| Battle
Exhaustion |
Neuropsychiatric
Wing attached to the 10th Canadian
General Hospital setting up
a new hospital, Bayeux, France,
2 August 1944. |
| Photo
by Ken Bell. Department of National
Defence / National Archives of
Canada, PA-132842. |
|
It was recognized early in the war that psychiatric
casualties would require treatment as well
as soldiers who had been physically wounded.
No. 1 Neurological Hospital was established
in September 1940 near Basingstoke in Hampshire
with 200 beds. Often simply referred to as
"Basingstoke", this hospital also
handled plastic surgery. In the Mediterranean
theatre, 1st Canadian Infantry Division appointed
a divisional psychiatrist, and a Base Neuropsychiatric
Centre was established at No. 15 General Hospital
in North Africa. Treatment included sedation,
rest, psychotherapy, and drug and electro-shock
therapy. Work served as another form of therapy,
Special Employment Companies being used to
load supplies of ammunition and fuel for the
battlefield among other tasks. Battle exhaustion
casualties apparently responded well to being
given something meaningful to do.
Although significant strides had been made
compared to the First World War, when stress
casualties were lumped together under the
rubric of "shell shock", attitudes
towards such men did not reflect the modern
notion that "each soldier has a limited
reserve of fortitude which runs out sooner
or later" (Bill Rawling, Death Their
Enemy: Canadian Medical Practitioners and
War, 2001, p. 189). Many exhaustion cases
were ultimately labelled "chronic";
psychiatrists reported that such men, inherently
unsuited for combat, should have been weeded
out before going overseas. In Northwest Europe,
senior officers took a harsher attitude to
psychiatric casualties, perhaps influenced
by a deepening reinforcements crisis that
left many units understrength at one of the
war's most critical stages. In the cases of
2nd Canadian Corps and 2nd Canadian Infantry
Division, commanders refused to integrate
psychiatric services into their medical organizations,
instead emphasising stern disciplinary measures
to deal with potential malingerers (Rawling,
p. 199). Treatment of exhaustion cases was
perhaps least satisfactory in the air force,
where many aircrew suffering from battle-related
traumatic stress were labelled as "Lacking
in Moral Fibre", or LMF, and treated
as disciplinary problems.
The typical symptoms of exhaustion are described
by Terry Copp, who notes that 90% of diagnosed
cases were among infantrymen, a statistic
no doubt influenced by air force attitudes
concerning the "moral fibre" of
its personnel. Copp writes: "The large
majority of individuals diagnosed as suffering
from Battle Exhaustion exhibited what the
psychiatrists described as acute fear reactions
and acute and chronic anxiety manifested through
uncontrollable tremors, a pronounced startle
reaction to war-related sounds, and a profound
loss of self-confidence. The second largest
symptomatic category was depression with accompanying
withdrawal" (J. Terry Copp, "Battle
Exhaustion and the Canadian Soldier in Normandy",
in Marc Milner, ed., Canadian Military History:
Selected Readings, 1993, p. 240). The incidence
of battle exhaustion casualties in First Canadian
Army reached crisis levels during the battles
south of Caen in July 1944. In an infantry
division of about 18,000 men, only a much
smaller proportion, approximately 4500, served
as front-line infantry. It was these men who
sustained the great majority of the 200,000
Allied casualties in the Battle of Normandy.
Casualty replacement schemes had been based
on statistics derived from the Italian campaign
which proved inapplicable to the nature of
the fighting in Normandy. The result in the
summer of 1944 was that sufficient reinforcements
to support the periods of "double-intense"
combat then taking place were not available.
A dwindling number of infantrymen thus had
to bear the task of driving the Germans out
of the occupied territories. Many inevitably
snapped under the strain. The crisis was only
alleviated with the German defeat in Normandy,
and although exhaustion casualties continued
to occur, they did not do so in the same overwhelming
numbers that had been seen in the aftermath
of the assault on Verrières Ridge,
for example.
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Canada in WWII
