Military History
Dispatches: Backgrounders in Canadian Military
History
THE ROYAL MILITARY COLLEGE OF CANADA
1876 to the Present
Dr. Cameron Pulsifer
The Royal Military College of Canada offers a professional military
education to officer cadets in the Canadian Forces. Unlike military
training, which focuses on the development of concrete skills, military
education involves the professional preparation of officers to lead
armed forces effectively in peace and
war1. As in other fields like
medicine, law, or engineering, the history of military education over
the last 150 years, in Canada and elsewhere, parallels in many ways the
evolution of military service as a profession. Military education in
this period became a vehicle to convey to officers and officer cadets a
body of specialized knowledge. Its mastery would provide a firm
foundation in military theory and analytical and communications skills
in addition to the soldier's historic training in technical or
combat-related subjects. In this, the history of military education is
also related closely to the development of civilian educational
institutions and the broader social, cultural, and political pressures
to which the latter necessarily respond. This was as true in
mid-nineteenth century British North America as in contemporary
Canada.
The Confederation, or union, of several British North American
colonies in 1867 as the Dominion of Canada occurred amidst some concern
over the new country's military security and the state of its
armed forces. Recent developments such as the proliferation of rifled
small arms and artillery, the increased use of railways for military
transportation, and improved communications through the electric
telegraph, had affected dramatically the conduct of war, as demonstrated
by the American Civil War (1861-65). They also placed additional demands
on the training of military personnel. While Canadian leaders remained
committed to the amateur citizen militia, a centuries' old
tradition, as the country's first line of defence, they
nonetheless concluded that enhancing the professional preparation of
officers would strengthen the militia.
In 1864-65, special schools opened in six Canadian cities to train
militia officers run by the British garrison's professional
soldiers; the militia continued to operate these schools after British
troops withdrew from Canada in 1871. In 1867-68, Ottawa also established
permanent schools at Kingston and Quebec to train gunners for the
artillery. Together with similar infantry and cavalry schools created in
the 1880s, these formed the basis from which a small Canadian Permanent
Force slowly emerged.
But the courses offered were short-term and mostly concerned with the
technical operation of running units. In his annual
Militia Report of 1873, the acting adjutant general, Colonel
Walker Powell, drew attention to the need for a different type of
school, one that offered education in a "higher class of duties and
capacity for superior command" and which would require a more
prolonged course of study. This could only be secured, he argued, by
sending Canadian officers to study at military schools in Great Britain,
or else by opening such a school in Canada. As part of a broader program
to strengthen Canadian-British ties, the Earl of Dufferin,
governor-general since 1872, likewise supported a reformed militia and
the creation of a military college. The latter, Dufferin believed, would
supply a much-needed core of military professionalism to Canadian forces
and help perpetuate British values in the new country.
Dufferin did not believe that a British military college could simply
be recreated in the conditions of colonial Canada. Earlier, he had
chaired a Royal Commission on military education in Britain. It had
commented favourably upon aspects of the program at the United Sates
Military Academy at West Point, New York (founded 1802), especially its
provision of instruction in the engineering and artillery branches
alongside the infantry and cavalry. In 1873, Dufferin's private
secretary, Colonel Henry Fletcher, reported that West Point's
new-world democratic traditions were more appropriate for Canada than
those of more "aristocratic" British institutions. West Point
accepted candidates from all levels of American society by means of a
relatively easy qualifying exam-ination and formed them into officers
through a rigorous four-year program of study centered around
mathematics and engineering. His additional conclusion that the West
Point system was the cheapest method of producing officers could not
help but appeal to economy-minded Canadian politicians.
Prime Minister Alexander Mackenzie (in office 1873-78), though
committed to reducing defence expenditures, was also a former militia
officer well aware of the force's deficiencies. Encouraged by
political allies and fellow militia officers like Toronto's
George T. Denison, Mackenzie concluded that the comparatively small
expend-itures required for a military college would constitute a sound
and inexpensive investment in the nation's future military
security. His government proposed a bill, passed by the House of Commons
on 15 May 1874, to create a college "for the purpose of imparting
a complete education in all branches of military tactics, fortification,
engineering and general scientific knowledge in subjects connected with
and necessary to a thorough knowledge of the military profession and for
qualifying officers for command and staff appointments." It was
located at the confluence of the St. Lawrence River and Lake Ontario in
the old garrison town of Kingston, and commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel
Edward Osborne Hewett of the British Army's Royal Engineers, a man
of "high scientific attainments" as well as an excellent
military officer. It welcomed its first group of cadets, known ever
since as the "Old Eighteen", on 1 June 1876 and received
permission from Queen Victoria to call itself the Royal
Military College of Canada (RMC) in 1878. Although West Point was the
model, British military tradition was paramount. The staff was mostly
British, the uniform and parade-drill were (and are) British-inspired,
and, until the 1950s, the strategic and tactical doctrine underlining
the curriculum was British as well.
Proponents of
RMC had
noted the fact that, at least before the Civil War, most West Point
graduates spent only a short time in the army before returning to
civilian life. As civilians, the ex-cadets played an important role in
building the roads, bridges, and harbours that were fundamental to
America's rapid economic development in the nineteenth century.
The new Canadian college, they argued, could play the same role by
formulating its courses in such a way that they would be equally
applicable to civilian and military endeavours. This would help
compensate for the inability of civilian schools to produce sufficient
quantities of engineers and other professionals.
RMC's
curriculum would include military administration and law, strategy and
tactics, arms training, parade drill, and the involvement of the cadets
themselves in maintaining daily discipline. Physical well-being and
group spirit would be promoted by a strong emphasis on athletics.
During its early decades, most
RMC
ex-cadets who wished to pursue a full-time military career did so within
the British service, which kept several commissions open for
RMC
graduates. By 1894, 84 were serving with British or other imperial
forces, whereas only 10 had joined the tiny Canadian Permanent Force.
This began to change after the South African War (1899-1902) as result
in part of efforts by Sir Frederick Borden, the minister of militia and
defence from 1896 to 1911. Between 1911 and 1914, 19 of 123
RMC
graduates took up imperial commissions but 23 accepted commissions in
Canada's Permanent Force. The rest returned to civilian life.
This gradual ‘Canadianization' of
RMC's
graduates was important to the professional development of the
country's military. So too was the military utility of
RMC's
civilian alumni. The expectation that the latter would form a reserve of
military professionals upon which Canada could rely in times of
emergency was borne out by the experience of the twentieth
century's two world wars. During the First (1914-1918), 982
ex-cadets served, or 86 per cent of those who had attended the college
before November 1919 and who were alive, healthy, and under age 55.
While small compared to the number of officers required by a military
that had expanded into the hundreds of thousands by 1918,
RMC
professionals exercised a disproportionate influence through their
involvement in the pre-war militia and, later, in training
Canada's wartime military. Ex-cadets were also well represented in
senior command positions during the war. Although not an ex-cadet
himself, Lieutenant-General Sir Arthur Currie, commander of the Canadian
Corps from June 1917 to the end of the war, wrote that the
"spirit" of
RMC's
graduates, "no less than their military attainments, exercised a
potent influence in fashioning a force which, in fighting efficiency,
has never been excelled."
In the inter-war Permanent Force, slightly larger than its pre-war
predecessor, professional qual-ifications gradually replaced political
patronage as the chief means of officer appointment in peacetime. More
RMC
graduates joined the Permanent Force as a result. By the end of the
Second World War (1939-45), they dominated the military's senior
ranks. All four of the officers who became Chief of the General Staff
during the war were former cadets as was General H.D.G. Crerar,
commander of First Canadian Army in Northwest Europe. In all, 1420
ex-cadets, or 80 per cent of those available, either served in the
forces or took up special war work. More served with the Royal Canadian
Navy and Royal Canadian Air Force than previously, but the majority
(901) served with the army, as the college was still mostly geared to
producing army officers. Although again few compared to the total number
of officers required,
RMC
graduates were proportionately numerous in command positions.
In 1942,
RMC closed
as a cadet college, its facilities used for purposes deemed more
immediately relevant to the war effort. When it finally re-opened in
1948, after the government had taken time to consider the future of the
whole defence establishment, it was to be a remarkably different
institution than before. It was now to be officially tri-service,
producing officers for the navy and air force as well as for the army.
In 1952, the government introduced the Regular Officer Training Plan
(ROTP). This was intended to ensure an adequate supply of officers for
the comparatively large forces Canada expected to maintain during the
Cold War. The government undertook to pay the fees of all cadets in
return for a promise on their part to serve for at least three years
(later extended to four). No longer would most
RMC
graduates go into civilian life, from which they might or might not be
called upon to serve. Now they would all go into the military on
graduation, with an expectation that many would opt to stay longer than
the minimum period. These changes reflected in part the gradual
evolution of Canada's military from a citizen-based militia with a
small professional cadre, to a larger professional standing army with a
more limited militia component.
The post-war history of the college also reflected broader
developments in Canadian society and political institutions. The
Official Languages Act of 1969 made the college officially bilingual and
led to higher enrollment by French-speaking Canadians. Women, who first
entered the college as cadets in 1980, constituted 27 per cent of the
student body at century's end.
As important to the post-war face of the college was a change in
curriculum. This was largely the work of the director of studies from
1948 to 1967, W.R. Sawyer, an ex-cadet, Harvard-educated chemist, and
chemical warfare officer with the Canadian Army. Sawyer had concerns
about what he saw as the pre-1939 college's narrow technical bias.
He believed that what the modern military officer needed most was the
capacity to think conceptually and creatively about complex issues, a
requirement that demanded a wide range of course options and a more
challenging intellectual experience. Conse-quently he not only
strengthened the science program, but introduced new courses in English,
French, history, politics, and economics and hired competent staff to
teach them. In this way, argued Sawyer,
RMC could
attract students of the same quality as those entering the civilian
university system. The difference would be that cadets would receive a
much more thorough grounding in both science and the arts than their
civilian counterparts. All cadets would take the same courses in both
programs in their first two years, after which they would specialize in
their preferred disciplines. In 1959,
RMC became a
degree-granting institution and today offers B.A., B.Sc., and
engineering degrees, along with honours and graduate programs.
After 1952,
RMC was the
flagship of a triad of military colleges that included Royal Roads in
British Columbia (founded 1942) and Collège militaire royale
de Saint-Jean. When the latter two were disbanded due to government
economy measures in 1995,
RMC resumed
its position as the only Canadian military college. A wide-ranging
debate in the 1990s over leadership, academic training, and the
profession of arms in Canada resulted in curriculum changes, enhanced
outreach programs, and increased links to civilian universities, which
reaffirmed the college's role at the centre of Canadian military
education. As part of this process the college placed renewed emphasis
upon its program's military component as well, especially in the
areas of leadership and military ethics.
Today,
RMC's
primary role remains to "educate and train officer cadets and
commissioned officers for careers of effective service in the Canadian
Forces", but it still comes closer to the civilian university model
perhaps than most other contemporary military colleges. This reflects a
continuing balance in Canada's military educational tradition
between military requirements and civilian influence.
1 John Whiteclay Chambers, III, The
Oxford Companion to American
Military History (New York, 1999),
p.243.
Further reading:
- Canada in the Great War, Volume VI, Special Services,
United Publishers of Canada, np. 1920.
- Sean Maloney, War Without Battles: Canada's NATO Brigade in
Germany 1951-1993, McGraw-Hill Ryerson, Toronto, 1997.
- R.G. Moyles, The Blood and Fire in Canada: A History of the
Salvation Army in the Dominion 1882-1976, Peter Martin Associates
Limited, Toronto, 1977.
- The Salvation Army, The NATO Years, Toronto, 1993.
(booklet)
- C.P. Stacey and Barbara Wilson, The Half-Million: The Canadians
in Britain, 1939-1946, University of Toronto Press, Toronto,
1987.
- Scott Young, The Red Shield in Action, The Salvation Army,
Toronto, 1949.
- Clarence D. Wiseman, A Burning in My Bones, McGraw-Hill
Ryerson, Toronto, 1979.