I never met my grandfather, Sergeant Morrison Carswell MM, of the Toronto Motorized Machine Gun Battalion. He died before I was born and my memories of him come from my father's stories.
Like most First World War survivors, he didn't seem to talk too much about his experiences. Although I know that he served from 1914 to 1918 in the horrific trenches of the front lines and was with the Army of Occupation in Germany until 1919, inspecting German technology, I have always felt a void when it came to his wartime experiences. We know that he was gassed during the Second Battle of Ypres and participated in all of the Canadian actions, finishing in the Canadian Corps Headquarters. He was part of the planning for the revolutionary indirect machine gun barrages at the Vimy battle.
My father gave me my Grandfather's medals, which include the Military Medal, the highest honour for bravery in battle for an enlisted man, other than the Victoria Cross. My father tells me that my grandfather said that he received it for running around and assisting when the Canadian HQ came under artillery barrage. He also said that the Generals were impressed by his evident valour, but he had done much more dangerous things when he was a machine gunner in other battles that no one had noticed.
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Sergeant Morrison Carswell MM
From Balmy Beach to Flanders Field
My grandfather was an Electrical Engineering student at University of Toronto in September 1914 when war was declared. His father was a senior banker at the Dominion Bank's head office. Morrison lived in Balmy Beach on Balsam Avenue, which was then a new subdivision made possible by the Queen Streetcar line and allowed businessmen to commute to the financial district. The family was well to do and had one of the first automobiles in the Beach, and the family summered at Bala in Muskoka. Morrison and his family were members of the Balmy Beach Canoe Club and I still have his restored cedar strip canoe at my own cottage in Muskoka.
Like many young men of his generation, Morrison rushed to sign up in the Canadian Army to "fight the Kaiser" when war was declared in September 1914. He wanted to join the Toronto Scottish Regiment, since his maternal grandfather James Morrison was prominent in Toronto's Scottish community. Unfortunately, this was an infantry unit and Morrison had flat feet so he was rejected. He then joined the newly formed Automobile Machine Gun Brigade No. l . This was later renamed the 1st Canadian Motor Machine Gun Brigade and was an innovative unit raised and funded by Raymond Brutinel, a wealthy French immigrant from Western Canada, and several other prominent Canadian businessmen, particularly Sir Clifford Sifton.
The unit was outfitted with "Autocars," commercial trucks purchased in the United States. They were armoured and fitted with Colt machine guns. The idea was that these trucks would provide mobility and firepower and this unit was probably the first mechanized army formation in military history. There is an excellent paper on the Canadian Motor Machine Gun Brigade by Cameron Pulsifer: "Canada's First Armoured Unit: Raymond Brutinel and the Canadian Motor Machine Gun Brigades of the First World War," (Pulsifer, Cameron (2001) Canadian Military History: Vol. 10: Iss. 1, Article 5.) which appeared in the Canadian Military History Journal and can be found online.
