PROCUREMENT: Canadian Parallel

Last week 30-odd U. S. publishers, editors, reporters completed a tour of Canada’s defenses: infantry training camps, the snappy artillery centre at Petawawa, even snappier Air Force stations at Camp Borden, Trenton, Uplands (Ottawa). They even got a long look at the crowded, guarded port of Halifax and some of the lately traded U. S. destroyers there. Because Canada got into high gear with its war effort only last summer, it cannot have much effect on the war before next year. But Canada has got far enough to be a working defense laboratory, wherein the U. S. could learn much about its own defense problems and procedures. Some of the questions to which Canada has drafted answers:

Is a single Department of National Defense better than separate ones for Army and Navy? Canada went into the war with such a department, nominally still has one. But the job was too big; the organization was overwhelmed. So Canada backtracked, provided Ministers for Air —able Charles Gavan (“Chubby”) Powers —Navy (gentle, genial Angus Macdonald) and Army (Defense Minister James Layton Ralston, No. 1 dynamo of Canada’s wartime machine). All have Cabinet rank; each has his own organization. Only when matters affecting two or more services come up does Mr. Ralston on occasion function as top Minister. Then the three Ministers and the chiefs of the three service staffs generally act in council, find that this system works better than the old one.

Should air services be separate units, independent of Army and Navy? Canada had an independent Royal Canadian Air Force when the war started, is keeping it that way. Results have been both good and bad: the air-training program is the high spot of Canada’s war effort; the Air Force has sometimes hogged both limelight and money, to the harm of general military cooperation. Canada’s best military men reason that the Air Force’s chief war chores (training, coastal patrol and convoy) lend themselves to separate direction. But they feel that the U. S. air services (Army and Navy) still have much to do in common with land and sea forces, therefore should not be separated now. A further reason heard in Canada for the U. S. keeping its system: once set up, a separate air force is hard to get rid of, if actual wartime situations require subordination of the air to other services.

Can volunteer committees, like the U. S. National Defense Advisory Commission, without explicit powers, a ruling head, do a real defense job? Canada tried the committee system at the war’s outset, abandoned it for a coordinated, thoroughly empowered Department of Munitions and Supply under quiet, hard-working Minister Clarence D. Howe. Mr. Howe has spent much time in Washington, has much respect for the U. S. commissioners and what they have managed to do up to now. But Canada’s dollar-a-year-men (Ottawa’s swank Chateau Laurier swarms with them) unanimously declare that the U. S. is bound to have many a headache, many a defense delay unless a board or a supply department with real powers and a single head is substituted for the present Washington setup.

Must an arming Government have and use powers to seize plants, otherwise whip industry into line? Canada re-enacted and amplified its World War I mobilization act (which closely resembled the U. S. National Defense Act), has seldom had to threaten to use the powers provided in the statute. But, without the threat, in a few vital instances, Minister Howe and his dollar-a-year aides would have been helpless. They were baffled by the uproar in the U. S. when Franklin Roosevelt received such powers, do not understand how the U. S. could expect a President to do his defense job without complete authority.

Can the sleepy peacetime commands of small, democratic armies cope with a war? Canada had to rake over the top command of its Army, now has as Chief of the General Staff dour, dark, brilliant Major General Henry Duncan Crerar. He is 52 (many a U. S. colonel is older; no top U. S. general is so young). He has found in Canada’s pitifully small (4,000) peacetime Regular Army a few officers with brains, flexibility, initiative to keep pace with him. In doctrine (but not yet in general practice, because of equipment shortages) General Crerar’s Army is ahead of the U. S. in training to combat mechanized foes. Most marked difference: in the Canadian infantry, the rifle is now a subordinate weapon, whereas it is still the basic U. S. infantry weapon. Canada’s (and Britain’s) substitute: ultra-light machine guns. Canadian Army men would have none of the U. S. Army’s famed, controversial semiautomatic Garand rifle—not because it is the Garand, but because it is still a rifle.

Can the U. S. house its mobilized National Guardsmen and conscripts before winter comes? Canada did the equivalent, and more, in less time than the U. S. Army has. Examples: runways, hangars and temporary but sturdy winterproof barracks have been in use at Uplands air-training centre near Ottawa since Sept. 15, on a site which was bare ground last June 5; at Camp Borden, quarters and complete facilities for 16,000 trainees were put up within a month. Canadians generally pished reports that they might move some of their training to the southern U. S., expected to carry on through their own winter.

Is the U. S. 12-month training period for draftees enough to produce a useful combat soldier? Canadian trainees for active service get a 16-week primary course, at the end are rated not as combat soldiers but as finished apprentices. They get 26 more weeks of advanced training in large units in Canada or England, are then considered ready for war.