugby and hockey as his favourite sports. He collected stamps as a hobby. His attestation records tell us that he was an Anglican. When war broke out in September 1939, he was an eighteen-year-old high school student. Such details mattered among Canadians who looked more to education rather than economic or social status as a way to choose their leaders. Jones was among the first generation that grew up in an era of widespread health, welfare, and educational reforms. Neil Sutherland tells us that Jones’s generation worked less and was schooled longer than their parents. His teachers were better qualified to lead a “new” curriculum and his classmates were less likely to be physically punished (either by the school or the state) than were their parents.5 Physical fitness grew in importance, particularly through team sports, which tested physical strength and taught lessons in teamwork. Still, social class and respectability remained important. Jones’s family was not wealthy, but army examiners may have seen his membership in the Church of England as some evidence that Jones was part of an AngloCanadian social elite. We may assume that Jones had at least some basic military training through his high school cadet corps, which remained a fixture across the country between the wars. Mark Moss has argued that such institutions, as well as newspapers, athletic clubs, and youth organizations, helped indoctrinate Ontario schoolboys before the First World War to accept notions of “patriotism, imperialism, manliness, and militarism, which, in effect, served to mirror the concerns of both official and elite culture.”6 No doubt family, school, and church framed Jones’s behaviour as well as his world view. But the memory of the First World War was conflicted, and the effects of economic depression helped nurture a more cynical and less deferential generation than before. One Canadian veteran from Niagara Falls recalled how students spread Left-inspired rumours that the head of the high school cadet corps earned a dollar for each student he trained. These sentiments were common. Samuel Hynes believed that his generation of young American men carried an imagined “war-in-their-heads” inspired by the antiwar poetry of the 415 Geoffrey Hayes First World War. Some swore off taking part in any future war. Yet Hynes maintains that a more conservative collective memory won out. “And so,” Hynes concluded, “when...