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Today, June 21st, is National Aboriginal Day. 

In honour of Aboriginal soldiers who have served or continue to serve their country, the National Aboriginal Veterans Association is holding a Ceremony of Remembrance and Wreath Laying today at the National Aboriginal Veterans Monument in downtown Ottawa. 

It seems a suitable day to feature an excerpt from my memoir Excuse Us! Herr Schicklgruber, which concerns the invaluable contribution of the Métis to my regiment in World War II:

The Métis

The Royal Winnipeg Rifles (RWR) could boast of 102 Métis among its ranks.  These men were the direct descendants of the soldiers who fought under Gabriel Dumont, the ‘battle adjutant’ of the Métis in the North West Rebellion.  Dumont was the ‘number two’ man to Louis Riel.

The contribution of the Métis to the fighting troops of the RWR is described in the Regiment’s history and elsewhere.  How good were they?  It is said, with some truth, that they could bring down an enemy or a buffalo while riding full tilt.  Their tactics had been bred into them.

They were superb fighting men.  Their inborn skills produced in them a superb sense of fieldcraft.  Also, the Métis were skilled at the tactics of the battlefront.  For centuries they had been taught how to fight.  Their leaders, with their coloured feather lances, could produce a sizeable force of fighting men, emerging seemingly from behind bushes or rising out of mist-covered fields.  It is well known, from reading the history of the German Army, that a sudden appearance of Métis soldiers on a hitherto unknown battleground created an aura of mystery.

It is more than a coincidence that there were three members of the Choquette family who died while serving in the RWR.  The three Choquette boys were known to me.  They were:

Rfn Morris J. Choquette of Oakville, Manitoba:  He died on June 8 ‘44 at the age of 24 and is buried at Beny-sur-Mer Canadian War Cemetery.  He was the son of David and Mary Choquette.  Choquette Bay (64 P/4) in Oolduywas Lake was named after him.  It is in the same square mile as Choquette Lake, named for Edmond Choquette (chronicled later); that is near Nueltin Lake.

Rfn Roland J. Choquette of St. Boniface, Manitoba:  He died on August 15 ‘44 at the age of 22.  He is buried in Bretteville-sur-Laize Cemetery.  He was the son of George and Aurora Choquette.  Choquette Point (64 I/13) on Shethanei Lake was named after him.  It is also in the square mile numbered 64.

Rfn Ed Choquette of Glenora, Manitoba:  Choquette Lake (64 N/6) carries his name; it is southwest of Nueltin Lake.  He is buried in Adegem Cemetery.  He lasted longer than the other two Choquettes, having died of wounds on October 28 ‘44 after a valiant battle at the Leopold Canal.  He was 26 years old.  Carrying on the tradition of the Choquettes, another cousin, Pte Lawrence Choquette served in the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders of Winnipeg and died on August 8 ‘44.

The documentary Against All Odds, which I produced in 1988, contains a short vignette.  I was filming grave sites, identifying the headstones of Winnipeg Rifles.  I pointed to the headstones of twelve of my Company, then came to the last headstone.   I was shocked and said on tape:  “My God, Edmund Choquette.”  Unbeknownst to me a German shell had killed him outright.  My nerves were in tatters for several days after seeing Ed’s grave. 

WORTHY OF NOTE!  It was common, prior to World War II, to call the Métis ‘half-breeds.’  The designation ‘half-breed’ fell into disuse when the RWR realized that it was a derogatory term.  The descendants of those fighters who had given such a stirring account of themselves against the ‘whites’ from the prairies in the Riel Rebellion of 1885 deserved a better nomenclature than the ignoble ‘half-breed.’  They were soon assimilated into the Winnipegs and certainly achieved equal status.  More to the point, those known as ‘half-breeds’ would resort to fisticuffs if challenged by this degrading term.  The name was first shortened to ‘breed’ and, before the Normandy campaign finished, they were ‘Métis’ – the proud descendants of a fighting tradition.

The manner in which the Métis could carry out a patrol left the regular Germans in awe and fearful.  As well, mentioned herein, is their ability as snipers and marksmen.

Their experience in the Armed Forces in World War II should have changed the public’s view of what they still termed the half-breed.  Unfortunately, the Métis could not take advantage of the generous rehabilitation plans offered to returning veterans.  If they wanted to enter trade school, they would need some basic education – a component which was denied them due to their nomadic existence and lack of schools.  In one now-famous anecdote, a Métis with what would amount to a grade three education, gained in four different schools as his family moved around the prairies, visited a Veterans Affairs office.  The counsellor ran through the options available under the Veterans Charter.  The interview ended by asking the Métis if he would like to become a lawyer or a doctor – this, to a man who had no education!  He had fought valiantly for his country and was among the top soldiers in the infantry.  Like most of his compatriots, he walked out of the DVA office in disgust – back to a canvas and two-by-four tent on a road allowance near St. Ambrois, just north of Portage la Prairie in the Brandon, Manitoba district.

In the last entry, I provided a profile of Eisenhower from the book Great Land Battles of World War II, by Ian Hogg.  In this entry, I continue with a profile on Montgomery.

Field-Marshal Sir Bernard Law Montgomery (1887 – 1976)

Opinionated, self-assured, a rigid disciplinarian, a non-smoker and teetotaler, with a sense of the theatrical, for all that, Montgomery deserves his place as one of the outstanding commanders of the Second World War and one of the greatest British generals of history.  He never suffered fools for one second longer than necessary, never hesitated to fire an incompetent commander, but was revered by the common soldiers as the man who won battles, and after the long British run of ill-fortune in 1939 – 42 this was the thing which counted.  He has often been denigrated as ‘never willing to take a chance,’ but the other side of the coin is that he was a firmly orthodox soldier who was not seduced by get-rich-quick schemes of warfare and who never committed his troops to battle without weighing all the options and making sure he had all the men and equipment he thought necessary to win.

Montgomery came from an Anglo-Irish family, attended the Royal Military Academy, and was commissioned in to the Royal Warwickshire Regiment in which he served with distinction during the First World War.  After various staff appointments, he commanded the 1st Bn of his regiment in 1938 – 39 and on the outbreak of war took the 3rd Division to France.  He commanded it skillfully during the collapse of France and the withdrawal through Dunkirk, and on returning to England received command of 5th Corps.  Here he built on an existing reputation as a high-quality trainer of troops with his insistence on physical fitness and sound tactical training.

He was marked down to be Eisenhower’s deputy for the North African landings, but on the death in an air crash of General Gott, Commander-designate of the 8th Army, Montgomery was sent to Egypt to assume his place.  He revitalized the Desert Armies, discarded most of the eccentric quasi-organizations which had fragmented the force and sapped morale, reinstated the correct formal organizations, and proceeded to fight the Battle of El Alamein and eject the German Army from Egypt.  He then pursued Rommel for the length of Africa and eventually, in conjunction with Eisenhower’s forces in Tunisia, completed the clearance of that continent.

He commanded the 8th Army in Sicily and Italy with distinction but was then returned to England to take command of 21st Army Group, the land forces involved in the invasion of Europe.  He immediately imposed his views on the planners, to the benefit of the eventual plan, and also made sure that the invasion troops were trained to the standard he felt was desirable.  Once ashore, he conducted a skillful campaign designed to draw the German armoured strength on to the northern sector while the American element made their breakout in the south, a plan which worked admirably.

In August the US 12th Army Group was formed, after which Montgomery was responsible only for the British and Commonwealth forces in the Armies of Liberation.  After crossing France and arriving close to the German border the Allied troops were brought to a halt by supply problems; here Montgomery sowed the first seeds of dissent by proposing, with Bradley, a single thrust into Germany.  Unfortunately neither commander would agree to be subordinate to the other, and Eisenhower resolved the deadlock by assuming overall command of the group and maintaining his theory of a broad front thrust.  This left Montgomery free to go north through Belgium and Holland in an attempt to outflank Germany, but this plan was severely curtailed by the failure of the airborne attack on Arnhem – possibly the only operation of Montgomery’s which failed, and that failure was principally due to elements of command which were in Britain and outside his control.

Montgomery’s next testing came with the German attack in the Ardennes.  The spearhead of 8 Panzer divisions split the allied front in two, and Eisenhower placed all the forces north of the split – which included large US elements – under Montgomery.  This was an obvious command move, but Montgomery’s somewhat acid remarks about US competence did little to endear him to the Americans.

After the Ardennes, 21st Army Group advanced into Germany fighting a text-book series of set-piece battles, until Montgomery finally sat down in a tent on the Luneberg Heath on 8 May, 1945 and accepted the surrender of all the German forces in the West.

In post war years he became Chief of the Imperial General Staff and Deputy Commander to Allied Forces Europe; in the former role he made considerable improvements in the living conditions of the soldiers of the British Army, for which he was universally respected, and in the latter post he was a strong protagonist of European self-defense.

This week marked the 66th anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy.  In recognition of this landmark battle, I would like to turn to a book that I spoke of in an earlier entry.

Great Land Battles of World War II, by Ian Hogg, provides us with a history of these two titans of D-Day:

General Dwight D Eisenhower (1890 – 1969)

For the first fifty years of his life, Eisenhower’s career was the epitome of peace-time soldiering, slow promotion in spite of good performance.  After that it took off in a meteoric rise which has never been paralleled in this century, and within two years he had progressed from an unknown lieutenant-colonel to command of the largest invasion force the world has ever seen.  His forte was administration, not field command, and he had the gifts of delegation, of tact, and of the ability to weld officers of widely divergent nationalities and personalities into a working organization.  Soft-spoken and with immense personal charm, he could, nevertheless, impose discipline with an iron hand when it became necessary.

Eisenhower graduated from West Point in 1915, in the same class as Bradley and Marshall and entered the infantry.  In 1918 he trained the first members of the US Tank Corps and by 1920 was a major, a rank he was to remain in for the next 16 years.  Between the wars he attended the Command & Staff College, the War College and the Army Industrial College.  In 1933 he became an aide to MacArthur and from 1935 to 1939 was his assistant military advisor in the Philippines.  A lieutenant-colonel by this time, he returned to the USA in 1939 to become Chief of Staff to 3rd Army, and in this capacity came to the notice of Gen. Marshall during the 1941 Louisiana Maneuvers.  In February 1942, he was named Chief of War Plans Division on Marshall’s staff and then Chief of Operations Division.  His rise had begun.

In July 1942, he went to England to assume command of all US Forces in Europe, a post which demanded all his tact and administrative skill.  In November, promoted to Lt-General, he commanded the US Forces in North Africa; this gave him his first experience of a field command.  In January 1944, he was named as Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force for the invasion of Europe, a task which was to demand every scrap of his good humour, tact, diplomacy and considerable ability.

Once the invasion was launched, Eisenhower retreated into the background while his army commanders conducted the campaign, but nevertheless his was the guidance as to the strategic method.  In this he clashed with Montgomery; Eisenhower advocated a broad advance against Germany, whilst Montgomery advocated a narrow thrust.  There were good political reasons for the former idea, good military ones for the latter, but in view of the skill which the German Army showed in the Ardennes campaign, it is likely that Montgomery’s idea would have failed.

After the German surrender, Eisenhower remained in Germany to accompany the US occupation force but returned to the US to become Chief of Staff in November 1945.  He retired in 1948 but returned in 1951 to become Supreme Commander, Allied Powers Europe.  After a year he retired once more to campaign for the Presidency of the USA, which he achieved on the Republican ticket with the greatest majority in US history.  After a series of heart attacks, he died on 28 March 1969.

Next… Another Titan - - Montgomery.

In this entry, I wish to tell about an interesting book that chronicles the story of an extraordinary group of World War I soldiers who were originally rejected for military service because of their height. 

More information on this book, The Bantams: The Untold Story of World War I, written by military historian Sidney Allinson, follows:

The Citizens of Le Havre weren’t prepared for the bizarre sight that greeted them after a British troopship arrived in their harbor in January, 1916, with a fresh contingent of reinforcements for the Western Front… the troops comically marched down the gangplanks and along the quay as though they were mocking the traditional image of the stalwart soldier.  They were all about 5 feet tall, miniature Guardsmen, more like mascots than fighting men.

And so the first battalion of Bantams, as they were officially called, prepared for battle.  They soon proved they were equal in stamina and greater in valor than standard-sized soldiers. 

By 1918, more than 50,000 Bantams, including almost 2,000 from Canada, had been in the trenches and their casualties were enormous, due in part to their heedless bravery.  Yet the story of the Bantams and their outstanding contribution to the war has been forgotten or deliberately concealed by army historians, who are perhaps embarrassed by the episode and fear that such little men, and the army’s need to use them, somehow revealed a weakness in the British character.

But thanks to a Toronto military historian, their story is now told for the first time, and it’s enough to make short men walk tall.  Sidney Allinson deserves credit for ferreting out the fascinating tale and for preserving it in the face of official indifference and even hostility.  He was able to track down 300 surviving Bantams and make good use of unpublished journals and letters.  His experience documents again the widespread illogical prejudice against people who happen to be short.

Although this book was published many years ago, it is still available through amazon.com.