Gunner's Lament, The

DESCRIPTION: "We're poor little lambs who have lost our way, Ba, Ba, Ba, We're former artillery now infantry, Ba, Ba, Ba." The former artillerymen lament being forced to fight as foot soldiers, and suggest they "drown our sorrows with many beers."
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1979 (Hopkins-SongsFromTheFrontAndRear)
KEYWORDS: derivative soldier technology drink
FOUND IN: Canada
REFERENCES (1 citation):
Hopkins-SongsFromTheFrontAndRear, p. 109, "The Gunner's Lament" (1 text, tune referenced)
Roud #29400
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "The Whiffenpoof Song" (tune)
NOTES [578 words]: This is (I think) intended to be dryly funny, but it is nonetheless a genuine complaint. Artillerymen required skills not needed by infantrymen (e.g. mathematics), and so were more highly trained and more elite; the Canadians tested soldiers for intelligence and ability to decide who would be in services such as artillery and anti-aircraft units (Bercuson, p. 240). To be downgraded to infantry status was a genuine demotion. (This apart from the fact that it probably put them in more danger.)
Hopkins-SongsFromTheFrontAndRear attributes the events of this song to a reorganization of the forces in Italy. This appears to be correct, but a slightly different perspective is possible. The Italian campaign was very difficult, because of all of Italy's mountains and rivers. The 5th Canadian Armored Division, one of the most experienced Canadian units, was reorganized to take this into account. Bercuson, pp. 189-190, records:
"The 1st Canadian Corps would have a two-month hiatus... time enough for the 5th Canadian Armoured Division to continue tank-infantry training and to be reorganized to take into account lessons learned by British and Canadians in the Italian campaign thus far.... The most important of these lessons was that the armoured divisions were too poor in infantry to be effective in a country that did not lend itself to mobile warfare. It was therefore decided to add a second infantry brigade (the 12th) to the armoured division, formed from reconnaissance, motorized, and anti-aircraft regiments converted to infantry. The reason was simple: shortages of trained infantry were already becoming apparent only weeks after the Normandy landing. The Canadian Army staff... based on the war in the North African desert, and greatly underestimated infantry casualties and overestimated how many other troops it would need when allocating manpower resources [the North African war was more mobile and had less trench fighting than in Italy]. This would become a serious problem by the fall [of 1944] and would precipitate a general manpower crisis in the Canadian Army."
The reorganization worked; the 5th Armored, after going back into line, managed to create a break in the German "Gothic Line." But the Allies had no troops in position to exploit it (Bercuson, pp. 190-191).
The same problem of not having enough infantrymen would afflict the Normandy invasion, and result in a very unpopular change in the Canadian conscription laws that contributed to the eventual downfall of the Mackenzie King governing coalition (Bercuson, p. 241; Tillman, p. 130).
For the British, the problem was if anything even worse; their estimates of casualties in various branches of the service tended to be inaccurate (d'Este, pp. 254-255 and repeatedly elsewhere in chapter 15, "The Manpower Dilemma"), and they had no men to spare. 94% of adult British males were in some sort of war service by 1944 (d'Este, p. 252). Manpower shortages in Normandy were so severe that whole divisions were being organized out of existence and the troops reallocated to other forces or trained for other roles (d'Este, p. 262).
The use of the Whiffenpoof Song (words by George S. Pomeroy and Meade Minnigerode, music by Tod B Galloway) as a melody is interesting. It is old enough to have been used in World War II -- published in 1936, according to Gardner, p. 491. But it did not become a hit until 1947 (Gardner, p. 491, says it was #6 in America in November of that year). - RBW
BibliographyLast updated in version 6.5
File: Hopk109

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