Review of Desmond Morton, Silent Battle: Canadian Prisoners of War In Germany, 1914-1919. Toronto: Lester Publications, 1992

Wiley, William H.

English

Wilfrid Laurier University

Canadian Military HistoryVolume 3 | Issue 1 Article 211-23-2012Canadian Prisoners of War in the Great WarWilliam H. WileyYork UniversityThis Feature is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in Canadian MilitaryHistory by an authorized administrator of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact scholarscommons@wlu.ca.Recommended CitationWiley, William H. (1994) "Canadian Prisoners of War in the Great War," Canadian Military History: Vol. 3: Iss. 1, Article 21.Available at: http://scholars.wlu.ca/cmh/vol3/iss1/21Canadian Prisoners of War in the Great War William H. Wiley Desmond Morton, Silent Battle: Canadian Prisoners of War in Germany, 1914-1919. Toronto: Lester Publications, 1992, 218 pages, $26.95. T he Montreal lawyer Errol M. McDougall, Canada's reparations commissioner and the man primarily responsible for handling the claims of former Canadian prisoners of war against the German government, was largely unsympathetic to the men who appeared before him, and made awards in less than a quarter of the 862 cases of alleged maltreatment he received. Some ofthe claims were palpably spurious and, as Desmond Morton sympathetically concludes, clearly motivated by the deleterious effects of the Great Depression on the by then middle-aged veterans. Whether financial hardship motivated one claimant to argue that he had been tortured by the "Red Baron" remains to be seen, but there can be little doubt that naked lies of this sort only undermined the ex-prisoners' cause. Similarly, as Professor Morton makes clear at the outset of Silent Battle, the veterans would hardly have been better served by appealing over the head of McDougall to a general public which by then had come to dismiss wartime accounts of German barbarity as mere histrionics and succumbed to the "almost quintessential Canadian" tendency to laud one's former foes as new-found friends. What was more, according to the author, it was the view of both McDougall and others that former prisoners had no reason to be especially proud of what they had endured and that those who had been singled out for often brutal punishment by German guards were for the most part the authors of their own misfortune. That some 3,842 Canadian officers and men were made prisoner during the course of 142 the Great War would seem reason enough to tell their story, given the absence of any scholarly consideration of their imprisonment. For his part, Professor Morton offers several additional rationales for a study such as Silent Battle, citing the "legitimate fascination with the stubborn endurance in the face of terrible adversity" shown by Canadian POW s, and his view that the treatment afforded to Canada's prisoners during the First World War foreshadowed "the vast slave army that underpinned the Third Reich." Insofar as the first aim is concerned, Professor Morton succeeds most admirably, touching on those facets of the POW experience which the more extensive scholarly literature dealing with the Anglo-American prisoners of the Second World War has made almost obligatory: the phenomenon of capture; the confusion and uncertainty in the minds ofthose newly-made prisoners; the difficulties of settling into camp routine and the numbing boredom which invariably set in; the often very serious lack of sustenance provided by the Germans and the resultant reliance upon parcels from the Red Cross and home, conflicts among the prisoners themselves; the very different experiences of officers and other ranks; the frequent abuse and at times inhumane labour to which the men were subject; and finally, liberation and repatriation. Of course, no study of this sort would be complete without an account of escapes, and the author does not disappoint. One hundred men made good on their escape attempts, although only one of this number was an officer. Given that commissioned ranks were incarcerated separately from their 1Wiley: Canadian Prisoners of War in the Great WarPublished by Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 1994men and generally free to wander beyond the gates of their camps as long as they promised to return, a single successful escape by an officer might strike the reader - with some justification - as a rather poor record. Evidently, the officers were lacking somewhat in motivation and a more rigorous German policy where they were concerned would certainly have helped matters. Other ranks were, however, often subject to the most appalling treatment, and the story ofthe travails ofthe rank and file takes up the bulk of Silent Battle. Compelled by international law and inter-belligerent agreements reached during the War itself to perform labour unrelated to military operations, Canadian troops and, often enough, their non-commissioned officers, found themselves cutting peat on wind-swept moors, digging for coal or, worst of all, condemned to mining salt. These and other forms ofback-breaking and soul-destroying labour were all too often carried out under the supervision of short-tempered guards ordered to see that their charges met quotas which were invariably unrealistic considering the prisoners' limited diet and the inadequate materials which they were given to perform the tasks at hand. While some ofthe overseers were outright sadists, Professor Morton implies through the inclusion of an excerpt from a prisoner's memoir of his captivity that cultural differences were very much a part of the problem: "Our men were not used to being shouted at," the ex-prisoner recalled, and when they were, they usually responded with spirit, and that together with an ignorance of the language, was largely responsible for the punishments that followed - punishments that were designed to break a man's spirit and which were fairly successful in their results ... This sort of explanation, though, hardly supports the suggestion made elsewhere that the experience of the First War prisoners foreshadowed that of the Second War's slave labourers. In fact, Professor Morton's argument may remind the reader of a scene in the Hong Kong episode of the otherwise forgettable documentary, The Valour and the Horror. In the scene in question, a former Japanese POW camp guard, brought face-to-face with a Canadian captured at Hong Kong fifty years before, explained away the Canadian veteran's complaint of having been systematically starved as something which he himself did not recall but, in the spirit of reconciliation, was willing to concede might be explained in terms of the wide gulf which had existed at that time between the Japanese and Anglo-American cultures. The Canadian veteran, showing remarkable restraint under the circumstances, replied rather incredulously that he did not see anything cultural about being starved. The point is, of course, that there is a difference between a prisoner economy predicated on slave labour, such as characterized the German treatment of non-western POWs in the Second World War, and a given Prussian soldier's resort to corporal punishment when faced with a recalcitrant prisoner during the Great War. The horrid fate of millions of Soviet POWs from 1941, juxtaposed against the generally decent treatment afforded to Anglo-American and other western prisoners during the same period, stemmed directly from the racial biases of the National Socialist regime and its military auxiliaries, particularly the OKW. That a different sort of prejudice underpinned the (mis)treatment of British and Canadian prisoners during the First World War is recognized by Professor Morton himself when he shows some sympathy with the argument that when British and Canadian soldiers shared a camp with their French and Russian counterparts - as they frequently did - the British and Canadians were given the dirtiest 143 2Canadian Military History, Vol. 3 [1994], Iss. 1, Art. 21http://scholars.wlu.ca/cmh/vol3/iss1/21tasks and cut the least slack. Similarly, the reader is told that the guards showed special resentment toward the Canadian prisoners on the grounds that they were so-called Geldsoldaten (literally, "money soldiers"); that is, men who had volunteered to fight and were thus regarded as little more than mercenaries by captors who did not understand the Canadians' feelings for the Old Country. On the whole, then, Professor Morton's comparisons between his subjects' experiences in German hands and the National Socialist regime's resort to slave labour is unhelpful, and points to a wider problem in Anglo-American scholarly literature on the subject of POWs: that is, the failure to adequately examine the problem from the enemy's perspective. While German source material is not entirely absent from Silent Battle, a stronger focus in this area would arguably have altered the book's interpretive framework. Specifically, had the opening discussion of the laws of war as they had evolved through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century gone into more detail, it would have become apparent that Prussian and later German officials and jurists embodied a tradition which showed a marked preference for the prevalence of military necessity over codified law and western custom, especially where reprisals and an occupier's right to the labour of enemy subjects were concerned. The often appalling behaviour of German troops in both France in 1870-71 and Belgium from 1914- a problem which is deserving of a dispassionate re-examination- revealed this tradition at work. As well, the arguments advanced by defence lawyers during the course of the Leipzig trials - a number of which were concerned with the treatment of Allied POWs- pointed to the divergent German interpretation of the laws and customs of war. Had Silent Battle examined this phenomenon, a much more effective contextualization of an otherwise admirable account of a forgotten episode in Canadian history might have been achieved, and the mistreatment of Canadian prisoners during the Great War seen not as a foretaste of the National Socialist regime's Ostpolitik, but rather of the often complete indifference to the laws of war shown by the German army proper in both east and west from 1939. William H. Wiley is currently completing his Ph.D. at York University. The D-Day Encyclopedia David G. Chandler and James Lawton Collins, Jr, The D-Day Encyclopedia. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994, 665 pgs, $85 us. D -Day, the sixth of June 1944, was a day of mo-mentous proportions. Church-ill referred to it as "the greatest amphibious operation in history," and "the most difficult and com-plicated operation that has ever taken place." By the end of the day, 130,000 men along with their vehicles, equipment and supplies had been landed. On the choppy waters of the Chan-nel, nearly 200,000 sailors in 1,200 ships comprised the ar-mada that conveyed this force to France. In the sky overhead, the AlliedAirForcesflewover 14,000 sorties in support of the inva-sion. lost. One of the greatest contri-butions made by The D-Day En-cyclopedia is to bring back into sharp focus the enormous en-deavour that was Overlord. The editors, David Chandler and James Lawton Collins, Jr., have assembled a comprehensive 665-page reference book composed of 437 articles related to D-Day. In perusing this collection one be-comes truly aware of the sheer scale of planning and effort that went into the mounting and ex-ecution of Overlord. 144 Unfortunately, amidst the catalogue of numbers used to express the operation's size, the true scale of effort tends to get This book is sure to become the standard reference book on 3Wiley: Canadian Prisoners of War in the Great WarPublished by Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 1994

Canadian Prisoners of War in the Great War

Scholars Commons

Canadian Military History
Volume 3 | Issue 1 Article 21
1-23-2012
Canadian Prisoners of War in the Great War
William H. Wiley
York University
This Feature is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in Canadian Military
History by an authorized administrator of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact scholarscommons@wlu.ca.
Recommended Citation
Wiley, William H. (1994) "Canadian Prisoners of War in the Great War," Canadian Military History: Vol. 3: Iss. 1, Article 21.
Available at: http://scholars.wlu.ca/cmh/vol3/iss1/21
Canadian Prisoners of War 
in the Great War 
William H. Wiley 
Desmond Morton, Silent Battle: Canadian Prisoners of War in Germany, 
1914-1919. Toronto: Lester Publications, 1992, 218 pages, $26.95. 
T he Montreal lawyer Errol M. McDougall, Canada's reparations commissioner and 
the man primarily responsible for handling 
the claims of former Canadian prisoners of 
war against the German government, was 
largely unsympathetic to the men who 
appeared before him, and made awards in 
less than a quarter of the 862 cases of alleged 
maltreatment he received. Some ofthe claims 
were palpably spurious and, as Desmond 
Morton sympathetically concludes, clearly 
motivated by the deleterious effects of the 
Great Depression on the by then middle-aged 
veterans. Whether financial hardship 
motivated one claimant to argue that he had 
been tortured by the "Red Baron" remains to 
be seen, but there can be little doubt that 
naked lies of this sort only undermined the 
ex-prisoners' cause. Similarly, as Professor 
Morton makes clear at the outset of Silent 
Battle, the veterans would hardly have been 
better served by appealing over the head of 
McDougall to a general public which by then 
had come to dismiss wartime accounts of 
German barbarity as mere histrionics and 
succumbed to the "almost quintessential 
Canadian" tendency to laud one's former foes 
as new-found friends. What was more, 
according to the author, it was the view of 
both McDougall and others that former 
prisoners had no reason to be especially 
proud of what they had endured and that 
those who had been singled out for often 
brutal punishment by German guards were 
for the most part the authors of their own 
misfortune. 
That some 3,842 Canadian officers and 
men were made prisoner during the course of 
142 
the Great War would seem reason enough to 
tell their story, given the absence of any 
scholarly consideration of their imprisonment. 
For his part, Professor Morton offers several 
additional rationales for a study such as 
Silent Battle, citing the "legitimate fascination 
with the stubborn endurance in the face of 
terrible adversity" shown by Canadian POW s, 
and his view that the treatment afforded to 
Canada's prisoners during the First World 
War foreshadowed "the vast slave army that 
underpinned the Third Reich." 
Insofar as the first aim is concerned, 
Professor Morton succeeds most admirably, 
touching on those facets of the POW 
experience which the more extensive scholarly 
literature dealing with the Anglo-American 
prisoners of the Second World War has made 
almost obligatory: the phenomenon of capture; 
the confusion and uncertainty in the minds 
ofthose newly-made prisoners; the difficulties 
of settling into camp routine and the numbing 
boredom which invariably set in; the often 
very serious lack of sustenance provided by 
the Germans and the resultant reliance upon 
parcels from the Red Cross and home, conflicts 
among the prisoners themselves; the very 
different experiences of officers and other 
ranks; the frequent abuse and at times 
inhumane labour to which the men were 
subject; and finally, liberation and 
repatriation. Of course, no study of this sort 
would be complete without an account of 
escapes, and the author does not disappoint. 
One hundred men made good on their escape 
attempts, although only one of this number 
was an officer. Given that commissioned 
ranks were incarcerated separately from their 
1
Wiley: Canadian Prisoners of War in the Great War
Published by Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 1994
men and generally free to wander beyond the 
gates of their camps as long as they promised 
to return, a single successful escape by an 
officer might strike the reader - with some 
justification - as a rather poor record. 
Evidently, the officers were lacking somewhat 
in motivation and a more rigorous German 
policy where they were concerned would 
certainly have helped matters. 
Other ranks were, however, often subject 
to the most appalling treatment, and the 
story ofthe travails ofthe rank 
and file takes up the bulk of 
Silent Battle. Compelled by 
international law and inter-
belligerent agreements 
reached during the War itself 
to perform labour unrelated to 
military operations, Canadian 
troops and, often enough, their 
non-commissioned officers, 
found themselves cutting peat 
on wind-swept moors, digging 
for coal or, worst of all, 
condemned to mining salt. 
These and other forms ofback-
breaking and soul-destroying 
labour were all too often 
carried out under the 
supervision of short-tempered 
guards ordered to see that their 
charges met quotas which 
were invariably unrealistic considering the 
prisoners' limited diet and the inadequate 
materials which they were given to perform 
the tasks at hand. While some ofthe overseers 
were outright sadists, Professor Morton 
implies through the inclusion of an excerpt 
from a prisoner's memoir of his captivity that 
cultural differences were very much a part of 
the problem: "Our men were not used to 
being shouted at," the ex-prisoner recalled, 
and when they were, they usually 
responded with spirit, and that together 
with an ignorance of the language, was 
largely responsible for the punishments 
that followed - punishments that were 
designed to break a man's spirit and which 
were fairly successful in their results ... 
This sort of explanation, though, hardly 
supports the suggestion made elsewhere that 
the experience of the First War prisoners 
foreshadowed that of the Second War's slave 
labourers. In fact, Professor Morton's 
argument may remind the reader of a scene in 
the Hong Kong episode of the otherwise 
forgettable documentary, The Valour and the 
Horror. In the scene in question, a former 
Japanese POW camp guard, brought face-to-
face with a Canadian captured at Hong Kong 
fifty years before, explained away the 
Canadian veteran's complaint 
of having been systematically 
starved as something which he 
himself did not recall but, in 
the spirit of reconciliation, was 
willing to concede might be 
explained in terms of the wide 
gulf which had existed at that 
time between the Japanese and 
Anglo-American cultures. The 
Canadian veteran, showing 
remarkable restraint under the 
circumstances, replied rather 
incredulously that he did not 
see anything cultural about 
being starved. The point is, of 
course, that there is a 
difference between a prisoner 
economy predicated on slave 
labour, such as characterized 
the German treatment of non-
western POWs in the Second World War, and 
a given Prussian soldier's resort to corporal 
punishment when faced with a recalcitrant 
prisoner during the Great War. The horrid 
fate of millions of Soviet POWs from 1941, 
juxtaposed against the generally decent 
treatment afforded to Anglo-American and 
other western prisoners during the same 
period, stemmed directly from the racial biases 
of the National Socialist regime and its military 
auxiliaries, particularly the OKW. That a 
different sort of prejudice underpinned the 
(mis)treatment of British and Canadian 
prisoners during the First World War is 
recognized by Professor Morton himself when 
he shows some sympathy with the argument 
that when British and Canadian soldiers 
shared a camp with their French and Russian 
counterparts - as they frequently did - the 
British and Canadians were given the dirtiest 
143 
2
Canadian Military History, Vol. 3 [1994], Iss. 1, Art. 21
http://scholars.wlu.ca/cmh/vol3/iss1/21
tasks and cut the least slack. Similarly, the 
reader is told that the guards showed special 
resentment toward the Canadian prisoners 
on the grounds that they were so-called 
Geldsoldaten (literally, "money soldiers"); that 
is, men who had volunteered to fight and were 
thus regarded as little more than mercenaries 
by captors who did not understand the 
Canadians' feelings for the Old Country. 
On the whole, then, Professor Morton's 
comparisons between his subjects' 
experiences in German hands and the National 
Socialist regime's resort to slave labour is 
unhelpful, and points to a wider problem in 
Anglo-American scholarly literature on the 
subject of POWs: that is, the failure to 
adequately examine the problem from the 
enemy's perspective. While German source 
material is not entirely absent from Silent 
Battle, a stronger focus in this area would 
arguably have altered the book's interpretive 
framework. Specifically, had the opening 
discussion of the laws of war as they had 
evolved through the nineteenth and into the 
twentieth century gone into more detail, it 
would have become apparent that Prussian 
and later German officials and jurists 
embodied a tradition which showed a marked 
preference for the prevalence of military 
necessity over codified law and western 
custom, especially where reprisals and an 
occupier's right to the labour of enemy 
subjects were concerned. The often appalling 
behaviour of German troops in both France in 
1870-71 and Belgium from 1914- a problem 
which is deserving of a dispassionate re-
examination- revealed this tradition at work. 
As well, the arguments advanced by defence 
lawyers during the course of the Leipzig trials 
- a number of which were concerned with 
the treatment of Allied POWs- pointed to the 
divergent German interpretation of the laws 
and customs of war. Had Silent Battle 
examined this phenomenon, a much more 
effective contextualization of an otherwise 
admirable account of a forgotten episode in 
Canadian history might have been achieved, 
and the mistreatment of Canadian prisoners 
during the Great War seen not as a foretaste 
of the National Socialist regime's Ostpolitik, 
but rather of the often complete indifference 
to the laws of war shown by the German army 
proper in both east and west from 1939. 
William H. Wiley is currently 
completing his Ph.D. at York 
University. 
The D-Day 
Encyclopedia 
David G. Chandler and James 
Lawton Collins, Jr, The D-Day 
Encyclopedia. New York: Simon 
& Schuster, 1994, 665 pgs, $85 
us. 
D -Day, the sixth of June 1944, was a day of mo-
mentous proportions. Church-
ill referred to it as "the greatest 
amphibious operation in history," 
and "the most difficult and com-
plicated operation that has ever 
taken place." By the end of the 
day, 130,000 men along with 
their vehicles, equipment and 
supplies had been landed. On 
the choppy waters of the Chan-
nel, nearly 200,000 sailors in 
1,200 ships comprised the ar-
mada that conveyed this force to 
France. In the sky overhead, the 
AlliedAirForcesflewover 14,000 
sorties in support of the inva-
sion. 
lost. One of the greatest contri-
butions made by The D-Day En-
cyclopedia is to bring back into 
sharp focus the enormous en-
deavour that was Overlord. The 
editors, David Chandler and 
James Lawton Collins, Jr., have 
assembled a comprehensive 665-
page reference book composed of 
437 articles related to D-Day. In 
perusing this collection one be-
comes truly aware of the sheer 
scale of planning and effort that 
went into the mounting and ex-
ecution of Overlord. 
144 
Unfortunately, amidst the 
catalogue of numbers used to 
express the operation's size, the 
true scale of effort tends to get 
This book is sure to become 
the standard reference book on 
3
Wiley: Canadian Prisoners of War in the Great War
Published by Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 1994


https://scholars.wlu.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1140&amp;context=cmh

Canadian Prisoners of War in the Great War

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Wilfrid Laurier University

Scholars Commons