The Royal Canadian Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (RCEME) have been with the Canadian Forces ever since performing a miracle a day in places like Juno, Korea, and Kandahar. They are the soldiers who can fix anything from torn canvas and metal through to the repair and battlefield recovery of every vehicle in the Canadian Forces.
Far removed from its complete reliance on imperial support in the Boer War, the Canadian Army in the Second World War once again fielded logistics units up to and including the corps level. It still took approximately 9,000 British support troops to furnish the army-level support for each of the five Canadian divisions fighting overseas. Unlike the birth of maintainers, the practice of replenishment remained more or less the same in terms of design. Aside from mechanization, the Canadian tactical replenishment systems and structures of the Second World War looked a great deal like those of 1918 and they performed magnificently both in the Italian and northwest European theatres. The Second World War in my mind lies at the summit of the brute logistics era — the days of piling the stocks and equipment high for operations. It marked a summit of sorts for Canadian logistics as well, as the conflict marked the last time, Canada would field such large logistics organizations.
The Korean War began on 25 June 1950.45 The first United Nations (U.N.) collective effort resulted in a determined “police action” to restore South Korean sovereignty. Five years after the Second World War, the Canadian Army was at low ebb having only one brigade under arms.46 The government’s immediate reaction was to announce the recruitment of a special brigade to be used overseas.47 This contribution to the U.N. forces in Korea was the Canadian Army Special Force, which eventually consisted of the 25th Canadian Infantry Brigade and a commensurate dollop of combat service support elements. These logistic assets were: 54 Transport Company, Royal Canadian Army Service Corps (RCASC); 25 Infantry Brigade Ordnance Company, Royal Canadian Ordnance Corps (RCOC); and 191 Infantry Workshop, RCEME. The logistics units sustained Canadian elements operating independently in Korea until the stand up of the Commonwealth Division in July 1951. Once the Commonwealth Division became a reality, 54 Transport Company became part of the Commonwealth Divisional Column along with two Royal Army Service Corps companies, 25 Brigade Ordnance Company was welded to its British counterparts to become the 1st Commonwealth Division Ordnance Field Park and 191 Infantry Workshop became integral to the 1st Commonwealth Division Recovery Company. In this capacity, the Canadian units provided splendid support.
Korea fascinates the logistician in me as it hinted at the shape of things to come. The Canadian Army was fresh out of the Second World War, an era of brute logistics where we had lots of Canadian soldiers under arms and tons of Canadian matériel. Support in Korea was fashioned out of a potluck “pooling” of the logistics resources of a number of different nations into a coalition or Commonwealth Division. Coalition operations inside a multinational division are dramatically different from operating inside a homogeneous Canadian one. Equipment and weapon compatibilities vary even between close allies, different ration preferences, different repair parts all pose challenges that make the job of sustaining the combat soldiers more difficult. It takes more time, patience, and more people to achieve the same tasks that a formation from the same country could achieve. More acutely, the unusual logistics requirements of different combat forces inside a coalition can be difficult to orchestrate. I can only imagine that the challenges that were tackled in working inside the Commonwealth Division were no different from the many we faced in Kandahar working as a Multinational Brigade inside an American-led division in Bagram. At the end of the day do we really want these headaches that coalition operations cause? Absolutely.
The farther the army marched from Korea, the rustier became its logistics doctrine. After 25 Canadian Infantry Brigade’s operations inside the Commonwealth Division in the Korean War, the Canadian Army moved permanently away from the division as a fundamental structure.48 The Canadian Army polarized around the brigade group concept — an overbuilt brigade that was jam-packed with additional capability. The Canadian brigade groups were a compromise of sorts between a lean brigade that resides inside the framework of a division and a full up division itself. They were called brigade groups because they had some of the essential medical, combat support, and logistics pieces necessary for fighting stapled to them. By the late 1950s, many began to detect fissures in the logistics architecture supporting the brigades. The biggest problem was one of coordination among the various units supporting the brigade group.
The service battalion, a logistics unit born and raised in Canada, was the clever answer to the departure of the Canadian division. The various logistics units that had served Canadian divisions so well in three wars had become a knotted, uncoordinated ball in the brigade rear area. The issue prompted Major-General Geoff Walsh, the General Officer Commanding Western Area, to tinker with his logistics assets. He swept all these uncoordinated support pieces into one large logistics unit. General Walsh proposed the Logistics Battalion trials of the early 1960s in Wainwright, Alberta as the means with which to forge a more effective combat service support structure.49 The trials, which entailed the pooling of the distinct support arms into a logistics battalion, became Walsh’s “pet project.”50 Like General Byng fine-tuning logistics in the Canadian Corps in 1917, Canadian logistics was once more to profit from undivided command attention. The Logistics Battalion was formed twice during the Western Area concentrations in 1960 and 1961. The success of the Walsh trials was startling. The new battalion almost immediately proved to be much greater than the sum of its parts.51 The perfect tool for the job at hand. Not only did the logistics battalions give the brigade a focal point for all its sustainment needs, but it also simplified the coordination of the rear area security and damage control, a perpetual burr under the saddle of Cold War Canadian brigadiers. Before the Logistics Battalion, the brigade headquarters had to deal with each supporting unit in turn. Clumsy and time consuming. In the new model, direction to one large unit would effectively control the entire family of logistics services and give coherent steerage to the challenging rear area.
The logistic battalion trials led directly to the defence minister’s announcement of a more concrete experiment, the standing Experimental Service Battalion in Gagetown, New Brunswick: “During 1963, the army will test a new supply concept ... It is designed to provide more efficient support and greater flexibility to fighting units in the widely dispersed and mobile battlefield envisioned in nuclear war.”52 The experimental battalion confirmed the positive observations made in Wainwright. The unit’s functionality was brilliantly summed up by the Gagetown newspaper in 1963: “You’d walk up and down a lot of main streets in this country to find all of the services and commodities provided by the new [Service] Battalion.”53 Eventually, “experimental” was dropped from the name and the unit became 3 Service Battalion. In 1968 four additional regular force service battalions were added to the Canadian Army order of battle on a basis of one for each of the brigade groups. The structural regrouping of logistics companies into a service battalion represented a significant advance. Here was a crystalline example of foresight, thought, and experimentation. It was the first time since the First World War that reorganization on this scale was introduced in Canadian Army logistics. Regrettably, it was the also the last time that any meaningful command attention was paid to Canadian logistics. The logistics battalion trials and the establishment of the new service battalions were the last true examples of logistics transformation in the Canadian Army.
Despite the innovative installation of the new service battalions, it took a decade of major divisional exercises known as the “Rendez-Vous” series for the army to realize that the division, as a fundamental formation was gone. Having perceived a training gap, the army planned a divisional exercise for the summer of 1981 in Gagetown, New Brunswick. This exercise was called Rendez-Vous 81 and it brought together the three Canadian-based brigades to form the Force Mobile Command Division in the largest Canadian exercise since the Second World War.54 Today the Post Exercise Report of Rendez-Vous (RV) 81 lies dust-coated in the Directorate of History and Heritage. It has some haunting words for logistics leaders. Essentially, the review of the exercise found that the current army combat service support system such as it existed in 1981 was “extremely suspect.”55
The logistics
