Harry Crerar
Henry Duncan Graham Crerar, was a senior officer of the Canadian Army who became the country's senior field commander in the Second World War as commander of the First Canadian Army in the campaign in North West Europe in 1944–1945, having rapidly risen in rank from brigadier in 1939 to full general in 1944.
A graduate of the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ontario, Crerar was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Non-Permanent Active Militia in 1909, serving with the 4th Battery, Canadian Field Artillery, which was based in Hamilton, Ontario. He rose to the rank of lieutenant-colonel in the artillery. He saw action in the First World War, for which he was mentioned in despatches and made a companion of the Distinguished Service Order. Electing to remain in the army as a professional soldier after the war, he attended the Staff College, Camberley, from 1923 to 1924, and the Imperial Defence College in 1934. He was appointed Director of Military Operations & Military Intelligence in 1935 and Commandant of the Royal Military College of Canada in 1939.
During the Second World War, Crerar became General Officer Commanding the 2nd Canadian Infantry Division, which was then stationed in England, in late 1941. He shares responsibility for initiating and reviving the tragic Dieppe Raid in 1942. He was promoted to lieutenant-general and assumed command of I Canadian Corps, fighting briefly in the Italian campaign in late 1943 and in early 1944. In March 1944 he returned to the United Kingdom where he assumed command of the First Canadian Army which, despite its designation, contained a significant number of British, Polish and Czech troops, including the British I Corps and the Polish 1st Armoured Division.
Under Crerar's command, the First Canadian Army fought in the latter stages of the Battle of Normandy in July−August 1944, participating in Operation Totalize, Operation Tractable and the Battle of the Falaise Pocket, before clearing the Channel Coast. Crerar was promoted to full general on 16 November 1944, becoming the first Canadian officer to hold that rank in the field. During Operation Veritable, the battle for the Rhineland in 1945, the First Canadian Army controlled nine British divisions. The Army became more Canadian with Operation Goldflake, the redeployment of the I Canadian Corps from Italy and played a key role in the liberation of the western Netherlands in April 1945, shortly before the end of World War II in Europe.
Crerar retired from military service in 1946. The Canadian military historian, J. L. Granatstein, wrote of Crerar that: "No other single officer had such impact on the raising, fighting, and eventual disbanding of the greatest army Canada has ever known. Crerar was unquestionably the most important Canadian soldier of the war".
Early years
Henry Duncan Graham "Harry" Crerar was born in Hamilton, Ontario, on 28 April 1888, the eldest child of Peter Crerar, a Scottish-born lawyer and businessman, and Marion Stinson Crerar. He had three younger siblings, Alistair, Violet and Malcolm, and an older half-sister, Lillian, from his mother's first marriage. His early education was in private schools in Hamilton. In 1899, he attended Upper Canada College in Toronto, the premier boarding school in Canada. He spent a year in Switzerland in 1904, then went to Highfield College in Hamilton to prepare for the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ontario. Highfield College had an Army cadet unit of which he was a member.Crerar was one of 35 cadets who entered the Royal Military College of Canada in August 1906. This involved passing competitive examinations, and obtaining certificates from the minister of Christ's Church Cathedral in Hamilton and the headmaster of Highfield College testifying to his high moral character. He graduated in 1909, ranked thirteenth in his class. He hoped to secure a place with a cavalry regiment of the British Army or British Indian Army, but only seven places were available in the British or Indian armies, of which just two were in the cavalry, and he did not rank high enough. Cost was also a factor; service in a British cavalry regiment was expensive and he would have had to rely on his father topping up his income. Instead, he accepted a commission as a lieutenant in the Non-Permanent Active Militia, serving with the 4th Battery, Canadian Field Artillery, which was based in Hamilton.
Crerar took a job as a superintendent with the Canadian Tungsten Lamp Company. In 1912 he went to Vienna to study the manufacture of incandescent light bulbs. The death of his father later that year prompted a career change and a move to Toronto, where he joined his brother-in-law Adam Beck as an engineer with the Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario. The two men travelled around Canada promoting the benefits of hydroelectricity and visited Europe in 1913 to observe the progress of electricity grids there. He courted Marion Verschoyle Cronyn, who was always known as Verse. She was the great-granddaughter of Benjamin Cronyn, and the daughter of Benjamin Barton Cronyn, a prominent Toronto businessman.
First World War
On the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914, the 4th Battery was one of nine militia batteries called up as units to form the artillery of the 1st Canadian Division. The members of the battery all volunteered for overseas service in the Canadian Expeditionary Force. Crerar was promoted to captain. The 1st Division went into camp at Valcartier, near Quebec City, where the 4th Battery was reorganized with six guns instead of four, and was renumbered the 8th Battery. The table of organization and equipment of each battery called for 6 officers, 187 other ranks, and 183 horses. Three batteries formed a brigade; the 8th Battery was part of the 3rd Brigade. The battery embarked for the UK on the SS Gambion on 1 October, and reached Plymouth on 14 October.The 1st Canadian Division went into camp on Salisbury Plain. Training was interrupted in November. Experience in mobile warfare had shown that six-gun batteries were too hard to control, so the British War Office decided to revert to the old four-gun battery organization. The reorganization of the Canadian batteries commenced on 17 November, and the 8th Battery was renumbered the 11th Battery. Each brigade should have had three batteries of 18-pounders and one of the 4.5-inch howitzers, but the latter were not yet available. Training was hampered by the weather; it rained on 89 of the 123 days the Canadians spent there, and there was competition for firing ranges from British units. There were also shortages of ammunition, and the batteries did not fire their guns until January 1915, when each fired 55 rounds.
The 1st Canadian Division moved to the Western Front in February 1915. The following month the division artillery participated in the Battle of Neuve Chapelle, where the 1st Canadian Division had a minor role, and in April was engaged in the Second Battle of Ypres, when the 11th Battery came under sustained German artillery fire. Crerar acted as 11th Battery commander from 11 to 22 July, and then assumed command of the 10th Battery. On 7 December he left on furlough to England then returned to Canada, where he married Verse at St Paul's Anglican Church in Toronto on 14 January 1916 in a ceremony conducted by Archdeacon H. J. Cody. He spent another month on leave in Canada before the two embarked for the UK, where she worked as a volunteer nurse at a hospital in Kingston upon Thames. She returned to Canada for the birth of their first child, a daughter named Margaret, in November 1916.
File:Monument commemoratif de guerre du Canada - 03.jpg|thumb|left|The Canadian National War Memorial in Ottawa depicts an 18-pounder. |alt= Statue of an 18-pounder with its crew
Crerar returned to the 3rd Brigade as adjutant on 22 February. He assumed command of the 11th Battery again on 25 March. It supported the Canadian attacks in the Battle of Flers–Courcelette in September 1916. He attended a gunnery course at Witley Camp in England in February 1917, but returned to lead the 11th Battery in the Battle of Vimy Ridge in March. He was mentioned in dispatches and made a member of the Distinguished Service Order in the 1917 Birthday Honours.
In May 1917, Crerar attended a junior staff officer course. In August he became brigade major of the newly formed 5th Canadian Division Artillery, which was training in England, but soon after joined the Canadian Corps on the Western Front. Crerar worked closely with the brigade major of the Canadian Corps Artillery, British major Alan Brooke, or "Brookie", as he was known from then on to Crerar, "a great fellow", and they would often "tramp the front line of battery positions together." Crerar also worked with the corps counter battery staff officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Andrew McNaughton; the two devised techniques for employing the corps's Newton 6-inch mortars in a counter-mortar role.
In June 1918, as part of the ongoing "Canadianization" of the corps, Brooke was given an appointment on the staff of the British First Army and was succeeded as Staff Officer, Royal Artillery, by Major Don A. White. White was immediately sent on a staff course, and Crerar acted as SORA until he returned. Crerar was thus SORA during the Battle of Amiens in August 1918. In October, McNaughton became the General Officer Commanding Canadian Corps Heavy Artillery, and Crerar succeeded him as the CBSO, a position he held during the Battle of Valenciennes in November 1918. That month saw the war come to an end due to the Armistice with Germany.
Although Crerar had survived the war unscathed, his two younger brothers were not so fortunate: his youngest brother, Malcolm Charlton Crerar, was killed in action, aged 19, on 3 August 1917 while serving in Palestine with the Royal Flying Corps, and his other brother, Alistair John Crerar, was badly wounded in France in 1918 while serving with the Royal Canadian Dragoons.