I Call it a University

I call it our universities. I commanded Canadian Forces in Europe before I came back to my final job here. And I considered myself almost a university president because this is where all of our officers had served. This is where all of our NCO’s had served. This is where most of our troops had served. This is where we worked with big armies; the British, the French, the Americans, and the Germans. We couldn’t do that in Canada. And when we saw these days coming down the road that we would pull out of Germany, we would lose, I was then commanding the army in St. Hubert, and I said we would then lose our universities as far as I was concerned, you know, the real big training ground - the big boy stuff, if you want. It’s on odd way to say it but you start looking at large armies and understanding how they function and the interoperability between them, the command and control systems. And always hanging over your head the possibility of course of having to use nuclear weapons. And our own aircraft in Germany were also capable of carrying nuclear weapons, with the same situation. We had a missile unit in the brigade, in the north then, capable of carrying nuclear weapons but they would have been the fractional type, you know, the smaller ones that we’re talking about. And so those were all the things that in NATO of course we got enmeshed in which was much more complex as a command control system than anything we faced in Korea. As a deputy chief of staff for operations and responsible for the war headquarters of the central army group which had two tactical air forces, had four, four army corps’ of about 100,000 people each. And I was the chief war planner for this thing, running the headquarters, the war headquarters. And American 4 stars, German 3 stars all over the place and yet, you know. But the trust that they give you in that kind of job was absolutely unbelievable and you come out of there, you know, you just hope that the sky doesn’t fall on you. You start feeling, I said, “Well Jesus, I’m charmed here. I’m getting something that nobody else . . .” and quite a few Canadians that have got, not quite a few, very few Canadians that had got that kind of chance.