Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014

by Gwynne Dyer

  The bitterness would have been particularly strong in the countries that had “lost” the war. Prime Minister David Lloyd George in Britain, President Georges Clemenceau in France—and, no doubt, Prime Minister Robert Borden in Canada—would have lost power very quickly, but there would have been no collapse of the entire political system of the sort that occurred in Berlin and Vienna in the real 1918.

  Two positive things would not have happened in the event of a German victory. There would have been no League of Nations: the idea was almost entirely an American and British one, and only came to fruition because they effectively dominated the peace conference at Versailles. It didn’t succeed, in the end, but it did provide two decades of experience in trying to run an international institution dedicated to the prevention of great-power war that would not have been available in our alternative timeline. And Canada’s de facto independence from Britain would have been delayed by a few years, partly because the alternative peace conference would not have provided an opportunity for Canada to insist on being treated as a sovereign state, and partly because we would have been so frightened of German power that we would have clung tightly to Britain’s skirts for a little longer.

  Austria-Hungary would have come out of the war intact, albeit only by the skin of its teeth, and there would have been no splintering of south-central Europe into half a dozen new countries. However, the contending nationalisms that made the Austrian empire so fractious and fragile would not have evaporated, and it is questionable whether it could have overcome its own divisions in the longer term even in the event that it “won” the war. The Ottoman empire would also have survived the war, recovering its conquered provinces in Iraq and Palestine from Britain and perhaps expanding its borders in the Caucasus. But the Arab revolt that the British had sponsored as part of their strategy against Turkey would not have been forgotten. Both of these ramshackle empires would have provided much raw material for confrontations and crises: there was no risk that the future would be boring.

  Germany would have had its hands full getting its various new satellite states in the east up and running, and it might also have got involved in helping the Whites against the Reds in the Russian civil war (as Britain and France did in the real history). That, plus the prestige the German military would have enjoyed for saving the country from a catastrophic defeat, would have ensured a high degree of military influence in the German government for the first few years after the war, but such influence does not usually last in a democracy at peace. There is no particular reason to doubt that German politics would have undergone the same evolution towards greater inclusivity and transparency in the few decades after a victory in the First World War that British politics did in the real history of 1918–50.

  Neither is there any strong reason to believe that the defeated powers, Britain and France, would have descended into fascism and risked major war again to even the score, as Germany did in the real postwar history. They could easily have indulged in a witch hunt for those responsible for losing the war, but their loss would not have been nearly as traumatic as Germany’s was, and democratic traditions were older and stronger in Britain and France. As for Russia, whether it was the Whites or the Communists who finally won the civil war, Russia would probably have been a dictatorship for at least some decades, and as easily a fascist as a communist one. It would also almost certainly have drifted into a military confrontation with Germany, which would then have gone in search of allies elsewhere. Japan, at the other end of Russia, would have been an obvious candidate if it had not already been allied to Britain. But that is the sort of difficulty that diplomacy exists to overcome, and it’s not inconceivable that Britain, German and Japan could have ended up allied against a fascist or Communist Russia twenty years down the line.

  The further you get down the timeline of this alternative history the more difficult it is to stay plausible, because the decision-points multiply and the probabilities get harder to calculate. That doesn’t matter, because the only point of this exercise was to see if the world in which Germany “won” the war would have been immersed in a dark night of tyranny. It would appear not. It would have been a complex, combative, often quite unlovely place, but at worst no worse than the world we inherited from the Allied victory in 1918. It might also have been a world in which the next world war was the customary fifty years or so away, not a mere twenty, as nobody had lost so badly that they would soon be back seeking vengeance. Of course, all this is true because we are not really talking about a decisive German victory of the sort that the Allies finally achieved later in 1918. There was never any possibility of that sort of victory after the failure of the Schlieffen Plan in 1914, and probably not even then. We are talking about a no-score draw masquerading as a German victory, and that might have been a quite acceptable outcome. Although a no-score draw reached after the Christmas truce in 1914 would have been a much better outcome.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE FIREPROOF HOUSE

  ON NOVEMBER 11, 1918, AS THE ARMISTICE FINALLY DESCENDED ON the Western Front, a group of Canadian gunners were fighting for their lives in northern Russia. Having advanced over a hundred miles up the Dvina River from Archangel on the Arctic coast to the village of Tulgas, they were surprised from the rear by a force of six hundred Soviet infantry. The Bolsheviks (“Bolas,” as the Canadians called them) were seen only when they got within two hundred yards of the 67th Battery, and the artillerymen would have been overrun if their drivers and signallers had not managed to slow the attackers down with rifle fire until the gunners could get one of their 18-pounder guns out of its gun-pit, turn it around and fire a quick-bursting shrapnel shell straight into the charging Russians at seventy-five yards’ range. In those early days the intervention in Russia generally had a rather impromptu spirit about it.

  The first military operation at Soroka … was a dashing reconnaissance carried out by Captain Adams, Canadian Engineers, who was sent to Ruguzero in Karelia with a detachment of six Canadian sergeants and six Karelian soldiers … attached to the Canadian Syren Party.

  … Although they had information that the village was occupied by a Red garrison of at least 150 soldiers, they decided to make an attack. Captain Adams sent Lieutenant Hordliski and the six Karelians with a Lewis gun to the southern end of the village. He and his six Canadian sergeants waited at the other end for zero hour. Then both parties dashed forward, firing and shouting, and the Bolsheviks, thinking they were surrounded and greatly outnumbered, capitulated without a fight. They were all herded into the village square, where they got the surprise of their lives when they discovered that a dozen determined men had killed or captured their whole garrison.

  A big celebration was held at Canadian Headquarters when Captain Adams and his party returned with their prisoners, a dozen sleigh-loads of rifles, and all the documents of the Bolshevik headquarters in that district. The patrol had left Soroka on January 14th [1919] and returned on the night of January 17th, having covered 120 miles in horse-drawn sleighs.

  John Hundevad, “A Saga of the North,” The Legionary, 1936

  The Allied intervention in northern Russia began in early 1918 with purely military motives. It was aimed at bringing Russia back into the war, which in practice meant trying to overthrow the Bolshevik regime that had signed a separate peace with the Germans. The Canadian soldiers who were sent to northern Russia in March 1918 as part of the “Syren Force,” a multinational concoction of British, French, Italian, American and Canadian units, were part of that effort, and nobody in Canada objected to it.

  However, the decision to send five hundred Canadian reinforcements to Archangel, the capital city of northern Russia, in September 1918 and, in particular, the decision to dispatch four thousand Canadian troops to Vladivostok in the Russian Far East in October were different from the start. Ottawa was playing its own hand there, for its own political ends.

  Intimate relations with that rapidly developing country [Russia] will be a great advantage
to Canada in the future. Other nations will make very vigorous and determined efforts to obtain a foothold, and our interposition with a small military force would tend to bring Canada into favourable notice by the strongest elements in that great community.

  Sir Robert Borden to Major General Mewburn, minister of militia and defence, August 13, 1918

  The major Canadian intervention in Russia began when the Germans were on the brink of defeat, and continued well after their surrender. Borden, a nationalist who had come more and more to see Canada as a “principal power” in the war rather than a mere British hanger-on, had observed how the great powers used their military forces to advance their national interests abroad, and was tempted into trying Canada’s hand at the game. So, on the assumption that the Bolsheviks would lose the Russian civil war and that the White Russian leaders would be duly grateful to those countries that had helped them win, Borden committed Canadian troops to Russia. He even arranged that a Canadian officer should command the entire five thousand–strong British empire contingent in Vladivostok, which was 80 percent Canadian (largely conscripts).

  A considerable number of Canadian airmen also fought for the counter-revolutionary forces in southern Russia in 1918–19. The 47th Squadron, Royal Air Force, which provided air support for General Denikin’s White armies, was commanded by Major Raymond Collishaw, Canada’s second-highest-scoring ace, and fifty-three of the sixty-two pilots he chose for the squadron were Canadian. The intervention had now turned into an anti-Bolshevik crusade, but almost none of the airmen bothered their heads with political thoughts. They were there to improve their chances of gaining a permanent commission in the postwar Royal Air Force or Canadian Air Force, or just to continue their love affair with the airplane. And they did have some splendid adventures.

  [Captain W. F.] Anderson [of Toronto] and his observer, Lieutenant Mitchell, distinguished themselves on 30 July [1919] while carrying out a photographic reconnaissance along the Volga. When Anderson’s fuel tank was punctured by fire from the ground, Mitchell climbed out on the port wing and plugged the leaks with his fingers, while Anderson jettisoned his bomb-load on a gunboat in the Volga. Meanwhile, Anderson’s escort, a DH9 flown by Captain William Elliott … had been shot down by machine-gun fire; Anderson thereupon landed close by. “Several Squadrons of Cavalry attempted to surround our machine,” he reported, “but they were kept clear by our machine-gun fire.” Elliott set fire to his aircraft, he and his observer tumbled into the other DH9, and with Mitchell still plugging the holes in the fuel tank with his hand, Anderson flew home.

  S.F. Wise, Canadian Airmen and the First World War

  Eventually, though, the intensely political character of what their troops were doing in the Soviet Union, and the fact that they had no business playing that sort of role in somebody else’s country, began to dawn on Canadians. As discontent with the Russian commitment grew at home and the likelihood of a Bolshevik victory in the civil war became clearer, Borden started to backpedal, and by April 1919 he was trying to get the Canadian troops home from Russia as quickly as possible. Not before time, because things were turning increasingly grim in Russia.

  On July 7, 1919 there was a major mutiny in one of the new Russian regiments that had been created on the Archangel front: its British and Russian officers were murdered and most of the men went over to the Bolsheviks. Two weeks later all the Russians on the Onega sector of the front mutinied simultaneously, thus isolating the foreign forces based on Archangel from those based on Murmansk. After that, it was just a question of getting the foreign forces out of Russia as quickly as possible, and the last Canadians left Murmansk in August.

  Surely Providence has something better in store for Canada than to become a nasty, quarrelsome little nation.

  Professor O.D. Skelton, Queen’s University

  The First World War was Canada’s education in the art of being a sovereign state, and it was a very good time to learn. There is only one way to become a sovereign state: by gaining recognition from the other states in the club and accepting the rules by which they run the international system. By the time Canada joined, however, it was already obvious that the club was becoming a lethal madhouse, and that the rules would have to be changed if the members were to survive.

  Prime Minister Borden was in Europe continuously from November 1918 to May 1919. His main preoccupation was to ensure that the wartime recognition of Canada’s independent status within the empire, even in questions of defence and foreign policy, should be maintained in peacetime and accepted by the rest of the world as well. The first step was taken at the Imperial War Conference in December 1918: to decide on the form of imperial representation at the Paris Peace Conference. It was a subject about which Borden felt very strongly:

  Canada and the other Dominions would have regarded the situation as intolerable if they, who numbered their dead by the hundred thousands in the fiercest struggle the world had ever known, should stand outside the council chamber of the Conference while nations that had taken no direct or active part in the struggle stood within and determined the conditions of Peace.

  Robert Borden, Memoirs, vol. 2

  Borden, in cooperation with the prime ministers of the other Dominions, managed to get Britain’s agreement to separate representation for the Dominions at Paris (plus a place for Canada on the joint imperial delegation). But that was only half the struggle; there remained the task of extracting the same recognition of Canada’s new status from the other countries present. The main opposition came from the United States, whose secretary of state, Robert Lansing, was “somewhat arrogant and offensive and desired to know why Canada should be concerned with the settlement of European affairs.… Mr Lloyd George replied that [they] believed themselves to have the right because … Canada as well as Australia had lost more men than the United States in this war.” In the end Canada was permitted to sign the peace treaties in its own right (although its name was indented, as were those of the other Dominions, to reflect its continuing membership in the British empire).

  There was a similar clash over the question of separate Canadian membership in the League of Nations, the new international body created by the Treaty of Versailles to keep the peace. Again the main opposition came from the United States, which affected to believe that the Dominions were not free to take an independent stand and that the whole issue was simply a British plot to get six votes (Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and India) instead of one. However, American objections were again overridden, and Canada became a founding member of the League. By the middle of 1919 Canada for all practical purposes had received international recognition as a sovereign state, but the achievement of sovereignty came as part of a package that was intended to abolish the most important single aspect of sovereignty: the independent right to make war.

  Even if I thought the proposal for a League of Nations absolutely impracticable, and that statesmen a hundred years hence would laugh at it as a vain attempt to accomplish the impossible, nevertheless, I would support the movement because of its supreme purpose and because it might succeed.…

  Sir Robert Borden to the Imperial War Cabinet, August 1918

  “The psychological and moral conditions are ripe for a great change,” General Jan Smuts, soon to become the prime minister of South Africa, wrote in December 1918. “The moment has come for one of the great creative acts of history.… The tents have been struck, and the great caravan of humanity is again on the march.” But it was not really the “great caravan of humanity” who demanded the creation of the League of Nations. It was mainly people in government, who understood that the war had been an inevitable product of the international system and that the system itself now had to be changed. It had served the victors well enough in the past (and the losers had no vote on how the system was run), but by the time of the First World War, the price of victory in warfare between industrialized countries had begun to race far ahead of any conceivable benefits that victory might brin
g. A war that was, in its political dimension, scarcely distinguishable from the War of the Austrian Succession in the eighteenth century ended up killing not a couple of hundred thousand regular soldiers but eleven million ordinary citizens.

  Perhaps even worse (from the point of view of statesmen and diplomats), the popular passions that were aroused by such mass slaughter had turned the war into a total war, even politically: all the losing great powers in the First World War had their regimes overthrown and their empires entirely dismantled. Indeed, the strain of total war had even destroyed the regime in one of the great powers on the winning side, Russia, and both the French and the Italians had had some anxious moments in 1917. The traditional zero-sum game with limited risks and rewards, and a guaranteed place in the next round for almost all the players, had unexpectedly turned into a no-holds-barred struggle that killed regimes. That was bound to concentrate the minds of those who ran governments quite wonderfully.

  The League would never have happened if the sovereign states that created it had not feared for their own future survival; nor, without the experience of the First World War, could any amount of political and historical analysis have persuaded whole populations to accept the decisive break with deeply rooted national reflexes that the League represented. Those who wanted to change the international system had a receptive mass audience for their views in 1918—but they knew they had to move quickly.