1. Guy Simonds was born in Ixworth, near Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, England on April 24,1903.
54 Facts About Guy Simonds
1. 2.
Guy Simonds came from a military family: his great-grandfather had been in the army of the Honourable East India Company, his grandfather had been a major-general in the British Indian Army and his father an officer in the British Army's Royal Regiment of Artillery.
3.
The Guy Simonds family was related to Ivor Maxse and Lord Milner.
4.
Guy Simonds had to quit school for two years at age fourteen to help support the family.
5.
Guy Simonds attended Collegiate School in Victoria and then Ashbury College in Ottawa beginning in 1919.
6.
Guy Simonds studied at the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ontario between 1921 and 1925, cadet number 1596.
7.
Guy Simonds' class was the last to be selected from nationwide exams and the first after the recently ended First World War to enter a four-year course.
8.
Guy Simonds joined the Canadian Militia and was commissioned in 1925 as a second lieutenant into the Royal Regiment of Canadian Artillery, serving first with B Battery of the Royal Canadian Horse Artillery in Kingston, then C Battery in Winnipeg.
9.
Guy Simonds was accompanied to England by his wife, and his first child was born there.
10.
Guy Simonds worked extremely hard and thoroughly enjoyed his time there and he was deemed by his superiors to have one of the outstanding students on the two-year course.
11.
Almost immediately Guy Simonds received orders to report to Ottawa where he was appointed to the newly raised 1st Canadian Infantry Division, as its General Staff Officer Grade 2.
12.
Together with most of the rest of the division, Guy Simonds went overseas to the United Kingdom in December 1939.
13.
Guy Simonds's job brought him into frequent contact with the 1st Division's General Officer Commanding, "Andy" McNaughton, a fellow gunner officer who had previously been Chief of the General Staff.
14.
Guy Simonds was with the GOC on 16 May 1940, six days after the Battle of France began, when McNaughton was summoned to a conference by General Sir Edmund Ironside, the British Chief of the Imperial General Staff, about the situation in France, which was not good and seemed to be deteriorating rapidly.
15.
Guy Simonds then became GSO I with the 2nd Canadian Infantry Division under Victor Odlum, a veteran of both the Second Boer War and the First World War in his sixties who was really too old to command in this newer conflict.
16.
In July and August 1942 Guy Simonds was involved in planning for an abortive Churchill-inspired attack on Norway, codenamed "Jupiter", thereby avoiding the Dieppe Raid debacle.
17.
In January 1943 Guy Simonds became chief of staff of the First Canadian Army, again serving under McNaughton, with Brigadier Howard Graham assuming command of the 1st Brigade.
18.
Guy Simonds suggested that McNaughton separate his "political" functions from "fighting" headquarters.
19.
McNaughton grew angry, and within 48 hours Guy Simonds was on attachment to the British Eighth Army, under Montgomery, then fighting in Tunisia.
20.
Guy Simonds came under fire for the first time on July 16,1943, after nearly 17 years of service in the Canadian Army.
21.
Always a supporter of Guy Simonds, Montgomery was impressed with the way the younger man had commanded 1st Division throughout the brief but bitter campaign in Sicily, marking him out as a man destined for higher command.
22.
Guy Simonds viewed this, along with the arrival of Lieutenant-General Harry Crerar and I Canadian Corps, as something of a comedown, although this was not the intent of CMHQ.
23.
Guy Simonds was furious when he learned that, to save shipping, his new division would have to take old equipment from the veteran British 7th Armoured Division.
24.
Guy Simonds's initial meeting with Crerar went poorly, and relations further deteriorated when Simonds ejected an officer sent by Crerar to measure his headquarters caravan.
25.
Crerar had become jealous of Guy Simonds, who had enjoyed more battlefield success and media attention as the general officer commanding of 1st Infantry Division and then as 5th Armored Division in Italy than he had.
26.
Montgomery wrote back that he had the "highest opinion of Guy Simonds" and rejected Crerar's claims that he was mentally ill.
27.
At the age of just forty, Guy Simonds was purported to be the youngest corps commander in the British Empire.
28.
Guy Simonds further noted the Wehrmacht would always launch aggressive counter-attacks in face of an Allied attack, stating:.
29.
Guy Simonds always spoke with a strong English accent, and his personality never inspired any affection from the men under his command who regarded him as a "cold Englishman".
30.
Guy Simonds has often been criticized for his reliance on heavy bombers to "blast" open a way for Operation Totalize, but the Canadian historian Jody Perrun argued that the marked inferiority of the Sherman tanks to the Panther and Tiger tanks of the Germans meant that Guy Simonds had no other choice, but to use air power to even the odds given that both the Panthers and Tigers had more powerful guns and heavier armor than the Shermans.
31.
Guy Simonds insisted that his French was not that good and so Kitching translated for him.
32.
Kitching later accused Guy Simonds of being better at French than what he pretended as the interval for translations gave him more room to develop arguments to dismiss Maczek's concerns.
33.
Guy Simonds, knowing of the weakness of the Sherman tanks, which were both under-armored and under-gunned, had planned for his artillery to knock out Meyer's Tigers and Panthers, and expected the Germans to counter-attack at once with their armor.
34.
The next day, Guy Simonds sent the Worthington Force, comprising a battlegroup of the British Columbia regiment and the Algonquin regiment, which however took a wrong turn, and was annihilated by Meyer who sent his Tiger and Panther tanks against the Shermans.
35.
In September 1944, Guy Simonds temporarily took charge of the First Canadian Army from Lieutenant-General Harry Crerar, who was recovering from a bout of dysentery, and led the liberation of the mouth of the Scheldt River.
36.
Guy Simonds was "undoubtedly deeply hurt" when he was passed over for Charles Foulkes as Chief of the General Staff in August 1945.
37.
Guy Simonds met and talked to leading politicians, industrialists, and servicemen of the Western Alliance.
38.
Guy Simonds returned to Canada in 1949 to take a role as Commandant of the Canadian Army Command and Staff College and the National Defence College, Canada.
39.
Guy Simonds wrote at the time that, since the shipping was not available to move two divisions to Europe, the Canadians best be there before World War III started.
40.
Guy Simonds clashed with Foulkes, the chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee about where to station the Canadians in West Germany.
41.
Guy Simonds stated that the Canadians had fought alongside the British successively in the Boer War, the First World War, the Second World War, and the Korean War, and moreover the Canadian Army was closely modelled after the British Army right down to having British-style uniforms and ranks and the same regimental structure; for all these reasons, Guy Simonds felt that placing the Canadians with the British in northern West Germany would be a better fit.
42.
Guy Simonds believed that esprit de corps was the key to maintaining morale, and felt that regimental pride in the history and traditions was what motivated soldiers to fight.
43.
Guy Simonds created a Regiment of Canadian Guards which closely resembled the Brigade of Guards in London, right down to having scarlet uniforms and bearskin hats.
44.
Morton wrote that a "more practical aid to morale, opposed by Guy Simonds, was a decision to allow families to join Canadian service personnel in Europe".
45.
Guy Simonds was active with Royal Life Saving Society of Canada, the Gurkha Appeal, the Canadian Corps of Commissionaires and was chairman of the National Ballet of Canada.
46.
Guy Simonds criticized the government for seeking closer ties with the United States, and opposed the reliance on nuclear weapons, advocating strong conventional forces.
47.
Guy Simonds proposed the use of aerial supply to reduce the vulnerability of army divisional supply chains.
48.
Guy Simonds believed in the "integration" of defence headquarters, but opposed the Hellyer "unification" of the armed forces.
49.
Guy Simonds concluded that the plans of the Defence Minister Paul Hellyer to unify the services would never work as it was based on the assumption there was really no difference between war on land, at sea and in the air and a common service could handle all three.
50.
Guy Simonds was honorary colonel of the Royal Regiment of Canada at the time of the regiment's 100th anniversary in October 1962.
51.
Guy Simonds was offered an honorary degree from RMC which he declined, as he had opposed the degree program, fearing the long tenure of civilian instructors would unduly influence the curriculum.
52.
Guy Simonds was buried in Toronto's Mount Pleasant Cemetery after a service at Grace Church-on-the-Hill.
53.
Shortly before retirement, Guy Simonds met Dorothy "Do" Sinclair whom he married on January 16,1960.
54.
Guy Simonds did not attempt to lead; he sought only to command.