ORIGINAL: pipewrench
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscripti ... is_of_1944
Canada's manpower in world war 2 . (excerpts)
In June 1940 the government adopted conscription for home service in the National Resources Mobilization Act (NRMA), which allowed the government to register men and women and move them into jobs considered necessary for wartime production, but did not allow them to be conscripted for overseas service.
By the late summer of 1944, the numbers of new recruits were insufficient to replace war casualties in Europe, particularly among the infantry.
Few conscripts saw combat in Europe: only 2463 men reached units on the front lines. Out of these, 79 lost their lives.
the conscription crisis of 1944 was more of a political crisis, the manpower problem in 1944 was mostly one of allocation, not an absolute lack of men.
In 1944, the Canadian Army numbered around 550,000. 450,000 were volunteers who had signed up to serve anywhere and 100,000 were draftees who could only serve in Canada.
In June 44, 3 divisions were slated for normandy. Between them, they had around 16-18,000 combat infantrymen. At that time, the Canadian replacement system was a cross between the US and British system. There was a central replacement pool, but an effort was made to allocate replacements to individual regiments and to have the replacements integrated into and trained with the regiment before being thrown into combat. There were around 8-12,000 trained infantry replacements in the pool in june. This was thought to be enough for the whole campaign. This was not the total number of replacements, since there were also replacements for the other branches.
As it turned out, the allied planners were totally off on their infantry casualty projections and the Army had gone through all the infantry replacements by september. This precipated a crisis back home which was fueled by many factors: resentment that draftees were safe back home while volunteers were risking their lives, the endless english-french tensions and media hysteria. This caused the decision to send draftees to Europe.
Meanwhile the Army solved its problem by reallocating personnel: soldiers and replacements in other branches were they were not needed were transferred to the infantry. Since Canada had a democratic volunteer army, the Army first proceeded by asking for volunteers and it turned out there were more than enough to solve the problem. These soldiers then had to be retrained as infantrymen. This process took several weeks/months. However, in the front lines, the infantry shortage was never severe enough to seriously affect the combat units. By the time the draftees showed up in the front lines in 1945, the crisis was already over.
