Out of a Clear Sky: The Mobilization of the Newfoundland Regiment, 1914-1915 (Essay‪)‬

IT CAME, AS ONE OBSERVER NOTED, "out of a clear sky." (1) At 9:25 p.m. on 4 August 1914, the people of Newfoundland, then a self-governing colony of the British Empire, (2) were notified officially that they were at war with Germany and Austria-Hungary. With a population of slightly less than 250,000 people, 32,000 of them in the city of St. John's, Newfoundland hardly counted as a major player on the world stage, and appeared quite unlikely to have any significant impact on the war in Europe. Most of the colony's workforce was involved in the fishery, with smaller numbers employed in the mining and forestry sectors, as there was little in the way of manufacturing or other industry. (3) Its government, led by Prime Minister Sir Edward Morris, was considered to be perilously weak, presiding over a polity sharply divided along regional, sectarian, and class lines. (4) In terms of being a potential participant in an armed conflict, Newfoundland was, according to one source, "as complete an example of unpreparedness and pacifism as could be found in the world." (5) By the end of 1915, however, the 1st Newfoundland Regiment, an infantry unit composed entirely of Newfoundlanders, was in action at Gallipoli, and large numbers of Newfoundlanders were serving on warships of the Royal Navy. Before the war ended, the Newfoundland Regiment would serve with distinction in some of the conflict's most savage battles, earning, in the words of one recent writer, "a reputation second-to-none as a battalion that could be entirely depended upon whatever the cost." (6) It was a remarkable and entirely unexpected accomplishment for a country with, as one British politician noted, "a population half that of Wandsworth." (7) Accounts of the history of Newfoundland's military experience in World War I have long drawn heavily on Colonel G.W.L. Nicholson's The Fighting Newfoundlander, an official regimental history published in 1963. (8) While Nichol son's work is very impressive as far as such officially commissioned publications go, after the passage of several decades it tends to show its age, as it consists mainly of a traditional "battle narrative" (9) with only a minimal amount of analysis. Most recently published work on the Newfoundland Regiment focuses mainly on questions of the war experiences of Newfoundlanders and the place of the war effort in Newfoundland's cultural memory. (10) Robert J. Harding, for instance, has written on the centrality of the disastrous battle of Beaumont Hamel to the war's legacy in Newfoundland, and how that has shaped public memory of the war. (11) Such works contribute greatly to our understanding of the impact of the war on Newfoundlanders and on their country, but generally say little about how the Newfoundland Regiment came into being and why its administration took the form that it did, beyond a reiteration of elements of Nicholson's account. The only major work that studies in detail the administration of Newfoundland's war effort is an unpublished MA thesis from 1981 which looks at the work of the Newfoundland Patriotic Association. (12) The time seems to have come for a reconsideration of this aspect of Newfoundland's wartime history.