Canadian WE's Heritage Canada

Discussion in 'Canadian' started by Buck-Compton, Nov 15, 2022.

  1. Buck-Compton

    Buck-Compton Junior Member

    Hello All,

    I have read on multiple occasions about WE's who can help indicate a units organisation and strength during deployment in ww2. I have found some links but they are either in active or link to documents which are hard to understand without context. Is anyone able to help me in the right direction where to find these documents? And is there an overview, similar to the ww2 Canadian war diaries on the heritage site, available somewhere which helps me to search in the right direction as I expect this to be a fairly large haystack.

    Regards,

    Remi
     
  2. dryan67

    dryan67 Senior Member

    I have put together a few spreadsheets on the Heritage Canadiana War Diaries in the Resource Section.

    Royal Canadian Engineer War Diary Index
    New Resource - Royal Canadian Engineer War Diary Index - Heritage Canadiana
    Royal Canadian Artillery War Diary Index
    New Resource - Royal Canadian Artillery War Diary Index - Heritage Canadiana
    War Diaries Index
    Updated Resource - Heritage Canadiana War Diaries Spreadsheet

    If you are looking for War Establishments, then you need to go to the 1946 Central Registry reels. Reels from C-4889 to C-4974 do contain WE information. I have not indexed this area, though.

    1946 Army Central Registry - Héritage
     
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  3. Gary Kennedy

    Gary Kennedy Member

    There does seem to be a pretty complete set of Canadian Army WEs on the Canadiana reels, certainly in terms of Divisional units. The reels are not indexed and you do just have to 'schlep' through thousands of images to find the ones you want. And some of the scans are quite poor quality. WEs (British or any Commonwealth nation that I can find) are my area of interest, and while I haven't done an index of what WEs are on the reels either, I do have a good familiarity with the Canadian Div level ones.

    Gary
     
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  4. Buck-Compton

    Buck-Compton Junior Member

    Hello,

    Sorry for my very late reply I was abroad for my work for a couple of weeks.

    dryan67: Thank you for the links I will look in to it.

    Gary Kennedy: Thank you for your reply. I had a quick look at the WE's. I was under the assumption I was looking at strength reports of units but it seems to be so much more than that. Is there a way to comb trough them to get to the information I'm looking for without having to 'brute force' download all of the images and then sort them out manually?

    Kind regards,

    Remi
     
  5. Gary Kennedy

    Gary Kennedy Member

    The War Establishment Table was the British, and by extension Commonwealth, equivalent of the US Table of Organization. They give the authorised number of personnel, broken down by rank, trades and duties, transport and weapons for each unit type and formation Headquarters. Strength reports, returns of the actual number of personnel with units and HQs, are a different subject and not something I can recall seeing myself while trawling the Heritage files.

    I don't know of a simple way to navigate the Canadian WE files online, the decision to include anything from 2000 to nearly 6000 images per reel, covering years of correspondence has rendered the job very difficult. I recall the dates covered also tend to shift in the WE files, rather than being completely in order. If there are particular unit types you're interested in I might have some locations marked in the reels.

    Gary
     
  6. Buck-Compton

    Buck-Compton Junior Member

    Gary Kennedy Thank you for your reply. My scope at the moment is fairly large. I'm trying to get a good view of how all Canadian units involved in the battle of the scheldt where composed. So we are talking 1st Canadian army HQ and troops, 2nd Canadian Corps HQ troops, the entire 2nd and 3rd Infantry division and the 4th Armoured Division.

    I had a brief look at the reels but it seemed to contain personnel files or records as well. Wasn't quite sure what I saw but it seemed like I was reading about court martials or something like it.

    Kind regards,

    Remi
     
  7. Gary Kennedy

    Gary Kennedy Member

    Sounds perhaps more like compiling an order of battle rather than assembling all the WEs that were used? I suppose it depends whether you're looking at identifying all relevant units and HQs, then summarising their strength and equipment, to build a picture of formations, or getting into the absolute detail of identifying all personnel in a unit, their role, and their weapon (at least the authorised details).

    Gary
     
  8. Buck-Compton

    Buck-Compton Junior Member

    Gary Kennedy Yes in a way it would be compiling orders of battle. But I had a look at the signals WE's a while ago and it seemed they had a very specific order of battle per unit and it gives me a clear view of equipment available to the specific unit. So to me it seemed quite worthwhile to have a good look at those specific files.

    Kind regards,

    Remi
     

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