>In one particularly cruel episode, Canadians even exploited the trust of Germans who had apparently become accustomed to fraternizing with allied units. Lieutenant Louis Keene described the practice of lobbing tins of corned beef into a neighbouring German trench. When the Canadians started hearing happy shouts of “More! Give us more!” they then let loose with an armload of grenades.
>Others were cold-blooded executions. In one case, a Canadian surreptitiously slipped a live grenade into the greatcoat pockets of a German prisoner. In another, infantryman Richard Rogerson went on a killing spree at Vimy Ridge after seeing the death of his friend. “Once I killed my first German with my bayonit my blood was riled, every german I could not reach with my bayonit I shot. I think no more of murdering them than I usted to think of shooting rabbits,” he wrote.
>We like to think of Canada as pure, but Canadians gassed everything that moved whenever they could,” said historian Jack Granatstein in a recent about the last months of the First World War. As Currie himself would say after the war “if we could have killed the whole German Army by gas, we would gladly have done so.”
You gotta learn to choose your allies well, my german friend
Juan Cox
>"I was sent back with 3 bloody prisoners, you see, and one was limping and groaning, so I had to keep kicking the sod down the trench. He was an officer. It was getting dark and I was getting fed up so I thought 'I'll have a bit of a game.' I had them covered with the officers revolver and I made them open their pockets. Then I dropped a Mills' bomb in each with the pin out and ducked behind a traverse. Bang! Bang! Bang! No more bloody prisoners." -Member of The Black Watch (Royal Canadian Highlander Regiment) WWI
Canada's first fight in WWI (Ypres) was also the first time Germans decided to use gas against enemies. It really made Canadians mad. There was also a story about a Canadian soldier being crucified to a barn door with bayonets. It is still not known if the story is true or not but Canadians certainly believed it. As a result they conducted themselves in an ungentlemenly fashion, usually just killing surrendering Germans and prisoners, sometimes in cruel ways. Canada also managed to devise some new tactics that made them effective. Germans learned to watch Canadians because they were always at the vanguard and Germans could predict an attack when Canadians moved. The animosity carried over to WWII when a leading Canadian commander said that unlike other allied nations Canada would not be in the business of taking prisoners. It got worse when news spread that Germans had destroyed the Canadian Vimy Memorial. It was false, in fact Hitler admired it, took a tour to prove it was intact (pic) and stationed SS troops specifically to protect it. As a result, unlike many other great war memorials, it survived untouched.