Compulsory military service took on the most organized, long-term form it has ever had in Canada during the Second World War. But few historians have looked beyond the politics of conscription to study the creation, administration, or impact of a system that affected more than 150,000 men. This thesis examines the Army's role in creating and administering the compulsory military training system, and particularly the influence of Major-General H. D. G. Crerar and other senior officers. Faced with the federal government's policy of conscripting manpower only for home defence in 1940, and influenced by their own personal and professional desires to create a large, powerful Army that could take a leading role in the fighting overseas, Army leaders used conscripts raised under the National Resources Mobilization Act to meet both purposes. In this development can be found the origins of the "big army" of five divisions that fought for Canada overseas. Ultimately, thanks to the burden created by the "big army," and the entry of Japan into the war in late 1941, the NRMA failed to meet the huge demands imposed on the nation's manpower resources. The result was the political crisis that almost brought down the federal government in October and November 1944. / This thesis also explores the origins and background of the conscripts themselves, and the impact of the NRMA on their lives. As the NRMA became more and more central to the Army's plans after 1941, conscripts were exposed to a number of pressures designed to convince them to volunteer for overseas service. By late 1944, the only ones who remained were those who had most strongly resisted these efforts, a fact that the country's generals understood better than its politicians. The events of late 1944 brought the Cabinet to an awareness of the situation, but only at the cost of the prestige and influence that the Army had built up over the earlier years of the war. Thus, the way that the Army managed the NRMA came very much to shape the political debates that took place, and the place of the Army in Canada after the war.

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