Lieutenant-Colonel G. Allen Ross
Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment

Alan Ross, still a major and acting CO. only, was not to be allowed to carry on in command. The Brigadier had decided to replace him with an unknown from the 48th Highlanders. This news did not greatly affect the new reinforcements, but the older soldiers, the N.C.O.s and officers, were properly irate. Ross had served the Regiment for a long time. He had displayed outstanding leadership in battle and, since Cameron’s departure, had handled the battalion with skill and good effect.

(Farley Mowat, The Regiment, 369)

Born in Montreal 14 September 1909, George Allen Ross Jr. was an investment broker and captain in the Royal Highlanders of Canada (The Black Watch). He went overseas with the regiment in September 1942 but transferred to the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment as a reinforcement officer in Italy over a year later. He joined prior to the Battle of Ortona and earned a field promotion to major within six months.

Having distinguished himself in battle as a company commander and later second-in-command, Ross temporarily took over in place of Lieutenant-Colonel Don Cameron on 15 February 1945. Shortly thereafter the regiment prepared for redeployment to Northwest Europe along with the rest of the 1st Division and I Canadian Corps. As they were withdrawn from the fighting line, Farley Mowat recollected:

Ross could now give the men what they had so well earned; and discipline and routine were relaxed sufficiently so that for these brief days, they could find some semblance of the almost forgotten freedoms they had known so long.

Although Ross had arrived from another unit in the middle of the Italian campaign, like his “outsider” predecessors Cameron and Bert Kennedy, the Hasty Ps embraced him as one of their own. To their great disappointment, therefore, once again high command turned to an external appointment for the official posting. “The fact that he was to be passed over in favour of an outsider made no sense,” Mowat later wrote. “It was inevitable that the new appointment should appear to be a deliberate slight on a firstrate officer and on the Regiment itself.”

In April 1945, as the regiment prepared for action in the Netherlands, Ross relinquished command of Lieutenant-Colonel G.E.B. Renison of the 48th Highlanders. A month after VE-Day, Ross resumed command and led the Hasty Ps home in October 1945.

From 1963 to 1963, Ross served as the regiment’s honorary lieutenant-colonel, and he took an active interest in veteran issues.

He died in Montreal on 17 May 1990.