General Andrew George Latta McNaughton (25 February 1887 – 11 July 1966) was a Canadian electrical engineer, scientist, army officer, cabinet minister, and diplomat.
Before the First World War, McNaughton was a professor of engineering at McGill University. During the war he distinguished himself as an officer of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, was wounded twice and was twice awarded the Distinguished Service Order. In the interwar period, McNaughton served as Chief of the General Staff, where he was instrumental in modernizing and mechanizing the Canadian Army.
McNaughton commanded major Canadian field units in the first half of the Second World War and served as the commander of the First Canadian Army until he was relieved in 1943. He then served as Minister of National Defence until the end of the war. During his tenure as Minister, McNaughton was involved in the crisis surrounding the decision to send conscripts, known as "Zombies," for overseas service.
Early life McNaughton was born in Moosomin, District of Assiniboia, North-West Territories (now part of Saskatchewan), on 25 February 1887. Both of McNaughton's parents were immigrants from Scotland, and his youth was a happy one, being brought up by an adventuresome father who had once been a trader in buffalo hides and a kindly, loving mother. His upbringing on a farm instilled in him a life-long love of hard work and self-discipline. McNaughton spent his free time riding horses across the vast expanses of the Prairies while also engaging in hunting and fishing. McNaughton credited his youth on a frontier farm on the Prairies with making him tough and hardy. His parents had both converted to the Church of England, voted Conservative and like many other Anglo-Canadians in the Victorian era strongly identified with the British Empire.
McNaughton held to a specific Scottish-Canadian identity, which led him to a sense of Canadian nationalism based on his feeling that the British Empire was dominated by the English while Canada was dominated by Scottish-Canadians like himself, but his biographer John Rickard noted "...even though he would come into conflict with British generals, he always held the British people and their accomplishments in a high regard". McNaughton always attended Anglican services, and though he was devoted to science, believing that the pure rationality of science was the best solution to the world's problems, he never seems to have any difficulty in reconciling his faith in the Anglican church with his faith in science. Despite being a member of the Church of England, he was always very proud of his Scottish heritage.
McNaughton was a student at Bishop's College School in Lennoxville, Quebec, after winning a scholarship. At Bishop's, McNaughton was both successful student and an athlete. In 1905, he entered McGill University in Montreal where he studied under the New Zealander physicist Ernest Rutherford. As a student, his grades were outstanding, and he was singled out by Rutherford as a man to watch. As an undergraduate, he applied for a commission in the Indian Army with the hope of a joining a famous cavalry regiment, saying it been his boyhood dream to serve the British Empire in India. He joined the Canadian non-permanent Militia in 1909. and earned a B.A. in physics and engineering from McGill University in Montreal in 1910, where he was a member of the Kappa Alpha Society, and earned an MSc with Honours in Electrical Engineering in 1912. He then stayed on at McGill as an instructor as a professor of engineering until the outbreak of the Great War.
His work in engineering innovation led to his invention of a cathode ray direction finder – a form of the technology that would evolve into radar. In 1914, he married Mabel Weir of Montreal, who was Irish and Catholic.
First World War While still a student at McGill, McNaughton joined the Canadian Militia in 1909. He took the 4th Battery of the Canadian Expeditionary Force overseas with the outbreak of the First World War in the summer of 1914 and arrived in France in February 1915. In March 1916 he was promoted to lieutenant colonel and went to England to take command of the newly arrived 11 (Howitzer) Brigade of the Royal Regiment of Canadian Artillery, taking it to France in July. In February 1917 he was appointed the Counter Battery Staff Officer of the Canadian Corps. Lieutenant-General Sir Julian Byng, the British commander of the Canadian Corps from 1916−1917, when Lieutenant General Arthur Currie succeeded him, personally selected McNaughton, saying that while McNaughton was a relatively young man, he had already heard much about his work, hence his promotion from the command of a brigade to senior position with the corps command. On the day before the Armistice with Germany in November 1918, at 31 years old, he was promoted to brigadier general and appointed General Officer Commanding (GOC) of the Canadian Corps Artillery.
During the war, he was wounded twice and received multiple decorations. McNaughton did not demand the normal privileges of an officer, living alongside his men and eating the same food, and was noted for his care for his men. McNaughton slept on the floor, consumed the same bully beef rations as the average soldier, saying he was a farm boy at heart and did not need a bed or better food while preferring to be addressed as Andy instead of by his rank. McNaughton was very popular with the men who served under him, who regarded him as their friend who represented their interests instead of the high command.
Particularly after being promoted to Corps Counter Battery Staff Officer, McNaughton used his expertise in engineering to help make advances in the science of artillery particularly in pinpointing artillery targets, both stationary and moving. His acumen and expertise is often pointed to as a key to the Canadian success in the Battle of Vimy Ridge where McNaughton's innovations in the detection of German artillery positions with flash-spotting and sound-ranging led to the Canadians accurately mapping the vast majority of German gun positions before the infantry were sent into battle. A technique McNaughton had developed to measure the wear on cannon barrels and make adjustments to their aiming proved to be vital on April 9, 1917, when the Canadian Corps assaulted Vimy Ridge. As the battle commenced, the combination of accurately plotted German gun positions and deadly accurate Canadian artillery fire led to precise strikes that eliminated over 80% of enemy artillery and machine guns, significantly blunting their defences. As the infantry attacked, precise artillery fire allowed the effective implementation of the creeping barrage which proved vital to the success of the infantry advance.
At Vimy, the counter-battery team under McNaughton's command knocked out 83% of the 212 German artillery guns on Vimy Ridge in the first two hours, making it possible for the infantry of the Canadian Corps to advance up the heights and take the ridge. Vimy Ridge had been unsuccessfully assaulted by the French with heavy losses in 1915 and likewise by the British in 1916, making it into a symbol of German power on the Western Front, a massive and heavily fortified ridge towering over the front that was widely considered impossible to take. The fact that the four divisions of the Canadian Corps in their first battle together took Vimy Ridge in two days led to the battle taking on a legendary aura in Canada that it retains to this day. McNaughton's role in using operational research to map out precisely where the German artillery guns were on Vimy Ridge and then taking them out made his reputation. The fact that McNaughton was only 30 at the time further marked him out as an outstanding gunner.
His most serious wound occurred on 5 February 1918 when he was hit by the fragments of a German shell, requiring a stay in a hospital. That same month, he received the Distinguished Service Order (DSO). Later in the year, a bar was added to his DSO, with the bar's citation reading:
By war's end, McNaughton was widely considered to be the most talented and capable artilleryman in any army. General Sir Frederick Pile, of the British Army's Royal Artillery, who served alongside McNaughton in the First World War wrote in 1918 that McNaughton was "probably the best and most scientific gunner in any army in the world. His ideas were colossal."
Interwar period
Chief of the General staff In 1920 McNaughton joined the regular army and in 1922 was promoted to Deputy Chief of the General Staff and Chief of the General Staff in 1929. During that time he worked at mechanizing the army and modernizing the militia. In 1919, it became necessary to integrate the numbered battalions of the returning Canadian Expeditionary Force with the old militia regiments, the then Prime Minister Sir Robert Borden created the Otter committee headed by General Sir William Otter. In general, the Otter committee tended to create as many regiments as possible across the country, but McNaughton, who served on the Otter committee, ensured Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, which had been privately raised in 1914, was taken on by the "permanent force militia" as a regiment for western Canada. Likewise, McNaughton ensured that the 22nd Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force was not disbanded, arguing that the 22nd Battalion, which came from Quebec and won more battle honours than any other Canadian battalion, should be kept on to show the army appreciated the sacrifices of French Canadians in the war. The 22nd Battalion was assigned to the "permanent force militia" as the 22nd Regiment, becoming the Royal 22nd Regiment in 1922, and went on to become the most famous French-Canadian regiment in the Canadian Army. McNaughton wrote the part of the Otter committee's report which stated the "principal peril" to Canada was "the danger of the overthrow of Law and Order" by "Bolshevik agitators", whom the report in a xenophobic note stated were mostly immigrants from Eastern Europe. McNaughton wrote that the best way of defeating the "Bolshevik peril" was "to have immediately available an efficient military body with which to overawe this unruly element, and secondly, by education, to convert them from their perverted ideals to a true conception of citizenship". As such, McNaughton envisioned the militia as primarily an internal security force that was intended to fulfil the role of "aid to civil power".