Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014

by Gwynne Dyer

  The “Phoney War” suited Mackenzie King right down to the ground. He agreed to send one army division across the Atlantic, to satisfy the English Canadian feeling that there should be at least some Canadian troops in Europe, but he didn’t want to see them in combat—and even King’s generals weren’t thinking of the kind of mass army that Canada had sent to Europe in the First World War. In fact, if King could have got away with it, he would have sent no troops to Europe at all—and just too late to be of any use to him, the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, asked for Canada’s help in a huge military training scheme that might have given him an excuse to keep Canadian troops at home.

  Actually, [King] was very distressed when Chamberlain proposed the Air Training Plan (September 26) that the proposal hadn’t been made earlier, because he felt that if it had been made earlier he could have reduced the army component, or at any rate delayed it. And it was the army that he recognised as the threat to the country itself.

  I mean, no one objected to the Air Force, and nobody thought you’d ever conscript for the Air Force—nor for the Navy, for that matter. But every time the army was expanded, the first question he asked was: “Can this be maintained without conscription?”

  Jack Pickersgill

  The Commonwealth Air Training Plan was a proposal for tens of thousands of Canadian, Australian, New Zealand and British airmen to be trained in Canada, where the skies were safe and there was lots of space. The plan was to set up sixty-seven training schools in Canada for pilots and other aircrew, all administered by the RCAF. The flood of trainees began to arrive almost immediately.

  There was a wonderful and tremendous mixture of people here at that time. You had the Aussies, you had the English who trained here.… I’ve no idea of the actual numbers, but they came in their thousands.… They simply didn’t know what they had struck.

  That was a very cold winter. And the Aussies, whose winter uniforms hadn’t followed them—there they were walking around in tropical outfits at maybe 35 below, and a northern wind. They thought they had come to the end of the world.

  Naomi Radford, Edmonton

  This was exactly the kind of war King wanted to fight: one waged almost exclusively on the home front, with no casualties. In his speech announcing the Commonwealth Air Training Plan on December 17, 1939, he stressed that this was also the approach the British themselves favoured: “The United Kingdom Government … feels that … the Air Training Scheme would provide for more effective assistance towards ultimate victory than any other form of military cooperation which Canada can give.”

  King had gone to some trouble to get the British to agree to this wording, but he couldn’t really conceal the fact that this was not all the British government expected from Canada. There were, moreover, plenty of influential English Canadians who expected more commitment to the war from their government. On the day of King’s speech, the first Canadian troops landed in Britain—and a month later the Ontario Legislature passed a resolution condemning the federal government’s half-hearted war effort. King was worried that his Ontario critics would call a provincial election and use the campaign to demand a “National” (coalition) government in Ottawa, so he decided to pre-empt them by holding a federal election first.

  It caught everybody off guard, and the Liberal victory in the March 1940 election was massive (181 out of a total of 245 seats). King’s strategy of avoiding a major role in a shooting war was still working, but it depended heavily on the fact that there wasn’t much shooting going on. Hitler could not afford to wait too long before attacking, however, for his enemies’ resources were greater than his own: Germany’s strategic position would deteriorate as time went on.

  Contrary to expectation, the real fighting began not on the German-French border but in Northern Europe, where the neutrals were picked off one by one. The Soviet Union went first, in the winter of 1940, annexing the three Baltic republics and seizing a large amount of Finland’s territory (in accord with the treaty it had signed with Nazi Germany the previous fall). The next target was Norway, which was important because most of the iron ore that Germany imported from Sweden was taken by train to the Norwegian coast and thence by ship to Germany. The British moved first, in April, mining Norway’s coastal waters in violation of its neutrality—just in time to catch the German ships that arrived off the coast the following day carrying an invasion force.

  The Norwegians fought back and appealed to Winston Churchill (who had just replaced Chamberlain as prime minister) for help. Churchill agreed, but noted: “The whole of Northern Norway was covered with snow to depths which none of our soldiers had ever seen, felt or imagined. There were neither snowshoes nor skis—still less skiers. We must do our best. Thus began this ramshackle campaign.” In fact, the only troops in Britain who had seen such conditions were the Canadians, but they never made it to Norway. Thirteen hundred troops from the Edmonton Regiment and Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry were sent to Scotland en route to Trondheim, but the Germans had driven the British forces out of northern Norway before the Canadians embarked. The following month, British and Canadian troops completed the subjugation of the North by occupying Iceland (allegedly to pre-empt a German invasion, but that was not actually a strategic possibility). Only Sweden’s neutrality was still unviolated. Then, with scarcely a pause, the focus of the war shifted south.

  One of my best friends is a fellow who fought [in the French army] in the last war and has just been mobilised again—he knows what it’s like—and after the failure of the last twenty years he goes back into uniform in the firm conviction that the last war, and this one too, are just put-up jobs arranged by high finance and the armaments manufacturers to sell their products and reduce employment by killing off a few million solders. You couldn’t persuade him otherwise—and it’s a pretty common opinion among remobilised war veterans.

  Frank Pickersgill, April 1940

  Pickersgill’s own opinions were a trifle more sophisticated than those of his French soldier friend, but not much: “The war is one between rival systems of oppression—the only thing in favor of the Allies is that the Anglo-Franco-American system of oppression is less odious in its results than the Italo-Russo-German one.” But they were both driven to such crude formulas by their perfectly understandable conviction that none of what was happening made sense in terms of the interests of those whose lives were being disrupted by it—not even the Germans. It would be tempting to argue that these attitudes, which were widespread throughout the Allied countries, had a lot to do with the sudden collapse of France when the Germans attacked in May 1940—but actually, the collapse was military, not moral.

  The German attack on France and the Low Countries cut through the Allied defences with dismaying speed, but not because the latter were unwilling to fight. Although the British and French were as strong numerically as the Germans—they even had more tanks—the Allies simply had no answer to the new Blitzkrieg tactics the Germans were using. Soon the British army in France was isolated near the Channel coast and in danger of being cut off from it. As part of a desperate plan to keep a toehold on the continent, the Canadian troops in Britain were ordered to embark at Dover to sail across and hold the Channel ports—but their commander, General Andy MacNaughton, made a personal reconnaissance of the shambles near Dunkirk and decided that they could accomplish nothing useful there. The order was cancelled, and one week later, at the end of May, 338,000 British, French and Belgian troops had to be evacuated from Dunkirk.

  One week after that, Italy entered the war on Germany’s side and invaded southern France. Just before France capitulated on June 16, a further British attempt to save their allies saw the First Canadian Division ordered to land near Brest in Brittany as part of the “Second British Expeditionary Force.” The intention was to reestablish a British military presence on French territory not yet occupied by the Germans, and keep the French government in the war.

  The First Brigade was the only brigade that
really got there, and we got on troop trains—cattle cars, actually—and moved into France. In the middle of the night we were given an order to turn around and get back to Brest and get on the ships and get out.

  We scrambled back, and came back to England having had to burn all our vehicles and ammunition supplies and so on, and came out with just what we were standing in. I lost everything I owned that side of the Atlantic except for my small pack, as did everybody.

  Dan Spry

  We overestimated the strength of the French army and underestimated the strength of the German army. It was not until France fell in June 1940 that I became convinced that Canada had to participate fully in the war.

  Escott Reid, On Duty (External Affairs, 1941–62)

  For Escott Reid, it was still true that the war was essentially just one more round in the perennial great-power struggle, but that did not mean that it made no difference who won. In the long run, there would have to be another attempt to abolish war as the main currency of international relations, for the level of destruction wrought by modern military technology was becoming unbearable. But first Hitler and his allies had to be stopped, and that now seemed to require Canada’s help.

  With the fall of France, Canada became Britain’s largest remaining ally in the war—and the British were expecting an invasion during the summer. The Imperial General Staff calculated the odds as sixty-forty in favour of invasion, and the entire country was mobilized to repel it—but the British army had left most of its weapons behind on the Dunkirk beaches. The First Canadian Division was one of the few army units in England still equipped to fight (apart from its First Brigade), and the pressure on King to contribute more to the British war effort rose dramatically. Four Canadian destroyers were sent across the Atlantic to help hold the Channel, and the 2nd and 3rd Canadian Divisions were authorized for overseas service as soon as they could be made ready.

  I think the Germans were far more experienced than we were, and we took tremendous losses. In 401 Squadron we had losses, at first, that were phenomenal.… For any aircraft we ever shot down, we lost two or three aircraft.

  Omer Lévesque, Ottawa, RCAF fighter pilot

  401 Squadron was one of the first RCAF fighter squadrons to be sent overseas. Like the many others that followed, its casualties were at first far higher than those of the Germans it was flying against, many of whom had previous combat experience in the Spanish Civil War, Poland and France. The “learning curve” for fighter pilots is quite short and steep: it took a pilot about ten missions to get good at the game, but a great many never got beyond the first or second mission. However, the total numbers of Canadian airmen lost were not large by the standards of land warfare, and by the summer of 1940 King was in the welcome position of having the Canadian Expeditionary Force safe in England, where it was suffering no casualties, while a relative handful of Canadian fighter pilots showed that Canada was “doing its part” by fighting in the Battle of Britain.

  When the Germans lost that battle and cancelled their hastily prepared plans for the invasion of England, that politically happy situation was perpetuated, for Britain had no immediate ability to carry the ground battle back to the continent. With the exception of the disastrous raid at Dieppe in August 1942, in which over nine hundred Canadians died, Canadian ground troops would not see battle in Europe for another three years. In fact, after the danger of a German cross-Channel invasion passed, something akin to the Phoney War returned to the west of Europe. Hitler turned east to the Balkans and then, in June 1941, invaded Russia. British and German ground troops were in contact only in North Africa (where there were no Canadian soldiers), so King shouldn’t have been under any pressure on the subject that worried him most: conscription. But he was.

  The pro- and anti-conscriptionists were already staking out their positions within King’s cabinet. Some were even talking about a “Union” government, and King was particularly upset by a “desire to have Meighen brought into Government. Said I would not countenance anything of kind in regard to a man who had been responsible for Wartime Elections Act, and for conscription in the last war.”

  The Conservative opposition demanded the same draconian measures that had just been introduced in Britain, which had given the government total control over the nation’s manpower, industry and resources in order to wage a total war. Conscription for military service was only a part of that package, but it was a part especially dear to the Tory opposition and the Liberal conscriptionists in Canada—and what they meant, of course, was conscription for service overseas to defend Britain. In fact, military manpower was just about the only defence requirement that Britain wasn’t short of at the time, but that was irrelevant: the purpose of conscription was to make imperial patriots in Canada feel better.

  King’s response was a brilliant example of diversionary tactics in politics: he began worrying aloud about “the possibility of an invasion of our shores. [If Britain falls], an effort will be made to seize this country as a prize of war. We have, therefore, changed to the stage where defence of this land becomes our most important duty. It will involve far-reaching measures.…”

  King’s grasp of military strategy was erratic at best, but he probably never actually believed that the fall of Britain could lead to an invasion of Canada. It was strategic nonsense: the Atlantic is three thousand kilometres wide, and the Germans did not even have much by way of a surface navy. However, King certainly knew that conscription for home defence only would ease the English Canadian pressure on him to do more without angering French Canadians too much—so in June 1940 the new defence minister, Colonel J.L. Ralston, introduced the National Resources Mobilization Act (NRMA). Parliament passed it with scarcely a murmur of protest. As the marching song went:

  Why don’t you join up?

  Why don’t you join up?

  Why don’t you join old Ralston’s army?

  Two bucks a week; all you want to eat;

  Great big boots and blisters on your feet.

  Why don’t you join up?

  The NRMA gave Ottawa total control over the property and services of Canadians for war purposes—with one exception. The government could conscript men into the army, but the conscripts were to serve only on Canadian soil or in Canadian waters—and technically, King was still not breaking his earlier promise: “Once again I wish to repeat my undertaking … that no measure for the conscription of men for overseas service will be introduced by the present administration,” he told the House of Commons one month after the fall of France.

  This halfway conscription bill was an elegant solution to a political problem. It helped King fend off the Tories and his critics within the Liberal party. On the whole, French Canadians recognized King’s strategy for what it was, and went along with it in the hope that it would keep English Canadian imperial patriots from escalating their demands. Recruiting for the regular army was still satisfactory: enough idealists, adventurers and unemployed were volunteering to fill the new units as quickly as equipment became available for them—and the NRMA conscripts would defend Canada if the Nazis invaded (or the Martians). But it wasn’t much fun for the “Zombies,” as they were called.

  In the winter of 1941 we got a bunch of Zombies in to train. Some French Canadians, but a lot of Ukrainians and what-have-you from towns and places in Manitoba and Saskatchewan. Our C.O. at Brandon, he told us to run the asses off them if we wanted.…

  We decided these Zombies better start the day right.… Except, Christ Almighty, when I think of it, there was no gymnasium, no drill hangar, and here’s these Zombies running through the streets of this town at 6.30 in the morning and it would often be 20 below. Hell, even colder. And in gymwear, too! … Anyway they knew they were in the army, and they knew they were NRMA crud because the regular troops didn’t get this treatment …

  Barry Broadfoot, Six War Years

  Few isolationists, French- or English-speaking, had worried much about who would win in 1939, since they anticipated a repetiti
on of the long stalemate of the First World War. But most of them recognized that the Nazi regime in Germany was a profoundly evil phenomenon, and by late 1940 it had, by clever military tactics and much good luck, reached a point where it looked as though it might succeed in establishing permanent domination over much of Europe. To a certain extent, that could affect practical North American interests—and to a far greater extent, it affected North American attitudes.

  The fall of France completely changed my views, as it did the views of a great many Canadians, even a great many French Canadians. I think the fall of France probably affected me the most of all public events in my whole life.…

  You didn’t need to tell me after that that we were vitally concerned about the outcome of the war. So when Ogdensburg happened it just seemed to me to make good sense; anything we could do to get the Americans more involved was a good thing.

  Jack Pickersgill, secretary to Prime Minister Mackenzie King, 1937–48

  In the summer of 1940 the United States was still officially neutral, and a majority of the American public was still isolationist, but President Franklin D. Roosevelt was not. Both his political sympathies and his concern for the balance of power drove him to work patiently to bring the United States into the war on Britain’s side. From Roosevelt’s point of view, the fall of France and the subsequent rapid extension of German U-boat activities into the western Atlantic were useful pretexts for bringing his country a little closer to commitment to the war, but the mythical military threat to Canada that Mackenzie King had evoked was even better. If Canada faced attack, after all, he could invoke the Monroe Doctrine to come to its defence.