by Conrad Black
The second half of 1940 was thus almost as successful for the Allies as the first half had been disastrous. France was gone and Italy was arrayed against the British Commonwealth, but it was soon clear that the Italians were not really interested in risking all for Mussolini’s superfluous supporting role beside Hitler. On November 11, the Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm attacked the Italian navy in its home base of Taranto and, with a loss of only two aircraft, permanently destroyed one Italian battleship and forced two others to ground to avoid sinking, eliminating for over six months half of Italy’s battle fleet, in which time two new British battleships and several aircraft carriers would be commissioned. The implications of a torpedo attack in a shallow anchorage, as executed at Taranto, were written up in British summaries of the action and sent by Churchill to Roosevelt, who passed them on to his own senior naval officers, but the attack was more closely studied by the Japanese than by the Americans, with grievous consequences a year later.30 The West was pleased and heartened by Finland having given Stalin a bloody nose in late 1939 and early 1940, although the Russians eventually forced the issue by sheer numbers. Stalin was cooperating with Hitler but showing no disposition to come farther into the war. The British (with the whole-hearted collaboration of the Commonwealth) and the United States (providing “all aid short of war”) had firmed up the concept of the English-speaking peoples – a concept that suddenly and for obvious reasons became popular in Britain and Canada – and had together produced a stasis in Western Europe. There was no longer any immediate danger of the British Isles being overrun.
It was disappointing to King that he wasn’t really on an equal footing with Churchill and Roosevelt, but all three men had been in government prior to the First World War, when the Canadians were still somewhat fearful of the United States and were generally treated by the British as a colony where foreign and defence matters were involved. Where Robert Borden had been trying to get the Liberal Senate to give the British the money to build British battleships in British yards, King negotiated in late 1939 the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, which would prepare 130,000 Canadian, British, Australian, and New Zealand airmen. It provided initially for 64 training centres, 20,000 Canadian, British, Australian, and New Zealand air personnel per year, and a budget of $600 million, of which Canada would contribute $350 million and up to 80 per cent of the candidates. It was a very ambitious program and would prove completely successful.
Canadian Involvement in the Second World War
In purely domestic matters, the Rowell-Sirois Commission summarized very well the fiscal and spending evolution of the different layers of government since Confederation, and concluded that the federal government should assume provincial debts, take over sole responsibility for unemployment insurance, and have sole power to collect income and corporate taxes and succession duties, and that a new system of adjustment grants should be established that would enable a uniform standard of social services to be provided across the country. Since Ontario, Alberta, and British Columbia, the wealthiest provinces, would be paying and not receiving these grants, they objected, and Quebec opposed the transfer of jurisdiction that was proposed. There was a good deal of unfortunate comment in Ontario about not wishing to pay for French Roman Catholic education in Quebec. (In fact, since the Church paid a reduced and not a secular pay scale to the clerical personnel in schools and hospitals, this would not occur, but bigotry rarely dwells long on the facts.) The Canadian federal government had already secured the right to a constitutional amendment to deal with unemployment insurance, a change resulting from the depression which now had passed, and there really was no longer any unemployment. Agreements were made for the rental of tax fields by the federal government in exchange for the assumption by it of expanded spending responsibilities, though Ontario refused to have anything to do with such an arrangement.
Canada was not a great power, of course – it was a recent colony – and Churchill was still trying to reinvent a version of Lloyd George’s placebo Imperial War Cabinet, and even suggested that King might like to play a prominent role in it by moving to England. This was an insane idea on every score: the domestic Canadian political scene required very careful watching, and the Canadian war effort could not be directed from outside. King declined Churchill’s increasingly urgent invitations to come to Britain for over a year, and while he was not taken fully into the confidence of his senior colleagues, he at least denied Roosevelt’s request for military bases in Canada and refused Churchill’s timeless efforts to subsume Canadian manpower into the British services. King had two problems, apart from the fact that Canada had less than 10 per cent of the population of the United States and 25 per cent of that of the United Kingdom, without counting any of the vast Empire that remained under direct British rule. The first was that he was directing all his efforts to becoming more intimate with Churchill and Roosevelt – and inciting the inference among his own countrymen that they regarded him as a serious confidant, if not altogether an equal – and this prevented him from making common cause with the Australians and prominent third states, especially the Free French of de Gaulle, who would be increasingly important as the French empire switched over to him, the French Resistance gained strength, and the liberation of France approached. King’s second problem was that he was not an inspirational leader. He was occasionally capable of a tolerably good speech in its content, but had no presentational flare and did not have a galvanizing voice, unlike either Churchill or Roosevelt, who were both mighty orators in different ways, Churchill the erudite, fierce, fighting leader, and Roosevelt the mellifluous, almost apostolic, patrician. One of King’s strengths was his indistinctness, his uncanny ability, half calculation and half intuition, to place himself at the radical centre, between poles, not to lead boldly. His strengths were essential to govern Canada through such a crisis but were a handicap in comparison to his illustrious wartime contemporaries. Canadians had learned decades before that when they wanted inspiration, it was not W.L. Mackenzie King who would give it to them.
The year ended with one of Roosevelt’s most famous of all his fireside chats, on December 29, 1940. Public places across America emptied as the hour of his address approached, and 75 per cent of Americans of comprehending age listened. He said there was no hope of a negotiated peace. “If Britain goes down … an unholy alliance” would continue to pursue world conquest, “and all of us in the Americas would be living at the point of a gun. There can be no ultimate peace with this gang of outlaws.” The “pious frauds” offered by the dupes of the dictators within America would not distract the American people. “No dictator, no combination of dictators,” Roosevelt told the world, would divert the American people and government from pursuing their moral duty and national interest. “We must be the great arsenal of democracy.” His address received overwhelming public approval. On June 25, the Gallup organization had reported that 64 per cent of Americans believed it was more important to stay out of war than to help Britain. On October 20, the same organization found the division of opinion on that issue exactly even; on November 19, it was 60 per cent in favour of aid to Britain whatever the consequences; and after Roosevelt’s year-end address it was about 70 per cent. The eloquence of Churchill and Roosevelt, the martial bravery and stoicism of the British, and the savagery of Hitler, had turned American opinion and altered the balance of world power. But where the balance was so narrow – given the ambiguity of Italy’s war commitment and the continuing, if tenuous, neutrality of the United States, the Soviet Union, and Japan – Canada was perhaps now the third most important combatant, and made a vital difference.
2. Mackenzie King VI: The Turning Point, 1941–1943
If 1940 had been the year of maximum crisis, 1941 would be the year where the road to victory became visible. King, from his own curiosity, cultivated the Japanese minister in Canada, Baron Tomii. Their conversations were relatively candid, and King assured the Japanese envoy that if Japan had “troubles,” as Tomii called th
em, with Malaya or India, Canada would certainly support Britain. He also tried to sound a deterrent note on behalf of the United States.31 On March 26, 1941, Tomii told King that if Germany invaded Britain, Japan would attack British Empire outposts in the Far East. (It had done the same with French Indochina, where even the communist nationalists were already nostalgic for the gentler hegemony of France.) Tomii said that Japan would ultimately emulate the political configuration of the winning side, totalitarian or democratic, in the current war. That proved to be accurate, but not, presumably, in the way that Tomii foresaw. King told him that if Japan became embroiled in war with Britain, the United States would come to the aid of the British. Tomii expressed confidence that Japan would not be at war with Britain or America anytime soon, but King did not believe him.32
At this point, Japan’s energetic foreign minister, Yosuke Matsuoka, was bustling around Europe trying to add the Soviet Union to the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Axis. To this end, Matsuoka negotiated a non-aggression pact with Stalin and Vyacheslav Molotov. Matsuoka was a Christian who spent much of his youth in Portland, Oregon, and in Oakland, California. He had a cordial visit with Hitler in March, but instead of aligning with Japan in the event of a conflict with Russia, the Germans said nothing of any possible disagreement with the Soviet Union. Hitler’s strategic concern by early 1941 was that he was obviously not going to be able to invade Britain and was now almost at war with a United States led by the implacable, reinaugurated Roosevelt. On February 13, the U.S. Senate adopted the Lend-Lease bill, by which the United States would essentially give the British and Commonwealth countries anything they asked, and they would repay by returning it when the war was over, or, if that was impossible, by equivalent consideration when it could be done. To the press, Roosevelt compared it to lending your neighbour your garden hose if his house was on fire. It was a brilliant initiative, and it effectively meant that Hitler was facing the full weight of the United States in all but manpower, and by now Roosevelt had ordered the U.S. Navy to attack any German ship on detection within eighteen hundred miles of the Atlantic coast of the United States. Churchill described Lend-Lease in Parliament a few days later as “the most unsordid act in the history of any nation,” and on March 12 the Parliament of the United Kingdom unanimously approved Churchill’s resolution, expressing “our deep and respectful appreciation of this monument of generous and farseeing statesmanship.… In the name of all freedom-loving peoples we offer to the United States our gratitude for her inspiring act of faith.”33
Godsend and act of genius though it was, Lend-Lease caused the transfer of some war supply from Canada to the United States, and King and Ilsley and C.D. Howe (now minister of munitions and supply) were concerned that Canada would lose exports and production, as well as foreign reserves to finance its own imports from the United States. King and his officials visited FDR at his Hudson River estate at Hyde Park, and the president rounded out Lend-Lease with the Hyde Park Declaration of April 1941, which increased American purchases from Canada by $200 million to $300 million per year and permitted American components to be fabricated in Canada and shipped on to Britain. Officials of all three countries were becoming much better known to each other. Thus, Howe became well acquainted with Roosevelt’s treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau, and with his chief troubleshooter, and, insofar as he had one, confidant, Harry Hopkins.
King was always on the lookout for talent to add to his cabinet and always sought ministers of higher quality. He tried to entice Canada’s greatest financier, John Wilson McConnell, proprietor of the Montreal Star, and farm equipment executive James S. Duncan, of Massey-Harris, to his government, and had an informal try for Adélard Godbout. King was always pleased, and never envious or threatened, by talented people he met, and was very impressed with the young industrialist Edward P. Taylor, now working with Howe in the munitions department: “A fine-looking and really splendid fellow,” wrote King.34
Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s close adviser in domestic matters, and his electoral opponent Wendell Willkie, with whom his relations were cordial, both visited Britain in January and February 1941 and made a very favourable impression on the British. And Willkie delivered to Churchill Roosevelt’s handwritten excerpt from Longfellow’s poem “O Ship of State,” which the British leader read over the airwaves: “Sail on, O ship of State! / Sail on, O Union, strong and great! / Humanity, with all its fears, / With all the hopes of future years, / Is hanging breathless on thy fate!” It was an electrifying citation, and one that reminded the whole English-speaking world how fortunate it was that its defence was being led by two men whose culture and high-mindedness largely personified the civilization whose official champions they were.
This was a scale of activity and importance that was not accessible to Mackenzie King. Canada was not adequately important, though it certainly was rather important, and King himself had no such call on the attention of the world, nor any such flare for mass leadership. He had, in the French expression, the fault of his qualities, and these were the compromise, the course adjustment, the calculated manoeuvre, not the epochal or astounding or brilliant gesture or even apercu. He had his strengths, but as usual with Canada, flamboyance, or even exceptional and evident virtuosity, was not among them.
In these circumstances, Hitler reasoned that if he did nothing Roosevelt would keep Britain afloat and eventually, when he was ready, attack Germany, and might at the same time be able to bribe Stalin into knifing Germany in the back. Hitler concluded that if he attacked Stalin now and knocked Russia out as a major power, or at least pushed it back toward the Urals, he would be immune from the danger of a two-front war, and the British and Americans would have to assemble a prohibitively immense force to land successfully in Western Europe and dislodge Germany from occupation of most of the continent and suzerainty over subordinate dictatorships in the rest (Italy, Hungary, Romania, Spain, Portugal, et cetera). It would be an immense gamble, but he had built his career on such gambles and had always won. It had a certain logic.
What is not clear is why he did not coordinate with Japan. By this time, Japan was under what was in practice an oil embargo from the United States, from which it imported 80 per cent of its oil, as Roosevelt considered the Japanese invasions of China and Indochina to be (as they were) a moral outrage. Japan would have to attack the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) to obtain oil if the American boycott wasn’t loosened. But if Hitler had attacked the Soviet Union in coordination with the Japanese, he could have promised Japan access to the Caucasian oil fields of Russia, and the British would not have dared to intercept Japanese tankers that came to fetch the oil. This would have enabled Japan to seize territory from the Russians in the east and contributed importantly to an attack on that country. In the alternative, Hitler could have made a major effort in North Africa – rather than the mere four divisions he gave Erwin Rommel, with seven ill-assured Italian divisions – to try to seize the Suez Canal and advance into the Middle East. This would have freed up oil for Japan and facilitated a combined attack on the Soviet Union in 1942.
Hitler – spurred by a fear that, if he did not move quickly, both Stalin and Roosevelt were capable of a sudden strike at him, with the connivance of the British – had the German General Staff prepare a plan for the invasion and conquest of the western Soviet Union by 180 or more German and allied divisions, starting in early May. Mussolini had foolishly attacked Greece from Albania and been given a good thrashing by the Greeks, as he was when he attempted the invasion of Egypt from Libya, which caused Hitler to send Rommel to prevent the complete sweep of the Axis from North Africa. These fiascos, and repeated British naval victories over the Italians in the Mediterranean, demonstrated how misguided the Chamberlain-Halifax policy of appeasement of Mussolini had been. (Lord Halifax had been banished by Churchill to Washington as ambassador.) When on March 27, 1941, under the influence of British and American intelligence, the Yugoslavs overthrew their prince regent, Paul, who had, under pressure, aligned Yugoslavia w
ith Germany, and replaced him with the seventeen-year-old king and military regents, Hitler reacted with even more than his usual ferocity when challenged in Europe. By April 6, a plan was developed and execution of it began for the crushing of Yugoslavia and Greece by twenty-five German divisions and some further units contributed by the Hungarians, Romanians, and Italians. Belgrade was occupied after a week, Yugoslavia surrendered on April 17, and Germany pressed on into Greece, where the British had diverted four divisions from the defence of Egypt. The Greeks surrendered on April 20 and the British forces lost ten thousand dead or taken prisoner, and the remaining forty-five thousand men were forced into another indecorous maritime evacuation by the Royal Navy, a miniature Dunkirk. This was finished with a German paratroop invasion of Crete overcoming the defending garrison of twenty-four thousand British between May 20 and June 3, when the British again took to the boats. It was another remarkable German tour de force, but it delayed the main operation against Russia by over six weeks.
