In his Christmas broadcast in 1942, former Conservative Prime Minister R.B. Bennett sarcastically noted that this was the fourth Christmas in a row that the Canadian Army was sitting in Britain doing nothing, and that the only land battles that Canada had fought to date were Hong Kong and Dieppe, both of which were defeats. During the Operation Spartan wargame in March 1943, General Andrew McNaughton, commanding the First Canadian Army, had been badly defeated and was judged unfit to command an army in the field. The wargame umpires criticized McNaughton for leaving his headquarters to supervise the building of a bridge while his supply lines were caught up in a huge traffic jam. After Operation Spartan, the British strongly pressured the Canadians to remove McNaughton before he could lead the First Canadian Army into a real defeat in a battle.
