By WWII, New Zealand had status in the Empire/Commonwealth as a Dominion, while Newfoundland was still a colony. A colony could be pretty much self-governing but its people were still British, whereas the people of a Dominion would have their own nationality.
There is plenty of scope for confusing the nationality of Canadians enrolled in the RAF during that war. E.g. if you were British born but emigrated to Canada as a young child, you might grow up thinking yourself Canadian, or Canadian first, and you would probably have Canadian nationality by the time you went to the U.K. to enlist, but unless you were very insistent about being called Canadian, your place of birth in the U.K. would almost certainly get you labelled as British in the official records. (I was born and raised in Canada, and when I joined the British Army in 1983, I was officially considered Canadian, though I didn't realise until later that due to my parents nationality, I was, since birth, also a British citizen. If I had known about that when I enlisted, I could have declared myself as British and all my records would have just said I was British.)
Sparky's slur on Montgomery and on the British in general for being "unable to staff their officer corps" is ill-founded. There were plenty of worse generals and not many better. He was only human, and certainly not perfect, but he got his command appointments the same way most generals did - because his superiors thought at the time that he was the best, or sometimes least bad, choice available for the job at the time, and he kept them because he generally proved successfull. Of course there was some national prejudice amongst the old professional officer corps of the British services, just as there was bound to be a prejudice amongst the professionals against the all the Territorials and Reservists and war service volunteers, but actual results in combat counted, and lots of pre-war regulars found their ceiling very quickly and found themselves serving under non-regulars and even the occasional colonial, foreign, or Allied commander.
There is no evidence that there was a significant pool of Canadian talent for high command languishing underemployed in the Canadian Army. The Canadian Army was relatively small and very new, so there simply hadn't been time for its pool of officers to gain the experience of staff work and unit and formation command to start throwing up a lot of candidates for higher command.
At the junior leaders level (company and platoon commanders, platoon sergeants, corporals and lance corporals as section commanders and section 2i/c) they have to lead by example and move about more within their positions to communicate, which means they expose themselves to enemy fire more and suffer higher casualty rates per capita than ordinary soldiers. After a couple of years of war, Britain was further down the road to depletion of its stock of potential leaders. The Army found an excellent source of junior officers not so much from exchanges (trading a British platoon commander for a Canadian one doesn't fill a hole in a British battalion) as from a program called CanLoan.
Many junior officers from the Canadian Army were posted to British battalions under this scheme, which on the whole reported them to be very good at their jobs. But to fault the British for not being able to find enough British officers for their troops invites the criticism that Canada couldn't raise enough Canadian troops for our Army's officers to lead.
There is plenty of scope for confusing the nationality of Canadians enrolled in the RAF during that war. E.g. if you were British born but emigrated to Canada as a young child, you might grow up thinking yourself Canadian, or Canadian first, and you would probably have Canadian nationality by the time you went to the U.K. to enlist, but unless you were very insistent about being called Canadian, your place of birth in the U.K. would almost certainly get you labelled as British in the official records. (I was born and raised in Canada, and when I joined the British Army in 1983, I was officially considered Canadian, though I didn't realise until later that due to my parents nationality, I was, since birth, also a British citizen. If I had known about that when I enlisted, I could have declared myself as British and all my records would have just said I was British.)
Sparky's slur on Montgomery and on the British in general for being "unable to staff their officer corps" is ill-founded. There were plenty of worse generals and not many better. He was only human, and certainly not perfect, but he got his command appointments the same way most generals did - because his superiors thought at the time that he was the best, or sometimes least bad, choice available for the job at the time, and he kept them because he generally proved successfull. Of course there was some national prejudice amongst the old professional officer corps of the British services, just as there was bound to be a prejudice amongst the professionals against the all the Territorials and Reservists and war service volunteers, but actual results in combat counted, and lots of pre-war regulars found their ceiling very quickly and found themselves serving under non-regulars and even the occasional colonial, foreign, or Allied commander.
There is no evidence that there was a significant pool of Canadian talent for high command languishing underemployed in the Canadian Army. The Canadian Army was relatively small and very new, so there simply hadn't been time for its pool of officers to gain the experience of staff work and unit and formation command to start throwing up a lot of candidates for higher command.
At the junior leaders level (company and platoon commanders, platoon sergeants, corporals and lance corporals as section commanders and section 2i/c) they have to lead by example and move about more within their positions to communicate, which means they expose themselves to enemy fire more and suffer higher casualty rates per capita than ordinary soldiers. After a couple of years of war, Britain was further down the road to depletion of its stock of potential leaders. The Army found an excellent source of junior officers not so much from exchanges (trading a British platoon commander for a Canadian one doesn't fill a hole in a British battalion) as from a program called CanLoan.
Many junior officers from the Canadian Army were posted to British battalions under this scheme, which on the whole reported them to be very good at their jobs. But to fault the British for not being able to find enough British officers for their troops invites the criticism that Canada couldn't raise enough Canadian troops for our Army's officers to lead.
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) He was more concerned about his personal agenda than his men.
