by Conrad Black
On June 18, the day after the French sued for peace, Churchill, in one of a series of mighty Demosthenean orations he delivered to the world by radio, concluded, “Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth should last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’ ”18 They did, and it was. The same day, King presented a measure of conscription for domestic service only, entitled the National Resources Mobilization Act. It passed easily, and the Quebec Assembly overwhelmingly defeated a resolution of dissent, but the tempestuous mayor of Montreal, Camillien Houde, precipitated a farcical controversy on August 2 when he described to a group of journalists his opposition to the inscription procedure as a deceitful preparation for conscription. When the Montreal Gazette reporter who had been present handed in his story, the newspaper’s city editor, Tracy S. Ludington, who moonlighted as English-language public relations director of Duplessis’s Union Nationale, wrote it up as a statement of advice not to register and sent it back with the reporter to ask Houde to sign it, which the mayor did. Ludington bannered it in the Gazette of August 5. As it was a recommendation to the population to join him in not registering, it was a violation of the War Measures Act, and the censor stopped the Gazette’s presses after about a quarter of its circulation had been printed and distributed. This generated an immediate agitation by the Opposition in Ottawa, now led by Richard Hanson, and in Quebec led by the vice premier, Télesphore-Damien Bouchard, to charge Houde with sedition. Ernest Lapointe returned hastily from the vacation King had ordered him to take when he had declared himself on the verge of breaking down from exhaustion, and Lapointe personally signed the warrant for the arrest of the mayor of Montreal, who was apprehended while leaving City Hall on the evening of August 5. The federal government did not announce the arrest for two days, and then did not allow Houde access to his wife, children, and counsel, federal MP Ligouri Lacombe. He would be interned in Ontario for four years, receiving letters from his wife addressed to “Camillien Houde, Hero.”
More important by far than Houde’s bumptious antics was the rock-solid support of the Quebec Roman Catholic Church, directed with dominating authority by the primate of Canada, Quebec’s Cardinal Villeneuve, who was now the most politically influential person in the province, was recognized to be so, and was even favoured with an invitation to meet with President Roosevelt, with whom, the cardinal allowed, he had “a delicious visit.”19 He ordered all clergy to assist in the registration of the faithful under the act Houde had urged them to ignore, and made a series of righteously bellicose declarations: “French Canada will solemnly swear never to set down arms or relax efforts on the internal front until the triumph of the democratic ideal over the Axis powers is secure.” He proclaimed days of consecration of the war and gave powerful addresses that were broadcast throughout Canada and to Europe and South America. Films were made promoting the war effort and featuring the cardinal, and conservative Action Française historian, French émigré, and Pétain admirer Robert Rumilly, wrote, “Cardinal Villeneuve assumed before the microphone the pose indicated by a technician, no doubt Anglo-Protestant. The transformation of the cardinal into an agent of British propaganda shocked not only the nationalists but a large number of French Canadians. The prelate’s habitual attention to the presence of photographers became an object of derision.”20
Villeneuve ignored his critics, who were, in any case, muted and overwhelmed, and he silenced and removed from public exposure any clergy that vocally dissented from his views. In one film at this time, he said, “The victory of Great Britain will be that of our country also, and of the whole Christian universe. It will be the victory of right over violence, of justice over iniquity, of charity over egotism, of divine right over sacrilegious usurpations … that we may be delivered from the fury of the enemies of God and humanity, that the peoples of the world may again know days of peace, charity and justice.” He delighted English Canada and won thunderous applause from the Canadian and Empire clubs of Toronto when he acclaimed Great Britain as a “valorous, untarnishable defender and propagator of civilization,” and quoted from Admiral Lord Nelson in evocation of the heroism of the British warrior. As he opened a large air base at what later became Quebec City’s municipal airport, he exclaimed, “Damned be war, but let us yet praise the Lord for calling forth from us the heroism of combat on the ground, on the high seas, and in the air, that we may rebuild justice and make goodness the victor in the triumph of God and of our country.” And he forced the publication in every parish in Canada of extracts of Pope Pius XI’s encyclical Mit brennender Sorge (“With Burning Sorrow”) of 1938, which condemned Nazi racism.21
There was a brief interregnum after the fall of France while everyone caught their breath. Hitler prepared to attack Britain, which prepared to defend itself as never before, not having seen the campfires of a serious invader for nearly nine hundred years, and Roosevelt prepared to overturn tradition and take the headship of his country for four more years. His opponent, the enlightened liberal Republican Wendell Willkie of Indiana and New York, supported Roosevelt’s aid to the democracies but accused the president of pushing the country into war and headed a divided party whose congressional leaders were inflexibly isolationist. All would depend on Britain surviving the German air assault, as Hitler would have to clear the skies if he was to have any chance of getting an invasion force past the Royal Navy. Churchill moved most of the British capital ships to southern ports to be ready to intervene in the Channel, and as the British had fifteen battleships and battle cruisers to two German and six Italian (which were in the Mediterranean and were very gun-shy when British heavy units were about), and had six aircraft carriers to none for its enemies, an invasion without complete German air superiority would have been an immense disaster at sea. No one, and certainly not Hitler, doubted that the British would fight to the last able-bodied adult in defence of their island home. If Britain could face the air onslaught and Roosevelt was re-elected, it was possible to envision the English-speaking world responding in increasing unity to what Churchill was already calling “the common cause,” in somewhat hopeful anticipation of events.
On June 20, a private bill was introduced in Congress without initial backing from the White House to bring in peacetime conscription for the first time in the nation’s history. On July 3, the British attacked the French fleet at Oran, Algeria, sinking or heavily damaging three French capital ships. The only operational battleship the French retained (as others were demobilized at Alexandria) was the just and incompletely finished Richelieu, a powerful ship that had barely escaped from the builder’s yard to the open sea as the Germans entered Saint-Nazaire. She sailed to Dakar, and would remain there for three years, the subject of Gaullist and Pétainist plots and counterplots among her officers reminiscent in complexity, if not in scale, of the activities of the ship’s namesake. At the start of the Dunkirk operation, Roosevelt reckoned the British chances at one in three, but he moved it to fifty-fifty after the evacuation succeeded, and the attack on the French and the huge ovation Churchill received in Parliament made that three to two or better in favour. On July 10, Roosevelt quadrupled the already augmented American defence budget and laid down eight battleships and twenty-four aircraft carriers (there were only twenty-four carriers in the world in all navies, including the United States) and ordered fifty thousand warplanes, five times the annual aircraft production of Germany. Roosevelt was renominated in Chicago on July 19 (by prearrangement with the Democratic machine in that city, which stampeded the convention after a letter from Roosevelt had been read by the keynote speaker, Senator Alben W. Barkley, telling the delegates to vote for whomever they wished; that is, the incumbent. The same day, a long row of fanioned automobiles conducted Hitler to the Kroll Opera House in Berlin (which he preferred as a speaking venue to the Reichstag), and he made a spurious offer of peace, according to which Germany and Britain would both keep everything they now had
. Churchill listened to the speech on the radio but dismissed it at once as just another act of treachery, containing no worthwhile elements and emanating from an unappeasable psychopath.
Air activity over southern England greatly increased after the middle of July, and the British continued to shoot down more German planes than they were losing, as even American journalists could verify, albeit unscientifically, just by watching the intense dogfights with binoculars in the clear summer skies. The British and German fighters were approximately equal in quality of machine and skill and courage of pilot, but the German bombers were sitting ducks when the RAF fighters broke through and attacked them. The British could recycle four-fifths of their aircrews shot down over England, as they landed on home ground if they parachuted safely, where almost all German aircrews which were shot down were killed or captured. The sinister Stukas, with their hornet-like appearance and sirens, which had so terrorized civilians in Poland, Belgium, and France, were decimated by British Spitfires and Hurricanes and after a couple of disastrous days never returned to British airspace.
Roosevelt’s re-election posture was that the war emergency was so serious that he could not attend the convention that renominated him in Chicago, and could not campaign. But he went on tours of military and defence production installations, which had the same public relations value as a campaign, and he reserved the right to intervene to “correct campaign falsifications,” with little doubt that he would profess to find some in need of being addressed. He asked Mackenzie King to meet him on his private train at Ogdensburg, New York, on the St. Lawrence near Kingston, on August 16 to discuss North American defence. King refused to allow American military bases in Canada, but the Ogdensburg Agreement, as it was called, led to the setting up of the Permanent Joint Board on Defence and to a high level of cooperation. Arthur Meighen spoke for the most militant Canadian imperialists when he claimed to have “lost his breakfast” reading about the agreement,22 but most Canadians recognized that in these circumstances, the tighter and more formal the U.S. guaranty of Canada the better. Typically, King, who imputed divine intervention to his dog’s indispositions and his own bowel movements, saw “the Hand of Destiny … as clearly … as anything in this world could possibly be … a converging of the streams of influence over a hundred years ago as to place and time and of life purpose in the case of Roosevelt and myself,” he wrote in his diary on August 22.23
Churchill had misgivings about creeping American influence and wanted Roosevelt to confine himself to assisting Britain to survive and then join it against Germany without encroaching on what he still regarded as a British domain in Canada. The British high commissioner in Ottawa, Sir Gerald Campbell, was an astute observer of King and reported to Whitehall that the Canadian prime minister was “very complex.… He goes far beyond the average Canadian in his mystical and idealistic talk of a crusade or holy war against the enemies of civilization and democracy. On the other hand, he is the narrowest of narrow Canadian nationalists [who will always] consider [how] the common cause can be made to help Canada.”24 This was, after all, King’s task and duty, to fight barbarism on the scale of threat Nazism had now achieved, and in doing so and in all ways to advance the Canadian national interest. From the Plains of Abraham approximately to the First World War, the British connection was almost constantly invoked by Canada as its insurance against being overrun by the United States. Now, British mismanagement of the peace in Europe had put the old country in mortal peril, and Britain was asking for Canadian help and not the other way around. The British did not seem to realize that Canada was in the war not because it was a British territory but because it disapproved of Nazi aggression and wished to support Britain when it was under threat as an independent act of solidarity, and that if, in doing that, it could add the formal military guaranty of the mighty United Sates of America, which had for so long been a threat to Canada and a rival to Great Britain, this was a thing to be done and was no legitimate cause of perplexity to Britain.
When Campbell told Churchill that King was upset by his cable, following King’s message that had been prompted by Roosevelt’s message to him, the British prime minister, who by this time had many more urgent concerns, dispatched a message to his sensitive Canadian analogue in which he thanked King for “all you have done” for the now proverbial “common cause and especially in promoting a harmony of sentiment throughout the New World” (a slight embellishment on what had been achieved at Ogdensburg). King carried this message around in his pocket for weeks and happily found occasion to show it to colleagues, friendly acquaintances, and reporters (and possibly even passers-by).25 Complicated though he was in some ways, in dealings with Churchill and Roosevelt, immense world historic personalities as they were, King was quite predictable. The Permanent Joint Board on Defence had its first meeting on August 26 in Ottawa. The Canadian co-chairman was Oliver Mowat Biggar, a former member of Canada’s delegation at the Paris Peace Conference and judge advocate general of Canada, and the American co-chairman was the ebullient reform mayor of New York City, Fiorello H. La Guardia, who could not be more different to King, but the two men got on well. (“He grows on one,” as King wrote.26)
Throughout August and September 1940, as the Battle of Britain flared in the English skies, the British were losing about twelve aircraft a day but recovering most of the aircrews, and the Germans were losing about thirty aircraft a day and practically all the aircrews. The British estimated German front-line air strength at the beginning of August at 6,000 and that annual German production had been increased to 24,000. The real figures for 1940 were 3,000 and 10,247. By mid-August, the air forces were swarming in the skies of southern England all day, and the British committed their final reserves; every airworthy machine they had was engaged. From August 25 to 29, Churchill sent forty bombers over Berlin, where the damage they caused was not great, but the effect on the population and on Göring and Hitler was considerable. These raids, and the unsustainable losses the British were inflicting, caused the Germans to change to massive nighttime bombing indiscriminately over populated areas. German intelligence also underestimated the strength of the RAF. The Germans thought that when they went to nighttime bombing, the British were down to 177 fighters and a production of 250 a month. The real figures were 1,084 and monthly production of 428, under the fine administrative hand of Canadian Lord Beaverbrook as minister of aircraft production. The British were free to buy what they wished from the United States (though American-built fighter aircraft were not as fast or manoeuvrable as the British and German types), and the Germans could not import aircraft from any worthwhile foreign supplier.
Roosevelt wrote Churchill on August 13 that he believed he could send him fifty First World War destroyers, which, though inferior to recent craft, could still hunt and sink submarines. Roosevelt proposed to trade the destroyers for the right to open American bases in British Caribbean islands and in Newfoundland. Roosevelt also began redefining U.S. territorial waters outwards from three miles in two-hundred-mile increments, ultimately to eighteen hundred miles, and ordered heavy patrolling of the coastal waters as redefined with any detection of German or Italian vessels to be communicated at once, en clair, to the British and Canadians. He had expanded this so-called neutrality zone to one thousand miles by late September. This was, to say the least, an idiosyncratic definition of neutrality, and a bold series of moves to undertake in the midst of a campaign for an unprecedented third presidential term. The Selective Training and Service Act, the first peacetime draft in U.S. history, was passed on September 20, and Roosevelt signed it at once, calling it, in Revolutionary War terms, “a muster.”
Between July 10 and October 31, the RAF lost 915 aircraft and the Luftwaffe 1,733. The kill ratio came down from three or four to one in favour of the British to two to one for the whole period when the Germans shifted to night raids and the kills were about equal. Changing over to night bombing brought German losses down to within their production and training additions b
ut made precise bombing impossible and grossly alienated international, especially American, opinion. The attacks strained but did not break British morale, and it was clear by mid-October that Britain had won the war in her own skies and that henceforth both sides would essentially control their own airspaces. On August 20, slightly in advance of events, but not unwarrantedly, Churchill had said of the Fighter Command of the Royal Air Force, “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” On October 21, he said in another of his great broadcast speeches, “We are waiting for the long-promised invasion. So are the fishes.”27 Churchill, whose mother was American, knew American politics well enough to know that in giving these inspiriting addresses and announcing a resurrection of his country’s military fortunes, he was helping Roosevelt and making the president, in the midst of his re-election campaign, appear both generous and prescient in the eyes of his own voters. Military success sired diplomatic and political success.
Wendell Willkie ran a tremendously spirited campaign, which came down to the war scare “Our sons are already almost at the boats!” Roosevelt replied that he would “repeat again and again and again: your sons will not be sent into any foreign wars.” The president entered the campaign in the last two weeks, and it was a spectacular windup. He hung the Great Depression on Willkie’s party and strongly implied that it was infested with isolationists who were fascist sympathizers and virtual fifth columnists. Unemployment was coming down by five hundred thousand a month through the campaign, and the president ran as a reluctant candidate who had saved the nation from the Republicans’ economic disaster and would save the peace for America by arming the democracies fighting America’s battle on freedom’s front lines. It was a believable message, and he was an invincible political operator and forensic virtuoso. On November 5, 1940, he was returned as president by a margin of five million votes, almost 10 per cent of the vote. Nearly 80 per cent of eligible voters cast ballots, and the incumbent carried 449 electoral votes to 82 for Willkie. The next day, Winston Churchill wrote him, “I did not think it right for me as a foreigner to express any opinion on American policies while the election was on but now I feel you will not mind my saying that that I prayed for your success and that I am truly thankful for it.… In expressing the comfort that I feel that the people of the United States have once again cast these great burdens upon you, I must avow my sure faith that the lights by which we steer will bring us all safely to anchor.”28 King telephoned Roosevelt the day after the election, and the two men had a jovial chat, as appropriate between two recently re-elected leaders on the most cordial terms.29
