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Post-War Reconstruction and
the Birth of Surveying Engineering at UNB:
One Soldier's Contribution

The Gregg Centre for the Study of War and Society organizes an annual UNB Remembers ceremony in conjunction with Remembrance Day. This year the ceremony was held at Memorial Hall on November 4th and I was asked to speak briefly about my father, Major Archie McLaughlin, a Royal Canadian Artillery Officer who served in the Second World War.

These notes, prepared after the fact, attempt to capture some of the key points from my talk.

The genesis for the invitation relates to the recently publication of Loyal Gunners: 3rd Field Artillery Regiment (The Loyal Company) and the History of New Brunswick's Artillery, 1893-2012 by Lee Windsor et al.

In their richly documented history of the 3rd field regiment, Dr. Lee and his colleagues include a chapter devoted to the period immediately following the Second World War. It begins by noting the wealth of experience that New Brunswick gunners brought home with them from the war. They reference in particular a dedicated cadre who helped place the UNB surveying program at the forefront in the postwar development of surveying, mapping and land administration.

Archie McLaughlin was one of those gunners and I was asked to share some thoughts about his contribution.

I began my presentation with some caveats: first, this is a large and complex story, one that I simply couldn't do much justice to in the ten minutes or so that was allocated. Second, it has a cast of many characters, including such distinguished veterans as Willis Roberts and Angus Hamilton, all richly deserving of their own recognition (as an aside, it was a particular pleasure to acknowledge Angus who was in the audience). And, on a more personal note, my talk spoke very much to a men's world and about how the immediate post war era provided them with the opportunities to utilize the training and experience gained while in service. My mother, Lt. Lois McLaughlin, was also a veteran, but her post war experience was very different. A story for another day.

My father grew up on the family farm in Tay Creek New Brunswick. The agricultural land in that part of the province was pretty miserable and the local economy was largely based on working in the woods.

Dad was the first in his family to go to high school, which entailed coming into Fredericton (he would often walk the 25 miles each way on weekends and boarded in town during the week). After graduating into the depths of the depression he went back home and back to the woods. We have very little in the way of records as to what life would have been like for him, although it is a world that has been captured very vividly in works such as David Adams Richard's The Friends of Meager Fortune.

It was the war that brought Dad out of the woods. He enlisted in the spring of 1940 at the relatively advanced age of 26 and was sent to Saint John for basic training. At some point, he was singled out for officer training and subsequently for extended training as a Forward Observation Officer (FOO). The training, undertaken in Ontario and later in Newfoundland, was extensive and delayed his departure for Europe.

In my presentation, I reviewed this training and experience as an artillery officer in a bit of detail, as it is key to understanding his subsequent contributions to advancing the field of surveying and mapping.

At the beginning of the war, artillery was widely viewed as the queen of the military sciences (or even more dramatically as Stalin once put it, "the God of War"). Since the late 1800s it had benefitted from an almost continuous stream of advances in engineering, metallurgy, applied chemistry and related disciplines. Even more important in terms of my father's training and subsequent experience as a FOO, were the developments in what came to be known as precision artillery.

Artillery had featured prominently in the First World War, culminating in its crucial role in the later stages when gunners became adept at dropping shells precisely where required. This led to the development of the so-called creeping barrage which cleared the field for the Canadian infantry in the Hundred Days Offensive from August to November 1918.

Precision artillery was in part based on the development of a number of tools for accurate targeting (such as a forerunner to radar invented by Andrew McNaughton, who went on to become President of the National Research Council in the inter-war years and then commander of the Canadian Army in WWII).

It was also based on new approaches to command and control. Pioneered in WWI for big set piece battles with heavy guns, it further evolved in the inter war period in support of the more rapid and flexible deployment of lighter field artillery.

Most relevant for my father, and especially important to his later career, was the concomitant changes in the role of the Forward Observation Officer. Traditionally, and very much still the American practice, the rules of engagement required observers to request fire from an artillery headquarters at some level. The British army (and the Canadians) began to change their strategies in the late 1930s towards giving FOOs authority to order fire. FOOs were assigned to the battalion unit their battery was supporting and as the war progressed it became the practice that they would arrange quick fire plans in support of short, fast moving offensive actions.

This then was the world that Dad trained for.

Eventually, he went overseas with the 19th Canadian Army Field Regiment, RCA. The Regiment saw action in France, Holland and Germany. Like so many of his colleagues, Dad rarely talked about his wartime experience. Indeed, it was only after his death, while going through his files, we discovered that he had been decorated by the Government of the Netherlands for bravery and leadership under fire.

But he was proud of his contribution and stayed on in the militia (12th Field Regiment) with Willis Roberts et al after the war for an extended period. As mentioned in my talk, I am sure that on more than one occasion at the Officers' mess Dad, Willis and the other gunners would have raised their glasses in response to Rudyard Kipling's famous words of gratitude:

And when the firin' dies away
The husky whisper runs
From lips that haven't drunk all day
The guns, thank God, the guns.

My father was in his thirties when the war ended, and felt he was too old to take advantage of the recently created Veterans university education program. Instead, after a bit of uncertainty, he joined the provincial Department of Lands and Mines and articled under Willis to become a New Brunswick Land Surveyor.

Initially engaged in very traditional chain and compass land surveys, from the beginning he was extremely frustrated with traditional practices and standards (I have been through some of Willis' correspondence and have come across any number of memos defending Dad and his new-fangled ideas). However, by the late 1940s - early 50s, a new mindset was taking hold as the waves of returning veterans began to take leadership positions and the postwar reconstruction plans began to fully materialize.

And it was during this period that the foundation was set for what was arguably the most significant contribution to building a sustained culture of innovation in the province's postwar era (in a field that first became known as surveying engineering and is now more broadly defined as geomatics).

Surveying and mapping, land administration - these were Dickensian institutions dating from before New Brunswick became a separate province and simply weren't up to the emerging challenges of the post war era. New strategies and systems were required.

There were three core components to introducing and sustaining a fundamentally new approach to the field:

And the academic home for all of this was UNB's Department of Surveying Engineering. Established in 1960, it was arguably the only academic discipline in Atlantic Canada ever to be widely recognized as among the very best in the world in its field!

Dad's contributions to all of this included building the NB Control Survey System and introducing the use of computers in surveying and mapping and in automating land records. That my father and his colleagues came so early to computer technology is perhaps not a surprise, especially given the intimate connection between wartime artillery problems and the initial developments of digital computing (ENIAC for example was designed and initially employed in calculating artillery firing tables).

The Control Survey System was an especially ambitious undertaking (one of the first modern jurisdiction-wide coordinate survey system in North America). It was enabled by recent technology developments in electronic distance measuring (derived from wartime radar research) and computing, and even more deeply informed by a way of thinking about applied geography that came from the wartime experience. And it received crucial support because of shared experiences from the war (in this regard I noted that the Minister of Lands and Mines, Norman Buchanan, was himself a former artillery officer).

Dad was the principal architect of most aspects of the system (down to designing the system for pouring the concrete survey monuments), but I especially remember his early days in computer programming: memories from the late 1950s with him and Dana Wasson (the father of computer science at UNB) in our small kitchen on McLaren Avenue programing a LGP-30 computer in machine language, his development of one of the first major coordinate survey computer software packages (initially using a 4K IBM 1130) and later his taking over the IBM 360 at UNB for several days in support of a major least squares adjustment of more than 28,000 survey control stations.

Beyond working with the computer as a super calculator, my father also began to lay out a vision for automating land records and for envisioning the world of computer geography (a vision which was deeply connected to his FOO experience). While Dad died in 1991, before the advent of the public Internet, some of his ideas (and those of his colleagues) made their way into the thinking behind the concepts of the National Spatial Data Infrastructure and the role of geography in the "information super highway". And just a couple of years ago, when I gave a keynote address on land administration in middle income countries in Istanbul, you could still see these ideas in play, still informing the way we think about geography in the digital age. Incidentally, for anyone interested in learning more about this period, I refer you to my interview as part of a UNB computer science oral history project.

On Remembrance Day, as we have for the past quarter century, Maggie, my sister Glenys and I made our way to the United Church Cemetery in Tay Creek where my parents are buried. As always, it provided a special moment for reflection.

We Canadians are not very comfortable with the "greatest generation" rhetoric, believing it to be too American, too boastful, lacking nuance. But I believe it. And, reflecting in part on the just completed U.S. election, I believe it more and more each passing year.

My parents were of a generation who left the towns and villages, the farms and fishing outports, who left a world to which they would never return. They may have gone for patriotic reasons, for the sense of adventure, maybe just to get off the farm. Whatever the reason, they made an immeasurable contribution to the defense of democracy and came home to build this wonderful society we too often take for granted.

It is important, perhaps even more important these days, that we continue to tell their stories.

I very much appreciate the opportunity to share these memories afforded me by the invitation from the Gregg Centre and by the subsequent interest of Prof. Richard Langley in posting my remarks to the GGE website.

Thank you.


John McLaughlin

November 20, 2016