Recruiting

It is evident from these extracts that the officers were using the carrot as much as the stick to motivate the private soldiers. The officers were no longer dealing with the keen volunteers of 1939 who would accept discomfort with a small amount of grumbling. Nelson Darling, who was regimental adjutant from December 1939 to June 1941, said of those first years "morale was excellent, subject to the usual problem of disciplining Canadians." By 1944 most of the original members of the 15th Coast Brigade had gone overseas. Some were held back by health or family ties and a good number of experienced officers and NCO's were deliberately retained as a reliable core for training recruits. The untrained recruits who replaced those gunners who had left were increasingly conscripts and not volunteers. They had been summoned to military service for home defence under the National Resources Mobilization Act (N.R.M.A.) of June 1940. They were very different from those men who had been in Vancouver's pre-war militia. Before mobilization, according to Nelson Darling, the 15th Coast drew heavily on the Canadian-born population of British stock. If we can judge from the nominal roll of the 1st Searchlight Regiment in January 1940, the same was true of this unit. The vast majority of the 204 persons listed had English, Scottish or Irish surnames. The balance, eighteen men, had Germanic, French or Scandinavian names.  The author knows from acquaintance that more than half of these were English-speaking Canadians and not recent immigrants. Surnames are not a perfect indicator of peoples' cultural ties. They do indicate that the militia artillery of the Lower Mainland at the beginning of the Second World War had the same ethnic makeup as Vancouver's first militia units. The officers still came from the same occupational group. In 1939 the officers of the 15th Coast Brigade were, according to Allan M. McGavin who was the first commander of Narrows North, "mostly businessmen." They included a lawyer, an insurance underwriter, a dentist, a shipping agent, a post office employee, some schoolteachers, and the officials of such commercial enterprises as a flour mill, a lumber yard and a timber company. The men in the lower ranks came from across the city: they were students, truck-drivers, policemen, employees of a storage company, metalworkers and sawmill workers, as well as a few of the unemployed who were given their streetcar fare to the armouries. "They were," says Nelson Darling, "either very young or very old, including a few hangovers from the First War." The gulf between the two age groups was soon filled by recruiting in the first months of the Second World War.
Vancouver Defended, Peter N Moogk, pg 108

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