Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014

by Gwynne Dyer

  Q. You didn’t tell them that there had been talks?

  No, we pretended there hadn’t been. I’ve seen no indication that the French realised the talks had been taking place, or the Belgians or the Dutch. It’s hard to believe that they didn’t, but apparently the preservation of secrecy may have worked.

  Escott Reid

  The British and Canadian scheme was a brilliant success. By the time the talks concluded in early 1949, Americans generally believed that NATO had been their own idea, and the Italians, the Portuguese, the Danes, the Norwegians and the Icelanders had also agreed to join. “It was a reversion to alliances and away from some of the universal aspirations we’d had,” fretted John Holmes, but for many people the pain of failure was eased by the rationalization that they were trying to stop another Hitler. This analogy was reinforced by the striking post-1945 linguistic fashion in the West to use the word “totalitarian” to describe both Nazis and Communists, implicitly putting them in the same category. (In the Soviet Union, the same political goal was accomplished by referring to both Nazis and Moscow’s current Western opponents as “imperialists.”)

  Now we are faced with exactly the same situation with which Britain and France were faced in 1938–39 with Hitler. A totalitarian state is no different whether you call it Nazi, Fascist, Communist or Franco Spain.… The oligarchy in Russia is no different from the Czars, Louis XIV, Napoleon, Charles I and Cromwell. It is a Frankenstein dictatorship worse than any of the others, Hitler included.

  I hope it will end in peace. Be a nice girl and don’t worry about your Dad’s worries.

  U.S. president Truman, letter to his daughter Margaret (then aged 24), March 1948

  The Canadians who helped to create NATO in 1948–49 had no intention of dividing the world permanently: they saw the organization as a temporary measure designed to stabilize Western Europe politically while the Marshall Plan restored it economically—and in 1949 it was still possible to believe (with just a little effort) that we were not re-creating the alliance system. Although the NATO countries promised to consult politically in the event of any threat, and to come to the aid of any member under attack, NATO as created in 1949 involved no military command structure and no vast scheme of rearmament.

  NATO was an alliance founded to stop an attack that wasn’t coming, by people who knew it wasn’t coming and were creating it for purposes of political morale-building among their own friends. That didn’t seem such an inexcusable crime to those who had to deal with the problems of the time, especially since one could hardly say that the Soviet Union was behaving in a more responsible manner. By the time the NATO treaty was ready to be signed, Louis St. Laurent had become prime minister. In 1947 he had publicly admitted that the proposal that eventually grew into NATO was “most undesirable,” but now both he and his new secretary of state for external affairs, Lester Pearson, believed it was a vital necessity.

  I was present at the signing of the treaty. I remember Mr. Pearson stating the Canadian position, which was that this should not be just a military alliance, and that this required a consultation system which would try and align our policies as far as possible. At the time when the signature was taking place and Mr. Pearson had just made this speech, it happened that the Marine Band that was deployed by Mr. Truman for the occasion struck up “It Ain’t Necessarily So.” (laughter).

  It seemed an appropriate comment.

  George Ignatieff, External Affairs, 1940–62

  The treaty was signed on April 4, 1949. Less than six months later, the Soviets tested their first atomic bomb. Eight months after that, war broke out in Korea.

  It was quite a quantum leap for the United States to go against the last will of Washington to keep out of European entangling alliances, as it was for Canada. But Korea was the explosive charge which really exploded the world of uncommitment that Mr. King had depended on.

  George Ignatieff

  NATO remained a paper alliance of mutual guarantees from April 1949 until June 1950. Then the coming of the Korean War stampeded its members into crash rearmament and the creation of a joint military command in Europe—with, naturally, an American as supreme commander. The arms race got underway in earnest, the Cold War entered its coldest phase and the anti-Communist witch hunt went into high gear in the United States. That was quite a list of repercussions for a war in a place that most Canadians would have had a hard time finding on a map in 1950.

  Korea had been a Japanese colony since 1910, and after the Japanese surrender in 1945, it was occupied by both American and Soviet troops. The Soviets, arriving by land, took over the northern part of the peninsula, while the Americans, coming by sea, assumed control of the southern part. At a meeting of foreign ministers in Moscow in 1945, a joint commission of the United States and the USSR was set up to organize a “trustee” government for a period of five years. Once a freely elected Korean government had been established, the arbitrary border at the 38th Parallel would disappear and a unified Korea would re-emerge. Predictably, however, Washington and Moscow could not agree on how to run the elections.

  The resistance against the Japanese had been largely Communist, which gave Kim Il-sung’s former guerrilla group a degree of legitimacy, and the Soviets helped him to entrench himself in the North. The Americans tried to help their own candidate, an American-educated politician called Syngman Rhee, by getting the United Nations to create the United Nations Temporary Commission on Korea (UNTCOK) to supervise elections throughout the peninsula. If the Soviets agreed to this commission, Rhee would likely win the election, as the U.S.-controlled zone had twice the population of the Soviet zone. If they refused, then Rhee could at least be put in charge of the south.

  In November 1947, St. Laurent, then still secretary of state for external affairs, agreed to Canadian participation in UNTCOK, but Prime Minister Mackenzie King refused. He believed, quite correctly, that the Russians would bar UNTCOK from the North, and he also suspected that the Americans had already decided to hold elections only in South Korea and wanted Canada in UNTCOK merely to help legitimize the decision. King sent Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs Lester Pearson to Washington to explain his concerns to President Truman. Pearson was hardly reassured by Truman’s response: “Don’t worry, you won’t get into any trouble over there, and if you do we are behind you.” Moreover, the president kept emphasizing that Canada was the most respectable member on the commission—and “that was exactly what worried Mr. King.”

  Mr. King, as you know, was a spiritualist and one of the messages he had received from the Beyond [from the late President Roosevelt] was that World War Three was going to break out over the division of Korea. As soon as he had received this message he really reverted instinctively to his former isolationism and said: “Canada must not be involved in this in any way.” St. Laurent went to him and said: “If you want me in this government, you have to support this kind of intervention. It’s the only way of the future.”

  Dale Thomson, secretary to Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent, 1953–58

  St. Laurent’s resignation threat worked: King agreed that a Canadian member could be appointed to UNTCOK, although the representative was instructed to withdraw if it became clear that Russian cooperation was not forthcoming. He was to have nothing to do with organizing an election in South Korea alone, which would merely freeze the division of the country. But Roosevelt had given King better advice than St. Laurent, despite the considerable handicap of being dead.

  The Russians predictably refused to admit the UNTCOK commissioners to their zone of Korea, and the United States used its huge majority in the United Nations to ram through a motion resolving that elections be held “in those parts of Korea accessible to the Commission.” (Canada was one of two countries to vote against it.) And in February 1948, while Canada’s representative in Korea, Dr. George Patterson, “happened” to be away in Japan, the other members of the commission decided to hold elections in South Korea only. Patterson had left instruc
tions that he should be contacted if anything important came up while he was away, but this was evidently not considered an important matter.

  The May 1948 elections duly produced a Republic of Korea in the American-occupied part of the peninsula, run by Syngman Rhee with ample assistance from the army and the secret police. Canada made it clear that it would regard any government of South Korea resulting from the 1948 elections as the creation of the U.S. occupation authorities and not of the United Nations, but the Americans had achieved their aim. Two and a half months later, the Soviets retaliated by recognizing Kim Il-sung as the leader of the “People’s Democratic Republic of Korea” in the North—and less than two years after that, we all got the Korean War.

  They always attacked at night because of our air superiority. They would rush through the minefield, blow it up, and lay on the wire. Then the next wave would come through with grenades, throw the grenades and go to ground. The next wave with burp-guns and so on, and just keep coming in waves.… You couldn’t fire fast enough to stop them, so the only way to stop them was massed artillery fire, often on your own position. The infantry would call down fire on their own position with VT fuses—a little radar set in the nose of the fuse would explode it [about 20 metres] above the ground and the shrapnel would all go down.

  So the night of 2/3 May [1953] on Hill 187, the 1st Battalion Royal Canadian Regiment, who our battery supported, were overrun, and the first order we got was “DFSOS. Drop 200. Fire till you’re told to stop.” DFSOS was as close as you could get for safety. So we questioned the order and we were told “Bloody well fire it.” So we kept getting drops—“Drop 200.” “Drop 400.” “Drop 800.”—until we were right on the RCR position. We kept firing all night. In my troop alone, with four guns, we fired at least 1,200 rounds.… The barrels got red hot and we were throwing water on them to try and cool them down. We fired right through till dawn, till the Chinese withdrew. The Chinese were bundling up their dead and rolling them down the hill. They wrapped them in wire and rolled them down the hill.… Two of my very good friends were killed that night.

  Francis Bayne, 81st Field Regiment (RCHA)

  EXCURSION 8

  WHY WAR IS HARD TO STOP

  THEY WERE BACK DOING WHAT THEY HAD ALWAYS DONE. Governments knew what needed to be done, but they still couldn’t bring themselves to do it. They understood that war is a systems problem, yet they allowed themselves to be swept back into an alliance, a great-power military confrontation and an actual shooting war practically before the ink was dry on the UN Charter. Why is it so hard for human beings to break out of the war system?

  Prior to the twentieth century, most people did not see war as a problem in need of a solution. Losing a war could be a very big problem, but the solution to that was to be good at war. It was the First World War, with its unprecedented level of destruction, that changed all that, and for the first time a number of serious people in positions of power addressed the problem directly. As people who lived and worked within the institutions of the state, they naturally emphasized the need to change the rules by which states operated, and in operational terms they were quite right. But they were not aware of how deep the roots of the problem go.

  The creators of the League of Nations knew that it would be very hard to put an end to war, as it has played a big role in civilized societies from the earliest times. At a rough guess, 95 percent of the civilized states that have ever existed were ultimately destroyed by war. As the great-great-grandchildren of the Enlightenment, however, most of these people would have shared Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s belief that before the rise of civilization, when human beings lived in the “state of nature,” they lived in peace with one another. The problem was the behaviour of states, and it could be solved (if only very slowly and against great resistance) by changing the rules.

  Then along came the archaeologists and anthropologists of the next half century, who discovered that warfare had been even more prominent in the lives of the thousands of generations before civilization. The hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists, who lived in groups of a hundred or less, whose attitudes and values evolved over hundreds of thousands of years, were fundamental to shaping what we now call human nature. They matched Rousseau’s description of “noble savages” in the sense that they were deeply egalitarian—but they were also extremely warlike. Indeed, the cumulative toll of deaths from war in these little societies was far higher than anything seen in civilized warfare. It took a long time for this fact to inform public debate about war and peace, for it was most unwelcome news and strongly denied by many. But however disheartening, it could not be ignored: in every place and time, human beings have almost always fought wars.

  And after that, from the 1970s on, came the primatologists, with the further bad news that our closest relatives among the higher primates (and almost certainly our own pre-human ancestors) also fought wars. If this behaviour is not actually inscribed in our DNA, it is at the least deeply ingrained in our culture all the way back to Homo erectus.

  One year later, a gang from Kasekela found their third victim. This time their target was Goliath, now well past his prime, with a bald head, very worn teeth, protruding ribs and spine.…

  It began as a border patrol. At one point … they spotted Goliath, apparently hiding only 25 metres away. The raiders rushed madly down the slope to their target. While Goliath screamed and the patrol hooted and displayed, he was held and beaten and kicked and lifted and dropped and bitten and jumped on. At first he tried to protect his head, but soon he gave up and lay stretched out and still.… They kept up the attack for 18 minutes, then turned for home.… Bleeding freely from his head, gashed on his back, Goliath tried to sit up but fell back shivering. He too was never seen again.

  The death of a Gombe chimpanzee, from Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence

  Jane Goodall’s discovery in 1973 that the chimpanzee troop she was observing in Tanzania’s Gombe National Park actually waged a kind of war against neighbouring bands came as a great surprise at the time, but subsequent studies by a number of primatologists—some chimpanzee bands have been observed for forty years now, with each member named and his or her behaviour recorded over lengthy periods of time—confirmed that fighting between rival groups of chimps is widespread, chronic and very serious. How relevant is this to human beings?

  Our line of descent separated from that of the chimpanzees five or six million years ago, but about 98 percent of our genetic material is still common to the two species. Until ten or twelve thousand years ago, all our human ancestors made their living in essentially the same way as chimps, by foraging for food in small bands. Both humans and chimpanzees were hunters as well as gatherers—chimps hunt monkeys regularly, and do so in coordinated groups using clearly conscious strategies—but chimpanzee “warfare” is hampered by the fact that they lack weapons, and it is very difficult for chimps to kill each other with their bare hands. As a result, most successful raids involve a number of male chimps from one band attacking a lone chimp from another, with some holding him down while others pummel and bite him—and even then the victim is often still alive when the attackers leave, although he generally dies afterward. But it is warfare, in the sense that it is purposeful and calculated.

  According to primatologist Richard Wrangham, who did his earliest work with Goodall’s team in Gombe in the early 1970s, chimpanzees conduct deliberate raids and make considerable use of surprise. Nor is it just blind aggression, triggered by the proximity of a chimp from another band: these raiding parties wait and count the calls of other troops to see if they are outnumbered, and almost always withdraw rather than attack unless they can catch a single chimp from a rival band on his own. Moreover, although the great majority of killings involve the ambush of single chimps separated from their groups, a campaign may be waged over a period of months or years until all the males of the rival band have been annihilated. Once that is done, the territory of
the defeated group may be taken over and the surviving females incorporated into the victorious group—but the infants will be killed.

  Two more things, both with worrisome echoes in human behaviour. One is that chimpanzee bands typically have a territory of about 35 square kilometres, but spend almost all their time in only the central 15 square kilometres. The rest is equally rich in resources but they treat it as a no man’s land, presumably because of the danger of ambush and death at the hands of a neighbouring troop. The other thing is that this endemic chimpanzee warfare, according to long-term studies of several troops, eventually causes the death of about 30 percent of males and a much lower but still significant proportion of females.

  Similar studies of human hunter-gatherers who still lived in intact societies were almost never made by direct observation. In the 1930s, however, anthropologist Lloyd Warner conducted extensive interviews among the Murngin people of Arnhem Land in northern Australia, who had only recently come into regular contact with Europeans. Trusting the strong oral history tradition among preliterate peoples, he reconstructed as best he could from interviews the scale of warfare among the Murngin in the late 1800s. The Murngin numbered about three thousand people and lived in many separate bands of the classic hunter-gatherer type. Out of a fighting-age population of about eight hundred adult males, Warner estimated that around two hundred died in warfare over a two-decade period at the end of the nineteenth century. Twenty years is roughly the length of time that any individual male would have been regarded as an active warrior, so these figures translate into a 25 percent death rate from warfare among males.