They joined the 2nd Battalion the Royal Scots Regiment, 1st Battalion the Middlesex Regiment, 5th Battalion 7th Rajput Regiment, 2nd Battalion 14th Punjab Regiment, the Hong Kong Chinese Regiment, and the Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Corps in defending the colony. Arriving in November 1941, the Canadians had little time before the Japanese attacked. The Royal Rifles of Canada and the Winnipeg Grenadiers were selected as the core of “C” Force, the name given to the Canadian reinforcement of Hong Kong. 1,975 Canadian troops were sent to the British colony to bolster its garrison in hopes of deterring a Japanese attack. That deployment, along with the return of two minesweepers from a stint with a NATO naval task force earlier this month, has left Canada without any warships in European waters for the first time since Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula in 2014.Canada’s first contribution to the Pacific Theatre came at the Battle of Hong Kong. HMCS Vancouver and HMCS Winnipeg were both deployed to the Indo-Pacific in June, the first time two Halifax-class frigates have sailed in the region together. The operational plans will get done, will be developed every single year as we look ahead to the sailing season.”Įven before the new strategy was unveiled, the navy was forced to make a difficult choice on where to send its frigates. ![]() ![]() ![]() “We don’t have the operational plans yet,” said one official, who could not be named as a condition of the briefing. The navy is also short about 1,300 sailors as the military writ large struggles with what senior officers have described as a personnel crisis. That’s because the navy has several other commitments, including in Europe, and a limited number of frigates.
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