Charles Belzile

CHARLES BELZILE

* Interviewers: R. Hill, D. Cox, N. Pawelek

 

[HILL]* Good morning, our guest this morning is Lieutenant General Charles H. Belzile, former Commander of Mobile Command. We are delighted to have you with us today General Belzile and we certainly appreciate your willingness to participate in this project.

 

[BELZILE] Thank you very much - a pleasure to be here.

 

[HILL] General Belzile, as you know, this project is an oral history of Canadian policy in NATO. We are trying to examine the importance of NATO membership to Canada and how well NATO has served Canadian foreign policy interests since 1949. We are trying to look at the main policy developments and issues in our field over the last forty years and to learn what happened and how Canada and the Alliance were affected by it. We are certainly very fortunate in having you with us today because of your very distinguished career in the Armed Forces and the range of experience that provided. We want to ask about the role that the Canadian forces under your command played at various times, about the impact of Canadian foreign policy on those forces, about their capabilities, and about the functioning of the NATO military system. In addition, we will be seeking your comments about the broader political context as you have seen it developing. As a graduate in Political Science from the University of Montreal, you must always have had your eye on the wider scene even when dealing with the most down to earth aspects of your military missions.

 

[BELZILE] Well, theoretically I suppose this is true, though I’m not sure it really applied like that all the time. I think I mentioned to you before, the military are not really the policy-makers, we are the ones that quite often have to live with it and pick up some of the pieces. And particularly when you’re a young officer starting in a military career - the time when you may not, and in my case this was certainly true, you may not have decided at that stage to make it a life commitment - quite often I suppose we don't spend that much time thinking about the broader policy issues except truly as an observer. I'm not too sure that we do a very detailed analysis of the context in which these policies are affecting our day-to-day life. But within that context, and recognizing that limitation, I'll be quite happy to offer what I feel are my opinions.

 

[HILL] Well, I think we'll put the questions and see what comments you have.

 

Part I - The Early Period, to 1953

 

[HILL] General Belzile, I note at the outset that you began your military career in 1951. You were commissioned in 1953, and have served in Korea, in various commands in Canada, in Canadian army units and commands in Germany, in a NATO command headquarters, in Cyprus, in National Defence Headquarters in Ottawa and as the Commander of Mobile Command. I believe it would be helpful if you could tell us something about your perception of the world, and of NATO and of the Canadian Army, around the time you joined the Armed Forces. For example, could you tell us a little of what you yourself were doing in the late '40s and in 1950. Which schools did you attend in that period, where did you live and so on?

 

(BELZILE] Well, at the time, the sort of time period that you are talking about, I was a student, of course, like most people my age were at that stage. I came from a small town in eastern Quebec, and was not a Montrealer, although eventually we gravitated, brothers and sisters, to Montreal, and I wound up attending a variety of colleges, one of which was with the Holy Cross Fathers, Roman Catholic classical type of studies which were at that stage the norm really in Quebec as opposed to anywhere else in the country. And when I got to Montreal, through the help of a couple of older brothers of mine, I was quite fascinated by the Jesuit approach to education, so I got myself transferred to College Saint Marie, which was an affiliate of the University of Montreal and of course came in the fold of the Jesuits. Half jokingly we used to say that the Jesuits were organized very much like an army, and they were founded by an ex-general; and we considered them, particularly in a Roman Catholic approach to education, as being much more avant gardist than any other educators that we knew at that time. It was an interesting atmosphere there. And one of the things that existed within the college was the Canadian Officers Training Course, the COTC, which was, of course, a programme that existed prior to the unification process, where university students could take a commission while they were students, similar to the United States ROTC kind of thing. And we did that usually for a job in the summer, quite honestly. So in 1951 I got into that programme because I wasn't about to graduate until 1953. But the Korean War had been on since the fall before, and the recruiting, I suppose one could say, was getting a little heavy on us because, besides committing troops to NATO, permanently stationed in Germany, we were also sending a brigade to Korea. So all this called really for a quadrupling, give or take a bit, of at least the army size of the operation and certainly also the air force because they were on the NATO commitment with a full air division of about 9 or 10 squadrons at that stage. In Korea the commitment was mostly an army one, except for, if I remember correctly, 426 Squadron, which was an air transport squadron which used to do the shuttling to get us out there and bring us back and bring reinforcements and bring Canadian kind of things to the place. I wanted to go into the Regular Army in fact at that time because I felt it was a bit exciting. I had been exposed to it by then and like a lot of men of that age, about 18 - 19 years of age, I thought it was a pretty exciting life. I wanted to go into the Regular Force and go immediately to Korea, because it was being talked about among the students. If I can put the context of the population reaction at that stage, quite honestly, I don't remember any negative comments about the Canadian participation in Korea. I think basically, at least in my student circle, we were great believers in the United Nations at that stage. It was a United Nations operation. Most of the students in my time were very much as they are today, but perhaps had different objectives. Anything that smacked a little of adventure, and that we felt was reasonably righteous, was attractive to us. I wanted to go in but I was talked out of it at that stage, in 1951, because I was going to graduate with my degree in 1953 and it was recommended that if I ever decided later to become a permanent force officer, that having my degree would be much more important for a future career. Even in those days we were seeking graduates as much as possible, for the commissioned ranks. So I decided to stay and continued my training then, but as soon as it ended, as soon as I graduated in '53, I then started to insist that the only reason I joined the army was to go to Korea and I wanted to go to Korea. Of course the war was still on then, in fact it still is, it has never stopped. You know what was signed at the end of July 1953 was a cease¬fire; there's no armistice in Korea. There's never been one to my understanding. Of course there was never a war declared either, so the situation is still by and large, if I understand correctly, very much like we left it in the mid '50s. But my own personal recollection of that time is that I wasn't thinking of being a military officer as a career for any grandiose reasons or any patriotic reasons. I think quite honestly I was seeking a little bit of adventure, and I was qualified as an infantry officer. We were being sought after because of an expansion, and any expansion is exciting in any organization. So a lot of this was contagious, I guess, and a quite a few of us just went in the system and I got to Korea after the cease fire. I almost said "unfortunately", which would not be a very smart word to use, but probably fairly close to the reality, because the kind of atmosphere that prevailed at that time and the reason we wanted to go, was, of course, I think, because we honestly believed in what was being done there. We were by and large, I think, staunch, particularly with the Jesuits, we were staunch anti-communists. If there were any perceived expansion of the communist world and if we could do something about it we were quite willing to go. So, by the time I got there, we were in a period of cease fire and we spent a lot of time rotating companies on the front and trying to normalize, I guess would be best choice of words, trying to normalize the life around us, ( with the farmers trying to get back into the land they had been forced to leave in the area of the demarcation line, the demilitarized zone). So, in order to keep the troops to a certain extent occupied, we did a lot of mine-field clearance. We did a lot of work with explosives. We did a lot of work of a training nature, of an intensive training nature. We always kept the company on the front on the lookout, in case. Of course, there was a perceived danger that a Chinese attack would start again. Perhaps once a week or every two weeks we would, on a contingency basis, man the battle positions and stay in there over night, fight the rats for a few minutes and then come back out next morning. By and large, nothing happened much more than that, except for a little shelling from the Chinese that used to get fairly close to us, enough to make us nervous and make us lose sleep anyway. And that was the atmosphere that prevailed at that time; and, quite honestly, I was —and I think this would be true of most of the young officers and the most of the student population at least where I was — pretty enthusiastic.

 

[HILL] I have one or two extra questions I would like to ask about the Korean period. What about you, David? Do you have anything on the period prior to going to Korea?

 

[COX] No, I don't think so. I was interested in your comment on public opinion generally, that you didn't feel there was really any strong sentiment against it. That would be so even in Quebec?

 

[BELZILE] Yes. I think in Quebec, in fact I remember when the first unit was sent to Korea, I remember specifically standing in the post office in my village of origin and hearing a few of the guys that returned from the Second World War talking out loud and wondering if they were still fit enough to get involved again. And that's even in Quebec. I am sure you realize there's a lot more people in Quebec that went to war than people normally admit, and so that's it. I remember being in the post office because it was Christmas time and my parents still lived down there and I moved from Montreal to spend the Christmas holidays with them and we had just sent troops in. We had just committed ourself to send the second PPCLI. I'd never heard of the PPCLI, despite my association with the COTC. But I remember this being in the news and I remember my father and I remember my brothers, a couple of which were veterans, and I remember the people in the post office, the huddles, you know, what's going on right now, the news, the village tom-tom if you want, and I don't remember hearing anybody saying you know "on n'a pas d'affaire la", "we have no business there." But temper that with the fact that I'm talking about 35-36 years ago. I was pretty enthusiastic personally, and maybe my recollections are coloured somewhat. But I don't think that they are.

 

[HILL] Do you think that the anti-communist atmosphere of that time made a difference? I mean, was Communism seen as posing a threat to the traditional values of Quebec, as well as of Canada as a whole?

 

[BELZILE] I think it probably was, without being identified as such. In the small villages in Quebec, particularly where many people had limited formal education, in a lot of cases they didn't know, I think, where Korea was. I remember checking a map when I first heard the news. Then, of course, there were some people in Quebec who had had families or friends involved with the Royal Rifles and the Hong Kong episode and things like that, who were a little more familiar with the Far East. They were able to explain that this was a country that as far as they could tell had been dominated by the Japanese forever; and when the Japanese were forced out of there, "the Russians” quote-unquote, as opposed to the Communists, had moved in and refused to leave; and they had just attacked the South. And as far as everybody was concerned, it was fair enough that we should go and do our bit to stop it. That's my perception of how it went. At least in the student world, in the group that I was with, there was no compunction about it. I mean, not very many of us on a percentage basis went and joined the army during that time, but those of us that did were not looked at as weirdos. In fact there's a very interesting thing that perhaps I should mention. It's anecdotal, if you want, on the side. In the old Roman Catholic colleges in Quebec at the end, at graduation, we used to have a ceremony which was called "La prise du ruban”, the taking of the ribbon, literally translated, and what this was, was when you graduated and your parents were there, you stood up and announced officially, by the wearing of a coloured ribbon, what your future intentions were. If you were going to be a lawyer and enter the Law Faculty of McGill or what have you, you had a green thing (I guess it was associated with Jurist or something). The doctors had a purple thing or maroon thing. The priests had a white thing, the virginal colour I guess. But all of these things were there. And when I said that I wanted to stand up there and say "military", and you know I wasn't in a military college, well, you know the first thing the Jesuits said was that they didn't have a ribbon for that. And I said, well, perhaps we should find one. There were about four of us in the class who graduated together and went into the army at the same time. And they said:"Well, you think of one". So I looked at what they had as a collection and gold wasn't used, so I took a gold one. This was presented to me, and it became, for the University of Montreal affiliated colleges, the symbology for a military career. And of course all this was stopped later when the university or school systems were changed. I doubt whether this kind of ceremony takes place now; but it was a ritual, which was very important to us.

 

Part II - Korea. 1953-55

 

[HILL] Could we follow up now, on what is the second phase of this series, which is your service in Korea? We have touched on it already. Were you at that time serving with the Queen's Own Rifles?

 

[BELZILE] That's right.

 

[HILL] And you did mention a little bit of the kind of activities you were involved in. Is there anything more that you could tell us about that? I mean, what did your platoon do in fact at that time?

 

[BELZILE] Well, as you say, I touched on that, but basically if you're standing in an official war theatre where you don't know whether it's going to start again tomorrow or tonight, it tends to be a little more tense than people realize. In some ways, we used to say, it was probably worse than for the guys that were shelled every night on a routine basis, because they came to know that between such and such a time 200 Chinese shells would fall on the position; and then it would stop. And they would do so many patrols and that sort of thing. We continued with the patrolling. We went through the DMZ constantly, and patrolled right to the demarcation line. We did a lot of mine clearance. And these operations were a little dicey in the sense that the Chinese used plastic and plastic fuses and used wooden containers for their explosives. And things like that. So the normal methods of detection such as the electronic systems and devices were useless. Dogs could be used, but only the British and the Americans had that sort of facility because they were bigger armies. We literally prodded with bayonets and with long prodders, you know every six inches of the ground. And, when you encountered resistance, you had to sort of carefully dig around it to see if it wasn't a rock. And, when you were satisfied that it was a mine, you cleared it and it was blown right there. We would destroy it right in situ. And so we did a lot of that, and it was a long tedious process; and none of this was properly recorded, or very little of it was. Ours theoretically were recorded, our mine fields, but even so they were tangled and overgrown and you had to be extremely careful when you did that work. The occasional farmer would come in and absolutely ignore our signs that said this is a mine area, stay out; and get themselves blown-up. Then we would get blamed by the local population, even if the mine could very well have been Chinese, for all we knew, that had killed the individual. We would get blamed

 

In the fall, the Canadian brigade, it was announced, would fold. That was the fall of '54 at that stage, and so they all went home except for one battalion. And the battalion that stayed was the second battalion, the Queen's Own, which was my unit. We were elected to stay there for about 13 months, and we didn't come home until the spring of '55, when we closed up shop, except for a small medical detachment that stayed after us to do a little clean-up of casualties. And what was left after that was only, as part of the U.N. Command, a major and a clerk. So that's the closing time of the Canadians in Korea.

 

[HILL] I am fascinated by what you say about Korea, because I was there myself just a couple of years ago and in fact went up on the DMZ, and to my mind it remains one of the touchiest spots in the world; far touchier, certainly in atmosphere, than Berlin, for example. The thing that hadn't really been clear to me before was just the state of chaos there was in Korea at the time of the war. I mean the extraordinary number of refugees and chaos in general. In fact they still have programmes to this day where they're trying to reunify families which were divided up at that time. Literally millions of people are still not able to find their relatives as a result of that whole period.

 

[BELZILE] Travelling through Korea in that time, even after the cease-fire, from the southern port of Pusan, was surely an experience. I got to know it, unfortunately for sad reasons, because this is where we left our dead, and so I had occasions to go there to participate in burial parties and things like this. We still had casualties; they were accidental, they weren't caused by enemy fire, but you know with all those mine fields, we had accidental casualties. We had a couple of officers killed when I was there, one of them was attached to the United States Air Force as a spotter and they crashed into a hill, so that sort of thing was still going on. So we had occasion to take those trains and travel there, and even at that time the Korean trains heading south were literally packed with people hanging on to them like grapes. Heading south to the city of Pusan; and in those days it was a quagmire, it was a corrugated iron and tarpaper shack city of probably four or five times the population that it was supposed to officially be able to hold. And these people were not making their way north very quickly. They would advance towards Taegu and eventually work their way up.But I'm not surprised that they are still trying to relocate some of these people. The city of Pusan, you literally could smell at sea from about ten miles. When one considers particularly that a lot of their waste disposal systems were right open and that sort of thing, sewers are open, and of course they use fertilizer that we don't normally use for the rice paddies and that sort of thing. I'm sure there is still some of that there. There is an atmosphere in Korea that I'll never forget. For a young fellow from Quebec that had never left the country, it was an education.

 

[HILL] Have you been back since?

 

[BELZILE] No. I almost did during Mr. Coates' time. In a way I'm glad I didn't.

 

[HILL] I think you'd find - despite the chaos and the problems I mentioned - I think you'd find an extraordinary change; I just mentioned that earlier. For example, Seoul is one of the most bustling cities I've ever seen. Another thing that was remarked to me by some veterans that I met, Canadian veterans who were there at the time I was there, was that at the time of the war, there were no trees anywhere. Everything was denuded and bare, blasted out, and now its right back to being forested again. Apparently it's quite a different scene.

 

[BELZILE] You would sit on top of a hill, like 355 where a fairly large Canadian battle was fought. When I was there 355 was still like a desert pimple. We had an OP there, an observation post, right in the DMZ, that we manned every night. And you just dug in, and used a few sand bags to build your wall. I don't think there was a shrub taller than three feet in that place, because of the intense shelling that eventually just leveled off the top of those hills (like Vimy still looks in a lot of ways).

 

[HILL] There must have been still the thought, the continual thought, that the war might break out again, because in a sense, as you said, there was never an armistice, only a cease-fire, and the world scene remained very touchy especially in that part of the world. So you must have been, I'll not say worried, but concerned that it might break out again?

 

[BELZILE] When we talk about it, like we are doing now, I guess I get flashbacks and memories talking about the difficulty in keeping the troops occupied and things like that. This was not the only time we encountered that. In places like Cyprus, during the quiet period, you were always looking for something to do, you know, of a useful nature. Unfortunately, some of this backfires, in places like Cyprus, because it is the Mediterranean and you show the guys that are learning to scuba dive. Those are the pictures that make their way to the national press. You see these guys beside some long-limbed Swedish girls, on the beach, and that is what is seen by the wives here. But none of this tends to look at the other aspect, which is the tedious boredom. I live not far from where some RCMP officers are guarding some residences here, and they sit in the car all day long. I know how they feel. We had people who actually snapped during that time. You know, one of the closest episodes of my life for almost being hit by a bullet, was by one of my own men. I was walking up to see him at night, and just the crunching of my boots on a little bit of gravel there made him so nervous that he started to shoot. He had a buddy, but he was answering a call of nature a few metres away.He shot at us; and then it was a long and tedious process to get close enough to him to calm him down, so that we could literally, physically, grab him. He never recouped. He did eventually, back in Canada, but we had to evacuate the man literally in a straight jacket. Yet he was never fired at, but he lived under this tension. The other time I remember seeing that was in the early days of Cyprus, where there were a lot of exchanges of fire. We'd take a young soldier, about 18-19 years old, and he would get off the airplane, and we'd give him 80 rounds of live ammunition, and say fill four magazines, put three in your pocket and put one on the rifle but don't bring the action back, don't cock it. The last time these kids, this is what they are really, had seen a live bullet in their rifle was on a rifle range under the supervision of a coach and an officer that is responsible to make sure the pockets are empty at the end of the day so he doesn't sneak them home and use them as hunting rifles or things like this. And God knows we know that this can happen anyway, even with the best security arrangements in the world. You know, without going through the stories of the Lorties and people like this. But I've seen these kids, they age literally two to three years at that moment. You turn them from a young recruit, from a boy soldier, literally into a man. Because finally you told them: "The Sergeant Major says there's 80 rounds live ammunition. If you ever have to use any of these I want to know exactly where each one has gone." We had to do some shooting of wild dogs and things like this. The soldiers learned to say, well, look, I fired two bullets at a wild dog that was bothering the village, eating chickens, things like this; and killed it. We actually had to report all this because you know it’s peacetime, you can’t have bullets being fired. So all this was kept track of. The young soldier became very mature very quickly. He’s harassed and bothered by either Turks or Greeks in the middle of the thing, you know. And we've had some who, physically, you know, really bothered them. You sort of expect that the other guy's got his finger on the trigger, and it takes a certain amount of discipline and a certain amount of self control not to squeeze your own trigger occasionally. So I always felt good, really, that we were able to impart that kind of training and that kind of discipline to our soldiers, even in so-called peacetime. But in a place like Korea this was particularly difficult to do. Boredom, plus the odd explosion, accidental discharges of weapons,was enough to keep people jittery. So, if you didn't keep track of your troops (this was a great school in junior leadership), you knew you'd soon have people in trouble.

 

[COX] Of course it's often suggested that continuing peace¬keeping is a valuable training exercise.

 

[BELZILE] It's a great training device. You know, I could talk about Cyprus also, I'm sure we'll get to that eventually. But the main reason to me as a professional officer, militarily, to keep it, is because its the greatest training device we've got. You can not duplicate this in a training exercise. And living on the line, and watching what was going on, and being threatened and having guns pointed at you regularly, and to have all these thing going on, and keeping your cool, is a tremendous training device. And it is tremendous training for the young soldier, for the young leaders, for the young corporals, for the young NCOs, the young officers who have never done that, and are responsible for 35-40 men. But you see, during that period of sort of boredom/tenseness in Korea, we had a couple of Black Watch soldiers when I was there. A friend of mine had to take a platoon to the DMZ to pick them up after the intervention of the International Red Cross. They got bored and decided to go and see the Chinese. So they went across the valley, and of course they were snapped up pretty quickly and the Chinese held them for about 72 - 96 hours, a great propaganda device, and then sent them back with stories of how well they were treated and that sort of thing. We didn't look at them so kindly when they got back. But you know it was all sorts of stuff like that. The odd guy blinded from drinking Lucky 7. You go into the village and the local girls are there, of course, like in most of the areas where there is a lot of fighting going on, and their subsistence depends on a whole bunch of things, including of course, prostitution and what have you. So a young soldier has been on a hill for five or six months, the exposure to that, the local hooch, the local booze which can blind you just as fast as get you drunk, the exposure of course to hygienic conditions which are at best appalling; and so you have a VD rate, you have a whole bunch of outside situations that you'd rather not have. But, as a leadership training period, it is great stuff. We’ve got a lot of our senior officers today, and a lot of the people that got to the top, who started in those kind of circumstances. And we never forget those first couple of years as a platoon commander in places like that; we never will. If only you could create that kind of atmosphere in a training camp you'd never need to send them anywhere.

 

[HILL] Could you tell us something about the relations with other allied forces at that time? I mean, Canada was presumably still part of the Commonwealth Division, wasn't it?

 

[BELZILE] Yes, until just before Christmas '54, when the Commonwealth Division was reduced. The Australians partially went home, and the Canadians partially went home and the New Zealanders were reduced also, and we wound-up with a super brigade at that stage which was a Commonwealth brigade. And if I remember correctly, it was the 27th Commonwealth Brigade. But I could be wrong. And we got along fine, mostly with the Australians and the New Zealanders, strangely enough, and used to gang-up on the Brits. And I'm told it's not strange behaviour, from people in World War II. Also the ex-colonies and the ex-dominions had much more an affinity than with the mother country. And so all the commanders of division were always British, the senior staff were always British, you got the odd Canadian Lieutenant Colonel in there, so if you didn't like the directives that were issued to you, it was a natural thing to say well you know only the Brits would send us to do that. But I think this is a very normal thing in armies anyway, I call it a friendly rivalry, really. So the relationship was very good across the board, but if it came to somebody ribbing the other guy, you'd probably find the Aussies and the Canadians ganging-up on the Brits.

 

[HILL] How about relations with the Americans?

 

[BELZILE] The Americans - the relationship with the Americans was a little more strained in a lot of ways. I've heard, I've never experienced any personally, but I've heard of a lot of cases where Canadian patrols coming back through American lines were shot at, and things like this. They're so big everywhere; we encountered the same thing in NATO later on. You know, they're so big everywhere that you almost feel as if you've got to align yourself with a whole bunch of their policy and their training systems and things like this, because you know you can’t survive unless you do, because the machine is so big that it tends to pick up the world along with it as it moves. The Marines, who were on our left at one point in Korea, were great friends of ours, the United States Marines. I think in a lot of ways we had more faith in them than we did in the United States Army. We believed them to be much better professionals and much better fighters. We believed also, rightly or wrongly, that if the fighting was going to start again we'd rather have the Marines on our side on our left or on our right than we would have any other army really. We had a lot of respect for the Turks; for their bravery and their toughness and things like this, and I for one had to travel through their lines many times and I was always very impressed because they were physically very hard, very tough people. Their training was very tough. They didn't have a rotational system like we did; they went to Korea and if they were still there in 1954, it was because they had survived. They got reinforcements but nobody ever went home because they'd finished in a year. The French had a battalion of Foreign Legion, which we had, I think, a reasonable amount of respect for, not for what they did in Korea but I guess for their reputation more than anything else, particularly in North Africa. And that's about the only ones I have had any personal recollections of dealing with very closely. The ROK army, though, was often looked at with a certain amount of suspicion. Which was unfortunate, because I'm sure that 95% of them were as dependable an ally as anybody else. But there was the language issue. They basically were under command of the Americans and they locked themselves in there, except for a company. We had about 150 men in our battalion and they were called Kat Coms, and there was another group that was called Katuses which were under the Kat Coms. The Korean army, attached to the Commonwealth Division,’ used an acronym called Kat Coms and Katuses. They were the same type of units that were with the United States Army or the United States forces. There were about 150 of these people in a battalion. They were soldiers, but the ROKs did not have, I guess, sufficient resources, so they came to us and they formed a company. And we armed them, we equipped them, they were dressed in Canadian uniforms and wearing a Canadian hat. There was a language issue;- you had to work through interpreters. Each unit used these people differently. We tended to keep them all in a company altogether. And we had a Canadian cadre, a Canadian NCO, and an officer cadre that ran them through interpreters and things like that. It was Major Bob Firlotte, and he got considerably frustrated at times with having to deal with them. Other units used them by scattering them all over the place. Other units literally used them as coolies. They were so fit physically, so tough and used to the hilly country that Korea was, that when you needed to carry a whole bunch of stuff you'd turn to your Koreans a lot and they'd take off with A-frames and a load about twice the body weight and run it up the hill which no Canadian could do or American. We just simply, even the fittest of our people, we don't work like that. And so we found them extremely useful in a lot of ways. So that was the atmosphere and our relationship by and large was pretty good.

 

[HILL] General Belzile, there is just one broad question I would like to ask you, which is about the scene in Asia at that time. This was the period in 1954 of the fall of Dien Bien Phu and the Geneva Conference. It was a period in which there seemed to be a great confrontation going on in the world between two different ideologies. I was wondering if you had any comments about how you had seen things at that time, being in Asia yourself at that period.

 

[BELZILE] Well, we saw it from afar, I guess. What goes on outside the country where you are is remote; we did not have the modern capabilities of listening to short-range radios and getting CBC every night and things like this, so we got news relatively late. What we used to get, though, was official briefings on what else was going on, and we were aware of what was going on in Indochina at that time. And we became, I think, much more aware of it because when it became clear that the Canadians, after Dien Bien Phu, were going to start putting people into the Commission in Vietnam, a lot of us volunteered to go. And so this is why I specifically remember that. I didn't go, but I remember my company commander at that time was hustled out of Korea and sent to Vietnam. So I think some of the first Canadian contingent to go to Vietnam came from Canada, but some of them were people that were with us in Korea at the time, because it was closer. I think they were ushered down there fairly quickly. But on a day to day basis we weren't really aware what was going on in detail. We knew that the French had lost Indochina at that time, and we knew there was a commission being set up, the details of which we were not that familiar with. I remember we said goodbye to Major Ed Price when he was heading down there with the first team, with a little bit of envy in our eyes because he was going to go and do something a little more exciting whilst we were going to keep on in our tedious boredom trying to keep ourselves busy. But, certainly at my level, as a young platoon commander, I think I spent more time writing letters for some of my troops who couldn't write, things like that, to their girl friends, and playing father confessor, than to worrying too much about the international situation.

 

[COX] I wonder if I could just ask you this: you obviously came back more experienced and wiser than when you went, but would you say that, when you came back, there was any change in your own political attitudes or assumptions. You mentioned earlier that you were a little concerned about the ROK; but more broadly than that?

 

[BELZILE] Yes, I think the simple answer would be yes, and I'll try and qualify that. First of all when I came back the first thing that entered my mind was the moment of decision as to whether I was going to be a permanent soldier or whether I was going to go back to Montreal and become a lawyer, which was the other thing in my craw. I wanted to, because, before I went into the Regular Army, I registered myself into the Law faculty at the University of Montreal, but I never went there, I never did go. And when I got back, I was one of those who had a short term commission which were only for two years i.e., you'd come back, and about five or six months later, you'd be demobbed. We didn't know whether the army was going to stay as big as it was. And of course NATO at about the same time was developing; we had a brigade over there in Hanover. It was an exciting period. So I remember taking the decision at that time, very clearly. I was offered a permanent commission. I didn't have to ask for it like some of my friends did. I was offered it and I accepted it on the spot. Then I had to go back to Montreal on leave, and explain to my father that I decided to become a soldier instead of a lawyer, which was received in a relatively lukewarm fashion. I remember. My father was of the old school, you see, that soldiers should exist in war time and when it's peace you go back and do something else. This to me is too simplistic a view about the profession of arms, and how complicated it is really, you know you need at least a certain cadre of professionals because you don't have the time to start shaping up whole organizations or mobilizations systems, as you did in the past. And if I can think back as to why I did that, I did that I think for two reasons perhaps, to be quite honest, the most important of which was that I liked the life. There was a tremendous amount of personal satisfaction in being an officer, looking after troops, being everything from father confessor to what have you to them, and this appealed to me. It was physical and I was a physical person and I enjoyed sleeping under the stars. Contrary to common belief, I really did enjoy that. To me the rough weather and that sort of thing, I found exhilarating, not something to avoid at that stage. I'd look at it a little differently now. But most of my friends who stayed in also, you know, we spent a lot of time in the officers mess at night with a gin and tonic, I suppose, and shooting the breeze. By and large, we felt that Korea had been a success, and I think by and large we felt that the situation with Indochina and with Korea was just the tip of the iceberg and that the whole domino theory, what became known as the domino theory, of course, which was so much expounded on during the American time in Vietnam - that eventually, you know, if we didn't continue to take a stand like this you'd have fortress North America in a matter of no time. And I guess most of us believed that. I think we felt that, but that's not the kind of thing that young officers express very well. I don't think we expressed it very much. We rather, in those days I think, and probably still the same today, we'd rather use the argument, oh, hell, it's a good macho life and this is why I'm in. But I think basically the macho life aspect really doesn't have enough to make you want to change your whole pattern of life for almost the rest of it. I think subconsciously anyway there are a lot more issues in there. And one of them in my case was that I think that I honestly believed in what I was doing, and I thought that this was a kind of occupation that would allow me to perhaps do a little good in this crazy world. But the one I would have explained to people in a loud voice in those days, I think, would have been the fact that that's my life. That's what I want. I'm doing what I want to do. And I would think you'd probably interview a whole bunch of young officers in those days, and they would tell you the latter instead of the former. They would tell you that they stayed because that was a real good man's life. In all these great statements that young people make with a couple of gins under their bellies, they want to die with their boots on and that sort of thing. It sounds crazy when you explain that to young people today, but there's quite a bit of that. And I think about the two ideologies confronting each other at that time. Most of us, certainly me again as a Jesuit graduate, did not believe in the other side at all, and we didn't want any part of it.

 

Part III - Western Canada. 1955-57

 

[HILL] I think we'll now go onto the mid '50s, which is part III. That was the time when you served as a staff officer at Western Command HQ in Edmonton.

 

[COX] I would like to ask about your involvement in the DEW Line: if in fact you were involved? Did you have any part to play in that?

 

[BELZILE] No, I did not. I was a staff officer at Western Command Headquarters in Edmonton. But really my main function was to run the Northern Alberta Recruiting District. So that was a human experience that I will never forget, because you know I spent a lot of time as a travelling salesman all over Northern Alberta and the Northwest and Yukon Territories, including Indian reserves and that sort of thing. So, that was an educational process for me. But I was not involved in any of the deployments except to drive partially on the Alaska highway, and being situated in the same headquarters with the people and the engineers that looked after the Northwest highway system and the communication system which were set up after The War, which was mostly run by the military at that stage instead of the RCMP and a variety of other departments. In those days, I guess the military was much more plentiful in the North, and Edmonton was the base from which they launched. That’s my exposure. I never worked on the DEW Line, never even went to a DEW Line site at those times. The Northwest highway system I was quite aware of because, as I said, I'd get up to Dawson Creek at mile 0 and I’d drive up parts of it but I mostly flew up to places like Yellowknife and White Horse to speak to high schools, to recruit the odd individual to become a soldier. That's what mostly I was doing at that time.

 

[HILL] Was there any sense, at that time, because of the fact that the DEW Line was being developed, that in fact the world was changing very much strategically? Or did people think about that much of the time? Do you recall people reflecting upon that or seeing things in those terms at all?

 

[BELZILE] We were not joint headquarters per se. I know this is a roundabout way to answer your question, but this was not a joint headquarters per se. We were in fact co-located with what was then the Northwest Air Command System, Northwac was the acronym by which we called it, with the headquarters on Kingsway in Edmonton. And we lived with them, we operated with them. In my particular function I had very little to do with the air force side of the house except for sharing information and for sharing travelling when we went to school orientation days and a variety of things that I did as a recruiter in those days. But my bosses, of course, were very much involved at that time. This is when the Bomarc discussions took place, when we bought Bomarc as an air defence system, considering whether we were going to be nuclear or not. I remember that there was much less of a concern with nuclear weapons, at that stage, than I think there would be today. We believed then that nuclear weapons were still controllable. And they were, by and large, those that were being considered by the Canadian forces for arming some of their aircraft or arming the tips of some of the missiles or indeed some artillery shells which could be fractional yield nuclear weapons. We studied those things and we saw them as just another extension, if you want, of the available spectrum of weapons systems, to allow you to fight a war if you ever had to fight it. And we did not look at nuclear weapons with the same global unease that I think we all do today. And the reason for that, probably, is that the proliferation, the number of weapons and warheads, was not nearly as great as it is today. The overkill capabilities were not perceived to be nearly as bad as they are today, and the accuracy of the intercontinental systems was still considerably less than what we would consider a CEP today, a probable error. You know what I mean, a probable error of delivery and accuracy. We tended to look at nuclear weapons with a certain amount of awe, but we considered that training and planning for their use, and defending against them (on the tactical side, in the case of the army particularly), was a very logical and a very necessary extension of our training. So we tended to look at it, I think, this way. We didn't have an all-pervasive fear of nuclear weapons, in my memory, in those days.

 

[HILL] Your time in the West was immediately before Sputnik 57, so I guess there wasn't the sense of Canada being caught in the middle of two superpowers to quite the same extent in those days, even though the DEW Line was being installed. It was kind of a different world.

 

[BELZILE] Yes, but it was mostly for an air breathing threat. It was intended of course to give warnings of manned bombers, that sort of thing, and the intercontinental ballistic missile was not our major concern at that stage; which, of course, now, plus the submarine-delivered ones, put an entirely different dimension on the whole nuclear issue. I guess the military mind doesn't feel so bad about a weapon that one can control. But once you foresee a situation where it's really out of control because of A) its destructive power or B) the sheer amount of it, then you have a problem. You know that, philosophically, most of us are terribly uneasy with that, and that tends to force you into different ways of looking at these things. All of this was not particularly in the realm of junior officers in those days. To us they were just tactical weapons, really.

 

[COX] Even a tactical weapon packs a tremendous punch with nuclear device on it. Would you have been thinking about that, just in terms of purely military response, or in terms of what it meant to conventional tactics?

 

[BELZILE] Oh yes, we did. In fact, the first time that I was in Germany, which followed that, we were very much then training under what we called a nuclear umbrella - the fear of a nuclear umbrella, if you want. We were very much training tactically with emphasized dispersal and emphasized survivability, and we were training our officers; we were training staff officers in nuclear fire planning and damage assessment and target analysis and that sort of thing. We tended to have smaller defended localities, like strong points with large distances in-between the two, what one would cover with fire or with movement instead of with physical presence on the ground. But you would still limit the damage by your varied disposition on the ground. So we were very conscious of that, at that time particularly. And this, in my mind, in the case of the  Canadians, probably had more to do with the mechanization of the army and the fact that the other armies were also mechanizing. The Central European battlefield was going to become a much more mechanized theatre, allowing much more flexibility to move from point A to point B, laterally or from reserve positions to the front, quickly, and that sort of thing. So while they were developing all those nuclear systems, the tactics to use them were developed. So we got more and more mechanized as technology was advancing, turning to vehicles which have an over-pressure system which protects you from fallout or dirty battlefield situations, dirty in a nuclear contamination sense. So that you could drive a tank through the fall-out without the crew being obliterated, 24 or 48 hours later, by the amount of radiation that they would inhale, or that they would take in in one form or another. So you would have an over-pressure system in your vehicle or tank to protect you against that. I think the two came at the same time; and in a lot of ways the need for battlefield mobility was probably triggered and pushed a lot more, technologically, because of the existence of tactical nuclear weapons, which of course in those early years we still considered a usable kind of weapon which limited damage. We did not necessarily, in those days, at least most of us, did not necessarily see it as automatically being linked to an escalation that would go all the way to intercontinental exchanges. Today, I think we find it very difficult to accept the idea that we could have limited use of nuclear weapons.

 

[COX] In retrospect, do you feel that you were well-informed about battlefield nuclear weapons i.e. well-informed about yields and battlefield effects of these weapons?

 

[BELZILE] In as much as the existing knowledge of those things was concerned, yes. Our staff colleges, our courses on fire planning, our target acquisition courses and training, always involved nuclear weapons studies, although as a matter of policy the Canadian government was hesitating as to whether we would have nuclear weapons for even our fighters, at one point. But I think that we always accepted, right from the start, the fact that whether we delivered nuclear weapons ourselves or not, we were going to be in the same battlefield as they would be and therefore we owed it to ourselves to know as much about them as possible. Besides, certain of us in later life got involved very much in the targeting and the fire planning systems in NATO headquarters and things like that. You don't throw the Canadian out of the room when the planning takes place because Canada is a non-nuclear power. Neither do you throw the Dane out of the room, or the German. So as a joint staff kind of activity we still need to be aware of, and have an understanding of, damage assessment and that sort of thing. Even if, politically, we have said that Canada now will never use nuclear weapons. The guy that flings them on your front doesn't have to answer to the Parliament of Canada. So yes, we were as well informed as possible. Whether it was good as it is today, I don't know. In a matter of degree, I think that most of the data, the analysis data on nuclear weapons, is something that has evolved considerably since the mid-1950s. But following the period of the mid-'50s, when I wound-up for the first time in the NATO army in Europe, it was very much in our mind. That's why I said immediately after that that it was very much in our mind. All of our training, and everything that we did, had nuclear weapons. They were there on the side all the time, and we never forgot that in planning.

 

[HILL] I think also, since that period or in the mid-'50s, there was an awful lot of analysis and thinking went on about it, I mean about how you'd use these weapons. And I think that's had a useful effect, letting people know or think about how they would use them.

 

[BELZILE] We went as far in our battlefield deployment as saying. that, in order not to completely eliminate the homogeneity of the fighting unit or the battle group or anything like that, then you could not accept more than, say, a combat team as destruction. Without getting into a long diatribe here, the combat team is a company cum tank squadron cum artillery battery. It's an all arms team. Usually, at that level, it could number some -40 to 50 vehicles and 200 or 300 men. You don't reduce below that very much if you want to have any all-arms capability. So you tend to build on these, to use the combat team as a building point. The level above is a battalion size organization, or a tank regiment with a grouping of the other arms with it that tends then to come closer to 800 to 1,000 men. There'll be about four or five of these combat teams in the battle group. Even if you get massive destruction in one of them, you'll still have a reasonably coordinated organization. Hence you would deploy each combat team at least two or three kilometers from the others. So that if one was hit the damage to the other one would be minimal. Or at worst it would be peripheral, perhaps flash injuries, if there was no warning or anything like that. You might have a few guys that were facing the wrong way, they might get a burned retina. But basically, the next organization would be a viable one, and so would the other one on the other side. And then you could still do quick manoeuvering and close the gap. If you have nuclear weapons of the yield that would take out two or three of these in one go, you are really getting into big tactical stuff. But the fractional yield weapons, this is the kind of damage they would do. And we tended to deploy our troops with that in mind.

 

[PAWELEK] I would like to ask you one question to maybe round out this section. I was interested to hear your impressions of the general strategic scene in the mid-1950s, and I would like to ask you to give a more general assessment perhaps of Canadian defence policy at the time. The mid-1950s have been regarded as a sort of golden age for Canadian foreign and defence policy. Canada was firmly supportive of NATO, had some of the best military forces and equipment in the Alliance, and was also fairly influential on the diplomatic front, as was indicated by our role in the Suez Crisis of 1956, for example. I was wondering if you would tell us whether you agree with that assessment?

 

[BELZILE] Oh, absolutely. There is no question in my mind that the term "Golden Age" is well chosen, because it was a pretty exciting time. I use the word exciting because the executor benefits quite often from the implementation, I suppose, of defence policy and foreign policy. It was a buoyant period in the sense that if we needed certain equipment, we needed certain capabilities to keep ourselves up-to-date, or even slightly ahead of most of our allies, we didn't seem to have any problems getting them at that time. And so that buoyant period, of course, was a pretty exhilarating time as far as we were concerned. We were moving to Europe, I was moving to Europe in 1957, for the first time, and although we did not have yet the sort of technology that was starting to be available in the United States Army, and the British Army and others like them, we used, in lieu, stuff to get ourselves ready for the receipt of all this new materiel. We did it with less sophisticated equipment but we tended to keep up with every other army in the world. And in Europe in the late '50s particularly, we were viewed, perhaps even more than today, although the reputation is still not bad, we were viewed as one of the finest forces in the world probably. And for professional reasons and for attitude reasons, for training, for standard of training, for standard of people, standard of staff officers, I think we were looked at almost jealously by a lot of European armies at that stage. So it is a fair assessment to say that this was a good period for us. And if it was a good period, of course, for the military, then obviously it must have been internationally for the nation.

 

Part IV - Germany, 1957-61 and 1966-68

 

[HILL] We come now to Part IV of the interview, dealing with your two periods of service in North Germany, 1957-61 and then 1966-68. I see that between 1957 and 1961 you served first with the 2nd battalion of the Queen's Own Rifles in Hamburg, and then, in the second period, as Brigade Major with the brigade group in Soest. So I was wondering, first of all, about the state of the Canadian brigade at the time you served with it, particularly first of all, in 1957-61. What was its state at that time? Was it well equipped, adequately manned, sure of its tasks and doctrines? For example, I think I've heard it said that what the brigade did at that time was that it manned a fort, or a series of forts perhaps, fairly close to the front line in Germany. I don't know whether that's a correct assessment. Perhaps you would like to tell us more about the state of the brigade, in both those periods, 1957-61 and then 1966-68?

 

[BELZILE] I would hope that I don't sort of balance between one and the other. As you were talking, I was starting to wonder when did this or that actually happen - was it in the first period or the second period? The first period was really the one that I started to refer to earlier, where we didn't always have the wherewithal that we should have had, despite our feeling comfortable with policy, our being quite aware of what our tasks were, and knowing exactly where we were going to have to fight the war if it ever came. And we knew exactly where to go. It was relatively close to where our garrisons were, compared to what developed later in the south, which was caused by an entirely different kind of problem. But we did not have all the wherewithal, such as the need to train within the NBC environment or under the NBC threat. That was very well established at that time; we did it, but we did it with substandard equipment. We were training with something less than what we should have had eventually as operational vehicles. For example, we were using three quarter ton trucks in lieu APCs. They don't give you any of the protection that the APC is going to give you against shrapnel, or small arms fire or that sort of thing, which allows you relatively greater immunity in moving around the battlefield. But tactically our doctrine was evolving. We were training with that in mind, we were training with the firm belief that, within two or three years, all the more sophisticated kit was going to be in our hands. The late-'50s to early-'60s was our preparation for it, so this is the way basically we felt at that time. We were reasonably well equipped, but with something that was a phased approach, if you want. Within a few years, later, we were going to be considerably better equipped.

 

[HILL] Were you, in the first of those periods, moving towards getting a heavier tank or more tanks, or more artillery, things like that. It just occurs to me that in '64 one had the first Defence White Paper, which looked to a more mobile kind of force and quite a different kind of structure. I think in fact that at that time they were thinking of equipping the army with a British- built Scorpion tank, which was a light tank. And so there was obviously a shift in doctrine in that period, to some degree. But I guess the question is really this: how sure was the brigade group of its tasks by 1961, and how well was it moving along towards what it thought it should be doing?

 

[BELZILE] Well, at my level at that stage, if I remember that, I was a Captain to a company, 2IC, and I was very confident that we could do what was expected of us and that we knew what was expected of us. And I remember exactly when the heavier artillery came in, because I was Brigade Major at that stage, in the second period that you're talking about. As to when we actually moved to a little more mechanization with the shift in policy involved that wanted us to become a lighter organization, I don't recall this from that period. So it obviously didn't affect me personally too much. In fact I remember that much more as being a problem during the days when Jean Allard was the CDS and the force was unifying. We were looking at turning the brigade into a much lighter force in Germany and moving it south, which is the next time I was in Germany. This is the time where the tank became a policy issue. This is the time when we had to decide as to whether we'd have a tank or whether we'd have a lighter vehicle, whether we'd turn the force into a helicopter mobile kind of thing - a very mobile light force. And I know we'll talk about that later because I think it would be safe to say that there was, within the army, a certain amount of resistance to that, and I was probably part of that. Because it's all very nice to talk about light roles and things like that; but it depends where they are. If you're going to fling those light roles in the middle of a highly sophisticated and heavily equipped battlefield, I think that, perhaps for the sake of saving a few dollars, you may be putting your own people at a great disadvantage in the atmosphere that surrounds them. So, perhaps my memory doesn't serve me very well about that period, because at my level the question of changing doctrine and policy, really it was a progression. The first period of mechanization came earlier, and was very much completed by the time that 1966-68 came along, except for the self-propelled heavy artillery which came during that period. I remember that specifically, because we had Soviet officers photographing every gun. And I remember being on the phone hearing about this and flying there myself with a helicopter to verify it, because we were going to accuse the Soviet mission of going over their stated mandate by the fact that they were doing that. Not that it made much difference from a security point of view, but it was a matter of principle, because they were doing that openly. We wanted to protest it officially, and I wanted to be satisfied that I knew exactly what was going on. I actually flew to the spot myself and saw a Soviet colonel photographing every gun and writing the serial numbers on each one. Now what great intelligence advantage this has baffles me a bit, because I don't think it has any. However, the Soviet intelligence gathering system is a little different from ours. I've had a few experiences with them in Cyprus, too. But at that time, as I recall it, we were progressing towards greater mobilization than in the first period. We then had, as you will remember, a specific front line mission as part of the Second British Division.

 

[HILL] That was one of the points I wanted to get at.

 

[BELZILE] We were in the British Army of the Rhine as a formation, and the brigade that was there was also intended in those days to be the forerunner of a second brigade in a divisional task force. And this is what led to the construction of Base Gagetown, close to the ports of shipment. I mean, we needed a large base where we could congregate up to a division and send them off to beef-up, not only the organization that was already there, but to put another brigade beside it and eventually a divisional headquarters. That is the system that was changed after Pierre Trudeau decided to pull back; then when that didn't quite work out with the allies, to at least reduce us to a considerable extent. I see that aspect as being much later than you see it, though it may be that it's the memory of my own involvement that's getting a little sketchy here. But this was the mechanization period to me. By about 1966 and 1967, the brigade was at the strongest it's ever been.

 

[HILL] By '67? Wasn't that the period when General Allard was CDS, when the changes were beginning to be made in terms of implementing the first Defence White Paper of '64?.

 

[BELZILE] Yes, but in those days, we had a nuclear unit in the brigade. We had an SSM battery with nuclear capabilities, we had an anti-tank specialist organization and we were organized. That brigade was about 6,600 strong, plus about 1,500 behind in LOC all the way back to Belgium. This was by far the strongest, technically, training-wise, and what have you - the strongest brigade we have ever fielded. And in 1957-61 the numbers were as great but the equipment and sophistication were certainly less. But the progression had started. And the doctrines and the tasks, I don't remember them evolving that much, we just became more capable of handling our part of the front. Regarding the doctrines, my perception of them at that stage was that they were leading towards more mechanization and more battlefield ability.

 

[COX] I wonder if I could just clarify this. Perhaps it reflects the fact that I don't know very much about armour. But some people make a distinction between an armoured, compared to a mechanized, brigade. When you're using the word mechanized here, do you actually mean that what we had there was an armoured brigade?

 

[BELZILE] No, it was an infantry brigade in that first period and when I went there in 1966 it was still an infantry brigade. It became a mechanized brigade in 1967 or 1968, the exact date escapes me. The difference is that an infantry brigade can still have armour and still have tanks, but basically the infantry is the predominant arm. It was basically foot or wheeled vehicles or motorized transport, with very little protection. Its own protection was its small size and its flexibility, because nothing, literally, stops a man on foot. You know, he goes through swamps when vehicles can't do so; he can be lifted in a light helicopter when the big vehicles can’t. The single man on the ground has hardly got an obstacle that he can't handle, if there's enough of him, and if he's got sufficient time. We had then a tank regiment, which was about the same size as now, probably about 60 tanks, because doctrinally that's about what we've looked at, 57-60. For most of my career, that has have been the number of tanks we've had in our tank battalions/regiments. We called them regiments, instead of battalions, and that's our British tradition. The Americans and everybody else would call them a tank battalion, but they'd be also a little smaller, usually. So our tank regiment is a little larger. We have not really changed that very much. We used to have, in the early days. Centurion tanks. They were then in their infancy and they were superb vehicles in those days and probably the best tank in the world. Later on, we went from the Centurion to a lighter tank, and a more mobile or more agile kind of tank, which was the Leopard, the German Leopard. But in numbers, by and large, we stayed about the same; we haven't moved very much on that. The heavier guns, the self-propelled guns, came in in the period ’67 or so. And before that we had towed guns, like we had in Korea, basically. So this was a well manned brigade, this was a big brigade, this was a strong brigade. But it did not have the fire power, did not have the tactical mobility, that the one that we had there a few years later had.

 

[COX] Well, just in light of what you were saying, and again to clarify my own understanding of this, from the first period to the second period you described a situation in which there was increasing mechanization. And I guess my question is: was the drive to that mechanization a consequence of the Canadian position on the north German plain?

 

[BELZILE] I think it was, partially, but I think it was also driven by the perceived need on the part of military thinkers at that time to have a little more dispersal and better protection capabilities under the threat of NBC, including nuclear, biological, and chemical, but mostly nuclear.

 

[HILL] Could you then comment on that issue of the NATO strategy of forward defence? How did it affect the Canadian way of thinking about our own role?

 

[BELZILE] I don’t really remember that it did very much. Of course, the strategy of forward defense and flexible response didn't come in until after 1957-61. In the second period, I was a lot more aware of the extent of the Canadian tasks, because of my job. I was the man who was keeping the maps, and I was manning and organizing and running the war room. And I was the man that used to go on the ground with the commander at that stage, and sleep with my map inside my pajamas, because there was no one else. So that was how sensitive this one was. And we had the right forward sector of the Second British Division. And we also held the inter corps boundary with the First Belgian Corps. This was our deployment area. And this was of course reasonably classified at the time and particularly the details of where the troops would be. And this leads to a question about how we dealt with the other allied armies at that time. I remember we felt very uneasy. We welcomed the additional mechanization and the quick response capabilities that we were getting, because we were very uneasy at the deployment of the Belgians, on our right, who were planning to use a different kind of defensive posture than we were - depending heavily on the coming forward of large reserves from the home country. They did not have all their troops on the ground, so they started in front and built up behind. And we could foresee the possibility they might have to pull back a little and give up a certain amount of ground, and that would have left our right flank exposed. And so we got very conscious of that, and of mechanization. I remember touching up our war plans in those days. Mechanization was a definite asset to us, to be able to react more quickly if there was a change in our right flank. And I remember at that stage feeling considerably better in the 1966-68 period, about our ability to do that, than we could have done the first time.

 

[HILL] How long or wide a front did the brigade have at that time, roughly?

 

[BELZILE] This particular one was about 12 to 15 kilometers-, but it was about 30 deep. And so, by today’s standards, it wasn't an overly wide territory on the front, but it was very deep. And one of the reasons it was deep was the dependence of our allies on the right on the arrival of sufficient reserves to build up to the full manning they should have had for that front. And if they didn't succeed in doing that, then we could foresee a difficulty in keeping the right flank. They might have been forced back quicker than us, exposing our flank. And, of course, that brought out, tactically, a situation where we could be enveloped from the south. My boss at the time, who was General Ned Amy, surely wasn't particularly keen on that. We spent a hell of a lot of time on the ground planning. But this to me was the progression at that stage. This strategy of flexible response, as it evolved, really wasn’t, in the early days, something we were very conscious of. It didn't change anything on the ground for us.

 

[HILL] But in the latter period we are looking at, say '67, which was the height of the strength of the Canadian force there, what sort of tactics would you have employed if the Soviets had attacked, and, let's say, the Belgians hadn't quite gotten there on time with their reserves and so on? Was this a sort of layered defence, point by point, where there were a lot of strong points in there, or was it mainly open country?

 

[BELZILE] It was hilly, wooded, with a certain amount of urbanization already started. There was a plain there, which was on the right, and this was the area we were worried about. And we had, if I remember correctly, a battle group here, a battle group there, and one at the back. Three major battle groups. We expected that the first two would be committed in the early stages of the battle and we'd fight a combination of what we called then static defense and mobile defence, by holding some of the strong points that I was describing before and having the manoeuvre troops ready to use as an anchor point and available for committing to either part of what would be threatened. One was definitely a reserve formation at that stage and another was strong in armour. It was based mostly on the Strathconas at that stage, which was the tank regiment that we had there. Then there was the RCR; and then the Vandoos; and then the PPCLI with the armour. Of course, in those days, this information was highly classified; and I'm only doing this from memory and only because things have changed. But basically, you see, the front was going like that, instead of a straight east-west thing. But having said all this, we held a key, pivotal position in Second British Division, and in fact in the British Army of the Rhine. We held a tactically very important piece of ground. So, from that point of view, as military planners, we all vie for something like that because you’ve got something really real to put our teeth into. So this was a very real problem and a very interesting one to plan for.

 

[HILL] When you say strong points, could you give us some examples of what you mean by that, right up near the front? What type of thing constitutes a strong point?

 

[BELZILE] Well, you would have a combat team at a defended locality which would have probably three infantry platoons dug in and perhaps up to a tank troop, some of them right in the position with them, in sniping roles. And these would be dug in with bunkers and overhead covers, so that you would not plan to move these troops during the battle. They'd stay there.

 

[HILL] And this was to be on a hill side or..?

 

[BELZILE] Or an urbanized area, or you'd pick an area that had a lot of natural obstacles, that is difficult; and you'd cover the ground between the two by fire and observation. Artillery or direct fire and what have you. Then you'd have your tactical reserve and so on. And so that's it, basically. We have not diverted very much from that to this day, as a basic defensive tactic. Unlike the Germans, who tend to be much more linear but have a psychological reason to be so because it's their territory. You know, losing even a couple of kilometers of territory is a psychological blow for the Germans. It is not so much so for us because we want more flexibility, and this is a better way to do it as far as we're concerned. So the Canadian defensive doctrine really is a combination of static defence, which is a Maginot Line kind of philosophy, where you dig in yourself with no penetration area, and you say nobody goes past (theoretically, anyway), unless they blow right through you. So we tend to use a combination of tactical mobility in the back, and ability to react, but using strong points as an anchor. So, instead of having everybody caught up in a move when the battle starts, some formations are fairly static, and the other ones have freedom of movement to come and beat them up or to go to their flank if there is a danger of penetration.

 

[HILL] How close is all this to the inter-German border? Is there a sort of railroad down the front there?

 

[BELZILE] There was a corps covering forest terrain, about 20 kilometers. You would have hit that at about 20 kilometers from the German boundary.

 

[HILL] And was there a stream or river or something natural?

 

[BELZILE] In this particular sector, there were woods and mountains; it was mountainous in that area, not very far from Brunswick. All the way to the Czechoslovak border, and then south. The Hartz Mountains were not very far from there. So there were natural features.

 

[COX] Which way?

 

[BELZILE] They were directly east from us.

 

[PAWELEK] One final question, General Belzile. I was wondering if you could comment on the functioning of NATO crisis management procedures at the time you were in North Germany, specifically during the Berlin crisis in 1958 and during the Czechoslovak Crisis in 1968?

 

[BELZILE] I'm not sure I can really usefully comment on NATO crisis management procedures, because the job that I had did not really involve me directly with NATO. In the first instance, during the Berlin crisis, all I remember is that we were CBd, confined to barracks, because there was a whole bunch of activity. It's a normal routine, you know, you pull people away from leave and keep them all in and check your equipment and have a good look at your kit, in case you need to go. So you do a lot of maintenance and things like that, and that's about the only thing I remember from it. I think that was about the time that I was becoming the adjutant of the unit. So I was the Chief Administrative Officer; I was the guy responsible to draw in the troops from leave and that sort of thing. In the 1968 crisis, I was a little more involved and I was in a more significant job in the sense that I was the Brigade Major; and I was responsible for the war room at that stage. Let me explain what the war room is. The war room wasn't much bigger than this room here. But it's a completely secured area, you know i.e., lead lined walls not secured from weapons but so that you could talk freely, so that no electronic listening devices from outside could pick you up. So the top secret kind of maps and material and your war plans were all kept in there in vaults and things like that. And when you were working on a piece of kit or on a map or on a plan that had a very high classification, you had to do it inside the war room. You never took the files out of there or the maps out of there, except when the balloon went up. Except that, when I would take one map if we went and visited the front, I would literally wear it on my chest, or inside my pajamas. Because there was no protection for it. Whether we overdid it, or not, never entered our minds quite honestly; you can argue these things today, whether we were too security conscious or not enough. As far as I'm concerned, when I was the guy responsible for the war room, I could not have been overly conscious, so I was always too conscious. What we used to do when there was a crisis like that — and we did it specifically, I remember, in the Czechoslovak one, because I was in the DM chair there — was to call in the intelligence staff. We would get the Canadian intelligence system that feeds us information from Canada, and we would get the allied intelligence system which is part of the crisis management that you're talking about, feeding us information on what's going on inside Czechoslovakia. You get a surprising amount of information which gets corroborated in due course by the more official channels or just from the news. You know, if you're a reasonably well trained guy who knows- what to listen for, you're getting a lot of information from them. So when we had those things, I remember being inside the vault and the brigadier and the brigade commander were coming in a couple of times a day. I would update them on what was going on in Czechoslovakia, and I would tell them that I was updating the war plans; and if there was a problem because a certain piece of kit was down I would tell them that. Because I was aware of everything that was going on, and we were literally manning the war room as if we were expecting to move to our battle position. And so, by a combination of allied intelligence summaries, by a combination of Canadian intelligence summaries, which in those days took longer to come to us from Ottawa than they would today - they're much faster today because the communications systems are that much better - and the news, we would get all the information that we needed. We had every radio tuned up there. Usually, in our intelligence staff, we had a couple of linguists, a couple of guys that understood Czech and Slovak, and would listen to some of the freedom types of radios that were beaming across trying to tell us what was going on. In certain cases, as they did in Hungary in '56, calling for help, in English in fact, so we were able to listen to that, to a large extent. So the processes inside the brigade command post, if you want, were very much as if we were getting ready to go to war. But we were never placed on any alert status during the Czechoslovak Crisis, as I remember. We kept ourselves with the pen ready to sign a message calling people off leave and things like that, but I don't remember that we ever did do it. The upward link was also established and constantly maintained with Second British Division, with the BAOR. Information was coming to us. And the British kept us aware of what they were doing. So, at that level, the crisis management system looked pretty good.

 

(COX] Was there any significant discordance at the time? You said you got intelligence from Canada and from the allies, and NATO. Were they mutually reinforcing?

 

[BELZILE] By and large they were. The Canadian ones were usually good. The analyses that would come later, anyway. And that’s still true, I think. The Canadian intelligence assessments and intelligence summaries, when they got to us in Germany, tended to put a Canadian flavour in the comment part, giving the establishment of the source, how reliable it was, and how reliable the information was. The message was usually coded in one form or another through a few key words that told us where it came from, and added a little bit to the credibility of it. Then there's always a comment, of course. The Canadian comment was always important to us and the comment usually had a Canadian flavour to it. Whereas the one of course that comes through the NATO system doesn't have the same Canadian connotation. And for a Canadian commander overseas, it is very important to get the Canadian one, because if you were the top of the totem pole there, despite the fact that there is an ambassador at NATO, and despite the fact that there is an ambassador in Germany, despite the fact that you have other channels of Canadian policy, things are being passed to you. You can foresee easily a lot of circumstances where you have to take the whole onus on your own shoulders, about what you're going to do in preparing the stages and things like that. And I guess, theoretically, we all have the attitude that you've got to be prepared to justify, that you've got to be prepared to validate later, why you've done certain actions. So I suppose we all have the tendency, a bit, of making sure that our files are up-to-date. And the Canadian one of course becomes critical because we know its coloured by the External Affairs assessment. We know that it comes coloured by somebody else as opposed to just the military.

 

[HILL] Your remarks about crisis management at the brigade headquarters level are very interesting, as I think in NATO headquarters there was some concern about how well crisis management functioned at the time of the Czechoslovak Crisis. In fact, I think that one of the things that happened was that there was so much information in the air that they had difficulty figuring out what was going on in terms of Soviet troop movements and so on; and I think the other thing was that there were cases in which Soviet ambassadors in some of the allied capitals in fact notified by the Western allies that they were moving into Czechoslovakia, but some of this was not in fact reported back to NATO headquarters. I think, subsequently, there was quite a lot of work done in strengthening those procedures. But it does make it all the more interesting that at the ground level, the front line level, on the whole you felt that things were relatively good.

 

[BELZILE] Well, we felt we had sufficient information, as I said. If my memory serves me correctly, we never instituted any stages of alert other than perhaps the very basic Canadian ones. We never did. However, when things started happening like this, we tended to use it as an exercise.  When I say that I hauled the intelligence staff into the war room, they started working shifts 24 hours a day at that stage. So they were getting a crisis atmosphere, a good training session out of it, and dealing with real information instead of an exercise scenario where you paint the situation. I wasn't painting the situation; I wanted them to paint it for me; I wanted them to be as factual as they could possibly be. Of course, in our briefings to the Canadian authorities at that stage, we always qualified the information we had by its degree of reliability. But it surely helps if it's corroborated by Canadian intelligence analysis and by German, and by American and British analysis, plus supported by somebody who's able to tune in to a radio signal from some isolated small station in the mountains in Czechoslovakia that's beaming a message, like - "Come and help us", that really describes some of the activity that is going on. A lot of our people are able to extrapolate from a relatively small bit of information, figuring out the area where this is going on and that is going on. And, of course, if you're hearing about a lot of Soviet tanks moving in the area, you start developing the order of battle as best you can. And within a period of time you can probably pin down what regiment it is, what division it is, how many of them there are, and where they are.

 

[HILL] I'd just like to ask again, on this European period, two points of clarification. One is, you mentioned Soviet officers photographing Canadian tanks and so on. Were these the Soviet officers with the military missions in Stuttgart or wherever it is?

 

[BELZILE] The SACSMIS we used to call them in the north. Then there are the ones in the south around Lahr with the French. Those were the exchange missions that were established after The War, during the occupation period. In every one of the four old occupation zones, the British, the American, the French, and the Soviet zones, there are missions from the others. And they're still there. And there's a major general heading the Soviet mission with the French headquarters in Baden, for instance, which rattled my wife at one point, because they met us at the French embassy on 14 July, about two weeks after we arrived in Germany, and I was the new commander of a brigade. And a Soviet general met us at a cocktail party and headed straight for me, with an interpreter. He said: "General, welcome back to Germany". And he knew exactly where I'd been before. And then he turned to my wife and said: "And how are your two little girls". She just looked at me and said: "Let's leave". You get used to that.

 

[COX] I was going to ask a very general question, just in case we don't get back to it. Given the two periods that you were there, were you happy to be with the Second British Division?

 

[BELZILE] Yes, I suppose I'm one of those who can compare the two periods. The real reason that the Canadian army, I think, to a large extent, was perhaps happier in its Northern deployment days, was that from a purely military and planning point of view, it was much tidier. We had a portion of the front, and we knew where we were going to go. When you become a reserve formation for a central army group, as we are in the south, it is more difficult. In my years there, I had to do a lot of talking to try and narrow down the employment options of the brigade so that we could do some sensible planning. To say that you’re likely to be used anywhere between Kassel and the Austrian border, it is pretty difficult to do any dumping programmes, to make any pre-deployment arrangements, to know where you’re going to store some stocks forward, move some of your ammunition ahead of time, or things like that. If you don't know if you're going to be fighting near Kassel or by the Austrian border, you never know for sure how to prepare yourself. I suppose you can always say, well, if you have a very definite place, you might never get there. But if we had never gotten to that place in the old days we’d at least have been somewhere behind there. Because we were stationed there. So we knew exactly where we were going and we knew what part of the front was a Canadian responsibility. With the deployment now, we have no idea. We have some definite staging areas, some definite deployment areas that we would start from, but it's much more difficult to elaborate sound military planning, with logistics systems well keyed in to the whole system. A commander on a front field is very uncomfortable if he doesn't understand how the tail behind him is working. Its not a comfortable position at all when you don't know where you will get your ammo the next day from, or petrol for your tanks, or food for the troops.

 

[HILL] Just one last, small question. You mentioned that, at this stage, the Canadian forces had a tactical nuclear weapon. I think you did. Was that the Lacrosse?

 

[BELZILE] That was the SSM, the Honest John. We had two batteries. We had a training battery in Canada which had no weapons, and we had the active battery in Germany which had weapons; but weapons in the hands of Americans, who were co-located with us. That was the custodian system.

 

[COX] I suppose you had two-key systems.

 

[BELZILE] Yes. The Americans never gave up their weapons totally. It was the same here and the same with our air force weapons and the 104s. There was always American custodial staff for the weapons, although we did the security around the weapons sites and things like that. But there's no way a Canadian could have used a weapon on his own hook.

 

Part IV - Cyprus, 1965 and 1969-70

 

[HILL] General Belzile, you served in Cyprus on two occasions: first in 1965, and then for a while when you commanded the Second Van Doos between 1969 and 1970. Could you tell us how valuable do you think UNFICYP was in containing the Cyprus crisis in 1964? You were there in 1965, but in fact there must have been a clear idea as to the role that force had played the previous year.

 

[BELZILE] Oh, very much so. In fact, in 1965 we were the third unit to go there. So it was exactly a year after the first Canadian unit went in there and they had replaced the British para-regiment in Nicosia and Kyrenia. The line was pretty well established in 1965 between the two, but the exchanges of fire between the two sides, with us being caught in the crossfire to a certain extent, were still fairly common; to the point where you would normally listen to an exchange of fire and go and investigate. We were able then to set up telephone lines to both the Greeks and the Turks and find out who was doing the shooting and go in and investigate after, so that we could report what had started it. It happened often enough that the investigation hardly went beyond that, in ‘65. You knew you could have as many as five or six times a day an exchange of fire between the two and you went in to check that, and got them to stop; and eventually you pacified them both. And they accused each other all the time of having started it. Most of the times we knew because of the location of our troops, in reference to the direction of the bullets. You could tell, usually, where they came from. So we were able to pacify them, usually, very quickly. But there were a sufficient number of these incidents happening that, in a daily SITREP, we probably reported something like four or five exchanges of fire, between Kyrenia and Saint Hilarion Castle. An estimated 7 or 8 hundred rounds were fired by both sides. Both sides would deny any involvement in starting the thing. We'd walk around and check that there were no casualties, nobody hurt. No dead animals and what have you. Case closed! That was about the extent of it. In 1969, if a thing like that would have happened, it would have gone all the way to New York, because it was so rare then. It was very peaceful at that stage. There had been a bit of an incident in '68, before we got there, but by the '69 period it was very quiet. So the difference between the two was dramatic, literally!

 

So, if I could go back to '65, I don't have any doubt from seeing the situation on the ground, at that time, that the Canadian and other United Nations contingents' presence in '64 was literally what stopped the bloodshed, because what was established as the green line was just the width of this room. In certain places, you could throw rocks at each other, or bottles at each other, never mind shooting. I mean, they are that close at times. And the two factions there had had incidences of things that would approach, I guess in any language and any stage of history, massacres really. . The numbers may not have been that great, but they would be' massacres in the way they were performed. The feelings were so strong between the two that, if we hadn't been in there, I don't have any doubts in my mind that it would have been worse in those days. Obviously, I think the presence of the Canadians and the other contingents in '64 stabilized the situation, no doubt about it. In ‘65, the situation was stabilized, although there were still, as I mentioned at the beginning, a lot of exchanges of fire. What we were trying to do in '65, what we started to try to do, was to try to normalize life a bit. So we did a lot of setting up of first-aid operations in the villages. We brought in military first-aid teams; we'd run sick parades, in the enclave and in Turkish villages which were completely surrounded by the Greeks.

 

The only way you could bring somebody who was sick or about to have a baby from a village in the Turkish enclave to a Turkish hospital in Nicosia, for instance, was to actually physically escort them with an armed vehicle in the front and an armed vehicle in the back. And we would warn the Greek police that we were going through with a pregnant lady, and take her to Nicosia and through their lines. We actually moved with machine guns in the front and machine guns in the back, hustling this young lady to the first Turkish hospital. The Greeks were trying to prevent that sort of thing, because, in their normalization process, they were hoping to convince the Turks to use the Greek hospitals; because they said that, as far as they were concerned, there was only one country and there was no need for the two communities. There is that great mixture of religion and politics there. Somebody asked me, at one point, whether I had experienced that as a youngster in Quebec. I said yes, I have, so I don't find the Greek-Turkish situation that strange to me, because it was very much like the role of Quebec when I was a kid.

 

The whole atmosphere in Cyprus in '65 was permeated by it. There was complete mistrust between the two sides, at least to the point where they both tried to accuse the other continually of violations. So we spent a lot of time out there doing investigations. We had to be terribly careful that, while investigating those violations, we didn't wind up working for one side or the other's intelligence systems. For instance, I remember cases where the Greek police would insist I go and meet them by Bel a Paix Abbey, so we could have a look across the pass at the Turkish positions. And they were trying to tell me: "See, that's a new bunker - a new bunker - a new bunker", knowing full well that I would have to send some troops there to go and have a look to see if things had changed since the last time we'd inspected the thing. If you came back and confirmed that it had changed, or not, you see, they'd put their maps up-to-date. So they were trying to use us. They were trying to use us to collect their intelligence and things like that. So that was the atmosphere in 1965. Total mistrust. There was no real fight between the two, other than occasional exchanges of fire.

 

I used to feel very strongly in 1965 that we were absolutely necessary to keep them from open fighting. In '69 I felt a little differently. There were two or three exchanges of fire in the six months that I spent there. It was summer. It was hot. I became a scuba diver to pass the time away. And of course we encountered then a lot more of the same kind of problems I was talking about earlier about Korea. You had to keep the troops busy, so they didn't go to Regina Street and look for the whiskey girls and spend every cent they had just to look at a female smiling at them. So the problem was a little different then; and of course the situation was stable then, I guess, in '69. In '65 it was more or less stable. So the easy answer is that there is no doubt in my mind that in '64 and '65 we helped, and probably saved a lot of lives, by being there. I would be a little more skeptical about 1969.

 

[HILL] At that time, the Canadian contingent, I believe, was partly on the Green Line in Nicosia and then also to the north and up towards Kyrenia. At that stage, the Turkish community was in what was in effect an enclave, which didn't have access to the sea at Kyrenia.

 

[BELZILE] Within the enclave there was the Turkish village of Temblos, in which I had a couple of incidents. There was a little enclave by Saint Hilarion Castle, and then the village of Temblos, which was almost at the coast. You had Temblos just inland, and then Kyrenia on the coast; and then Lepitos. This is where we had to go over a mountain pass, which was very rough and very narrow. If you wanted to take some wounded or some sick people out from the village into a Turkish hospital in Nicosia, as I was describing, the only way, of course, was through the Greek lines. Through the normal highway, through the normal pass. And this is what forced us to have to go through the village to Kyrenia and having to warn the police and do the armed escort to take out a pregnant woman.

 

But every time we pulled their people out of the hole like this, which we thought was our job, the Turkish side felt that it reduced a bit their propaganda capabilities. And so they would try and pull some stunts on us once in a while. They'd say, it takes too long when we go through the United Nations. We have a wife in the village that's about to have a child and we're not going to wait. So we're going to go up by Saint Hilarion Castle and we'll walk her. Just about kill the poor woman. But, just to prove their point, they would run her up all the way up there and bring her to the Turkish road that would start just on the other side of the Kyrenia range. They'd bring her down through Genellie and Orticoy, and take her down to a Turkish hospital. And, of course, if she died, then I was the guy to blame, because supposedly the United Nations wasn't fast enough or the Greeks weren't cooperating enough to let that woman go through. You know their line; they had no business doing that. So, one of the things they kept on wanting to do all the time was to build a road to join these two Turkish areas. There was in fact a trail, with an OP here, which we called trails end. And there was one at "The White House." Strange, but there was a Turkish restaurant called the White House; and Saint Hilarion Castle was just there. There were exchanges of fire quite often in that area. So they started to build that road,and, of course, in order to be able to do that they wanted to knock my post out. So I actually had to deploy my company in fighting formation once, in 1965, to prevent the Turks from going through. They were going to push our OP out of the way with bulldozers, unless I ordered it out. And of course I said I wasn’t going to do that. I said, you know, if they come and try to remove it by force, they must realize they're attacking the United Nations, a United Nations position. And the United Nations would defend themselves. Now while all this was going on, the Greeks knew that they were building this road. And we didn't want the Turks to do it because that was considered provocative. While this was going on, they started to squeeze on both sides; and they started to approach with the intention of sealing off the village. So I had to establish two new posts, one on each side,to keep the Greeks at bay. And these were still in existence in '69 when I was there, because we were still in the north in those days. So we had some of these instances in '65 which came very close to fairly major shooting exchanges. But somehow we turned them around, with 5 or 10 minutes to go most of the time. They played that chicken game, the only way I could qualify it, to see how far they could push us and how far they could push things. So it's very useful to have been there, but at the same time it was very trying; especially for some of our junior leaders who were really on the spot there, because you know you don't really know when anything is going to start. So, I'd keep a unit in Cyprus, regardless of our national policy, because this is the greatest training that we've got. It's the nearest thing we have to a guy being on the line where there are bullets flying and the other guy's got a gun.

 

[HILL] I also went down that track at that time to Temblos and you could see the sea; it was about 200 yards away but the people who lived in that village could not go to the sea at that time. That is all changed now, of course. All that area was occupied by the Turkish army in '74, and so that whole issue is now different, the whole situation has changed. Do you still feel the Canadian contingent in Cyprus is performing a valuable task at this time? I mean, the problem of keeping the two communities apart has now gone,and there are other problems. The two sides are still confronting each other, but you don't have the kinds of problems you just described - of people having to drive to hospital through hostile territory and so forth.

 

[BELZILE] I think you can best answer that by answering exactly the same way I did in 1974. When the Turkish invasion took place in 1974, I had just taken command of Four Brigade in Germany. The airborne regiment was in Cyprus, and when the invasion started it became obvious that they needed a little more protection. So we shipped some from Germany. We took some heavier vehicle APCs, and there are still about 11 or 12 of them on Cyprus (I was there last time, last year, about this time, and they're still there), with the intention of having a little more protection for our people as they moved about and patrolled there between the Greeks and Turks or tried to stop them. General Quinn was then commanding Canadian forces in Europe, and since I was the most recent commander in Europe that had been to Cyprus (about 5 years before) he asked me then what I thought was going to happen in Cyprus. And I said, well, in my humble opinion, the Cyprus problem is about to be solved. And I said, when the Turks move in there, the world and the United Nations may not like the way they're going to solve the problem, but they have in fact solved the problem. They have partitioned the island. And I don't see anyway out of it. And I'd be terribly surprised if, in my lifetime and the lifetime of most of the people around me right now, we saw the old arrangements again. The Turks have kept only two areas besides the main 40% of the island or so that they hold. They have kept Famagusta, and they have kept a little enclave in the south, which in my mind are two bargaining chips. They're prepared eventually to give them up, I think, for a de facto recognition. As you know, they have created their own state up there now. They use Turkish Lira as money; there are Turkish banks, everybody speaks Turkish; they changed the names, and the whole thing is Turkish. I don't think they're about to move from there. As to whether we could foresee that coming, I think the Greeks, in my personal opinion, gave them the best excuse under the sun, by trying to put Nichos Sampson in power. Nichos Sampson of course was in Eoka. It was pretty well established that was an Eoka hit man during the British days. And the Turks simply would not accept that.

 

But, you know, even in '65, I remember seeing bottles of pop in a Turkish restaurant that would have the word " Texen" on it. Texen, according to my best lexicon in Turkish, means separation. So, in '65, they fully intended to separate the island.

 

[HILL] Do you think the UN force there now still has a very useful role to play?

 

[BELZILE] If you accept, or partially accept, the premise that the Cyprus problem is solved, even if we don't like the way it has been solved, by the Turks, then "No". I think you could perform the same function now in a progressive way. Or, if you want, you could probably do the same thing with teams of observers, like we had in Lebanon and Jordan and places like that; as opposed to troops. However, it will probably take a while for the wounds of 1974 to stop festering. I suspect there would be some howling if we tried to pull the United Nations right out. My opinion is that we would probably need to have an evolutionary withdrawal, where we would change the nature of the force into something else. But, as a force that keeps the two sides apart, I don't think its usefulness is as great as it used to be.

 

[HILL] Now for the last question, about having UN forces in there. Although Turkey eventually intervened in and occupied the northern part of the island, at least Turkey and Greece did not go to war, although I think it came very close to that on a number of occasions. And even though the initial role of the U.N. forces was undermined, if you like, by the Turkish invasion, nonetheless, the fact of Canada and other U.N. forces being in Cyprus in that earlier period was really very valuable from a NATO point of view, I would say. I mean, I wonder if you care to comment on that point? Just how valuable has Canada's role in Cyprus been to NATO?

 

[BELZILE] Oh, I think the whole presence of the U.N. contingent in Cyprus is certainly seen by most of us, and I believe with very valid reason, as a stabilizing influence on the southern flank of NATO. As you pointed out, the danger of Greece and Turkey going to war in 1974 was probably very great at one point, although I think that what kept it from happening, probably, was the great proximity of the Turkish forces, versus the long line that the Greek forces would have had to fly or to navigate to make any significant impact on the situation. It obviously has not helped the relationship between Greece and Turkey. And I think it does flaw, to a large extent, the security of the southern flank of NATO. But I think that the animosity that existed between the Greeks and the Turks would have been there anyway; because I think it has always been there. Cyprus is not the only point of contention between the two.

 

[HILL] But you do feel that Canada's role in Cyprus is well regarded by the other NATO allies, and has been seen as making a major contribution to allied relations?

 

[BELZILE] I think it still is, although since '74, basically, it has been so stable that there has not been very much involvement by the troops, except for manning the Green Line.

 

[HILL] But in the earlier period, for example.

 

[BELZILE] In the earlier period, absolutely.

 

[HILL] Thank you very much, General Belzile.

 

Part V - Canadian Years, 1968 and 1970-74

 

[HILL] General Belzile, aside from the second tour of duty in Cyprus, which we have just mentioned, the years between 1968 and 1974 were spent in Canada commanding the Second Van Doos at Valcartier; as a member of the career planning staff at CFHQ and as Commandant of the Combat Arms School at CFB Gagetown. These were also quite momentous years in Canada’s relations with NATO. Canadian troop levels in Europe were cut in half in 1969. There was a new Defence White Paper in 1971 which put national sovereignty and defence of North America ahead of NATO and peace keeping. The Canadian Armed Forces were cut in numbers and faced static budgets which prevented them from carrying out normal re¬equipment programmes. The CAST commitment to Norway was established, but in reality nothing very much was done to make it a live, functioning, military activity. At the same time, in 1970, the Armed Forces were relied upon very heavily during the FLQ crisis, which saw 10,000 service personnel deployed in Quebec. I wonder if you could tell us something of your personal experience of those years. What was the effect on the Armed Forces of the developments I've just mentioned?

 

[BELZILE] Well, if I may, I'd like to perhaps start with a few comments on my last few months of service in Europe prior to coming back to Canada and taking over the command which you mentioned. The first indication that there was going to be a massive cut in Europe came to us while I was still the Brigade Major and the senior operations officer in the brigade. Teams from Canada started to come in, to discuss what a brigade group of about 2,500 people would look like, situated in the south of Germany, compared to what we had. You remember, in previous conversations, I mentioned that the brigade was at its peak at Soest at the time with about 6,600 people, a nuclear unit and a tremendous amount of fire power. The commander, at that stage, using me, and his other staff as planners, indicated that we were to take a first cut at trying to design this force for southern Germany, with a few basic principles in mind. The first one, and the most critical one, was to be, that you were not going to reduce any more than possible the fire power of the organization i. e., the hitting or the fighting power of the organization. And most of your cuts should be designed at the outset as being in the administrative support and in the reduction of our capabilities to sustain the force. You would have only a bit smaller force at the front if you ever needed to use it, but it would not have the durability, it would not have the same lasting power, as the organization that we had had in the north. So, that's the way we first looked at it, with a lot of misgivings, to be quite honest, because no commander on the front line is going to feel very comfortable unless he is comfortable with whats behind him - what the support systems are going to be. Nevertheless, I guess, in the back of our minds, we believed that nobody would leave us there as orphans and that somehow and some way, the administrative support, the logistics support, which had to be weakened, were going to catch up with us before we did get involved. So that was the context in which I got involved in this reduction in Europe: I was one of the staff officers who had some of the early cuts at designing the reduced force. Despite the statements by the commander at the time that we should try and keep as much of the fire power as possible, that turned out to be impossible to do within the parameters that were given to us regarding overall strength. Things such as the SSM Battery, the nuclear unit, disappeared at that stage. Things like the specialist anti-tank unit, which had the first sort of missile system that we used as an anti-tank system, as opposed to other tanks or guns. There was also the SS-11 French system that we had bought a few years before. That organization disappeared as a group. One of the basic battle groups that I was describing earlier, the battalion level kind of organization, disappeared, leaving us with only three battalion groups instead of the four that we continued to believe we really needed.

 

[HILL] What was the reaction of the army at that time?

 

[BELZILE] It was one of frustration. You’ll also remember this was also the period of the integration process, ordered by the Minister of National Defence at that time. And integration did not bother too many people because we all recognized that in small peacetime forces you cannot afford really the flexibility of training pilots for instance, in three different schools. Let the RCAF do it, instead of having three schools; training cooks, training drivers in three schools, depending on whether they were going to go to the navy or the air force or the army. All of us recognized that a lot of these things would provide tremendous savings if we were able to join together a lot of that kind of training. And the command and control above it would get better coordinated and better integrated.

 

[HILL] That of course was in the '64 White Paper. What in effect seemed to happen was that it took several years to implement. I mean I recall in '67 there were still the old uniforms. It wasn't until '68 the new one came into effect.

 

[BELZILE] That was true. But this was the start of it, and all of this was happening in a parallel fashion. Not only were we being cut, but our basic philosophical or fundamental underpinnings, if you want, were changing dramatically. So I'm mentioning it only perhaps to try and explain the context in which we functioned at the time. So we weren't very happy with that, because we felt we would have a less balanced force, one with no depth, one quite capable of fighting within its given strength and equipment and training status, but with no durability. So nobody felt particularly good about that and that's the reason I bring it up. Anyway, I came home at that stage, before all this in fact took place, so my involvement was in the planning, but I was able to see the uneasiness that was floating around the army, particularly, at that time. I didn't have too many contacts with the other services at that stage, because the air force was still in France and southern Germany and we didn't have that many contacts with them.

When I came back to take over command of the battalion in Quebec City and in Valcartier I knew I had two very interesting years ahead of me, so a lot of the big policy aspects of the thing really didn't bother me too much. I'd just like to mention a few of the things we got involved in, too, at that stage; and you'll see why policy was the last thing on my mind, because I was too involved. When I got back I already knew that I was going to go to Cyprus in '69, so a lot of the early days of my service there was Cyprus- oriented. I also already knew that we were going to form a new quick-reaction force in Canada, called the Canadian Airborne Regiment. And one of the roles that I had in the second battalion of the Royal Vingt Deuxieme then, at that stage, was that we had the parachute role, we had the Northern Canada Reaction Force, its functions were now going to be taken over by a new organization. So that affected us in the sense that I took everything that was parachute-training oriented in my unit, and gave it all up including about 200 men, to a new organization which was forming up. So it was a period of turmoil. But a period that was particularly interesting because of the turmoil. We did Cyprus. When we came back, we thought perhaps that, with the new White Paper, things were going to start changing. The White Paper wasn't out yet. It didn't come out until '72 or so, I guess, or late '71. So, at that stage of the game, our priorities were not seen as being different. Instead of the parachute and the northern defense role, my battalion was staffed then by Mobile Command, to be more oriented towards the southern hemisphere, more oriented to reaction perhaps in tropical areas, to wherever Canada decided to send us, either for United Nations duties or other tasks. We had to have a force capable of reacting fairly quickly to whatever came up. And I was then sent with the aircraft carrier Bonaventure, as a floating base, and we went to Jamaica for about three or four months. We trained in the jungle, which was totally different for a unit that had previously been northern-oriented. We were in the bush then, learning to swim with floating rafts and things like that, across rivers, and in a particularly warm climate, and an oppressive kind of heat that we found in the cockpit country particularly, that big hole in the northern part of Jamaica where we did our training.

 

So, at the end of all this, the brouhaha was starting to be felt on the FLQ side. The Montreal City Police were also making noises about strikes, which was a little ahead of the 1970 FLQ crisis. But in 1969, you will remember, we were doing some contingency planning to go and replace the police force in the centre of Montreal. I was involved in '69 and '70 doing all the recces and things like that, ready to go into Montreal to replace the police if they ever decided to walk out. As it turned out, this was very useful, because when we had to deploy for the FLQ, later, all of our recces and all of our plans to move into the city and to operate there were already in place, although they weren't originally set up for the FLQ crisis. And I think that perhaps it is important to mention that, in a way; it indicates that a well trained armed force can be fairly flexible. But our original reconnaissance, original planning, to move into areas like Montreal, was mostly related to police strikes. You remember that the first signs of FLQ activity started much earlier than that, in 1963. The existence of the FLQ in Quebec was well known at that time, and we tended to try and get closer than the police, to try and get our intelligence network a little up-to-date. But we were discouraged from doing so, interestingly enough, and I don't remember who discouraged us. I guess we were simply told at that time that this was a police matter and we had no business trying to keep track of who the FLQ was and things like that. We were to leave that to the police. However, for what it's worth, I think some of us kept ourselves as aware as we could of the whole situation, because I think we could read the writing on the wall, that somewhere along the way we'd have to get involved with that situation.

 

So anyway, in the summer of '70, I came to Ottawa, and when the FLQ crisis broke in the fall of '70, I was a staff officer in Ottawa - a frustrated one, because I would have liked to have taken my troops on this job. I had done the planning and I had done all the deployment. However, somebody else got the involvement and I was on staff here in the old headquarters in those days. When the force was also deployed in Ottawa, it was under the command of a very good friend of mine, General Rad Walters, who commanded Petawawa. And he used to come into my office. So I kept myself fairly up-to-date on what was going on then. But they were covering the sector of the National Capital Region, really, and the other side of the Ottawa River, the part of Quebec from Hull going north to Petawawa, where you'll remember some of the searches took place for either kidnapped people such as Cross or what have you. Some of the earlier searches took place up there too. And some of the mass arrests of course around Luskville and Quyon and a whole bunch of little places up there, were not seen like the same tinderbox that Montreal or even Quebec City were. But I guess the police had enough indication that there might be trouble. We had some troops around Ottawa, not only for the protection of various embassies and VIPs, but also for reaction to anything in the part of Quebec which is just across the river from Ottawa.

 

[HILL] I would like to ask one or two further questions following up on what you just said. The first one is about the troop cuts in Europe which you mentioned. In other words, the brigade in Europe had an idea that these troop cuts might be coming, as I think you said, before it was announced. I was wondering, did the forces of the other allies get wind of this in advance, and what was their reaction?

 

[BELZILE] I'm not sure how much they really knew about it, but at the stage when I was still there, I expect they knew quite a bit. At my level, I was working fairly closely with the Belgian brigade that was also stationed in Soest, and we used to conduct some command post exercises with them occasionally. They lived right around the same area that we did, and used the facilities of our officer clubs and things like that. And I think that, at that stage, they expected that we would move. And of course they wanted all the PMQs, the family housing, and all of our schools, and our club facilities, which they eventually wound up taking over. But I don't really know the state of knowledge of this quite honestly. It was kept fairly discreet still at that stage, but I expect that NATO was well aware of it. Therefore it would have filtered down, but I don't have any precise recollection of their reaction to that.

 

[HILL] Do you recollect what was the attitude in the army, the Canadian army, after the troops cuts were announced? You were back in Canada at that time. What was the reaction of the army in general, and most of the officer corps?

 

[BELZILE] Well, I think that, generally speaking, "disastrous" would probably be the word that I would start from, and then qualify it. Regardless of what White Paper we're dealing with, and regardless of the priorities therein stated, our NATO commitment by and large has steered the professional development of the army, and that's one of the things that I think scared us the most about NATO becoming a lesser priority to a certain extent, at least in words and in print. There was the fact that we were not going to get as many people rotated through the highly sophisticated, the technological, battlefield that was contemplated for Central Europe. And I would not belittle that from a point of view of professionalism of the force. We still feel like that today, in fact. Unless you can get your army rotated, and most of your people through a place like Europe, which has the high-intensity battlefield as a likely scenario, we feel that we are missing out on the general staff training and missing out on the professional development of our own officer corps. So despite the fact we can do United Nations tasks, we can do a whole bunch of reaction actions in Canada and that sort of thing, I think we feel pretty strongly in the military that the NATO commitment is really at the base, at the core, of our professionalism. As you know, we discuss warfare on a total spectrum, from low intensity to high intensity. There is no scenario that we can think of for any war that would occur in Central Europe that is not in the high intensity spectrum. We felt then, and we continue to feel to this day, that Europe is where the high intensity battlefield is likely to be. And hence the professional training of our officers should include that. Because the better and the higher intensity the force is trained for, the easier it is to do the other jobs. While the opposite is not true. You cannot have a United Nations type of light force and throw it into the high intensity situation and expect it to function very well. So, despite the fact that in 1971 the Paper changed the priorities, in actual fact, as far as the army particularly was concerned, we still kept our eyeball mostly, from a professional point of view, on Central Europe, which we still do in all of our doctrinal studies.

 

[HILL] There is also a point about having a critical mass, if you like, within the Canadian army. If the European commitment had been done away with altogether, as was discussed I think at one stage, then presumably there would not have been a need for more than say a maximum of 10,000 ground troops in Canada; then with that, I mean, you would not have had, probably, a solid, coherent kind of armed force.

 

[BELZILE] That is a very valid point indeed. But perhaps more important in my mind is the fact that, professionally, even a smaller army would have lost considerable expertise, which takes years to rebuild, should you ever need it. If you would just allow me one example: you know, at that time, also, the battle was on as to whether we were to retain tanks or not, because they were perceived as an aggressive weapons system whereas we were purely a defensive force. What do we need tanks for? Well, without getting into a lesson in tactics, you know, the tank; on the battlefield, is not only a well protected vehicle, it is a vehicle with a tremendous amount of shock power. And if you don't have that kind of shock and that kind of sustained power, you have a force which is totally unbalanced. And, as the Israelis proved, the same was true the opposite way in '73. Using tanks without infantry is suicidal also. So you need this all-arms, general combat capability. Once you start removing a segment of this, you've got an army that doesn't understand tank-infantry cooperation, doesn't understand how to use tanks in a defensive battle and how to use them also in an offensive battle. You stop understanding this. And when any emergency starts later, it is too late. It would take years to rebuild the kind of expertise which is now imbued in the officer corps. You remove one spoke of the wheel, then the wheel is weaker. And most people start saying, well, you know, you get a lesser task then; we won't ask you to do the same job. You will do more of a police job and things like that. But what you have lost is that total expertise in a certain area and the synergetic value of that expertise. You could also use the example of the Navy. How long do you think it would take our Canadian Navy to rebuild? Even if we gave them the equipment, suddenly, which they don't have, the mine warfare capabilities that a balanced navy should have, an anti-mine capability or a mine sweeping capability, which the Canadian Navy hasn't had for years, how long would it take the Navy to rebuild their expertise? I'm not a sailor, but I submit to you that it would take years of rebuilding to rebuild the expertise which has been lost. And we felt very strongly about the tank. Not only for its power, and for its weapons system. We felt very strongly that, if it was removed, we would be left with an army that would not be able to fight in a high intensity battlefield, because it would not be balanced. We would then have had to revert to much lesser roles and probably not have been able to survive very well in a high intensity battlefield. But if one ever decided to go back to a high- capability system, it would have taken years to rebuild the synergetic value that is necessary. So we sound emotional when we talk about tanks, but there is a little more than just that big iron machine. The whole professional cadre and corps of an army is involved.

 

[HILL] You mentioned the spoke of a wheel. I think the mechanized brigade group in Europe is seen as one spoke.But, also, a good portion of the army in Canada is in fact designed as a backup to that spoke. You have to have at least twice as many people here to provide rotational capabilities and backup in a wartime situation, if I'm not mistaken. Would you care to comment on that?

 

[BELZILE] You're perfectly right. We can say that, even without getting into the validity of the figures used in NATO planning for casualty rates and things like that in a high intensity battlefield. You were talking earlier about the critical mass. We talk about critical mass in a variety of fashions, but the critical mass that is the most important one in action, is the one that is required to maintain fighing capability. When you get a unit that's decimated, to about 65 to 70% of its original strength, that saps interpersonal knowledge and confidence within the group, and then what you're really dealing with is a gaggle of people instead of an organized and well balanced force. So we have tended, in past wars, and I submit that it would not be any different now, to believe that by the time a unit or formation gets to about 65%, you cannot just keep sending replacements to it and expect it to function to any capacity. So you have to pull it out of the line and replace it with another, new organization, with all the built- in collective training that they've done together, whilst you rebuild the other in the back somewhere. So, what this means is that you're looking at two types of reinforcements, two types of augmentation. You're looking at the individual one which goes in to fill a few key spots when a guy gets hurt, gets wounded or gets killed. You've got to replace him, or you lose coherence. You lose a tank, you lose a tank crew, you come in with a tank with a crew in it. You don't just arrive with a tank and give it to them. It's got to come with a gunner, with a driver, and with a crew commander. But at a certain point you can't keep doing that, you've got to literally pull the whole organization out and put a new one in there. Now, we expect in high casualty battlefields to have somewhere between 1 and 3% casualty rates on days of battle. And if 65% or 70% is considered the critical mass, that gives you 10 days at the highest rate. So it means that you have 30% decimation or attrition in that force, which starts playing very close to that critical mass and the ability of the organization to function well. So once you get below that you're really looking for another organization. That means you should have a twin organization. If your commitment calls you to stay there with that kind of force, you should really have, ready to go, a twin organization, or as close to a twin organization as could be there within 10 days. Or, if the commitment or the contact that the force is involved in is much less, put it at 1% if you want — if the intensity is a little less— you still have 30 days; that's 70% critical mass. So we wind up with somewhere between 10 and 30 days if we commit forces to battle in Europe; and if our commitment in Europe requires us to keep at least that level of force there without even augmenting it, then we need to be able to get another force in there of that same size within 10-30 days. In order to have it ready in Canada you should really have it here, fully manned, fully equipped, with similar equipment; and there's one of our main flaws. We don't have enough tanks, for instance, to do that now. Then we have to think also of the CAST commitment. So we've got two brigades committed to Europe, one of which is in Canada. And we need at least two to back them up, at least two. And then some sort of a system for individual augmentation or crew augmentation and so on. And so far you have not even considered looking at expanding the force to say, perhaps, a division, and so on, which history tells us would probably happen quickly.

 

[HILL] Also, there's the point, I think, about rotation in peacetime. I mean, you cannot keep one force over in Germany indefinitely. You've got to be able to bring them back here again, so presumably there's that requirement as well. You have to send some people over there for three years, then bring them back again. So there's that sort of requirement. I was very interested in your comments on the critical mass on the battlefield; but also there was the question of the critical mass of the army in general in Canada. You need a certain size in order to function at all, in fact, in the kind of environment we are talking about.

 

[BELZILE] Now, of course, when you come back to Canada, the army need not - if we continue to use the analogy of spokes in a wheel - the army need not to be at the same intensity, the same capacity, as needed on the Central Front. For operations in Canada, we don't expect a horde of tanks coming across the border, because there's no way they can come in across the border, or land on the beach in the north. But the kind of problem that you would probably have in Canada would be an internal security one; and where vital points, either of a military nature or a civilian nature, water systems and what have you, could be subjected to partisan sabotage or indeed to direct infiltration by such troops as Speznatz and groups like that. It can be very demanding in terms of numbers of troops, but not necessarily with the same equipment or indeed the same standard of training as for Europe. But the ideal force for that is one that is not necessarily available, except when the cadre forms, in peacetime. And the ideal force for that is probably the normal citizen army that we've always had in the past. I mean our reserves, or the territorials as they would call them in Britain, our Militia and other reserve forces. But that whole complex has got to fit together. The army system cannot consist of two separate armies. Professionally, it's got to be one that can flow from one to the other, because you never know how a scenario will develop. There's a maxim here that says that: "The only thing that you're sure of when a military operation starts is that nothing will be as you planned it". So your plan is just a starting point, a launching platform. Then everything takes its course. So the more flexible the force is, the more balanced the force, and the more ready your reserves and your mobilization basis, the more secure nationally we should feel.

 

[COX] I wanted to ask you, regardless of the outcome, did you feel that in '69 there were fair opportunities for the professional soldier to present his views to decision makers?

 

[BELZILE] That's a very interesting point. I've thought about it quite a lot. When I was commander of CFE in Europe, for example, most of the policy discussion that took place in Brussels never involved me as a commander on the spot. There were always some guys from Ottawa coming over, and leaving me with a bit of an uneasy feeling that whatever arrangements they made, I'd got to live with. I think that the commander on the spot should be involved, but, generally speaking, he is not. It's perhaps too strong an accusation, but the involvement of the local commander is often very marginal.

 

[HILL] I had much the same thought in my mind because it occurred to me while you were speaking. When you came back from Germany, in this period, as you mentioned, your first charge was looking after the north and looking after paratroop tasks, then given other duties, then sent down to Jamaica to train for world wide responsibilities, and then involved in civil duties in Canada. It must have been a time of great confusion in many ways, seen from the perspective of the military officer, not at the highest ranks, but at the regimental levels.

 

[BELZILE] I was in the Citadel then, of course. It is a great peacetime garrison, but it doesn't have much storage space, so we had to have facilities in Valcartier, also, about 18 miles up the road. I had a hanger for the Arctic kit, and a hanger for the tropical kit. And I said to my company commanders: "Whatever emergency we would go on, fellows, the part of the message to tell you to execute plan A or B will also have a paragraph that will say hanger B or hanger C, whatever it is, because that's where you bring the troops to pick-up the kit". Because, if you go to the tropics or if you go to Baffin Island, you need two different sets of kits. The underwear for the north is a little warm down south. So there are all of these things to consider. And we had to keep the kit for all of these tasks, and maintain it. And that brings me back to this question of critical mass. Its a real problem when you use the same people for multiple tasks. Some of the jobs are so different, one from the other, that you literally have to reorganize and re-equip the force every time you move.

 

[HILL] Did the military officers at the regimental level ever have the feeling that the people at the top had taken decisions without having much idea, really, of the implications for the guys on the ground? Here you are, all of a sudden, landed with a whole bunch of different tasks. The doctrine and training for those tasks are presumably different. And you're kind of left to scramble and implement it.

 

[BELZILE] I think that would be a fair observation; and I used to feel that way myself then. But I believe it is fair at this stage to tell you that, as I got to be more senior myself, I think I began to understand a little better the difficulties of the senior guys, also, in this planning process. Perhaps I would be less critical of them now. I moved to the "we," I guess, versus the "they". I would be a little less critical now because I understand the difficulties under which the senior staff operates a little better than I did then. But, by and large, except for bar talk, if you want, where you say, "Well, these so and sos don't know what the hell they're talking about", except for that, by and large, most of our people at the working level, the regimental level, don't concern themselves too much about these things.You don't have time.

 

[HILL] Let's talk a bit more about the CAST commitment. That was set up around the time that the troops in Germany were cut. Presumably you were over in Germany at the time those decisions were made. So you would not have been involved in any of those discussions at that time. But were the Van Doos involved at all in that period, or was that task given to other units elsewhere in the country?

 

[BELZILE] The CAST brigade, in it's early infancy, used to be a force made up from units from right across the country, as opposed to an organization like Five Brigade which has the majority of this task right now. But that came much later. There was a battalion of Van Doos, it wasn't mine, that had a CAST role at that stage, together with a battalion from Ontario and a battalion from western Canada. That sort of CAST brigade was not a brigade on the ground in Canada, it consisted of designated units from right across the country, that would come together and go to Norway when required. We had the same kind of situation with the parachute force at one time, also. We had a parachute role in Northern defence; it was done by a collection of units from across the country. This was instead of having an organization such as we have now, which is mainly at Petawawa, a lighter, quick-reaction force, sort of kept all together. In the early days of the parachute force, we used to use troops from all over the country. Likewise with CAST. But, in my two years in Quebec, or gallivanting between Jamaica and Cyprus, I really never gave such questions much thought. But I do remember that my sister battalion, the Third Van Doos, was involved in CAST at that time. However, it was only one of a variety of tasks.

 

[HILL] I think that was the point I wanted to ask.

 

[BELZILE] I had the north and I had the tropics. He had the north and he had Norway. So it was a multi-tasked organization; And the CAST commitment was only one of the things they had to plan for. Now, quite a few years later, a lot of us felt very uncomfortable with that kind of multiple tasking. I initiated a land forces operational effectiveness study when I was commander of Mobile Command, which led to the primary tasks assignment system that exists now in the Armed Forces. We changed that in 1984. But before that we had mostly multi-tasked units.

 

[HILL] David, do you have any questions on CAST?

 

[COX] No, except, I guess, to ask what was the logic of choosing units from across the country. It doesn't sound as if it would make military sense to do that, given where they had to go.

 

[BELZILE] I will have to try to put myself into the minds of some of my senior colleagues. One reason for drawing people from across the country in that way was, I think, historical. And the second was probably professional, wanting everybody to have a crack at this kind of territory and to be familiar with, and knowledgeable about, the land north of the Arctic Circle. And the same went for Norway. So, when exercises took place, you would expose more troops.

 

I mention the first reason, the historical one, because that refers to the way we've always committed troops to war in Canada. It has always been the case that we were careful that the troops didn't all come from the same area of Canada. I mean, in a given formation, such as a brigade, whether it was Dieppe, or elsewhere. We always made sure that if a force was going to be committed somewhere where there was a very strong chance that they would get a very bloody nose, then the casualties would be absorbed across the country. We didn’t want to see a couple of villages having all their young men wiped out. Now, I'm not sure how much validity there is to that. I'll leave that to the sociologists to worry about, except that I know that historically we've always done that. We've trained brigades that were from the same area, from the west or from Quebec or elsewhere, but we've never really committed them to action that way. The force in Germany is an example; there's always one French-speaking battalion, and there's always one that comes from the West.

 

The second reason, without elaborating, is the one that I think has most validity. That was the interest in exposure. Get everybody to know as much as possible. Again, the small army syndrome- the development of a small army that is truly professional and endowed with maximum flexibility. So, you put as many people as you can in the Norway scenario, and you put as many as you can in the Central Europe scenario. Not for the pleasure of sending them on trips, but to expose more people to the various kinds of territory, to give them knowledge of the land, and to teach them how to interact with other allied forces. So that you'd get more people in Canada familiar with working with the Norwegians, the Italians, and so on.

 

Part VI - Europe Again, 1974-79

 

[HILL] General Belzile, I believe that, between 1974 and 1979, you held a succession of senior command and staff positions in Europe, notably as CO of Four Mechanized Brigade Group in Lahr, as Assistant Chief of Staff, Ops, at Central Army HQ in Mannheim, and then as Commander of Canadian Forces Europe. These were also vital years in Canadian-NATO policy and in East-West affairs: beginning with detente and the Vladivostok Accord and ending with doubts over SALT II, NATO's two-track decision on intermediate-range nuclear forces, and finally the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. I wonder: how do you see this period of your career?; what do you think were the most important developments regarding Canada's NATO policy and East-West affairs?; which ones were you personally involved in?; and what comments do you have on them?

 

[BELZILE] Well, that's a big question. I was thinking about that a bit last night; and in fact I was wondering if the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan wasn't at the tail end of that period. In fact, I think I was back in Canada when that occurred, because I got involved in some of the NATO post-Afghanistan planning from my job here in Ottawa. But, to start with, as a very general statement, I think it would be safe to say that, besides eventually becoming the godfather, if you want, of the whole army in Canada, this was perhaps the most professionally rewarding period of my career. It was a fascinating time. And the three jobs that I had then are, of course, three jobs that a lot of people would have given their right hand for. So, I was very lucky. I am referring not only to the two periods of command in Europe, but also to that middle section there that lasted only one year. I would like to spend a little time discussing that. I am talking about the period when I was at Central Army Group Headquarters in Mannheim- Seckenheim, in the Heidelberg area in Germany. The reason that I want to discuss that period, a bit, is because that was the first time that I was really exposed to any extent to a large international headquarters and could see it functioning with some of the national jealousies that sometimes one observes. The two years when I commanded the brigade were also significant, in two ways. First of all, this was when we won the psychological battle for the tank. And I would like to mention that I was very involved in that. I've already elaborated to a considerable extent before about this need for a balanced force, so I will spare you from getting too involved emotionally again in that issue. But I will make the point that when I was there was the time when we almost lost the tank. Had we lost that, of course, the functions and capabilities of the brigade would have been dramatically reduced, because we would have had to restrict the army's employment options to a considerable extent, and make it a much lighter force (to be employed usefully probably only in built-up areas or in forest or mountainous areas, and so on - tasks that would have taken us out of the all-inclusive high-intensity battlefield). So-that was probably the most critical point. And I like to think that we were part of the decision-making process at that stage - to a considerably greater extent, at least, than on a lot of other things. And that’s partly because of some of the individuals involved. The chief here was a fellow that I had a lot of respect for, who believed, as an ex-commander himself, that he should involve his commanders in discussions of major issues. So I was very involved then. That was General Dextraze, who was the chief here at that time. And we also had John Halstead as our ambassador in Germany; and I had a two-way relationship with him — both when I was at the brigade and when I was commander in chief — that I look back upon as one of the most rewarding I've ever had, particularly so far as dealing with the External Affairs side of the house is concerned. So, that period of time was particularly good for those reasons. And, as I mentioned, Canadian policy-makers decided at that time that we would retain the tank and that we would retain the more general combat capability. Whatever the exact reasons for that decision, it was a good one. The newspapers, as you'll recall, said that the Europeans, Chancellor Schmidt and others, had tied the issue to our relations with the EEC. It was tied to our ability to deal with Europe; and it was tied, I guess, to a large extent, to how much weight our comments in NATO circles would have. If we wanted to stay part of the team, we had better put some of our chips on the table. And I've heard all sorts of theories as to what eventually swung the direction of the thing around. But the direction was eventually swung round by a political decision. And, at that stage, I felt that we military commanders were kept very much involved. And another way that we became involved was through visits from parliamentary committees, which used to travel to Europe at that time and come to talk to us. And large media groups used to visit us, because it was a very topical issue in Canada. So we got a chance to put in a word at that stage, much more than I've experienced before, or, perhaps, since. So, from that point of view, it was an exciting time. One of the things we were also able to do at that stage was to take a further look at the Canadian brigade. I think I referred to that previously, about the Canadian brigade being at that time the Central Army Group reserve, and being a very small reserve for an army group. In fact, Canada has sometimes been accused of indulging in tokenism. However, that is not completely true, because this brigade is the only initial reserve force of the Central Army Group that is not already totally committed on the front. The net result of that was that our tasking was very nebulous. And so I found I couldn't plan properly. It was very difficult to plan to commit forces when the battle position was to be just "somewhere" between Kassel and the Austrian border. You're talking about three to four hundred kilometers of width. And it might be anywhere there. So you wouldn't know where you were to go, you wouldn't know where you were to dump supplies, or to put in some stocks in advance in a likely deployment area, such as munitions, other stocks, and consumables. You didn't know that. So I engaged then, as a national commander, in discussions on this issue. I had the help of General Quinn, who was commander of CFE at that time, and General McAlpine for a while. I was allowed to engage in discussions directly with General Davison and General Blanchard, who were the commanders of Central Army Group at that time. I did it as a national commander, despite my relatively low rank, compared to the Germans and the Americans in the force, discussing the tasking of the Canadian brigade and trying to get it narrowed down to at least a part of the front; to have two or three mother organizations, if you want, instead of the whole world. And I was successful in doing that, and narrowing down our tasks to about three or four likely missions, which of course helped us then in terms of reviewing our war plans. And it also, I think, led directly to my next appointment, because I got so involved at that time in those discussions that I got access to a much higher level of planning than most officers of my rank would hope to see. So, that led directly, I think, to my getting my next job, because I was the first Canadian to go into Central Army Group at that rank; and to become the Assistant Chief of Staff for Operations, in fact the Chief War Planner. And as the Chief War Planner I also ran the international command post, that was in a bunker under a mountain. Instead of being very mobile at that level, you try to hide them under a mountain, like we do in North Bay, so hopefully they can take a hit, including a relatively strong nuclear hit, and still survive. So, you're well down in the bowels of the earth. I was responsible for running the innards of this system when I was there. So, one job led, literally, directly to the other. The only difference was that, when I arrived in Central Army Group, instead of having one brigade to worry about, I had thirty-six. That was the size of the Army Group. Becoming an operations officer at that level was a very valuable experience for me. General Blanchard asked for me by name. He wanted me for a couple of reasons, partly because of my inter-operability experience with the other allied forces there. The Canadian brigade always inter-operated with either a German division or an American division, which a lot of German or American brigades never got to do. Inter-operability was a big NATO term at that stage. It was the "in thing", and everyone talked inter-operability, the ability to use each other's equipment, each other's services, to be able to gas your helicopter in an Italian battalion, and so on. We were considered almost the experts at that because we did it all the time. So I was asked to go there because I would be involved in the inter-operability work. And, for the first time, I got involved with the French armed forces in a big way. And that was the second reason he wanted me, because of my experience in Four Brigade and the fact that I spoke French and could go and talk emergency and contingency planning with the French. I could do so in Strasbourg or in Baden, without having to work through an interpreter, which of course makes it considerably more difficult. You know, I could wax eloquent for a long time on that period, because the work we did then was considered very sensitive. This was not quite a return, of course, to the pre-de Gaulle days, when the French pulled out completely from the military command and control system of NATO. Everybody knows they remained in NATO, and, of course, they had a military mission at Central Army Group continuously. When I arrived there, the military mission was still there, and in fact it was increasing at that time. So I did a lot of work with them and we did discuss all sorts of contingency plans for the employment of the Second French Corps, as a contingency, in Central Army Group, or indeed the whole of the First French Army, which has its headquarters in Strasbourg. Around Lahr, of course, the Canadians were very involved with the French, shopping in each other’s stores and that kind of thing. We got to know most of the senior officers there. At least, I got to know them. So it facilitated that dialogue to a large extent. And I was the first Canadian to get in there. The situation is not so critical now, because a lot of these contacts are routine now. Whether the Canadian in Heidelberg speaks French or not is not so critical anymore. But it was in the early days. So that was the kind of environment I was in. And that whole review took place during the one year that I spent there. The whole GDP, the General Defence Plan, for the whole of the Central Army Group, which has a territory that goes from Kassel to the Austrian border, was being negotiated or re-negotiated at that time. And so were the contingency plans for the flanks, which have neutrals- like Switzerland and Austria alongside them. How do you overlap with their forces, and so on? We are very conscious always,in the military, of physical deployment. We always have boundaries between two organizations which we identify on the ground by saying: "This is my territory and I'm responsible for that. That is yours you're responsible for it". So we don't shoot each other. We don't do all sorts of stupid things to one another. This is a little more difficult to do when you've got Austria and Switzerland between the two, because you don't know what the Austrians and the Swiss are going to do. Nor do you know which route the Soviets would use for  an attack, whether they would respect Austrian neutrality and come through Czechoslovakia completely, or whether they would run up the Danube valley or run up the Danube flats through Austria, regardless of its neutrality. But, because you don't know that, you have to be terribly concerned about it.

 

One of my functions at that stage was also dealing with Land (South) as liaison officer, so I used to fly over the mountains and go to Verona in Italy and do all the contingency planning with them. That had all sorts of "ifs" in it: if Austria was penetrated, if Austria was not penetrated, and that sort of thing. So we had a buffer between the two fronts. That was an extremely interesting period, because of the level of the staff work in which I was involved. I felt that I was kept really in the picture in many of the discussions on policy that took place about war alert status, national emergency measures that people would take at different stages of alert, and so on. I wasn't doing that specifically on behalf of Canada. I was doing that for Central Army Group, which had two German corps, two American corps, the Canadian brigade, the Pershing brigade of short-range nuclear weapons, and, of course, as a contingency, the back up of the First French Army. So, because of that, I found myself in fora where I'd not had the chance to participate very much before then. It was a tremendous experience to work in this kind of setting - in a structured allied command that was mainly a collective thing but also linked, by various national intelligence and other networks, back to the various national headquarters. We did it during exercises, for example, manning the command post when reservists from both sides, American and German reservists, would come into the operation. I was the guy who had to coordinate them.

 

And I asked General Blanchard, at one point, what made him pick a Canadian. He said a variety of reasons. He said there were a variety of reasons. First of all, he told me, I knew you; but perhaps more important is the fact that you come in here with a little less of an ax to grind than the other two. And, he said: "If I have an American general doing that job, with one star on his shoulders, he's got two or three American generals of three stars breathing down his neck; and the same with a German. - With a Canadian you can shrug that off a hell of a lot easier". And he was right. The American senior commanders and the German senior commanders at the corps level, although outranking me by at least two ranks, and being to a large extent a lot more experienced, eased up to a considerable extent when I negotiated with them, versus another American or German. Eased up on their demands and were much more conciliatory, which of course - was a great experience. They were much more conciliatory because, if I was able to come up with a solution, it did not have a national slant to it and it was more looked at from a global point of view.

 

I didn't stay there for more than one year, unfortunately. Then I got a call from Canada asking me how I would feel about leaving there immediately, after one year, but being promoted and going back to Lahr to command Canadian Forces Europe. Of course, I would be there again in the same territory as the French army. I was asked by General Blanchard to continue to be chief liaison officer to the French army, on behalf of Central Army Group (although I was more with the international command and control system then). As Commander, Canadian Forces Europe, you're strictly a Canadian commander, and you have, theoretically, nothing to do with the French, the Germans or the Americans, except for negotiating support arrangements. But the fact remains, of course, that I knew them all. I was able to continue a little bit more of an involvement than perhaps a new commander coming from Canada at that stage. So that was roughly what went on at that stage.

 

[HILL] How about command and control systems and crisis management procedures in that period?

 

[BELZILE] There are two aspects to that which I think deserve a little discussion. One of them relates to nuclear release or chemical release. The systems there are very, very complex, which I think is a blessing, because if they weren't complex, if these things were a little too streamlined, it might be a lot easier for some senior commander to convince the system that it was time to go nuclear on a tactical basis. But, because of the establishment of the NATO sixteen-nation senior civilian committees, at the ambassadorial level, and related arrangements, and of course the veto that some of these nations - though not all of them - have over certain actions, it generates a very complicated release system. I had to staff an exercise scenario, for instance, for nuclear release requests, from Central Army Group all the way up to Brussels; and of course then it goes to all the sixteen national capitals. And, you know, it can take time for all of this to feed back to the right people at the right time. Which, in a lot of ways, is a blessing. If a commander, whether an American or a German, felt that the time for nuclear release had come, then, whether one liked it or not, it would not be a very easy matter to obtain permission for it. But with such a powerful weapons system, of course, it is obviously a blessing that that permission not be too easy to get.

 

We felt, perhaps, a little bit more uneasy about the chemical weapons release procedures, because of the abhorrence that, by and large, the western nations feel for chemical weapons. This is an abhorrence that is obviously not shared on the other side of the fence. But, unfortunately, chemical weapons of one kind or another have been, and continue to be, used around the world, and are not as abhorrent to everyone as we think they are. The chemical weapons release procedures were just as complex as the nuclear ones. And this tended to frustrate us a little, because we knew that, at the divisional level, the Warsaw Pact forces could have as much as 15 to 20% of their first line of ammunition stocks as chemicals. And we knew that we did not have: a) the stocks to be able to respond in kind; and b), where the stocks did exist, command procedures that would enable a commander to get release of a few shells of this material in time to make the other side think twice about continuing to use them. Those were the two things which were, by necessity, I think, very complex and very difficult.

 

Then of course there were the petty jealousies that naturally existed to some extent. We didn't find them too bad; you can work with that. The intelligence gathering systems are often national, they're not all necessarily shared amongst all the nations, which tends to complicate your life. The fact is that there are direct channels, on a national basis, between the big organizations such as the Americans and the Germans; and I can assure you not so from the Canadian point of view, except for very broad policy matters. I didn't have any access to Canada except through Commander CFE, when I was at Central Army Group. Other than that, I think the only useful statement that one could make about the command and control structure is that it puts very heavy demands on the liaison staff. Much more than when you function nationally, because, say, two Canadian brigades working side by side in operations know each other, understand each other, and know each others' ways of functioning, because they are relatively the same. It's simple. You know, we tend to liaise in one direction, down, and to the left; and everybody does that; and that way you get enough coordination. But in NATO, you've got to liaise down and liaise up and liaise left and liaise right. Even among nations that speak the same language. And I found this an interesting thing, because when I was back at CFE (with my Central Army Group experience), I was asked by General Blanchard if I would coordinate a three language lexicon for Central Army Group, including French. It was German, English and French, mainly. But a lot of the problems that we had were between the Canadians and the Americans, despite the fact that we were both using mainly the same language, English. We put entirely different meanings on a lot of things. So, in any international force, this becomes, at times, a fairly major issue. What we call a contact point, what we call a fighting patrol, or what we call a liaison point, to defend a locality, is completely different from one nation to another. As a result of that, we've created these lexicons which tend to complicate life a bit among the staff officers.But they are very useful; and I was involved in developing this lexicon and enjoyed it because it was a good intellectual exercise if nothing else, so there was a lot of fun working on it. But, at times, it's also terribly frustrating. And, add to that the fact that the tactical doctrine of the German defensive posture differs from the Tunerican defensive posture, which is now based on the Air-Land Battle 2,000 concept, which advocates penetrating deep on the other side to knock out the reserves and things like that, and which advocates accepting penetrations and then using pincer movements or "killing zones", to use the vernacular, to counteract them. The Germans, of course, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is psychological and national, don't want to lose one inch of their territory. So you have this constant give-and-take in the command and control process. On an exercise, you get around that easily enough by playing with boundaries on the map, in china graph pencils and so on. In real life, I think, it would cause us to have a much greater need of liaison staffs at both levels; and both left and right, as I said.

 

[COX] If it happened, would you in fact find that the different major armies, the German and the American, were in fact using quite different tactics.

 

[BELZILE] Initially, perhaps, but I think within a day or two the situation would stabilize itself. I, for one, despite the apparently overwhelming conventional capabilities of the Warsaw Pact, believe that they could be stopped, conventionally, mainly with the forces in Europe now, as long as there was a back-up relatively quickly behind and they were not left on their own too long. They would need the reinforcement capabilities from the United States, the territorials from England, and the few bits and pieces from Canada and from outside the country, and the reserves from Holland and Belgium, up at the front reasonably quickly. I'm not as pessimistic as many other analysts seem to be about the Warsaw Pact capability to roll over NATO forces very easily.

 

[HILL] I was fascinated by your reference to the different inputs of intelligence information, and the fact that members of that international staff had access to their own national intelligence. Does it mean that the Americans, for example, and the Germans, are running their own programmes drawing on their own perceptions of events; and then you've got other people trying to fit in the middle of all of it. I mean, despite all that, is there a coherence about force operations in general?

 

[BELZILE] I think there is, because there are ways around that problem. In an alliance it is inevitable. How we react to certain degrees of alert, for instance, varies considerably between nation and nation. Most of this is classified nationally. I don’t have to use specific examples, but certain nations do things differently, in a different sequence. So we don’t automatically take the same action. And I guess this is a weakness of any alliance.

 

[COX] Could I just take you back a little, before we go on. I wanted to ask you two questions. One is: have we been able to maintain some presence in the Central Army Group headquarters?

 

[BELZILE] Oh yes, the same. I was the first Canadian at that level, but we are still there.

 

[COX] Who is there now?

 

 [BELZILE] General Jack Dangerfield.

 

[COX] I was going to ask, just before we leave the question of question of nuclear weapons release, did you and your colleagues feel, in that use-them-or-lose-them scenario, that you would ever get a political agreement, political consent, in time?

 

[BELZILE] That's a difficult one to answer, and I think the reason it is difficult is that there's no way that you could simulate a scenario in an exercise that really would have complete validity when the real emergency came. In a peace-time exercise scenario, some how, some way, people are always willing to go along with nuclear release because it is part of the whole exercise process. In a real life situation, there would be a lot of hesitation. But eventually it would come, if required. In real time, I would think, the reluctance would be much greater than during an exercise. But I can't base that on any experience.

 

[COX] We don't have any.

 

[BELZILE] No. That's a gut feeling. I don't know how exactly, but when it came to the real thing, I think it would be very difficult. And I think that, if I was the man at the staff level who had to take the decision, I would find it very difficult.

 

[COX] I was going to say, in view of your very interesting comments on the ability of NATO forces to block the Warsaw Treaty Organization, this might be a good time to ask the question: do you think we should increase CFBG to 10,000 troops; and, if so, would it be a good idea to stay in Lahr or would a move to some other area be necessary to increase the level of military effectiveness.

 

[BELZILE] Well, I'll take those two separately, if I may. Obviously, from everything that I said before about durability and about depth and about balance, I'm one of those who advocates that 4CMBG should be increased. But whether it is 10,000 is another matter; and I'll tell you why. It has been increased, as you know, by about 1,200 in the past two years. So it has a little more depth, it's a little more survivable, and a little more viable than it was. But even with the additional 1,200, their war time requirements, in my book, would still be probably for another 2,000 or so. Within the brigade. In other words, they're at about 70% now, which is close to that critical mass that we said should be there. But since they're all together, and all trained together, it might be possible to shift the critical mass figure somewhat. Only a commander on the ground would know whether he's starting to lose efficiency because of disorganization and so on. You can't predict that with too much accuracy. To my mind, the brigade is still lacking some of the balance it needs because it doesn't have enough infantry, and also because it needs at least a fourth manoeuvre unit which it doesn't have. I believe it is critical to have four manoeuvre units. The brigade has three now. On the other hand, when I say that I feel very strongly that they should have four, most nations don't always have four. A lot of them use three. I'm not sure if they do it by choice, doctrinal choice, or whether they do it because that's all they've got. Every army has the same kind of problems. If we could have exactly what we would like to have, you know, we would be able to be a little more philosophically pure. So, the other thing which probably constitutes a major weakness for the brigade now is reinforcement and supply. We attempted to sort this out a few years ago by the introduction of the ILOC (which is the integrated line of communications) , an agreement with the United States to help us provide in common for air and sea lift from all Eastern Canadian and United States airports and sea ports and so on.

 

We have started, at least in skeletal form, to man this now. We may have about twenty to twenty five Canadians now working along the ILOC, as it's called, which did not exist really at the time that I arrived there. The agreement was just negotiated at that stage. I inherited a good deal of the planning function, but the work had started before I arrived there.

 

So, to return to the brigade, I think it should be bigger. But, what is really required, to my mind, is a better, more guaranteed third-line support system behind the brigade to replace what we lost when we moved to the south. That used to exist among the Benelux countries and Germany for the area that the Canadian troops were stationed in. We had a supply and maintenance system in those days, tacked on to a British organization. It existed in peacetime, so we did all the rebuilds ourselves of our tanks and guns.We had the heavy workshop capabilities and all those things we don't have now. Nowadays, we either would have to negotiate for capabilities with the Americans or the Germans, or to create a new system as the requirements developed. And, creating things at a time of chaos is not the best way to do it. So, obviously, most of us believe that we should have some of these capabilities in place in peacetime. So, when you start talking about 10,000 troops in the brigade group — and I'm not sure that I would go that high — I would probably like to see a brigade of about 6,500, plus maybe 1,500 - 2,000 in a good line of communication system. So you're getting closer, as a whole system, to 9,000 people. If you got beyond that, then I think you should be looking - and I'm sure this is one of the options being considered now - at transferring the CAST brigade from the north to the Central Front. So you would have two brigades for the Central Front at that stage, and that would mean creating a divisional headquarters and having a light division. So you would change the nature and the context of the commitment. You increase the commitment. There is no doubt in my mind that the durability of the brigade, as it is now, is suspect (even though it certainly can fight and account for itself very well) . And one of the things that would help its durability, besides additional troops, is the third line support, a better logistics system. Being integrated with the Americans is fine, but provided we have enough of a dedicated capability to make sure that our own specifically Canadian needs are looked after. You see, we use certain kits that are different from the Americans'. Certain of our weapons are different. So you can never have a totally integrated LOC, even though most of our kits are the same.

 

[COX] You seem to feel, though, that the die is cast really for staying in Lahr.

 

[BELZILE] Well, I’ll tell you why I feel that way. It’s because infrastructure costs are horrendous; and, of course, we’ve established ourselves there now and we’ve spent a lot of money in setting up Lahr and Baden with all of the domestic support facilities, the schools, the Canadian stores, and the Canadian community, which is about 18,000 people in Southern Germany. As a community, once you start, you know, adding the wives, the children, the school teachers, the school staff, the banks, there's a fairly large Canadian community there. If you move that somewhere else, either you change the philosophy and just leave the troops and return all the wives and all the kids home and then you have a lesser requirement for a heavy infrastructure. Or you recreate an infrastructure somewhere else which would be very costly. Unless you negotiated that with NATO so that it's a shared cost. My suspicion is that no Canadian government would ever tolerate that right now because of the cost of the move. Now, militarily, lets forget the potential costs and lets look at the military option. Militarily, there's no doubt in my mind that the two brigades would be better together, somewhere. So instead of having two lines of communication from North America, one to Norway, one to the Central Front, whichever place you put them in, one would obviously be more efficient. Even if it's a little bigger, it would be more efficient. But, if you have them both together, where should they be? Well, of course, you can argue the point based on our Nordic and Arctic experience and so forth. We should perhaps stay in Norway and get out of the Central Front. The flaw with that idea, of course, is that we'd have to have everybody back here in Canada, because the Norwegian constitution doesn't allow for the stationing of foreign troops on their soil in peacetime. Ergo, we cannot station forces there. One option is, of course, to keep our forces here in Canada, if we think we can react fast enough to developments over there in Norway. I’m talking about the army, only, now. I'll bring in the air force in a minute. The other option, of course, is to put all our forces in Europe into the Lahr area. But the infrastructure that exists there now could not handle a second brigade, together with its equipment and so on. So we would have to procure additional infrastructure, which we could perhaps get from some of the French forces around there, which are being redistributed. But we certainly need at least another base in southern Germany, even if the troops weren't actually all stationed there; because we would have to have enough logistic stocks, enough equipment, to get the second brigade there reasonably quickly. Like we do now, incidentally, in Norway. There are a lot of Canadian kits up there. The troops are in Canada, but the kits are up there. There are about 150 trucks. We don't have the guns and things like that, but we have ammunition stockage, we have consumables stockage. Consumables are the things you use only once, you know; the hard rations and that sort of thing. A lot of that is already out there, so that we can save on airlift. So we'd have to have the same thing in the south, if we put both capabilities together. The third option is that you put the whole thing together and somewhere else. Then, of course, we would conduct a dialogue with NATO and discuss the matter - where is the main danger spot and where would we feel we could make the greatest contribution. My own view, although it's perhaps too late to do that, is that we should take a very good look at northern Germany again and at the Baltic approaches - Zeeland and Denmark and so on, which constitute a relatively weak front right now. And I would also look at having our air force up there, because Fifth Allied Tactical Air Force, which is in the north, is considerably weaker than the air force which is on the Central Front (with 4ATAF and 2ATAF, which consist mostly of the RAF and the United States Air Force, both of which are big air forces). The Canadian air force commitment to the Central Front is relatively minuscule, compared to what it would be, relatively, if it was up in the north. Likewise with the army, because there are many more troop concentrations where we are now. One advantage of moving somewhere else, of course, is that that would probably bring us a little closer to the part of the front where we'd expect to fight, should it ever come to that (instead of being 400 kilometres away from the line, as we are now) . So, really, I'm not advocating one or the other. I'm just pointing out the advantages and disadvantages of the three options. But, since we have a situation now with a very heavy infrastructure component, and since the costs of moving that infrastructure would be enormous, I think that that becomes, inevitably, a very important factor.

 

Part VIII – National Defence Headquarters and Mobile Command, 1979-86

 

[HILL] General Belzile, you served as Chief, Land Doctrine and Operations at National Defence Headquarters from 1979 to 1981. Then you were promoted to Lieutenant General and appointed Commander of Mobile Command, a post you held for five years. This was the time when President Reagan was in office and began a major build-up of United States forces, when East-West relations turned acrimonious and confrontational, particularly after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, when the United States embarked on the Strategic Defense Initiative. Canada continued, in this period, to re-equip its armed forces, but money was in short supply and the country faced problems of block obsolescence in many parts of the military structure. There were calls for increases in defense expenditures or, if this was not possible, for cuts in the number and range of Canada's military commitments. Questions were raised about CAST, in particular. A new Defence White Paper was eventually promised by the Progressive Conservative government elected in 1984. What would you see as the main achievements and problems of Mobile Command between 1981 and 1986? What shortages of equipment, manpower, training facilities, and so on, especially needed rectifying, and perhaps still need rectifying today; and how costly would it be to straighten out whatever problems there are?

 

[BELZILE] I would start by pointing to a couple of main achievements, and then go on to elaborate a bit. The second area, I must say, remains a major problem, despite the fact that we've progressed somewhat. I think one of the best things we've succeeded in doing has been to reassign the primary tasks of the brigades and to rationalize army tasking to some degree. That was done in 1984 as a result of a very extensive study into the main problem areas in all of our various commitments- not only the ones to NATO, but the ones to northern Canada, to defense of Canada operations, and to what we call the Canada-U.S. Land Plans, which we haven’t had a chance yet to discuss. The Canada-U.S. Land Plans, of course, are just as the title indicates. They are a bilateral agreement responsible, functionally, to the Permanent Joint Board of Defence (PJBD). And perhaps I should say a few words about that.

 

When I first came back from Europe, I was a CLDO, as you pointed out, but one of the things I wound up doing at that time was to be the army member of the PJBD, which is probably the oldest on-going alliance that we're still using on a routine basis. It was a bilateral agreement that was initiated by Mackenzie King and President Roosevelt in 1942. The PJBD had navy, air force and army members, and was led by either a senator or a high public figure, or a member of parliament; that is to say it was led by civilian politicians, parliamentarians usually, on both sides. During the two years that I was there, that I was CLDO, I was the army member. In fact, the Honourable George Hees, the current Minister of Veterans Affairs, was our man at the helm at that stage. We used to negotiate all of the bilateral agreements that were required between the two countries; I mean those relating to the air force, for instance, involving NORAD; naval coordination measures that would be required in time of war; and so on. As far as the army was concerned, it included a redesignation of what we call The Plans. We call them CANUS now, but they were called ALCANUS before Alaska became a state in its own right. We were committed to go to the defence of Alaska, at the same time as the Canadian Arctic, and vice versa. The American troops in Alaska were also committed to come and help us in the Yukon or on the Northeast side of the border. When Alaska became a State, the "AL" was dropped from this planning arrangement, and it became known simply as the Canada-U.S. Land Plans, which call for the availability of one or two brigades, almost at any time. One of these has to have a quick reaction force such as our Special Service Force at Petawawa now has (with the airborne regiment, the parachute capability, the light troops capability that can go anywhere in the north or really anywhere in the country without any difficulty at all). Well, as long as the airlift is there, there's a way to get them in there even if you can't land the aircraft. We hardly touched on that in our previous discussions, since we were focussing mostly directly on NATO. But when we talk today about the need for a couple of brigades to back up the two brigades already dedicated to NATO, we are really talking about another two or three brigades available in Canada to do what we call Defence of Canada Operations. This is a unilateral kind of capability. Then there is CANUS, Canada-U.S. Land Operations, which call for a joint force that could be utilized in Canadian territory or, technically, in American territory (although, for all practical purposes, given the size of our Armed Forces, I can't really see the Canadians getting involved in defending Alaska. I can see much more the opposite possibility i.e., maybe the Americans coming and helping us in the north).

 

That leads me to the two achievements I wanted to talk about. The first one, as I've already mentioned, was the reassignment of tasks, in 1984. And the second one, I think, concerned mobilization planning, and the use of the reserves, particularly to back up the Canadian and North American commitments as opposed to European ones. We are more dependent on the citizen army for North American operations, and on the territorial army. They are raised in crisis periods to assist the normal forces of authority, be they police or fire fighting services, or similar, especially in operations where they could take much of the responsibility for low intensity kind of operations: counter terrorism, counter-sabotage, and so on, or just general provision of security for people and facilities (either here in Canada alone, or in North America in conjunction with the United States). I think we've made a lot of progress in that last area. And I'm hoping that the next White Paper may have a few positive statements to make about how we're going to reorganize the Reserves, equip them better, and really train them better also. This would call, of course, not only for equipment, but also for more training time, and also for greater strength ceilings than we have now. And it would probably call, in due course, for different measures of legislation, that would allow us actually to call the Reserves out if we ever needed them. As it stands now, a reservist can show up if he feels like it, even if we do call them out. If he doesn't turn up, there's no legal action we can take against him, because it's a purely voluntary force. Short of the War Measures Act, the legislation doesn't exist to create it. This is a very complex issue. In times of mobilization, the government can create the "Active Force", as we call it; and the Active Force can take those reservists and put them under legal obligation to come forward. But, before the Active Force is called out, there are all sorts of levels of relatively low level emergencies that could occur for which, at present, we have no guarantee of the availability of the reserves. There are a variety of reasons for this. First of all, the reservist may not show up. Second, he may be employed with, say, Bell Canada, or with another kind of job that is considered just as important, nationally, as reserve service. So, I think we've made quite a lot of progress in that respect. At least in the acceptance of general principles. And what I, and my staff, tried very hard to do in the last little while, was to make progress towards a better structure for the Militia in Canada, so that the territorial aspect of the army presence across the country would be built on the reserves instead of the existing regular force.

At the same time, that brings us to the main problem still existing in 4CMBG, which is directly linked with that: I mean the fact that there is a shortage of manpower. We are short in the Regular Force, for immediate availability. We are short of about 8,000 or 9,000 troops in Mobile Command, right now. Some of them could be replaced by reservists, provided that we had the training systems and the resources to bring them in. In order to try and alleviate that, we have in fact now tasked some of the Militia and other reserve elements with operational roles. We have, for instance, designated some reserve elements to provide reinforcements for our parachute capability. We didn't have that before. We have created some artillery batteries in the reserve that are a little readier than they used to be. So we have progressed in that way. But we have not progressed as far as we would have liked, because of a need for government involvement and legislation. But we have progressed to some degree; and I think that that's a reasonable accomplishment. The other area where we have progressed is in the re-equipping, or modernization of the equipment, of the Canadian Forces in general. The army, in particular, of course, has benefitted from acquiring the new tank. Even so, they are not in sufficient numbers, or with sufficient trained tankers here in Canada, to provide all the back-up that we require in Europe. So, to my mind, we've made again a start in the right direction, but without overcoming entirely the problems caused by the fact that we don't have enough tanks. We have some equipment now that we use in lieu of tanks, but these are not nearly as capable of sustained action as tanks are. The field force in Canada is not as well balanced as it should be.

 

[HILL] When you said 8,000 or 9,000 extra troops in Mobile Command as a possibility, presumably you were referring to Mobile Command in Canada?. This is in addition to possible increases in CFE.

 

[BELZILE] That's right.

 

[HILL] I believe the former Associate Minister of National Defence, Mr. Harvey Andre, said that the government is working on developing new emergency legislation that would permit a graduated response in crisis situations. So I guess there's some hope that that will appear before long. I don't know whether you've heard anything recently on that.

 

[BELZILE] No, I haven't. Of course, I expect that, right now, a whole series of measures are hinging on what the White Paper is going to say. But, I tend to be a little tentative about the White Paper, because I'm no longer working on it. Nor am I aware of the discussions on it that are taking place now. I only know where they stood at the time that I removed my uniform. I don't think they've changed that much, though. I'm hopeful that there will be some pretty positive measures in there, particularly with regards to the Reserves and back-up systems.

 

[COX] This question may not be answerable, but let me try it. What role in Europe would be most useful from the point of view of employing the reserves? What role would be most compatible with an enhanced Militia?

 

[BELZILE] Well, I've touched on that briefly. The full spectrum, really, depending on how long any emergency lasts. At a given stage, you've got to be able to support the NATO commitment with reserves. But the initial tasks for the reserves would be to fill the void left by the departing Regular Forces. The second aspect would be what we call, euphemistically, regional operations, which are really security or internal security tasks, which take place in normal society and really would be a support to existing law- enforcement agencies or civil authorities of various kinds. That exists now, whenever the police get beyond their capabilities. Not that I would advocate the reserves becoming policemen. But they can do a lot of security tasks, freeing up the police forces to do what the police should do. And that does not necessarily mean manning street corners with rifles. So, the territorial kind of functions have to be done, including security functions. And, at the same time, there are training functions to perform, in support of mobilization and aimed at eventually replacing or indeed reinforcing the committed forces. You can really see the Reserves involved across the whole spectrum. But, obviously, because these Reserve forces would initially have a relatively lower standard of training, many of them would be used on what I would call, really, almost "home guard" kind of tasks. They would be a civil emergency kind of force, a regional operations force, that doesn't have to be moved across the country but deals basically with local situations,that knows the local territory. If you need to send troops to the Rocky Mountains for whatever reason, then it is better to use the troops from interior B.C. than to send Regular Forces from eastern Canada. That goes back to the territorial role which the Militia has historically developed, for a variety of reasons, around the centres of population. The Militia are best suited for that sort of thing, thereby freeing up the initial force of Regulars to go and do the primary missions. But that would not last very long, and the reserves would have to get involved in a whole range of missions, including putting together brigades to replace, eventually, the ones that we're fielding overseas. There'd be no other sources of manpower at that stage.

 

[HILL] The primary problem here is the budget again. I mean, we've just seen a new budget in which in fact DND got very little increase. I think it was less than 1% in real terms. And I think the biggest problem for the reserves over time has been simply that they come off worse in terms of the amount of money they get; and this has been going on for a long time and there have been many many statements made over time in terms of increasing the reserves, strengthening them, giving them better roles, and all that. But until money is put into it they're not going to improve.

 

[BELZILE] Well, I agree with that. I, at the same time, believe that a lot of progress can be made at relatively low cost. First of all, in the reserve force organization, structure, headquarters, and command and control system. We have twenty-seven headquarters running the Militia in Canada right now. What we've advocated in Mobile Command is that they should be reduced to about twelve training brigades; that doesn't cost more money, in fact it saves money. It doesn't prepare troops better, necessarily, but it reduces the overhead and starts putting whatever money is available down where it counts. You can also, at relatively low cost, cut out some featherbedding in areas outside defence. Perhaps some of that money could also be used to increase the strength of the reserves, even with relatively light equipment such as rifles, personal equipment, and things like that. Those are the first steps to take. I calculate that we need about 50,000 to 60,000 reserves right now to do our job in a reasonably sustainable fashion. We have, in the three services combined, less than 22 - 23,000 reserves at present. You could at least double that at a relatively cheap cost, I mean in terms of personnel costs. The facilities, the armories, the training areas, would require a little bit more equipment. You would require, you know, more kits in training centres across the country, so that they could move on to learning some of the skills. But you don't do all that you need to do just by saying that you've got a new reserve of 50,000. You've got to equip them. That's the equivalent of 8 new brigades. You need all the kits for that. It can be relatively cheap, because a reserve soldier probably costs only 1/4 to 1/3 of the cost of a Regular soldier. You can't use him to replace the Regular soldier, but he can provide necessary back-up. The reservist can be more lightly equipped, and can be trained at relatively low cost. So, I agree with you about that. There's a money problem, of course, but we could make a very definite difference to the state of the reserves in Canada with a relatively few million dollars. You know, I'm not a cost analyst, but we've gone through those figures umpteen times. I don't have them with me, but it's not that costly.

 

[HILL] Linked to that is the question of a mobilization plan, which you mentioned earlier. Now, this has still not been published yet, I don't think. Presumably that also will come out after the White Paper.

 

[BELZILE] Well, I would like to think so. I think mobilization planning has made a lot of progress in the last few years. You know, we function now with an interim mobilization plan, and I guess a mobilization plan will forever remain an interim one, that is constantly revised. But some of the things which some of us at least have advocated, focus mostly on giving the reserves a better structure and that sort of thing. These things could be implemented now, and I'm hoping that the White Paper will start providing the executive authority for some of this to take place. It's not because we haven't been trying to do it already. It's just simply because somehow other things have taken priority and we have wound up not being able to make these relatively cheap but useful moves.

 

[COX] I wonder if I could just try to reconstruct, in my mind really, the force structure which, in a sense, seems to have come out in your comments. Let's just say that the CAST commitment was relocated, so that no matter where it was we would have a mechanized brigade in Europe and a semi-mechanized brigade. Am I correct in thinking that if that were the case, then the actual commitment would come to something close to let's say 10,000 troops in Europe in CFE, and that one would require the two brigades back here to reinforce them? So that you'd have that as reinforcement; and your third element would be reserves to take the place of Regular forces. And they, if the emergency went on long enough, would be equipped and trained to replace some of the Regulars. Is that, roughly-speaking, how the Force structure makes sense?

 

[BELZILE] Yes, in broad terms, it's exactly as you're describing it. You know, if we continue with a commitment of two brigades overseas, we need one in situ and one that would go wherever required. We need two back-up brigades in Canada, and ideally they should be as well equipped, or equipped the same way, as the first two. And after you literally run out of Regular troops, you'd have to depend on the reserves for follow-on echelons. If you only committed the one brigade, and used the second one as a back-up, then you'd reduce that requirement somewhat. But don't forget that you also have a requirement for a quick-reaction capability of up to about three brigades in Canada, that would not go overseas, but look after our problems on this continental land mass. These may be low intensity forces and may not be needed at the stage we are talking about, but I think that it would be wise to have a solid, sizeable force of this kind available. If not in a totally Regular force, then including the reserves. You could have a lot of forces in-being at a cadre level, maybe 15 or 20% Regulars, and the rest of them being reservists, that you could build up quickly once the other ones take off for overseas. But if you want to talk about force structure, the best way to do that is to take the Regular Force that exists now, and the reserves that exist now, and weld them all together into one structure - not have two armies, have one army. Have one army, with the Regular brigades that exist now and the Militia training brigades that have been advocated - twinned together, if you want - or having a sister training brigade or two or three sister training brigades, and grouping them together on a regional basis (because an army is a territorial animal. It's not like an air force or navy which really has a function wherever they are. An army is much more territorial, and it functions best on ground where it is familiar with the territory and with the local defence problems). The reserves are ideally suited for that. At the same time, you ceratinly need the right structure, combining Regulars and reserves. Otherwise, on M day, which we use as the term for mobilization day, the first thing the army would have to do would be to reorganize itself. So, a lot of people like me, including some still in uniform, are fighting tooth and nail to try to reorganize the army on a loose sort of divisional cum army structure across the country, so that we could pluck out the components as they're ready for whatever commitments we have.

 

[HILL] I think that some members of the Militia and so on are very concerned about maintaining the coherence of their own units in the event of an emergency. Presumably that could be maintained?

 

[BELZILE] In fact, not only that. I think it's the only way you can protect the coherence of the force. I know they're very concerned about maintaining the integrity of their units, but there's different tasking that you can give to reserve units. One of the things that we've done in the past is to go to Militia units and pluck out their officers and NCOs. You make the unit incapable of mobilizing. You're taking away all their cadre, all their training, and all their training potential; you're taking it away. If you do that, you hurt them a lot more than if you say to them: "OK, Governor General's Footguards, your primary mission is to provide one rifle company, including one major, one captain, and three lieutenants". You know, that's not the whole unit. One rifle company that would be thrown in to 2 RCR in London, Ontario, for instance. Then, after that, your second mission would be to mobilize the battalion. We've done that in every past war. But, if you go and pluck them out as individuals, to reinforce the Regular Force immediately, what you will in fact take away from them is their cadre, and make them incapable of mobilizing. So the two are not exclusive. What I'm suggesting is not exclusive one of the other. In fact it is very complementary.

[HILL] I have a broad question that I am sort of groping at a little bit. I'll try it anyway. The period when you were Commander at Mobile Command, was in fact the period when President Reagan came to office. It was a period in which there was a large build-up of US military power. It was the period of SDI, also. And in your comments through the whole interview, from time to time, there have been comments about relations with the American forces at one time or another. Canada right now is in the process of negotiating a free trade agreement or freer trade agreement with the United States, which I think a lot of people believe could lead into a very different kind of relationship with the United States. I mean it could become a good deal closer. That's not necessarily going to happen, but it might do. And we might have a new international posture for Canada, giving priority, first of all, to this relationship with the US, that is to say, as a first layer of relationships. Then with the other allies, and then with other people. How would you see that kind of thing affecting the Armed Forces? Would they be able to fit in easily with something like that, to have a sort of special, harmonious relationship with American forces in that kind of way?

 

[BELZILE] Well, over the years, this has been like an accordion. One would like to think that if we go to a freer trade situation, then we'd start getting a little closer to a new political relationship; not a political union, but a political easing if you want, of relationships, one with the other. In the case of the Armed Forces, and particularly the army, the relationship has always been excellent across the border anyway. We used to be able to, and we still do, except there's different pricing problems now, we used to be able to exchange training, exchange aircraft, exchange people in big groups, send our troops to train and jump out of United States aircraft, bring the Americans here and have them jump out of a Canadian aircraft using our techniques, using our parachutes, and so on. We've been able to do this for years.

 

We have battalions who come and train with us, and we send battalions to Alaska and so on. But in the last few years, strangely enough, just as people have been discussing freer trade, we seem to have seen the opposite occurring in relation to the Armed Forces. Some people have got themselves all worked up and started to ask why Candians should cross the border and train in US facilities for free; and they start charging us cash on the barrel, for every soldier we send across. Well, you know, I don't have to tell you that we reduced to a considerable extent our presence there. But, at the same time, our own accountants are starting to say, well, OK, if they do that every time they come to train in Canada, we will charge them too. Whereas before, we were able to do all that on a mutually agreed basis. You'd have the National Guard from Vermont, for instance, coming to Gagetown and shooting their guns and doing all their training every year, because it's the closest camp to them. They cross the border from Vermont into New Brunswick and they're there. The closest camp in the United States is Fort Drum, just near Rochester, south of Lake Ontario, which is considerably more expensive for them to go to than to come to Gagetown. We used to be able to do that at the colonel's level. I'd get a phone call when I was in Gagetown, and I'd say: "Come on in and bring your brigade in". Now, no more, because some accountants somewhere decided that maybe we could make money with that process, and vice versa. I sent the Airborne Regiment last year to an exercise in Texas. They were airborne, getting ready to jump out in the parachutes over the training area, when we got a bill for every soldier who was going to land. And once he's airborne and he's heading down, you know, he doesn't have any choice about turning around. So, I'm a great sceptic when it comes to this freer trade thing. If it reduces the accountants getting mixed up in military training, then I'm all in favour of it. If it only complicates life, we've got enough complications as it is now with accounting systems and financial administration acts and one thing and another. The last thing we need is some more complex forms, every time you want to send a soldier on a course in the United States. And the same thing is happening with respect to the British. We used to interchange training left and right. We can’t do that anymore.

 

[HILL] Perhaps, General Belzile, we could complete our discussion with a mixture of specific and general questions. First of all, we've noticed that in 1986 the government of France recognized your active work in the betterment of military cooperation between France and Canada by appointing you Commander of the Legion d'Honneur. Given your comments and recounting of your early life, when you were a student in Montreal and training for the army at that time, this and your own French-Canadian background, this must have been a particularly gratifying award to you. Could you tell us what lay behind it?

 

[BELZILE] Well, you know, I suppose I should start by explaining that, theoretically, when you receive a decoration, you're not supposed to know about it in advance. In theory, you don't know who has recommended you; everything is done very discreetly until the honour is announced. And then you try to find out who brought it up. I received the Legion d'Honneur, and I was taken a bit by surprise, a pleasant surprise of course, because, as you may know, very few have been given in Canada in recent years. There were some during The War, and so on; but I think that, as far as a military officer is concerned, mine was the first one in peacetime. And, you know, you try to find out what brought it up. I guess I got enough out of the French embassy, and a few people that I knew, to give me an idea. I was for 4 1/2 to almost 5 years the Canadian Co-President of the Franco-Canadian Military Cooperation Committee, a job which I took over for the two years I was CLDO. I did it in Ottawa here, and then carried on for the first three years that I was commanding Mobile Command. During that time, we negotiated a lot of exchanges with the French: not trying to balance what we did with the Americans and what we did with the British, but trying to increase the exchanges with the French for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was that they have a very professional army and their officer cadres are excellent. We wanted to increase our participation in some of their war schools and some of their specialist schools, such as mountain schools and skiing schools. Those were some of the things that I negotiated. Although this had existed for a while, Mr. Lamontagne, who was the Minister at the time, visited his French counterpart, Francois Hernu, and they both agreed that we should increase the military cooperation between the two armies. And by "armies”, I’m talking generically, I include the navy and the air force, les armies, using the French term, plural. And I was given my marching orders by Mr. Lamontagne, saying: "Increase co-operation with the French. Get on with it, and do more with the French". The French also have very good kits, very good equipment, and some of this equipment is now being pushed by the French to try to break into the North American market. They have just sold a tactical communications system to the Americans. And the Canadians are looking for one now; so I guess they are hoping for another order. So maybe I was lucky. I got caught up in these affairs at a time when the French were trying to be nice to Canadians. I was very involved in the situation. I used to host the French delegation every two years, here; and I used to go to France, to Paris, to a variety of schools, and so on. Other Canadians have done similar things, but I guess I was at it a little longer. Also, I was told discreetly that some of my earlier work and contingency planning with the French - mainly in Germany - was also taken into account. They summarize a guy's career. They knew I was about to retire and they had just negotiated a protocol with Canada for official approval of decorations. As you know, our own orders here prevent Canadians, usually, from receiving foreign decorations. You can accept them, but you are usually not allowed to wear them unless they have been gazetted in Canada and approved by Rideau Hall, by the Governor-General. In my case, the honour was approved ahead of time. It was then gazetted in the Canada Gazette; so I was allowed to wear it. I received a boutonniere, plus the gong. It's on my uniform; and I can wear it. Now, other Canadians such as poets have received La Legion d'Honneur, chansonniers and politicians in Quebec, but their's were not always accepted by the Canadian system. They can wear them. But military personnel do not normally have the same entitlement. So, I don't know what more I can say about that. One of the things that surprised me was not only to receive such a decoration, but also to find that I had been appointed at a high level, as a Commander. That includes the cravatte, the decoration worn around the neck. Even during The War, people like General Allard and so on were appointed only at the officer level. I received a higher level than that. In fact, I'm probably the only Canadian who is a Commander.

 

[HILL] I'd like to offer our congratulations — a bit late — but along with everyone else. Maybe I could ask you one very last question, a very broad one. Do you, after all your career, think that NATO is valuable to international peace and security?; and, also, how important is it, how useful is it to Canada?

 

[BELZILE] Absolutely, an unqualified "Yes", for me. Canada is a middle power. We have an incredible amount of geography; and a mutual insurance system, to me, makes so much sense that I don't even understand how anybody could consider an alternative. So, to a large extent, I look at it that way. I'm a firm believer, after all my years of exposure to NATO. I think that most NATO nations that I've had the pleasure of working with — with the officers - - are very cooperative; and Canada has been asked to do mainly the things that we are good at. I remember, for instance, in Europe, receiving a personal call from Alexander Haig, when he was SACEUR, asking me, personally, as a national commander, to take on the training of the cadres of the first Portuguese mechanized brigade ever to exist. That was when the Portuguese pulled out of Angola. And that was a little feather in our cap. The reason he came to us Canadians was because he considered that we were the most professional mechanized force available. We would not be involved with the French in the way that we are, we would not get involved with the Germans and the Norwegians in the way that we have, unless we were participating in NATO. So, professionally, for the Army, and I suspect for our two other services, NATO is an absolute "must" Also it is necessary for national purposes, because there is no way we could defend Canada against a determined organization, even a relatively small one, that would work internally. The main danger of a flash point is still, of course, in Central Europe, and perhaps the need to look after our own territorial integrity is not as great a likelihood. But, having said that, if that requirement ever does come up, then we can count on the rest of the organization. Additionally, our membership in NATO has given us armed forces that would be capable of generating a range of capabilities that we might need relatively quickly. I, for one, don’t see how we could do that without being part of an alliance such as NATO. Otherwise, we would have to almost subordinate ourselves to the United States.

 

[HILL] Thank you, General Belzile.