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The making of a general

Broadcast Date: April 12, 2000

Long before he was called to lead the United Nations peacekeeping force in war-stricken Africa, Roméo Dallaire was just a young working-class Montreal boy obsessed with military history. As the son of a career military man, the young Roméo spent hours acting out famous battles on his family's living room rug while dreaming of a career as a soldier. As this CBC Television documentary shows, Dallaire's trademark drive and intensity were evident even from an early age.

The making of a general

• Romualius "Roméo" Dallaire was born in Denekamp, Holland, on June 25, 1946, to Canadian Army officer Roméo Louis Dallaire and Catherine Vermeassen, a Dutch nursing student.
• The couple met in the winter of 1945 during the liberation of the Netherlands from Nazi forces. Dallaire Sr., a 44-year-old bachelor, was serving as a staff sergeant in Eindhoven, Holland, where the 26-year-old Vermeassen was working.


• Dallaire's parents moved to Canada in December 1946 when he was just six months old.
• The eldest of four children, Dallaire grew up in a working-class environment in Montreal's east end, where he attended a boys-only Catholic school and was involved in Boy Scouts and military cadets.


• From a young age Dallaire aspired to follow in his father's military footsteps. In his award winning book, Shake Hands With The Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda (2003), he called the military his "first love," and fondly recalls his first toy — a replica of a Canadian army Jeep.

• In 1928 Roméo Dallaire Sr. joined the Canadian army's Royal 22nd Regiment, commonly known as "the Van Doos." He would eventually serve as a non-commissioned officer and head of a support crew in the Second World War.
• After the war he brought his young family back to Montreal, where three other children — all daughters — were born. He retired from the army in 1957 and took a civilian job in an army garage.

• To learn more about the Van Doos, please visit Royal 22nd Regiment: Canada's Fighting 'Van Doos'
• Roméo Dallaire's career path was greatly influenced by both his father's career and his mother's tales of destruction in Nazi-occupied Holland.
• In Shake Hands With The Devil he wrote: "Unlike many of my generation, who became passionate peace activists determined to put an end to war, I took the opposite lesson."

• Despite being what he calls "an indifferent scholar" for much of his educational life, in grade nine Dallaire resolved to earn a spot in military college.
• He promptly committed himself to improving his grades, sometimes locking himself in his room for 12-hour stretches. Within a year he managed to boost his grade average to 91 per cent.

• In 1964 Dallaire was accepted as a cadet at le Collège Militaire Royal de Saint-Jean located in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Que. His father urged him to change his name to "Dallairds" in order to succeed in the English-dominated army. Dallaire, a fiercely proud French-Canadian, refused.
• Dallaire committed himself to becoming an artillery man, something that few francophones in the predominantly anglophone Canadian Armed Forces had succeeded in doing.

• In 1969 he graduated from the Royal Military College (RMC) in Kingston, Ont., with a bachelor of science.
• In the fall of that year Dallaire met Elizabeth Roberge, a teacher at a Canadian army school in Valcartier, Que. Roberge also came from an army family — her father having served with Dallaire's in the Van Doos in the 1930s.
• The couple dated and eventually married on June 26, 1976. Two years later they had their first son, Willem. They would go on to have a daughter, Catherine, and another son, Guy.

• Despite almost failing at RMC, Dallaire would go on to become a lieutenant in 1969. The following year the 24-year-old was put in charge of 41 soldiers and ordered to protect the National Assembly in Quebec City after the War Measures Act was invoked during the FLQ crisis.
• He went on to attend the Canadian Land Forces Command and Staff College, the United States Marine Corps Command and Staff College and the British Higher Command and Staff Course.

• In 1989 Dallaire was promoted to brigadier-general and posted as a commandant at the Collège Militaire Royal de St-Jean in Valcartier, Que. A couple of years later he was appointed commander of a 5,200-strong artillery unit based in Quebec City.

The making of a general

Medium: Television

Program: The National Magazine

Broadcast Date: April 12, 2000

Interviewer: Brian Stewart

Duration: 3:01

Last updated:
Nov. 12, 2010