Conscription in the English Speaking World. Passing an Anniversary

We've been posting some on conscription and today is a World War One conscription anniversary.

 

The Irish Canadian Rangers, a unit raised, but not fully filled, in Quebec, drawing from Irish Canadians.  It had to be filled out by Irish recruits from Ireland, and then was folded into another Canadian unit.  In some ways, its story is emblematic of the situation in Quebec during the Great War.

Not in the United States, however. Rather, its the centennial of the Military Service Act which, ineffectively, ushered in conscription in Canada for the Great War.

Canada was a country with a population of only 8,000,000 people during the great war.  It's almost a shock to realize how small the population really was.  23% of that population was made up of the Quebecois.  During the war 400,000 Canadians, more than a few of whom were English immigrants, although the majority were not, volunteered to serve in Canadian army.  Full mobilization, for countries with universal conscription, is usually regarded as 10% of the population, all male in the traditional form of conscription.  So Canada mustered men at the rate of 5% of the population.  Pretty darned impressive really for an all volunteer force. And that doesn't include those contributions from Prince Newfoundland, and Labrador, which were not part of Canada at the time.

Royal Newfoundland Regiment crossing the Rhine, 1918. This is not the Canadian army.

By 1917 the well had somewhat run dry in Canada. And in these regards it was facing the difficult choice that other English speaking countries had already faced.

Conscription was not a strong land army tradition in any of them.  The English had never had conscription for ground troops in modern times, although it did have it for sailors in the 18th and early 19th Century.  Indeed, conscription of sailors gave rise to the War of 1812 between the United States and the United Kingdom as the Royal Navy felt free to remove Englishmen from American ships to serve in the ongoing war with Napoleonic France.  There's more to that to be said, but given as this isn't an entry on the War of 1812 of the Napoleonic Wars I'll forgo telling it.  Anyhow, that did mean that England had a bit of a tradition of conscription, but not for land armies. That came to an end with the British Military Service Act of 1916 which made men from age 18 to 40 liable for service in the English Army.

The application of that act, of course, gave rise to the Easter Rebellion in Ireland which ultimately lead to the Anglo Irish War and an independent Ireland.  Conscription in Ireland was pointless, really, as the Irish were already serving in such high numbers.  In the end, conscription was likely necessary for the British in the war, but the cost proved to be great in terms of permanently severing the UK's political ties with Ireland.  Perhaps an added element of irony in regards to that is present however as the UK would resort to conscription very early in World War Two and the Irish, now citizens of the "Free State", once again volunteered to serve in the British Army in high numbers.  Very unusually, and in recognition of the Cold War, the UK would reinstate conscription in peacetime in 1948 but would phase it back out a decade latter and official end it in 1960.

Australia put conscription up for vote twice during the Great War, and both times it was defeated, although narrowly.  Australia would contribute 416,809 men to the Australian army during World War One, a massive contribution given its also small population.

An Australian pro conscription poster.  The Australians weren't persuaded and while plenty of Australians went to help, they were all volunteers.

Australia's conscription story was more complicated for World War Two during which it first made all unmarried men of 21 years of age liable for military training.  In 1942 it introduced conscription, but it wasn't until the end of the war that Australia deployed conscripts overseas.  Australian soldiers who were conscripts stand apart ab bit, during World War Two, as they did not measure up to the same aggressive quality, at first, that Australian volunteers did.  Australia twice reintroduced conscription after the World War Two, once for the Korean War and once for the Vietnam War, but unlike other nations that kept prolonged peacetime drafts, they kept them tied to the wars themselves.

New Zealand had a friendlier view towards compulsory military training than Australia, having had a militia history that is somewhat analogous to that of the United States. While almost every English Commonwealth nation had been looking at compulsory military training prior to World War One, that movement was fairly well received in New Zealand. New Zealand, therefore, had started compulsory military training for teenagers in 1909, exempting conscientious objectors.  Conscientious objectors, however, were not well regarded.  Having already established compulsory military training and having effectively created an army reserve prior to the war, it is not surprising that New Zealand followed the UK by enacting conscription in 1916.

That brings us back to Canada.

Canada had a vigorous militia system prior to the Great War and readily adapted that enthusiastically to its army that went overseas in World War One.  It was an all volunteer system, however.  Noticeably absent amongst the volunteers were the Quebecois.

There are undoubtedly a variety of reasons for this but chief amongst them were that the Quebecois, a sizable minority of the Canadian population at 23% of that population, but concentrated in Quebec where they were a majority, did not regard the United Kingdom as the mother country and had a distance and separate history from France, having been severed from Imperial France during France's royal Bourbon period.  They did not see the war in Europe as their war and were not keen in serving in it.  Their view cannot be regarded, quite frankly, as unreasonable.  By 1917 the Canadian government was ready to attempt to force the issue which was largely unsuccessful. There was large scale opposition to conscription in Canada and in the end only 24,132 conscripts were sent to France.  The word "only" has to be used with some caution, of course, as that's over a division of men and 124,000 men were drafted and therefore added to the army.  Not everyone in a North American army in any war has made it overseas, so perhaps this contribution was more significant than supposed.

Canada would repeat this history during World War Two. Canada enacted conscription at the start of the war but it was overwhelmingly opposed in  Quebec.  As a compromise Canadian conscripts were not liable for overseas service at first but by late 1944 this was changed.  During World War Two only 12,908, contemptuously called "zombies" were sent by order overseas, although quite a few draftees volunteered for overseas service.  The repeat of conscription during World War Two, however, served to worsen relations between the Quebecois and English speaking Canadians which would have an impact after the war.  Canada has not attempted to enact conscription since the war.

Other Commonwealth nations had other experiences with conscription.  I do not believe that it was attempted in the Union of South Africa during World War One or Two, no doubt because of lingering resentment against the British amongst the Afrikaans population during that period.  In 1967 the country started to conscript white men over the age of 16, a young age for conscription by that time, and then phased it back out in 1993 after the collapse of apartheid. The country has toyed with reintroducing it in recent years.  It's neighbor to the north, Rhodesia, enacted conscription following its declaration of independence from the UK modeling it on the British system.  I don't know if Zimbabwe retains it today.

Which leaves us with the US.

We've explored that a bit in recent posts.  Conscription was not a popular concept going into World War One by any means, having only strictly existed during the Civil War.  The Wilson Administration was so concerned it would be poorly received that it attempted to camouflage its nature by calling it "Selective Service", a name it still officially retains in the United States, under the theory that the country would be fooled that the country was simply selecting volunteers, more or less.  Nobody was fooled.

 Selecting the first U.S. draftee during World War One.

Generally, Americans volunteered enthusiastically, and enthusiastically accepted the draft, during the Great War.  Nonetheless that well known story isn't as simple as it is often related to be. There were two uprising amongst southern yeoman populations against conscription during the war, one of which we've already discussed.  These were serious armed uprisings, not mere protests.  And hard left organizations, which were in some ways at the peak of their popularity in the country, were dead set against conscription.  Organizations like the IWW actively campaigned against it.

The US did have compulsory militia duty on the part of military aged males from the colonial period up until after the Civil War, and that's a type of conscription, so this story isn't quite as clear as it might at first seem.  That had passed away by the late 1800s, however, and the memory of it seems to have been largely forgotten.  So the World War One draft was an unusual event.  After the war conscription was halted, only to be reintroduced just prior to World War Two, but with very narrow support.  It went away again after World War Two but, just as in the UK, it came back in 1948 with the need to form a large Cold War Army.  It was retained in the US up until 1975, although nobody was conscripted after 1973.

Jeffrey Mellinger, who was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1972 and who remained in the Army until he retired in 2011, making him the last American serving who entered the military as a conscript.