It didn’t help that the 2nd Canadian Army was under Montgomery who tended to hog the limelight and perhaps didn’t talk a lot about the Scheldt campaign as his failure to capture it earlier in the campaign may have been raised.
The fact that the UK and US media tended to lump the Canadians in as part of the British Army also didn’t help.
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Don’t get me started on that weasel Montgomery I could rant about that media hog for hours on end. Along with Patton I could rant about those two for hours and hours as both did their best to steal the glory the Canadians brought them which mostly worked and not many Canucks have nice things to say about either commander due to their inflated egos and wanting to be in the spotlight.
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Not to defend those but in order to get to top you have to be good at politicking as well and most of them were working primarily on their future career as well as fighting the war. Stealing other people’s glory happens all over sadly. And guess what the best underlings are seen as a threat to their job if that makes sense.
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First Canadian Army under Crerar. Monty also had the 2nd British Army under Dempsey plus various American units attached as needed, including the 82nd and 101st airborne divisions during Market-Garden, and (briefly) the US 1st army (under ?Hodges?) during the Bulge and the US 9th army (under Simpson) from the Bulge to the Ruhr.
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There is so much truth in that statement although it sucks to hear it. There is so much I want to say at how the Americans and the British used their allies to look good but I would just end up ranting rather than being objective about it.
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I know it sucks to hear but sadly it is the truth. To use a more recent example Wozniak from Apple did all the work but always stayed in the relative limelight and he actually gave money to the people who helped in succeed. The successful leaders all depend on many loyal followers.
Even in the revered Band of Brothers TV Series (which I still think is good) there was a lot of politicking and also apparently antisemitism going around. My main source here is Ed Shames Lt. 101st who I had some discussions with IRL. Also in the US there was a lot of antisemitism in the 30s and 40s according to Ed Shames. Well the Klan was still really big back then. So politicking is everywhere, then again humans have short lives and more often then healthy for us very large ambitions. Also just writing about “the greatest generation” while ignoring the negatives sells more books.
Maybe also to press the point, we historians sometimes not realize this as writing books/papers or just this post is a fairly solitary activity and requires a lot of thinking over decisions. As opposed to military leaders who have to make decisions quickly with limited and continuously changing information. Also they must have, not sure how to put it best in writing, a certain casualness about losing people under their command.
This is a very different mindset than spending hours evaluating and not having to worry how many people died because of your decisions. Also they could die any minute themselves in WW2.
Everyone was under massive pressure and leaders within large organisations often are to very uncertain people on the inside who above all are scared to lose their job or secondly as a result also go down in history as another “loser”.
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Which kind of makes sense because England (or Brittania) at the time saw themselves as the big leader of the pack. Wait…having lived in London I am tempted to say something about present 
To divert let me just say that the Wookie 
was the real underrated Star of Star Wars. He never landed on taxyways!
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By big, you mean “shadow of its former self.” 
Wanna see big? See how the Klan was in the '20s.
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Great point, Ed Shames might have been too young in the twenties to really realize that as far as personal experiences go. Thanks for pointing that out 
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Thank for the correction. Had just been studying the Scheldt operations and got the Corp and Army numbers confused.
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Neither Ike nor Bradley found it necessary to be Prima Donnas.
Or Slim on the British side.
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Instead of starting a new thread I’d thought I would add it here
Lately I’ve been watching mostly American YouTube Historians cover the Dday landings and the weeks after and one commonality I am finding with all their channels is how uninformed they have been about the Canadian contributions to the liberation of Europe and just how much of an effective fighting force the Canucks were compared to the Americans and British.
Of the dozen or so American YouTube historians almost all were surprised at how well the Canadians fought and how much the Germans respected and feared the Canadians.
Just something I found interesting
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Most people did not see Canada as truly independent at the time; the Americans only regarded the British and Soviets as true equals, everyone else was expected to toe the Allied party line. It’s a misunderstanding but it doesn’t make a difference.
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It’s not just Americans who didn’t know about Canadian contributions … even in Canada, the wartime service was relatively quickly forgotten so that by the 1960s, many Canadians would have been surprised to find that Canada had even fought in the war. I’m not exaggerating by much to say that you could have spun a tale about Canadians only being there as blue-helmet peacekeepers rather than as extremely active combatants on the Allied side.
I don’t understand why the history was effectively lost, but I have my own suspicions … but that heads off into the political weeds and doesn’t belong here.
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I definitely agree with you there it would seem after every war we’ve been part of our military excels in its capabilities and outstrips it’s relatively small size then after the war is over people tend to quickly forget the battles that were fought. This can be seen in every action Canada has been part of from the Boer War right up to Afghanistan.
It’s one of those things that I have a burr up my ass about
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Same here in the Netherlands, we all know about the massive efforts of the Canadians here in the Netherlands and Vimy Ridge but most like me tbh didn’t know too much about the massive Canadian efforts on D-Day. Mostly it is Utah/Omaha/Point du Hoc and Quistreham/Pegasus that get the most attention due to the big movies.
For me the massive Canadian effort became apparent to me when I spend my november weekend in Normandy and found a hotel on the seawall of Juno Beach. The next mornig I met Nelson Bird a Canadian TV presenter (at the time Indigenous Circle). His father landed right there and guess what I dedicated a D-Day episode to him through a virtual memorial.
Also I specifically chose Canada and First Nations private because this part needs to be remembered as well!
Best Regards,
Marc
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Thank you! Dedicated episodes are far, far beyond my means but I’ll look forward to this one especially when it comes around.
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Thanks, i am very greatful to anyone who contribute some coin, stories or even follows the show. It is a lot of money for me but after meeting his son on Juno just before armistice day 2005 , this meeting has come full circle and I think I must support this legacy. Nelson Bird still works for CTV. I dedicate one of the D-Day episodes to Charlie Bird Regina rifles. Any First Nation info is very welcome. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QQFrYluSn0
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Canada is not the US and part of the culture difference isn’t entirely political. In most churches standing during the war, ones that have Memorial Rolls, the one for the First World War is longer than the one for the Second. The Second World War came to be seen as “The Necessary War”, the one that nobody wanted. When the war was over, they came home to an intact country. It was a popular sentiment to “get over it”, particularly as reintegration of soldiers after the first war had been seen as a failure. The Royal Canadian Legion at that time had the air of being men who just “hadn’t gotten over it”
It didn’t help that the conscription crisis in 1944 poisoned national unity and the political class desperately wanted to heal that wound. It reappeared three decades later too.
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