by Gwynne Dyer
Well, the scheme worked, but not as quickly as I’d been told it was going to work. I remember General Foulkes had told me that there were only a handful of Germans over there—you know, five or six thousand—you should be able to clean it up in four, five or six days.
Well, of course, it took us a month, and a lot of casualties. But when it was all over, and I went to report personally that that piece of battle was over, I said to General Foulkes: “Remember those five or six thousand Germans you said were on the other side of the Canal?”
He said: “Yes, what about it?” I said: “Well, we’ve just taken twelve thousand of them prisoner.” And he said: “Don’t you talk to me like that.” He didn’t think it was funny.
Major General Dan Spry
It wasn’t actually very funny, and Colonel Ralston, the defence minister, having talked to the generals and visited the troops and the hospitals, returned to Canada in very much the same frame of mind as Prime Minister Borden in 1917. He wanted conscription for overseas service to be applied immediately. Mackenzie King could hardly believe what he was hearing. For five years he had managed to avoid conscription, and now the war was clearly nearing its end. (The German surrender came only six months later.) And now, of all times, his soldiers and his defence minister were telling him he had to do what he most feared and bring in conscription for overseas service. It would “undo much of the good which our war effort up to the present time had effected.” There would be “a repetition of what occurred after the last war when Borden returned and demanded conscription, only the situation will be worse.”
Finally I said to Ralston that it seemed to me that what we had to consider was … the probability, if not the certainty of civil war … in consequence of any attempt at conscription. That I could understand, for reasons of pride, the desire of the army to be kept up to full strength to the last.
MacKenzie King Record, vol. 2
King was understandably furious with his generals. There were plenty of volunteers in the military who could have been filling the gaps in the infantry’s ranks, but they were all in the wrong places: in the two parallel administrative and supply chains serving the Canadian armies in Italy and in France; in the hypertrophied air force, which had a superabundance of aircrew; in the army’s non-infantry trades, because the military planners, making their decisions back in the days when the German air force could still attack the rear areas of the Allied armies, had trained too many men as replacements for casualties among the artillery, engineers and cooks. But the only (allegedly) trained infantrymen available as replacements were the NRMA conscripts still sitting in Canada.
Every time the army had expanded or taken on a new role, King had asked his generals if this commitment could be maintained without resorting to conscription; they had always said yes. Nevertheless, it was clear to King that if he now refused to send NRMA men overseas his cabinet would split, and that before long he would be forced into an election which the Liberals would lose. Moreover, if recent by-elections were any guide, it was quite possible that the winner in such an election would be the CCF. (It was only a few months later that British voters threw Churchill out and elected a Labour government.) Clutching at straws, King made one last effort to wriggle off the hook of conscription: in November 1944 he forced Ralston to resign, and appointed General Andrew McNaughton as defence minister in his place.
McNaughton, who had also always opposed conscription, spent the next three weeks trying to convince NRMA men to volunteer for overseas service. He was wasting his breath.
[King] thought use could be made of the great popularity that McNaughton had achieved as Commander of Canadian forces and that this would do the trick. Well, it didn’t do the trick at all, of course … and during that three weeks the resistance in the Department of Defence … developed.
The senior officers were going to resign. They weren’t going to try to establish a military government or a coup d’état or anything of that sort, but the fact of the matter is that the government could not have survived … a vote in parliament on maintaining the opposition to conscription.
The night of November 22, when he was having the Cabinet at eight to announce (his decision) to the Ministers, most of them didn’t know up to that time that he had changed his mind at all.
Jack Pickersgill
By November 22, 1944 McNaughton had been told by the chiefs of staff that voluntary enlistment would not get them enough men. The commanding officer in Winnipeg had already resigned, and it looked as if others might follow him. McNaughton was worried that the whole military machine might disintegrate. The Army Council believed conscription was the only solution, and told McNaughton they would resign as a group if their recommendation was not implemented. King, the great political survivor, announced that NRMA conscripts would be sent overseas at once. There was an outcry in French Canada and among the sections of English-speaking Canada traditionally most opposed to conscription: the farmers and the central and Eastern European communities in the Prairie provinces. There were even a few outbreaks of resistance in NRMA camps when Zombies were ordered overseas. But on the whole, conscription, when it finally came, caused far less uproar than it had in the First World War.
I feel, in a way, that we had bored the country with it. It had been delayed long enough, and it had been evident enough that Mackenzie King was doing everything he could to minimise it, that the resistance didn’t develop really.
Jack Pickersgill, secretary to Prime Minister King, 1937–48
King was lucky to the end. There was not time for the resentment in French Canada to build up to an explosion as it had in 1918; the war was over less than six months after conscription was brought in. Fewer than 2,500 Zombies ever got to the front, and only sixty-nine were killed, so there were hardly any unwilling French Canadian “martyrs of British imperialism” to serve as the kindling for an eventual open rift in the country, let alone the civil war King feared.
Just at the very end of the war we had a few zombies come in as reinforcements. They didn’t see much action, but I’m afraid they got pretty bad treatment from the soldiers that had been fighting. I was really ashamed of the way the cooks treated them.
Serres Sadler
Canada lost 42,000 dead in the Second World War—only half its loss ratio in the First World War, allowing for the intervening growth in its population—and by 1945 it was a fully industrialized country. King was a devious and deeply unlovable man, but he brought the country through the war more or less united. A week before the German surrender on May 8, 1945, preparing to depart for San Francisco where the leaders and diplomats of fifty nations would discuss what was to become the Charter of the United Nations, King indulged in a little gloating in his diary. He had outlasted almost all the other leaders.
Apart from Stalin, I would be the only original left on either side. I have, of course, led my party longer than Stalin has his.
Mackenzie King Record, April 30, 1945
General Dan Spry was one of the last Canadian soldiers to return from Europe after the war, having supervised the rather chaotic business of getting all the troops embarked on homeward-bound ships. Hitler was gone—but the sovereign state was still a thriving reality:
My wife and two very small children and I were the lone Canadians on the Queen Mary with 17,000 American paratroopers. The paratroopers thought I was an odd bod, with a funny uniform and a red band on my cap. I think they thought I was Salvation Army, but they were very good to the kids.
But as we were getting ready to disembark, I was given a form to fill out for the U.S. Immigration Authorities. One question, I think question 31 or 32, asked me whether I was entering the United States to overthrow the government by force, or to assassinate the President. I said that I didn’t think so really because I was in transit to Canada and I wouldn’t have time.
Well, you should never try to be funny with a foreign immigration authority. They separated me from my family, and put me in a wire cage, like a monk
ey, on Pier 90. And my wife and two kids and fourteen pieces of baggage were stacked up outside, and here were the kids saying, “Mommy, why is Daddy locked up in the cage?” I thought that was really quite a way to come home. The conquering hero, and I end up in a wire cage on Pier 90.
EXCURSION 7
WHAT IF WE HAD NOT FOUGHT HITLER?
ANOTHER “COUNTER-FACTUAL” SPECULATION? YES, BECAUSE there’s no better way to examine whether the choices that were made were the only or the best ones. What would have happened if Britain and France had not extended the unconditional guarantee to Poland in March 1939 that subsequently triggered their declaration of war on Germany in September? After all, it was both rash and dishonest to promise to protect Poland when they had no conceivable means of getting military help to the Poles, and no intention of mounting an offensive against Germany’s western frontier to draw the Wehrmacht away from Poland. A little more thought, and perhaps a little more honesty, might have persuaded the British and French governments that they should not make a promise they couldn’t keep.
Without that Anglo-French guarantee, there probably wouldn’t have been a war in September 1939 at all. Knowing that no help was coming, the Poles would probably have given the Germans what they wanted—the city of Danzig, and a sovereign road and rail route across the “Polish Corridor” to connect East Prussia to the rest of Germany—and then they would have concluded an anti-Soviet alliance with Germany. That was Hitler’s original plan for Poland, whose 35 million people would be useful in his planned anti-Soviet crusade. True, they were “racially inferior” Slavs according to Nazi ideology, but Hitler was prepared to be flexible on such matters, and official Poland, at least, shared his own anti-Semitism.
There would not have been a cynical and temporary Nazi-Soviet pact in this history either, for that was a direct response by both countries to the Anglo-French guarantee to Poland. There would certainly have been a war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union eventually, for Hitler saw Communism as a “Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy” and truly believed that the Soviet Union had to be destroyed. The war might have come a bit earlier than June 1941, when he invaded the Soviet Union in the real history, or it might even have come a bit later, but it would probably have unfolded in much the same way.
It’s very unlikely that Britain and France would have gone to war at that stage in the game to save the Communists, so the Russians would have been on their own. Hitler would have enjoyed a few more advantages in this counter-factual version of his attack on the Soviet Union, as Poland would have been his ally and the start line for the invasion would have been several hundred kilometres closer to Moscow. He would also have been spared the distraction of an unresolved war with Britain at his back—but he might have found the need to keep up his guard against a hostile Britain and an unconquered France even more burdensome.
Could Hitler have won his war in our alternative history? Probably not, for in the real history the outcome of the German-Soviet war, the greatest land battle in the history of the world, was not heavily influenced by events on other fronts of the Second World War. The Allied bombing offensive, for all its casualties, did not significantly reduce German industrial production before late 1944; nor did the Atlantic Wall tie up more German troops than, in the alternative history, would need to have been kept in the West to protect Germany from an Anglo-French declaration of war. Germany lost the war on the Eastern Front because it was outnumbered two-to-one, outproduced by Soviet industry and decisively beaten on the battlefield, and those same factors would have led to a Soviet victory over Germany even if Britain and France had stayed out of the war.
Britain and France would have gone to war with Germany in the end, of course, because they would not have wanted victorious Soviet troops to occupy all of Germany up to the French border. Indeed, they would probably have attacked Germany around the time when the advancing Soviet army entered Poland: that is to say, at around the same time as the Allied landings in Normandy reopened the main ground war in the West with Germany in the real history. And the United States would almost certainly have been part of that anti-Nazi alliance.
Even by the rather flexible rules of writing counter-factual history, we are obliged to leave events beyond the specific area where we are making an alteration (no Anglo-French guarantee to Poland) unchanged. And in truth we may safely assume that Japan would have launched its campaign of conquest in South-East Asia and the Pacific around the time (late 1941 in the real history) when it looked as if Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union was going to succeed. That would have made Britain, France and the United States allies in the war against Japan, and they would no doubt have remained allies when the time came to enter the war against Germany. Their motive would have been to prevent an overwhelming Soviet dominance in the centre of Europe—but in practice, they would have been countering it by introducing an overwhelming American military presence into the west of the continent, because the United States was the only potential counterbalance available.
This alternative Second World War would still have ended, therefore, with American, British and French troops sharing a divided Germany with Soviet troops—and in all likelihood falling into serious disaccord quite quickly. No matter how you fiddled with the details of the history, you would still get a Communized Eastern Europe and a divided Germany out of this alternative scenario.
Some details would have been different, of course. The Jews of France and the Low Countries would have survived. So perhaps might the Italian Jews, for Mussolini might not have taken Italy all the way into a war with the Soviet Union, which offered him no territory or other advantages. Instead, he might have limited himself to sending “volunteers” to the Eastern Front as Spain’s fascist dictator, Francisco Franco, did—and perhaps stayed in power after Germany’s defeat as Franco did. But the details do not really matter, because the object of this exercise was simply to see how inevitable the outcome of the war was. And at the end of the exercise, it looks pretty inevitable.
This does not prove that Britain and France should have stayed out almost until the end of the war. We can moralize or strategize about that until the cows come home. But it does suggest that the war was really just another great-power struggle, driven by the same calculations as all the others. Even though it certainly didn’t feel that way to Sergeant Al Clavette, who fought in the Breskens Pocket with the Canadian Scottish Regiment.
I think that the boys themselves felt that we were making a contribution to rid a menace to the world, and I think they’re right as proved out. Because if Germany had, for example, got the atomic bomb, I don’t think [Hitler] would have hesitated two seconds to use it.
Al Clavette, Canadian Scottish Regiment
The trouble is that our side would have used it too. In fact, it did.
CHAPTER 8
A DREADFUL MISTAKE
THE FIRST ATTEMPT TO CREATE AN INSTITUTION THAT WOULD PREVENT another great-power war, in 1919, was made in the same place, at the same time, by the same people who wrote the vengeful peace treaty that had virtually guaranteed exactly such a war. In 1945 the problem was different. The losers were punished even more severely than in 1919: their countries were occupied militarily for a decade, their wartime leaders were executed, some of their territory was handed over to their neighbours, and (in Germany’s case) a country was physically divided in two. But none of that was a great threat to future peace, because both Germany and Japan fell out of the ranks of the great powers after 1945. The real danger this time was that the victorious great powers would fall apart and become enemies, and everybody was aware of it. Especially the Canadians.
It was hard for Western governments to ignore the Soviet Union’s constant indulgence in the crudest invective, predicting inevitable conflict with the “imperialist states” and their eventual bloody demise. It created the impression that the Russians would attack if only they could. The Marxist-Leninist mode of thought, 1940s vintage—with its simple-minded Social-Darwinian bel
ief in a final, inescapable world cataclysm from which “socialism,” the higher form of social organization, would emerge victorious—has a lot to answer for. However, it is almost always a mistake to take the statements of ideological true-believers too literally. Most of them manage to find ways of incorporating a realistic assessment of the world within their ideology, and make decisions remarkably similar to those that would be made by a non-ideologue on the grounds of rational self-interest.
Now, one of the myths of San Francisco is that the people who framed the Charter assumed that there was going to be close co-operation. I can’t believe they did.… Our custom was, when each of us came back from the committee meeting we would go to [Undersecretary of State for External Affairs] Norman Robertson’s room to report on what had happened at that committee that day. One time I had started to report and he said, “I wish to God somebody would come into this room and not start his report by saying ‘those bloody Russians.’ ”
Escott Reid, External Affairs 1941–62
The Soviet delegates … use aggressive tactics about every question large or small. They remind people of Nazi diplomatic methods and create, sometimes needlessly, suspicions and resentment. They enjoy equally making fools of their opponents and their supporters. Slyness, bullying and bad manners are other features of their Conference behaviour.… It is unfortunate from our point of view as well as theirs that they should have made such a bad showing, for I think they are proposing to make a serious effort to use the organisation and are not out to wreck it.
Charles Ritchie, External Affairs, 1934–71, The Siren Years
In April 1945, less than two weeks before Germany’s surrender, the four Allied great powers and fifty other nations came together in San Francisco to draw up the charter for the new “United Nations Organization.” President Roosevelt had died, but not his vision of world peace enforced by continuing cooperation among the victorious great powers: the “four policemen,” as he called them (two sergeants and two constables, in practice, since the United States and the Soviet Union far outweighed Britain and China in power).
