Smythe Speaks Out

A wounded man, fresh from the battlefield, shocked Canada last week. Said Major Connie Smythe, M.C., peacetime boss of Toronto's Maple Leaf Hockey Club: Canadian overseas casualties were high because Canadian reinforcements were green and poorly trained. Major Smythe is recuperating at Toronto's Chorley Park Military Hospital from wounds received at Caen. ''Many [reinforcements]," he charged, "have never thrown a grenade. Practically all have little or no knowledge of the Bren gun and . . . most of them have never seen a Piat antitank gun, let alone fired one."

These were serious charges from a man technically still in uniform and subject to military discipline. Smythe was baiting the Government as he had once baited referees. He had a purpose. He wanted Canadian taxpayers and parents to insist that Canada's over 50,000 "Zombies" (home-defense draftees), many of whom had been in uniform from two to three years, be sent overseas.

Smythe's accusations angered Defense Minister James Layton Ralston in Ottawa. He seethed in silence. But from Ottawa came inspired stories hinting that Soldier Smythe was gunning for a Tory nomination in the next federal election.

National Defense Headquarters said: "The statement is simply not understood." This answered nothing, merely sidestepped the two questions all Canadians were asking: Are green men being rushed into battle? Are men from engineering and other specialist units being transferred to the infantry reserves without sufficient training? Snapped the usually even-tempered Ottawa Journal: "What [we have here] is an attempt at an official brushoff. . . . They [the public] want an answer and a civil and specific one. They Avant somebody--somebody in authority--to go between quotation marks."

No one in the Canadian Cabinet seemed willing to do so. Whether or not Smythe's charges were wide of their mark, there was one thing the Government could not deny: that many of the Zombies still at home and safe in Canada were better trained than some of the reinforcements going into the battle line.

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