Use of French Language …

[Michael Ockenden]

The 5th Canadian Infantry Brigade was composed of:-

The Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment) of Canada
Le Régiment de Maisonneuve
The Calgary Highlanders

Would Le Régiment de Maisonneuve have used French in all documents such as Standing Orders, War Diaries and so on? If so, were these also translated into English for the information of Brigade HQ? Or were the staff at HQ expected to read French? Were orders from Brigade sent down in English and then translated at regiment level?

To what extent did the use of two languages impinge on co-operation between units?

Comments appreciated.

Mike

[Garry Shipton (RIP)]

Hi Mike..On a personal level,having met many French Canadian vets,,I perceive that the language on "Standing Orders" was in English.Having personally met Brig-General Dollard Menard of the Royal 22nd Regiment(the Vandoos),whose english was impeccable,I feel that all orders went to the regiments in english,where senior officers would translate them on a regimental level.Many French Canadians were trained in Ontario,and,as many relate,everything was in english,notwithstanding the racial slurs/barbs they put up during training.The language of choice in the regiments among the ranks would definitely be French.AS one example,when one of the french regiments landed on D-Day in Normandy,the locals were astounded that many of the rank's ancestors sailed from Normandy,and in many ways our guys used the same french upherisms(expressions) as the locals did.AS to the Black Watch,I know of many French Canadian vets from this regiment who joined up in Montreal.One told me he joined because he coukd wear the kilt,and in that way, would pick up de girls easier.Looking forward to other input on this subject.

[Michael Ockenden]

Thanks for the reply.

I've posted this on another forum but have not yet found out the answer. However, I'll make a point of looking at some WDs asap and will report back.

However, rather more important is the matter of confusion on the battlefield. Did the Canadians need liaison officers between Francophone and Anglophone units?

Few Anglophone Canadians spoke French - and even though the Quebecois tended to know more English than was the case in reverse, they were (are) far from bi-lingual. N'est ce pas?

Comments appreciated.

Mike

[John McGillivray]

There is a history of the 5th Brigade written by Terry Copp Called “The Brigade”. Here are some excerpts from this book:

“The decision to transfer the Calgary Highlanders to a Quebec brigade arose from the failure of a long, complicated attempt to establish a French-language brigade. Originally the Royal 22nd Regiment [R22R], the Fusiliers Mont Royal and the Maisonneuves were to be combined in 5 Brigade, but it was then decided that a French Canadian unit was needed in 1st Division. So the Black Watch, very much an English-speaking unit, replaced the R22R in 5 Brigade. Since there was not to be a French-language brigade there was no point in concentrating the two remaining French-language battalions, so the Fusiliers Mont Royal went to 6 Brigade while the Calgary Highlanders joined the Maisonneuves and the Black Watch in 5 Brigade.”

In the section concerning the raising of the Black Watch:

“A limit was placed on the number of French Canadians enrolled, in ‘fairness to the French units in the city.’”

The following is about the Regiment de Maisonneuve:

“The third battalion assigned to the Fifth Canadian Infantry Brigade was the Regiment de Maisonneuve. The name had been selected in 1920 to designate a new militia unit which would perpetuate the honours and traditions of the 85th Regiment. The 85th had begun in 1880 as a rural unit made up of six scattered companies. Eventually the Regiment's headquarters were established at the Craig Street Armoury in old Montreal, and the 85th increasingly recruited its soldiers from among workers in the east end of the city. When war came in 1914 existing militia units were ignored by the government and, like its sister regiments, the 85th had to be content with sending its members to newly created battalions. The Regiment recruited 1,286 men of whom 524 served in France and 122 in Great Britain. Of those who served 102 were killed and 198 wounded. [47]

“The regiment's new name was selected to honour the founder of Montreal rather than the industrial suburb of Maisonneuve. [48] The cadre of officers who served with the regiment in the interwar years were drawn from the French-Canadian aristocracy and bourgeoisie of Outremont and the upper city, not the east end. A strong military tradition persisted in a number of French-Canadian families and the Maisonneuve enlistment rolls contain numerous cases of sons and grandsons following fathers into the regiment. For example, the first commandant of the 85th Battalion was Lieut.-Colonel Julien Brosseau (d. 1912). One son, Charles-Auguste, commanded the regiment from 1930 to 1934 and a second son, Paul, was to lead the battalion during its first two years in England. [49]

“Family traditions could keep the regiment alive but in the twenties and thirties the Maisonneuves did not even possess an armoury of their own. This vacabondage might have threatened the existence of the regiment were it not for organized sports. The Maisonneuves were keen participants in militia leagues, especially softball. The officers' team had won the district championship eight times since 1921. The team for NCOs and other ranks was always competitive, winning the league championship in 1938-39. When war broke out in 1939 the regiment was one of the first in Canada to fill its ranks.

“Historians have no ready explanation for the large scale enlistment of French-Canadian volunteers in 1939. Most have either pretended it did not happen or suggested that the volunteers were all, like Florentine's father in The Tin Flute [50] (Bonheur d'Occasion), made desperate by unemployment. Canada's entry into the war, we have been told, was opposed by French Canadians and only the promise of no conscription for overseas service prevented a major disruption. [51]

“This traditional view of the events of 1939 commits the cardinal error of treating French Canada as a monolith rather than as a normally complex society. The Maisonneuves, like the city's other French and English militia regiments, found that there was no shortage of officer or other rank volunteers. Nationalist opposition to Canadian participation in the war was strongly expressed in the pages of Le Devoir, L'Action Catholique and a few other journals but the mass circulation newspapers, La Presse, La Patrie and Le Canada, had kept French-speaking Montrealers abreast of events in Europe and had endorsed Canada's declaration of war. Ernest Lapointe, federal minister of justice and the leading French-Canadian political figure of his generation, insisted that Canadian neutrality was inconceivable, and proclaimed the justice of the Allied cause. He and like-minded colleagues campaigned energetically to defeat the anti-participation provincial government of Premier Maurice Duplessis, and in October 1939 the Liberals swept Duplessis from office. This is not to argue that the majority of French Canadians fully supported Canadian participation or were anxious to enlist personally, but rather that the tens of thousands who did enlist in 1939-40 did so without isolating themselves from French-Canadian society.

“When the Maisonneuves were ordered to mobilize on September 1st Lieut.-Colonel Robert Bourassa, a Great War veteran, was commanding the regiment. Bourassa was a Crown Attorney, prominent in Montreal legal circles, the third generation of his family to serve in the regiment. [52] Bourassa was not an easy man for the Canadian army to deal with. He was taking a refresher course for field officers when word came that war was imminent. Reaching Montreal on August 25th he quickly became involved in a bitter dispute over the command of guards posted in the city. The men were from the Maisonneuves but the officers were English-speaking and artillery to boot. Bourassa would not accept this injustice both to his regiment and to French Canadians, and a long battle of words ensued. [53]

“This quarrel did not interfere with recruitment. According to the War Diary more than 2,000 men presented themselves to be enlisted in the first week of September, before Canada was officially at war. Many of these were rejected because they were overage, married, or of poor physique, but a steady stream passed the medical exam and joined the ranks during September. Almost all the militia officers volunteered for active service, although most of them were too old to be employed overseas when the time came. One exception was Lieutenant Julien Bibeau, a thirty-one-year-old sales manager for Maple Leaf Milling Company. Bibeau was commissioned through the Canadian Officers “Training Corps at the University of Montreal and had joined the Maisonneuves in 1937. [54] A natural leader and instinctive soldier, Bibeau became one of the outstanding battalion commanders in the Canadian army. The Maisonneuves had no First World War veterans to draw upon for training and no one from the regular army. A young graduate of the Royal Military College, Lieutenant Jacques Ostiguy, was attached to the regiment in November. Ostiguy, who became an outstanding company commander in North-West Europe in 1944, turned his infectious enthusiasm to the task of organizing the Sports Committee of the regiment.

“The Maisonneuves trained in even worse circumstances than the Calgaries and the Black Watch. They shared the Craig Street Armoury with an artillery unit and were forced to billet many recruits in their own homes. It was not until January 1940 that a large factory building in St. Henri was obtained as a temporary barracks. In the meantime trips to the Mount Bruno firing range, and endless drill and bayonet practice were all that could be managed — except for sports. In the winter of 1939-40 boxing, gymnastics and, above all, hockey played a crucial role in the life of the regiment. [55]

“It was not easy to maintain morale that winter. Lieut.-Colonel Bourassa might have felt better if he had known that in Calgary the same problems persisted, but in Montreal the Maisonneuves appeared to be particularly hard done by. Le Devoir kept its readers aware of the continuing struggle over the use of the Craig Street Armoury, reporting in early January that the regiment was being denied space for offices and training by “un regiment de langue anglaise.” [56]

“The Maisonneuves were also having difficulties with some of their recruits. Initially the Canadian army had enlisted men without the aid of x-rays, urinalysis or other modern medical techniques. In November all recruits had to be re-examined and a large number of Maisonneuves failed their second test. Bourassa was unhappy with this procedure and on January 25, 1940 he put his views in writing:

1. Practically every day we receive orders to send some of our men for medical examinations and so forth.
2. Amongst those to be ordered to be re-examined, there are men who are very good and whom we desire to keep.
3. Since mobilization, we have been operating under the most unhealthy conditions.
4. While we were at Craig Street, the men had no boots and they had to be in the open, whatever the weather was. When they could not be on Champ de Mars, they had to be in the Drill Shed, where there was no heat. Now that we are in Rose de Lima Barracks we have to suffer the dust from cement floors which according to our Medical Officer and the Hygiene Officer is very unhealthy, endangering the men's health.
5. When the weather is unfavourable, the men are in the cellar of the building, exposed to the cement dust all day long and to the humidity of the cellar, which is not heated. As a matter of fact, the Hygiene Officer condemned the place while he was here.
6. Under the circumstances, I think it is most unfair for men to be called to a Reboard, when they have been living under such circumstances and such unfavourable conditions.
7. I think that before my men are called to Reboard, they should be allowed a period of rest under favourable conditions as it would bring them back to normal and allow them to be on the same stand as the others when they arrive for their Board. [57]

“Conditions did not improve significantly and on May 30th the regiment travelled to Valcartier to join the Black Watch, and the black flies. The Maisonneuves were not sent to Newfoundland; instead they spent the summer of 1940 at Valcartier in training exercises and guard duty for German prisoners of war arriving in Quebec. On August 24th the battalion sailed for England. The voyage was marked by extensive fog and warnings of the presence of enemy submarines. The sound of depth charges could be heard on the troopship and life-boat drill seemed far from routine. But on September 4th they reached Scotland and the next day the trains moved off to Aldershot. That evening Lieut.-Colonel Bourassa was rushed to hospital with what turned out to be a brain tumor; He would never see his regiment again. Major Paul Brosseau, the second-in-command, took over the next day. [58]

“The convoy that had brought the Maisonneuves to England had also carried other elements of the brigade, including the Fifth Field Regiment, Royal Canadian Artillery. The gunners, like the infantry, had yet to see modern weapons, but they too were assigned to an immediate role in the defence of Great Britain. The Canadian government had done little to prepare its young men for the tasks that now faced them. Fortunately there was time to make up for years of neglect.”

I hope that this helps.

[Garry Shipton (RIP)]

Great input John.Thanks

[Michael Ockenden]

Thank you very much, John, for replying so comprehensively to my query.

I had heard of the book by Terry Copp, but this is the first time I’ve seen an excerpt from it. Could you please tell me the publisher and the date of publication?

Before picking up the thrust of my original inquiry about the use of French, I can tell you that the 5th Brigade was based in the Eastbourne (Sussex) area of the UK and that I have various spot dates. I understand they moved into our area in Dec 41; I have references to their presence here in Jul 42, but am not sure when they left. Does TC devote much space to their presence here?

The information about the proposed ‘Francophone Brigade’ is new to me and most interesting.

With regard to what is said about the raising of the Black Watch:

"A limit was placed on the number of French Canadians enrolled, in ‘fairness to the French units in the city."

Is there a suggestion here that French Canadians might have preferred to join the BW, perhaps because it was already a well-established regiment in Montreal? Certainly the conditions at the Maisonneuves’ Barracks left much to be desired! Lieut.-Colonel Bourassa comes across very well in the excerpt.

TC says: -

"Historians have no ready explanation for the large scale enlistment of French-Canadian volunteers in 1939. Most have either pretended it did not happen or suggested that the volunteers were all, like Florentine's father in The Tin Flute [50] (Bonheur d'Occasion), made desperate by unemployment. Canada's entry into the war, we have been told, was opposed by French Canadians and only the promise of no conscription for overseas service prevented a major disruption."

I realise this could be a touchy subject, but elsewhere I have read:-

"We can conclude from limited studies that French speakers outside Quebec volunteered at about the same rate as their English-speaking counterparts, while the number of Quebec Francophones who enlisted was not at all commensurate with their presence in the 18-to-45 age group in Canada as a whole. "

(French Canadians in the Canadian Armed Forces in 1944 by Serge Bernier, Acting Director History Department of National Defence)

Anyway, it seems a pity that a Francophone Brigade was never created. How about the Le Régiment de la Chaudière? I wonder why they were not called upon to make up a Francophone Brigade – or were they already part of the 3rd Division by that time?

As far as the practicalities of inter-unit co-operation are concerned, no one has posted regarding difficulties encountered. I suppose there was a sufficiently high level of bi-lingualism among officers and NCOs to overcome this problem.

However, I’m looking forward to getting sight of some WDs in order to find out whether they were written in French or in English. And I’ll post when I have something to report.

Renewed thanks for your help …

Mike

[John McGillivray]

Mike, lets be blunt about it. The Canadian military during the Second World War and earlier was almost entirely an English institution. This is covered in the book “Canada’s Navy: The First Century” by Marc Milner. Here are some excerpts from his book:

“The spirit of a limitless future was shared by two important and dominant groups in Canada before 1914. One was the wave of English (not Britons, but people from England proper) immigrants who arrived in Canada starting in the 1880s. The old Canada was largely a collection of French, American Loyalists, and settlers from the Celtic fringe of Britain - Scots, Welsh, and Irish. English was the common language of the latter groups, but only a smattering of Englishmen proper arrived before 1867. Subsequent immigration changed the character of the country and, to some considerable extent, polarized its politics. The waves of English who arrived starting in the 1880s transformed much of Canada outside Quebec, especially southern Ontario and British Columbia, making the country much more English, and much more enthusiastic about the empire, than it had ever been.

“This anglicization of Canada affected politics and the press, and extended into military reforms as well. The Canadian militia, pushed at the end of the nineteenth century into serious reform and driven towards professional standards of training, looked more and more like English county regiments. There was no room in this reform to accommodate the long and venerable traditions of the French-Canadian militia: they simply had to learn English. The push from English Canadians for a real navy, designed and operated to Royal Navy standards, owed a great deal to this same impetus. The same could be said for the ardent support for direct aid to the imperial fleet.

“It is tempting to dismiss these English-Canadian zealots as mere toadies of British imperialism, but the truth is more complex. By the end of the nineteenth century, many anglophone Canadians believed that in the twentieth century, Canada, with its enormous expanse, limitless resources, and potential for a huge population, would take over leadership of the empire itself. Men such as Sir Sam Hughes, who by 1914 was minister of the militia, believed strongly in the empire for that reason, yet considered themselves Canadian nationalists as well. Imperial federation was, in the long term, simply a way of securing Canadian control of the British empire itself.

“The second reason for developing a navy in the first decade of the twentieth century had to do with a maturing belief in the importance of influencing the larger, collective security organization to which Canada belonged. It is easy now to forget that, before 1914, the British empire was a remarkably powerful and important world institution. Indeed, Britain was the only world power. Thus, quite apart from the constitutional obligation on the part of the dominion to work inside the framework of the empire, the empire was a pretty good club to belong to. Most anglophone Canadians, and many francophones as well, took pride in being part of the greatest empire the world had seen.” (p. 31-32)

“Finally, attempts by Laurier and his Cabinet to secure a place in the new service for unilingual francophones were scuppered by Kingsmill's staff. It was 'not desirable that candidates should be permitted to take the [entrance] examination in French,' they concluded. Moreover, any attempt to combine the two languages would be detrimental to the service. The exclusion of French as a working language in the new navy must have been a bitter blow to the key French Canadians who had laboured so long and hard to establish the service. It was, moreover, a policy they could not challenge openly, since to do so would simply have confirmed the worst fears of Bourassa and the Quebec nationalists. The exclusion of the French language as a matter of policy seems to have been quietly accepted in early 1911. Perhaps the government anticipated reopening the issue as Quebec shipyards began building the fleet. Given the tenor of the national debate and the weight of British naval influence, however, such a capitulation in 1910-11 was understandable. But as Brodeur observed, it did mean a loss of whatever popular support the navy enjoyed in French Canada, and it also meant that the navy was much less a national institution than it ought to have been. And so it would remain for the next sixty years.” (p.22-23)

“It is a moot point whether French-Canadian resistance to the navy would have been overcome had the fleet been built in Quebec or the RCN been open to the enlistment of unilingual francophones from the outset. Certainly Brodeur and Laurier hoped so. However, no fleet was built, and their failure to insist vigorously on the establishment of a bilingual national service stands in mute but powerful testimony to the forces against it. Indeed, it proved extremely difficult to enlist even anglophone Canadians in the navy before 1914, but until well after the Second World War the navy remained essentially an ethnically English (perhaps not even British) Canadian institution.” (p.33)

The same type of forces had affected the rising of the Canadian Army in 1914. The minister of the militia Sir Sam Hughes, who was of Northern Irish decent, had opposed the rising of French units. French Canadian militia units that had mobilized in 1914 were broken up and forced to serve in English battalions. It took the intervention of the PM to get a French Canadian battalion established. This was the 22nd battalion.

In the Second World War there were only four French Canadian Infantry Battalions in the First Canadian Army. I am not aware of any French units in the other arms such as the Artillery, Armour, Engineers or support services.

In John Gilbert’s book “Bloody Buron! Canada’s D-Day + 1” it has the following concerning the formation of the Sherbrooke Fusiliers, a Quebec based unit:

“The regiment was mobilized in July 1940 and when it reached full strength, with first line reinforcements, it was comprised of half French-speaking Canadians and half English-speaking. It served on coastal duty in Newfoundland from August 1941 until the end of February 1942. On its return to the mainland it was stationed at Debert, Nova Scotia whereupon it was immediately and very successfully converted into an armoured regiment. The result was extremely rewarding because in September of the following year, it was awarded the highest merit marks of the entire Canadian 3rd Army Tank Brigades. Then, for combat reasons, it was decided that the two languages were incompatible and as a result the French-speaking Fusiliers were reduced to approximately fifteen percent. All would require a sound education and a good working knowledge of spoken and written English.” (p.29)

[Michael Ockenden]

Thank you again, John, for your posting.

Funny, but I thought I’d replied to that 2nd posting before – must have started to write something but failed to save it!

One can quite see that the RCN and RCAF would need to be monolingual for operational reasons.

It’s interesting to read about the Sherbrooke Fusiliers and how they gradually moved to English.

Of course, it’s on a much smaller scale, but I wonder how the Belgian army deals with this matter … (?)

Renewed thanks for your help.

Mike

[Michael Ockenden]

I’ve now seen the WD of Le Régiment de Maisonneuve and can confirm that it is indeed written in French. However, the orders which are appended are in a mixture of English and French – those from Brigade are in English with orders generated at Battalion level in French. There is a mixture of both languages, often within the same sentence: ‘Le Lieutenant Massue a passé avec grand succès un cours de Driving and Maintenance’.

However, although I had expected to find the above WD in French, it was somewhat surprising to see that the WD of the 7 LAA Regiment (57 th Battery) was also French. I wonder whether there were many other such cases.

Mike

[John McGillivray]

Mike I sent you a PM concerning "The Brigade"