Canadian and Indian troops reach Europe

In the last two weeks of 1939 the first soldiers from two of the most important parts of the British Empire reached Europe. On 17 December a convoy carrying some 7,400 men of Major General Andrew McNaughton’s 1st Canadian Infantry Division steamed into the anchorage at Greenock on the estuary of the Clyde. The next day, 18 December, the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, announced to the world that the Canadians were in Britain. On 26 December four animal transport companies of the Royal Indian Army Service Corps came ashore at Marseille, brought from Bombay together with more than two thousand mules. The Canadians were to become the core of an army that a few years later fought in Italy and Normandy. The Indians, though few in number and not sent to fight, were the first soldiers of the Indian Army on a European front in this war.

Popular chronologies give 18 December for the arrival of the first Canadian troops in Europe and 27 December for the arrival of the first Indian troops in France. Both dates need refining. The Canadian convoy reached Scotland on 17 December, and the news was made public on 18 December. The Indian contingent landed at Marseille on 26 December, Boxing Day. Nor were these the first Canadians in Europe: a small group of officers had already arrived in London in November and set up Canadian Military Headquarters there, and many Canadians had been serving in the RAF since before the war. The 1st Division was, however, the first Canadian fighting formation to cross the Atlantic.

Canada sends a division

When Canada declared war on Germany on 10 September 1939, the government of William Lyon Mackenzie King wanted a “limited” war, with the emphasis on the air force, the navy and supplies, and with the smallest possible expeditionary force. The memory of the First World War, when Canada had lost some 60,000 dead and conscription for service overseas had torn the country apart, counselled caution in committing land forces. Under pressure from public opinion and from the British, who needed every division they could get, the government nevertheless agreed in the second half of September to send one division overseas and to keep a second ready at home. On 28 September the defence minister confirmed this publicly.

Command of the future division went at the beginning of October to Major General Andrew McNaughton. Born in 1887 in Moosomin, Saskatchewan, McNaughton was a gunner who in the First World War had created Canada’s effective counter-battery system, had been Chief of the General Staff in 1929–1935 and, from 1935, president of the National Research Council. He was regarded as Canada’s most outstanding soldier and as a “soldier-scientist”. As an opponent of conscription for overseas service, he was King’s ideal commander. On the day his men arrived in Britain he was on the cover of the American weekly Life, which presented him as the Allied general most likely to take Berlin.

The division, re-formed on 1 September 1939 on the basis of the formation of the First World War, consisted of three infantry brigades drawn from units across the country – from Ontario, from the western provinces, and from Quebec and the Maritime provinces, including the French-speaking Royal 22e Régiment – together with artillery, engineers and services. Half the men had had no previous military training. Modern weapons were lacking: the infantry had obsolete Lewis guns, the artillery guns from the previous war, and the soldiers had not even been issued with steel helmets.

The first flight

In the first days of December units from all over Canada travelled by train to Halifax in Nova Scotia. In 1914 the first Canadian contingent, more than 30,000 men, had sailed for England in a single enormous convoy. Now, in view of the threat from submarines and raiders, the division was divided into flights of 7,000–8,000 men. The first, numbering 7,449 officers and men according to the Canadian official history, was embarked in five great passenger liners: the Aquitania, Duchess of Bedford, Empress of Britain, Empress of Australia and Monarch of Bermuda. The ships still had their peacetime fittings, and the men travelled in conditions their successors could only dream of.

The Admiralty, which had been running convoys from Halifax since September, gave the troopships a powerful escort: the battlecruiser Repulse, the battleship Resolution, the cruiser Emerald, the aircraft carrier Furious and, for the first stage, six destroyers, four of them Canadian. The convoy left Halifax at noon on 10 December. At the same time British cruisers in the South Atlantic were hunting the Admiral Graf Spee, and the pocket battleships and U-boats were the main reason for so strong an escort. The voyage passed without any encounter with the enemy. The only mishap was a collision in fog on the last day between the Aquitania and the liner Samaria, fortunately without serious damage. On 16 December the convoy was met by twelve destroyers sent out from Britain.

On the morning of 17 December the ships entered the Firth of Clyde. The chronicler of one of the battalions noted that all along the narrow channel the Scots leaned out of windows and doorways, waving flags and cheering. At about noon the convoy anchored off Greenock. The Dominions Secretary, Anthony Eden, and the Canadian High Commissioner in London, Vincent Massey, went aboard the Aquitania, in which McNaughton and his staff had sailed. A message of welcome from King George VI was read out: the British Army, he wrote, would be proud to have as comrades in arms the successors of those who had come from Canada in the Great War and fought with a gallantry that had never been forgotten. Trains were already carrying the men to Aldershot in Hampshire, the largest military centre in England, when on 18 December Churchill announced their arrival. That same day German fighters shattered a raid by British Wellingtons over the Heligoland Bight, and in the following days the press reported it alongside the news of the Canadians.

The second flight, somewhat larger, sailed from Halifax in seven ships on 22 December, escorted by the British battleship Revenge and the French Dunkerque. The men spent Christmas at sea and entered the Clyde on 30 December. By the end of the year almost the whole of the 1st Division was in Britain. The third flight, made up mainly of auxiliary units, reached Scotland on 7 February 1940. On 21 February the Canadian Active Service Force in Britain numbered 1,066 officers and 22,238 other ranks.

Winter at Aldershot

Unlike their predecessors of 1914, who had spent the winter under canvas on Salisbury Plain, the Canadians were housed in brick barracks. But the winter that followed was the harshest since 1894. The barracks were not built for frost, and the men discovered that the damp English freezing point was every bit as trying as the far lower temperatures of Canada. On the Western Front the Phoney War dragged on, the Germans had not yet bombed Britain, and training was hampered by the weather and by shortages of equipment. Observers wrote of “boredom, homesickness and the feeling of not really being needed”. The British gradually replaced the Canadians’ machine guns with new Brens and their guns with modern gun-howitzers, but the process was slow. The division was to join the British Expeditionary Force in France once its training, estimated to take several months, was complete.

Mules from India

The road of the soldiers from India looked very different. India had entered the war on 3 September by decision of the Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, without consulting Indian politicians, on the same day that Australia and New Zealand entered the war. Brigades of the Indian Army had been sent to Egypt and Malaya as early as August. To Europe, however, the Indian Army sent no infantry. The British Expeditionary Force was fully motorised, but its command, remembering the mud of Flanders in the First World War and expecting positional warfare, asked for pack transport that could go where lorries could not. India had more of it than any other part of the Empire: mule companies carried supplies in the mountains of the North-West Frontier.

The contingent was called Force K6. Its core was formed by four animal transport (mule) companies of the Royal Indian Army Service Corps, numbered 22, 25, 29 and 32, supplemented by a supply depot, a reinforcement unit, part of an Indian hospital and a remount section to replenish the animals. Each company numbered several hundred men and several hundred animals. The soldiers were overwhelmingly Muslims from the Punjab and the North-West Frontier, from lands that in 1947 became part of Pakistan. They were service troops, not combat units. Their officers were partly British and partly Indian; one of the companies was commanded by Major Mohammad Akbar Khan, later the first general of the Pakistan Army.

According to British and Pakistani accounts, the contingent sailed from Bombay on 8 December escorted by destroyers and put into Marseille on 26 December. The thousands of mules were unloaded, it was emphasised, without the loss of a single animal. There was a certain symbolism in this: in the same port in September and October 1914 the divisions of the Indian Corps had landed, and that autumn they had plugged the gaps in the British front in Flanders. The companies were dispersed across northern France, some to the Le Mans area, others near Lille and Orchies, behind the sector held by the British on the Belgian border. Through the bitter winter of 1939–1940 they carried supplies to positions that mud and snow had cut off from the roads.

Place in the war

Neither the Canadians nor the Indians experienced the Phoney War as they had expected. In April 1940 part of the Canadian division was taken to Scotland to take part in a landing at Trondheim during the Norwegian campaign, but the operation was called off. In June, when after the evacuation from Dunkirk an attempt was still being made to save France, the 1st Canadian Brigade landed at Brest and had to return almost at once, losing all its equipment. In the summer of 1940 the Canadians were one of the best-equipped formations in England, ready to meet a German invasion. In 1942 McNaughton took command of the First Canadian Army, and in 1943, at odds with the British and with his own government, he was recalled; in 1944 he briefly served as defence minister. The 1st Division did not go into battle until July 1943 in Sicily (Operation Husky), after which it fought through the whole Italian campaign, from Ortona to the Gothic Line, and in 1945 took part in the liberation of the Netherlands. From a small professional army Canada built up during the war land forces several hundred thousand strong.

In May 1940 Force K6 was caught up in the German offensive. The companies fell back with the British towards the coast, abandoning their animals, which were handed out to French farmers. Three of them were evacuated through Dunkirk – Akbar Khan’s men embarked from the mole on 28 May – while No. 22 Company, cut off outside the town, was taken prisoner. The evacuated Indians later served in Wales, Cornwall and the Scottish Highlands, where they trained for mountain warfare; their graves lie in the cemeteries at Brecon and Kingussie. In 1944 they returned to India. Their story was long forgotten, but it is a reminder that the Indian Army, which during the war grew to some 2.5 million volunteers and fought in East and North Africa, in Italy and in Burma, was present in Europe from the first winter of the war. At the same time it was precisely the war, into which India had been drawn without its consent, that hastened the end of British rule and the partition of the subcontinent in 1947.