Lieutenant-General Guy Granville Simonds, (April 23, 1903 – May 15, 1974) was a senior Canadian Army officer who served with distinction during World War II. Acknowledged by many military historians and senior commanders, among them Sir Max Hastings and Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery, as one of the best Canadian generals of the war, Simonds, after serving the first few years of the Second World War mainly as a staff officer, commanded the 1st Canadian Infantry Division with distinction in Sicily and Italy from July 1943 until January 1944, and later II Canadian Corps during the Battle of Normandy from June−August 1944 and throughout the subsequent campaign in Western Europe from 1944, towards the end of which he temporarily commanded the First Canadian Army during the Battle of the Scheldt, until victory in Europe Day in May 1945. The historian J. L. Granatstein states about Simonds: "No Canadian commander rose higher and faster in the Second World War, and none did as well in action. Simonds owed his success wholly to his own abilities and efforts—and those of the men who served under him".
After the end of the war, he went to the Imperial Defence College (IDC) in London, initially as a student and later as an instructor, before returning to Canada to command the National Defence College. In 1951, at the age of just 48, he was appointed Chief of the General Staff (CGS), the head of the Canadian Army, a post he held for four years, including during the Korean War, before retiring in 1955.
Guy was born in Ixworth, near Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, England on April 24, 1903.
Simonds came from a military family: his great-grandfather had been in the army of the Honourable East India Company, his grandfather had been a major-general in the British Indian Army and his father an officer in the British Army's Royal Regiment of Artillery. The Simonds family was related to Ivor Maxse and Lord Milner. On his maternal side, his grandfather William Easton was a wealthy Virginian horse breeder, who had moved to England, renting Ixworth Abbey. Eleanor "Nellie" Easton, his mother, was one of five daughters, four of whom married army officers.
His father Cecil, a major, resigned from the British Army in fall 1911 (when Guy was 8) and moved his family to British Columbia, working as a surveyor for a railway. Cecil's expectations of having his own survey company were frustrated by the requirement to pass local professional examinations. Re-joining the army at the start of World War I, Cecil was wounded in 1918, and demobilized in 1919 with the rank of colonel. The family spent the war in a rented house in Victoria. Guy's mother sold family possessions to make ends meet. Guy had to quit school for two years at age fourteen to help support the family. Graham speculates that the period of fatherlessness made him a "loner" and self-reliant.
Simonds had three siblings, Cicely, Peter and Eric. Eric (anecdotally an excellent rifle shot, having won prizes at Bisley) became a test pilot, but died in an air accident off Felixstowe in July 1937 in a Miles Magister while serving with the A&AEE in England. Cicely worked as a secretary in the Admiralty during the war. She and her daughter were killed by a V-1 (flying bomb) attack in June 1944, during World War II.
Education and early military career
Simonds attended Collegiate School for Boys in Victoria and then Ashbury College in Ottawa beginning in 1919. The college's dining hall is named after him.
He studied at the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ontario between 1921 and 1925, cadet number 1596. Simonds' class was the last to be selected from nationwide exams (Simonds having been placed second) and the first after the recently ended First World War to enter a four-year course. At graduation he was awarded the Sword of Honour, judged the best "all rounder", placed second academically, and was generally considered the best horseman in the class.
He joined the Canadian Militia and was commissioned in 1925 as a second lieutenant into the Royal Regiment of Canadian Artillery, serving first with B Battery of the Royal Canadian Horse Artillery in Kingston, then C Battery in Winnipeg. In September 1932 (just weeks after his wedding) with the rank of brevet captain, he attended the Long Gunnery Staff Course in England. He was accompanied to England by his wife, and his first child was born there. He returned to Kingston in 1934. In 1936 and 1937 he attended the Staff College, Camberley in England. Major-General Lord Gort was the commandant at the time, although he was soon replaced by Major-General Sir Ronald Adam, while the instructors included Lieutenant Colonel William Slim. Simonds worked extremely hard and thoroughly enjoyed his time there and he was deemed by his superiors to have been one of the outstanding students on the two-year course. Furthermore, had he been a British officer, he would have been specially selected for an accelerated promotion in order that he might return to the college to serve as an instructor. This was not to be, however.
Promoted to major, he returned to the Royal Military College of Canada as an associate professor of artillery and later as instructor in tactics. The college's commandant at the time was Brigadier Harry Crerar, a fellow gunner officer who was to play a significant part in Simonds's future military career, and under whom he had served towards the end of the 1920s. Historian J.L. Granatstein writes of the two men:
The two were not friends — a major and a brigadier could not be friends — but the older man developed some sense of Simonds's worth. That would be important in the war that began for Canada on 10 September 1939.
During the pre-war years, Simonds and E. L. M. Burns, a future corps commander, debated concepts in the pages of Canadian Defence Quarterly.
On September 10, 1939 Canada declared war on Nazi Germany and officially entered the Second World War. Almost immediately Simonds received orders to report to Ottawa where he was appointed to the newly raised 1st Canadian Infantry Division, as its General Staff Officer Grade 2 (GSO2). His first duties as GSO2 were to supervise the operations and training of the division, as well as for its organization and equipment. Together with most of the rest of the division, Simonds went overseas to the United Kingdom in December 1939.
There his job was to consume him in the weeks and months ahead, so much so that he scarcely wrote to his wife, Kay. Colonel Ernest William Sansom, a fellow officer in the 1st Division, had heard about Kay's misgivings about never hearing from her husband, wrote to his wife, stating that he was not surprised, and claimed that Simonds, "is working very hard and doing an excellent job as GSO II."
Simonds's job brought him into frequent contact with the 1st Division's General Officer Commanding (GOC), "Andy" McNaughton, a fellow gunner officer who had previously been Chief of the General Staff (CGS). Simonds was with the GOC on 16 May 1940, six days after the Battle of France began, when McNaughton was summoned to a conference by General Sir Edmund Ironside, the British Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS), about the situation in France, which was not good and seemed to be deteriorating rapidly. The briefing stated the situation as being critical but not completely hopeless, and urged commanders to teach bayonet fighting to instil in their men a fighting spirit. The briefing also urged that German paratroopers were not to be made prisoners of war.
On July 20, 1940, after being promoted to lieutenant colonel, he went on to be commanding officer of the 1st Field Regiment, Royal Canadian Artillery, his first command since leaving C Battery.
In November 1940 he was appointed commandant of the Canadian Junior War Staff Course (an intensive 14-week program that compressed one year of the Camberly course), intended to fill the shortage of trained staff officers. He then became GSO I with the 2nd Canadian Infantry Division under Victor Odlum, a veteran of both the Second Boer War and the First World War in his sixties who was really too old to command in this newer conflict. Despite this, Odlum came to admire the younger man, informing McNaughton of Simonds's, "splendid work" and that he had, "never had an officer on my staff who gave better service."