Regimental Thinking

The Military Museums in Calgary is the second-largest museum of Canadian military history. When I first visited almost twenty-five years ago, its name was the Museum of the Regiments, and it consisted of four separate institutions in one building, each devoted to the history of units that had their birth in or strong connections to the city. What struck me at once was the difference in the quality of each regiment’s displays. The Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry’s story was professionally designed and beautifully presented. The Calgary Highlanders’ space was similarly well done, and the Lord Strathcona’s Horse exhibits were very good. Only the King’s Own Calgary Regiment museum had an amateurish feel.

Why the differences? Money, of course. The Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry and the Calgary Highlanders had wealthy patrons, honorary colonels, or veterans who had done well and contributed to the non-public funds controlled by a regimental foundation. Although it had its own foundation, the King’s Own Calgary Regiment, for whatever reason, appeared to lack such financial support — and it showed.

Now the Calgary Highlanders and the King’s Own Calgary Regiment both have new regimental histories, and if there was a financial imbalance before, now there is a scholarly one. The Highlanders volume is a fat coffee-table “pictorial history” by Michael Dorosh that is published with the backing of the Calgary Highlanders Regimental Funds Foundation. Similarly, in his account of the King’s Own Calgary Regiment’s history from 1910 to 1960, Patrick H. Brennan acknowledges the “Regimental Foundation which, by financing publication costs and much of the research, made the book possible.” The Dorosh volume features glossy paper, black and white and colour photographs, reproductions of regimental art, and all the trappings of excellent design. The Brennan book, meanwhile, has only muddy black and white photos and looks like the university press publication that it is. Style matters, of course, but so does excellent research in Canada and Britain, as well as evocative prose. In this case, excellence trumps style, no matter the monetary difference.

Brennan is an emeritus professor of history at the University of Calgary (and almost forty years ago, he was my student at York University). In his introduction, he sets out his aim: to detail the King’s Own Calgary Regiment’s actions in war and its survival in peacetime, to note the leaders, the followers, the brave, and the rank and file, but also to broaden the story to show the connections of the soldiers to their hometowns and their families, often revealed by the correspondence that flowed back and forth. Many other regimental histories have tried to do this, but none have done it so well.

For example, Brennan’s account of the Battle of Vimy Ridge, in April 1917, focuses on the 50th Battalion, the regiment’s predecessor. The infantry had fought against the Germans, and when the defeated came out with their hands up, many were killed. “The combat was intimate, and all the more savage for it. The men’s blood was up,” he writes. Some officers “had actively discouraged their men from accepting surrenders this time. Mercifully, the battle was over quickly, all objectives having been seized within 45 minutes.” Blunt truth.

Midway through the Second World War, the Calgary Regiment (then called the 14th Canadian Armoured Regiment) landed its Churchill tanks on the main beach at Dieppe on August 19, 1942. In the best account of the armour at the French seaport, Brennan details the difficulties: heavy enemy fire that destroyed many landing craft before they could get their tanks ashore; the stony beach that ruined tank tracks; and the decision to pull back those tanks that had advanced farthest to provide as much protection as possible for the surviving infantry. Then came the surrender: the firing stopped “and through our periscopes we could see the Germans coming,” a trooper named Tom Pinder recalled. “And very shortly after there was a German outside the tank saying ‘Raus.’ So I opened the escape hatch and Johnny Mayhew and I got out and there was this Jerry there with his rifle. The wrong end of a rifle sure looks big.” For the survivors, there was a POW camp, also well portrayed, as are the efforts of families to find out whether their men had been taken prisoner or killed.

Brennan’s work takes the regiment through the campaign in Italy — the fighting at Ortona, as well as at the Hitler and Gothic Lines — and then to the Netherlands. After the war, the regiment, again a militia unit, acquired its present name. The account ends with the regiment’s fiftieth anniversary, when it had few soldiers and scant equipment.

Dorosh is not an academic, but he is the author of six military histories and a long-time soldier in the Calgary Highlanders. His latest book goes back to the formation of the 103rd Calgary Rifles in 1910; soon after, at the outbreak of war in 1914, the Rifles sent 300 men to the new camp at Valcartier, Quebec. More followed, and they and soldiers from Winnipeg formed the 10th Battalion of the Canadian Division. At Ypres in April 1915, the 10th and much of the division were destroyed. Rebuilt, the battalion fought on throughout the war in all the major battles. Several new units were recruited in Calgary as the conflict went on: the small city enlisted 49,000 men and women, Dorosh notes. In the postwar reorganization, the brass in Ottawa created two new units, the Calgary Highlanders and the Calgary Regiment, the genesis of the units that continue to this day. In the Second World War, the Highlanders fortunately missed the Dieppe Raid, but they suffered heavily in the Scheldt campaign.

The postwar life of the unit is told at length — every royal visit, argument over kilts, and training exercise recounted. The Highlanders have sent soldiers to Korea, to NATO service, to the former Yugoslavia, and to Afghanistan, and its men and women have performed well. It was and is a fine regiment, and its soldiers deserve this lavish book.