In his Christmas broadcast in 1942, the 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 battles on land that Canada had fought to date were Hong Kong and Dieppe, both of which were defeats. In March 1943, during the Operation Spartan war game, General Andrew McNaughton, commanding the First Canadian Army, had been badly defeated, and was judged unfit to command an army in the field with the war game's umpires criticizing McNaughton for leaving his HQ to supervise the building of a bridge while his supply lines were caught up in a huge traffic jam. After Operation Spartan, the British had been strongly pressuring the Canadians to remove McNaughton before he led the First Canadian Army into a real defeat in a battle. King had tried to keep the Canadian Army out of action to avoid casualties that might require a difficult decision on overseas conscription, but in the spring of 1943 with the Allies clearly winning the war, he was seized with the fear that the war might end with Canada winning no battles on land, something that was certain to hurt the Liberals in post-war elections. Accordingly, King demanded that the 1st Canadian Infantry Division, which had been sent to Britain in 1939, be included in Operation Husky, the Allied invasion of Sicily. General McNaughton was not keen on having a division being taken from his command but was promised that 1st Division would return to Britain after Sicily was taken.