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Old 15-10-09, 07:37 PM
WJ Miller's Avatar
WJ Miller WJ Miller is offline
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Join Date: Jan 2008
Location: Calgary, Aberta, Canada
Posts: 514
Default What's in a name?

Well, in Canada, just because you got called a "tank" regiment, doesn't actually mean you got a tank!

Hmmm, if I had organized my collection by regiments that actually had armoured capability I could have saved myself some money!?

Outside of a few members that attended the Armour School courses between '36 and '40, I am not sure if the ALI Tank actually ever trained as an armoured unit. "Tank" units were not on the Cavalry ORBAT but were on the Infantry ORBAT.

The WE of the 1936 tank battalions included 66 non-existant tanks. Resources available to the Militia were abysmal. Real tanks (surplus WW1) were not available for training until early in the war. By then many of the pre-war Tank battalions like the ALI were converted to infantry roles.

In the RCAC Illustrated history notes how poorly prepared the mounted units were. By the outbreak of the war, "...four of the six fledgling tank battalions had begun to master some of the basic tenets of armoured warfare, progress was uneven, essentially because they had no vehicles. The Argyll and New Brunswick Regiments (Tank), however were judged to have accomplished very little." What they lacked in skills they made up for in enthusiasm. The book notes that the militia units did provide well disciplined and dedicated officers and NCO's for the later overseas units.

There is a photo in the book showing the Calgary Regiment training with a plywood contraption mounted on a Model A, representing a tank. The pre-war militia units were little more than weekends and summer camps away from the wives, whatever the name...

If we are talking a collection of badges representing actively trained units of Canadian Armour in WW2, I would stick to the numbered order (1st -32nd CAR's + 1CACR) after 1940. A collection of units that actually saw combat is much smaller still.
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