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3 Storms of Our Grandfathers

General Arthur Currie, the brilliant commander of the Canadian Corps, deliberately created a logistics crisis before the move to Amiens from the Ypres Salient on 1 August 1918. Like a quarterback looking to his right to freeze the defence, he suddenly turned left and sent the large Canadian formation rumbling noiselessly south. Currie did not inform his chief of logistics, General Farmar, about the move until 29 July 1918, giving the logistics staff approximately 24 hours of planning before the Corps had to start moving.⁵

The coming offensive down at Amiens was defined by a tight secrecy at all levels of preparation. The presence of Canadians, who had come to be used as shock troops inside the British Expeditionary Force, would easily telegraph a coming offensive to the Germans. Transportation and movement planning were mightily tested because of this requirement for absolute secrecy. In the course of compressed preparation time, the subordinate divisional logistics staffs were left with a mere five days of advance notice. By 1 August 1918, when the Canadians began to move down to the Amiens sector for the coming fight, there remained only six days to extend the logistics conduit from Boulogne. Furthermore, the Corps would need to move and prepare for battle in an unfamiliar sector under complicated conditions. It was assigned only two main supply routes — the Amiens-Roye road and the Amiens-Villers Bretonneux. These two roads could only be used at night, as recorded in the Canadian War Diaries: “The Division is now in the first stage of a concentration march preparatory to assembling in battle positions. Surprise is to be the essence of the operation and therefore, all movement is to be restricted to the cover of darkness ... transport is to be parked under trees and troops not to be allowed to move about ...”⁶

To complicate matters, the Canadian sector in Amiens had been a French sector, bereft of the compatible logistics pieces to sustain a British formation.⁷ This placement in a new, non-British sector meant that the logistics chain would have to haul from refilling points farther afield. There was no end to the administrative challenges in the preparatory actions for the Canadian Corps, but when the balloon went up at H hour on 8 August 1918, by God, the Canadians made it rain.

The accomplishments of the Canadian Corps throughout the Hundred Days campaign were plentiful. High among the list of achievements was a logistics proficiency that was the envy of the British Army in France.

When you enter Normandy Hall, the breeding ground of leadership at the Canadian Army’s superb Command and Staff College in Kingston, the first thing that strikes the eye is an ancient oak ship’s rudder mounted on the wall. A tiny brass plate next to the oak explains that it was recovered during the construction of Normandy Hall in 1953. As the story goes, the rudder belonged to a French warship that had been ransacked and burned during the ballsy raid on Fort Frontenac by Lieutenant-Colonel Bradstreet in July 1758. Bradstreet had launched the raid on the Fort Frontenac from Oswego, New York, with 2,737 men. It was a clever strategic move that knocked out the logistics base of the French, sending reverberating shock waves all the way down the Ohio Valley. The account of the raid conjures up a number of heroic images and vistas of audacity and triumph. For a combat logistician, this vignette brings other thoughts to mind.

July in Kingston is oppressively hot and muggy. This probably reduced Bradstreet’s requirement for canvas, firewood, and baggage, but water, ammunition, and rations would be needed to sustain his men. Did the raiding party merely fill their canteens in the Cataraqui River? One assumes so. How many boats of ammunition did Bradstreet bring, what sorts of specialized equipment, and how much food did his force, almost as large as our current Canadian Task Force Afghanistan, require? How long did he intend to fight, presuming everything went well? These questions fall into the realm of logistics, and though they might occur to the disciplined student of history, they are usually among the last ones to be considered by Canadian officers. The logistics specialist can grasp the operational points of the Bradstreet raid, but he or she must reduce aspects of the plan to a time-honoured calculus. The application of violence, both blood and steel, must be appreciated in an additional dimension.

Canada and Afghanistan pose the same challenges to an army: crushing geography and a climate that can kill. In the earliest military history of our great nation, logistics were synonymous with survival. We live in a land defined by large tracts of space with a climate that can often be lethal to its inhabitants. Canada is the second-largest country in the world in terms of geographical area, comprising some 9,984,670 square kilometres and stretching for nearly 9,000 kilometres along the border it shares with the United States.⁸ From the strategic support bases of Hochelaga and Stadacona in Quebec, through to the building of the great transcontinental railway, logistics systems have been designed to carry essential matériel across our vast and rugged country. The Red River Rebellion of 1869–70 showcased the earliest, rudimentary editions of these Canadian lines of supply. The Red River crisis was the first military test for the young Dominion of Canada and logistics in a Canadian context. The rebellion was sparked when the Dominion government purchased the belt of Rupert’s Land from the Hudson’s Bay Company. The less than 10,000 residents of what is now Manitoba were unhappy with the Dominion’s plans, and under the leadership of Louis Riel stood up in resistance. Riel formed a provisional government in Manitoba in an act meant to show defiance and Métis sovereignty. A federal force of 1,044 men, made up of some 400 British regulars and enlisted Canadians from Ontario, was mobilized and placed under the leadership of General Garnet Wolseley. The Dominion force followed an arduous route across Lake Superior, and a “rugged canoe route” from the lakehead to Manitoba.⁹ It can be said without exaggeration that getting to Manitoba was half of the battle. The Dominion forces were successful in quashing the Red River Rebellion without bloodshed. Riel fled in exile to Montana.

Louis Riel later incited the North-West Rebellion of 1885 in what is now known as Saskatchewan. This rebellion illustrates well the logistics challenges a big country like Canada poses to a fighting force. Riel set up a second provisional government at Batoche and enlisted the military leadership of Gabriel Dumont to fight the Dominion forces. The great transcontinental railway was not yet complete, but by using the existing Canadian Pacific Railway lines and American railways south of the border, an effective movement system was put in place. Of greater import was what Desmond Morton has called the “ready-made supply system” in the form of the network of Hudson’s Bay posts to glean the bulk of the required supplies.¹⁰ General Middleton had to lean on these hardy trading posts to furnish the supply needs of his force. Over the course of two western uprisings, the Canadian militia got the job done, even though it lacked dedicated military logistics.

The Boer War (1899–1902) saw a small Canadian Expeditionary Force made up of newly minted units such as the Royal Canadian Regiment and, in the second contingent, the Royal Canadian Dragoons. The Canadian detachment fought inside the larger framework of the British Army and received its logistics support from it. More than 8,000 Canadian soldiers fought in the Boer War, and yet there was no formal Canadian supply chain. The Canadian government was responsible to pay for the initial kitting of the Canadian contingent and the costs of their transport to theatre of operations. Once in South Africa, logistic support to the Canadians was the responsibility of the British Army. Two hard lessons were borne of Canadian experiences in the Boer War. The first lesson centred on the Canadian soldier’s first look at an irregular style of warfare. After the British victory at Paardeburg, in which Canadian forces figured prominently, the Boers reverted to guerrilla-style tactics to further their aims. These tactics included attacking British supply lines on the veldt, which made resupply a tactical challenge. The second lesson followed from the tendency for Canadian troops to be served after the regular British units by the British Army logistics system. Victims of another nation’s supply chain, it was not uncommon for Canadian soldiers to endure weeks on half rations or to be routinely served only after British units. This tier-two treatment left an indelible impression on the contingent and it cut a deep groove in the memory of the fledgling Canadian Army: it is always better to bring your own. When war erupted in Europe a decade later, the Canadian Expeditionary Force would at last include tactical logistics units among their number. We have been bringing our own logistics troops to Canada’s fights ever since.

TRIUMPH OF PERSONALITIES

Most of us tend to think of the First World War as a mass of senseless bloodshed — an unfortunate clash of empires in which there are few relevant military lessons. It is easy to understand this view. The “Great War for Civilization” claimed over 60,000 Canadian lives out of a population of eight million.¹¹ A modest exhibit at the Canadian War Museum struck me most poignantly in the spring of 2007. This particular exhibit displayed the ephemera and awards a grieving mother received after her two sons were killed in action in the war. The two Memorial Crosses behind the glass mesmerized me. These little bits of silver were all that the grieving mother had to show for her brilliant boys, her best heart’s blood. Losses like these were widespread across the Dominion of Canada and virtually every hamlet and village in Canada maintains some form of memorial tribute to their First World War fallen.¹² I have never contemplated the silver cross from the perspective of knowing so many fresh recipients.

Canadian General Dave Fraser, my boss in Kandahar and the commander of the Canadian Task Force as well as the Multinational Brigade in RC South, had to prepare his fighting force for a new type of battlefield. Such a difficult intellectual task was not without precedent. Combat in the trenches of Europe from 1914 to 1918 was defined by an industrialized lethality that rocked the paradigm of contemporary field commanders. The logistics structures and systems bearing the weight of the British Expeditionary Force and by extension the Canadian Corps on the Western Front were initially static and lacked the capacity to support this industrialized battlefield.¹³ The British commanders that held direct sway over the Canadian Corps, specifically Douglas Haig and one of his subordinate corps’s commanders, Julian Byng, invested time in their sustainment structure. Both of these generals were able to enhance the logistics functionality of the Canadian Corps in a profound manner. The British Army Field Service Regulations (Part 2) of 1912, which is like an owner’s manual for operating in the army, encouraged commanders to remain aloof from matters of administration and logistics.¹⁴ This is an antique bias that unfortunately still finds traction in the current edition of the Canadian Forces. Remarkably, the actions of Haig and Byng strongly suggest that they understood the importance of logistics in the projection of combat power despite the prevailing convention of their time.

Has history been unkind to Field Marshal Haig? Haig’s reputation has been shredded for his steerage through such atrocious campaigns as the Somme and Third Ypres. Most military libraries hold at least some books and academic papers that criticize his blunders. I do not consider myself an apologist for Haig but I believe it is easy to overlook accomplishments that speak to his abilities and staying power as the commander-in-chief of the BEF from late 1915 through to the end of the war. Can you imagine for a second the moral and physical demands that such an immense responsibility would have placed on the man for such a long period? Gervais Phillips strikes an accurate chord in recollecting Haig’s administrative accomplishments:

His army was well supplied in the field, his wounded swiftly evacuated and well cared for ... the figure of Haig looms ever larger as that of the man who foresaw more accurately than most, who endured longer than most and who inspired most confidence amongst his fellows.¹⁵

Not only did Haig have to solve the challenges that came with unprecedented volumes of matériel, but he also had to deal with enormous advances in technology. Some of the biggest seeds of innovation that would impact the Canadian Corps during the Hundred Days were sown at his insistence after the butchery of the Somme offensive of 1916. Most prominently, Haig knew that reworking the entire logistics system was imperative. During the height of the battle, the replenishment system proved incapable of delivering the crushing volumes of matériel required at the front. A report of the Ministry of Overseas Military Forces of Canada recorded: “After the Battle of the Somme, it was clearly proven that road and animal transport could not alone bring forward ... the weight of war matériel required to stage a modern battle.”¹⁶

Haig was able to overcome contemporary army disdain for all matters of logistics and administration. He had to. As he knew, and as we learned again and again in southern Afghanistan in 2006, there are rarely service publications and books to help you solve the seminal problem of the day. The problems of your generation tend to be off the known chart. Against strong military advice to the contrary, the commander of the BEF sought the assistance of a civilian transportation expert, Sir Eric Geddes to overhaul the sustainment system.¹⁷

Sir Eric Geddes took a basic, first principles approach to the problem and confirmed that the system of replenishment sustaining the BEF in 1916 was indeed inadequate. Geddes examined actual requirements in France and then systematically studied the capacity of existing means to get it there. A typical division in the Great War required 150 tons of supply each day.¹⁸ Geddes was quick to confirm that matériel moving into France was at a level far below this actual requirement. In essence, the BEF was sipping through a straw when in fact it required a fire hose worth of matériel, some 290,000 tons per week by Geddes’s detailed 1916 estimate.¹⁹ Geddes made a number of grounded suggestions to Field Marshal Haig. Key among them was adjusting the capacity of the replenishment system so that matériel would never again constrain British operations. Haig implemented most of Geddes’s recommendations. His ability to ignore conventional bias in his army and invest considerable effort in his logistic architecture had a telling impact on the Canadian Corps inside his BEF.

Lieutenant-General Julian Byng, who assumed command of the Canadian Corps a month before the Somme on 28 May 1916, was instrumental in advancing the Corps’ logistics proficiency.²⁰ This increased proficiency was achieved by emphasizing logistics staff training and attention to administrative detail. Byng was a talented officer who quickly won the trust and admiration of the Canadians, and recognized that they “were too good to be led by politicians.”²¹ Intelligent, balanced, and insightful, he too was able to overcome the 1912 prejudice of Field Service Regulations (Part 2). Byng, a hard-nosed warfighter, was the beneficiary of a unique background and therefore acutely valuable in increasing the standard of Canadian logistics. His exposure to logistics began early in his career when he served on the staff of General Redvers Buller. Buller was the father of the modern Army Service Corps (Transport Corps) and a key proponent in modernizing British Army logistics.²² Serving with General Buller ensured that the young leader was immersed in operational and strategic-level logistics work at an impressionable point in his career. Today it is extremely rare for Canadian combat arms officers to get similar professional opportunities. This early familiarity with logistics planning was reinforced by Byng’s experiences fighting under Buller in the Boer War. Byng became well versed in the criticality of ground supply, as attacks on logistics lifelines were a large part of the tactics in South Africa.²³ He would not have been flat-footed grappling with Taliban IED attacks on his columns rumbling to Pashmul west of Kandahar in 2006. Similar tactics were part of the war in South Africa. The lessons of the Boer War taught him that logistics was worthy of command attention.

Byng fully retrained the staff of the Canadian Corps, greatly improving the formation as Jeffrey Williams observed: “No function that contributed to the Corps’ effectiveness — engineers, signals, supplies, medical, and transportation — escaped Byng’s eagle eye....”²⁴ He also polished the existing sustainment apparatus at the lower levels, taking an active interest in the smallest minutiae of the Corps’ logistics plumbing. Most important, General Byng invested attention into the entire breadth of his formation in a manner that has long vanished from the cap-badge obsessed Canadian Army. If you want to make the army better and more successful on the battlefield, attention must be put into where it is weakest. General Byng had a remarkably grounded touch and he possessed the charisma and social intelligence to achieve his aims. The Canadian Corps was much more adept at sustaining a modern battle by the time Currie, the brilliantly successful Canadian officer who had demonstrated his skills as a division commander at Vimy Ridge, replaced Byng in 1917. Drilled and polished under the enlightened but iron guidance of a soldier’s soldier, the logistics structure of the Canadian Corps stood ready to use the innovations of late 1916 to great advantage in the last year of the war.

LOGISTICS SECRETS OF THE CANADIAN CORPS

The most telling attribute shaping the success of the Canadian Corps was its sheer size. The corps was large, equating in strength to a small British Army. Whereas a British division consisted of approximately 15,000 soldiers, a Canadian division had more than 21,000.²⁵ General Currie had resisted the move to triangularization, which had been implemented in the rest of the BEF in January 1918.²⁶ The attrition of Allied personnel throughout 1916 and 1917 had left the British divisions in the field, “hard-pressed for men.”²⁷ The solution was to reduce each brigade by one battalion so that at least on paper, the BEF could field the same number of divisions. Triangularization eroded the resiliency of imperial formations by thinning out human resources and equipment. Currie’s views regarding this thinning out process contrasted sharply with the imperial plan:

The proposal was also put up to the Canadians, with the suggestion that the battalions thus freed might serve as the basis for two new divisions. General Currie, however, preferred to retain the old organization. He took the view that four strong divisions would be more effective than six weak ones.²⁸

Additionally, Currie had seized an opportunity that came with the breakup of the Fifth Canadian Division to overman the four blooded divisions of the Canadian Corps. Beefing up the four divisions rather than stretching to field a fifth increased the punch of a formation already infused with structural redundancy.²⁹

The next defining attribute of the Canadians was a solid penchant for motor transport. The Canadian Corps logisticians loved their trucks, and the Canadian Corps had more mechanical transport units than other corps in the BEF.

Two additional mechanical transport companies gave it approximately 100 more trucks than a British corps, thereby increasing inherent mobility. The corps maintenance organization was similarly much larger than anything other imperial corps had to work with. A British corps possessed only one medium ordnance mobile workshop, while the Canadian Corps had two.³⁰

This meant that in terms of general transport and repair the Canadian Corps had a significant logistic edge. There was a measure of both combat and logistics resiliency built into the corps that enabled it to absorb the mobility challenges of the Hundred Days. Additionally, Canada’s small national army within the BEF possessed the best machinery in France to get the job done, benefiting from the fact that nearly all corps level transport was motorized. This equipment edge was not enjoyed by other imperial formations.³¹ The motorized companies were responsible to act as the extension of the railway and deliver combat supplies forward to the horse-drawn logistics units of their respective divisions. They knew in 1918 that motorized flexibility was critical to sustain a more fluid, open style of warfare.³² In an attempt to increase lift within available resources, corps logistics structures were reorganized on 14 April 1918 with the intent of gaining more trucks through efficiency.³³ Even though the effort to generate more general lift capability fell short, the initiative was significant as it pointed to vibrant CSS experimentation based on thought, experience, and interest.

Finally, there was a great deal of effort on the part of General Currie and the Canadian government to keep the Canadian Corps together as a fighting formation.³⁴ This desire served to develop cohesion and affiliation among the various staffs and units of the formation. British corps, in contrast, did not retain divisions.³⁵ They were shuffled in and out of different corps regularly. The ability of the Canadian Corps to retain its subordinate formations not only led to cohesion and ease of planning but also a high degree of affiliation. Affiliation may seem trivial at first glance; however it leads to trust and efficiency when the friction of combat raises the spectre of logistics doubt in the mind of the fighting echelon. Like old hockey linemates who, through familiarity and respect, can take their level of play to a higher level, affiliation or a sense of team enabled the Canadian Corps to generate combat power with finesse. Ian McCulloch juxtaposes the advantages of Canadian affiliation against the more modular British concept as follows:

The homogeneity of the Canadian divisions “was a great advantage ... they always operated together under a corps commander and staff whom they could trust and whose methods and abilities they knew and understood. In contrast, British divisions moved about from one corps to another, and sometimes suffered from misunderstandings arising from different ... administrative practices in the different corps ...”³⁶

With sound affiliation a fighting force can survive with fewer questions or requests for clarification stemming from unfamiliarity with technique. The result is that preparation times are compressed and the physical act of resupply is conducted more effectively between units that know and trust each other implicitly.

CANADA’S HUNDRED DAYS

The Canadian Corps in the “war to end all wars” was a highly prized formation in the BEF. The ferocity of the Canadian Corps in combat and its sterling logistics capability made its soldiers an obvious choice for repeated use as shock troops in the last stanza of the war — the Hundred Days. The Hundred Days comprised the rich operational period of 8 August to 11 November 1918. It was only during this last stanza of the First World War that logistics, like all other aspects of combat power, endured the weight of modern warfare. Offensive success has to be underwritten by logistics mobility. The Canadian Corps’ sophisticated mobility was demonstrated both in its movement in contact with the enemy as well as its large-scale administrative movements (away from enemy contact) across war-torn France. The corps was passed between British armies during the Hundred Days like a prized carpenter’s tool with the intent of breaking key nodes in the German defences. John English observed: “Time and again, the Canadian Corps was used to crack some of the toughest and most vital points of the German defence, thereby creating the conditions and opportunities that allowed the Allied Armies to drive the German war machine to the point of collapse.”³⁷

There are many parallels between what our great-grandfathers were able to achieve in the Canadian Corps and what we have set in motion in Kandahar. Canadian equipment, from the LAV III fighting vehicle to the brand new Nyala mine-proof truck is the envy of every other nation in southern Afghanistan. Even with the aging aftermarket-armoured logistics trucks we used, we developed a quick reputation for getting the job done. It was a refreshed reputation reminiscent of the pristine motor transport companies of the 1918 Canadian Corps. In everything we did in the National Support Element we sought to augment this legacy of a Canadian “can-do” attitude.

Today it is rare indeed to find leaders in the Canadian Army who understand the sustainment capacity of their commands. How much diesel fuel does their formation carry; how much more can be amassed in a given period? This is not to suggest that the commander must know every last little detail about logistics. He or she must however know the limitations of his or her force and where the edges of possibility lie. If a military commanders lack understanding of logistics capacity, they will never know when they are taking risks, when they are pushing too hard or not hard enough. None of these scenarios are acceptable. It is difficult to dispute that Canada’s “pocket” army was part of the cutting edge of combat logistics innovation in 1918. Through the long years of Canadian military logistics experience from the Red River Rebellion and the war in South Africa to the Armistice in 1918, Canada had built a valued logistics capacity into its army — to the point where it became the envy of other Commonwealth armies and a defining characteristic in the Canadian manner of fighting. Logistics was understood by and important to Canadian commanders.

The unavoidable question remains, “What happened?”