Disentangling Moral from Morale: Attempted Suicides in the Canadian Army, 1943–1944

Abstract

The following is the story of two men. Two men stationed at the same military training camp in Petawawa, Ontario. Two men who both held one of the lowest ranks in the Canadian Army as gunners during the Second World War. Two men who were both charged with attempted suicide. Two men who had similar cases but vastly different outcomes. The story of these two men, while small and perhaps seemingly inconsequential, illuminates the military structures that were guided by the efforts of the Army to maintain morale through strict discipline that reinforced the moral code that soldiers were expected to follow. Their stories teach us about masculinity, military life, military justice, family, and lastly, suicide and the way it has been defined and understood as a threat to the military establishment which identified suicide as a social contagion early in the development of military law. Those considered carriers of this social contagion, as we will see in the cases of John Lauzon and Albert Mulligan, were secluded, manipulated, silenced, punished, or stripped of legitimacy altogether.