Lieutenant-Colonel Ronald Morton
10th Armoured (Fort Garry Horse) Regiment

He commanded our respect, our obedience and our love. On leaving he reported Officers are the soul of a Regt, the Sgts are its backbone. To write a biography of Col., MORTON is impossible here, but surely it may be and should be done elsewhere. “If I have built a good foundation, the Regt will be just / as well off without me.”

(FGH war diary, 28 Aug 1944)

Born in Toronto on 12 December 1900, Ronald Edward Alfred Morton graduated from RMC in 1923 and joined the Permanent Force. In October 1941, he transferred from second-in-command of the Lord Strathcona’s Horse to replace Lieutenant-Colonel S.J. Cox of the Fort Garry Horse. Despite eighteen years in Winnipeg with the LdSH, he was still viewed as an outsider but soon accepted as a “synthetic westerner.” He would serve as commanding officer for the unusually long period of almost three years, and led the FGH Tanks in the invasion of Normandy on 6 June 1944.

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