by Conrad Black
Germany launched that immense invasion, Operation Barbarossa, on June 22, with a seriously shortened campaign season before the Russian winter would close in on operations in November. If Hitler had made the main push in Africa, he could have enlisted the Japanese to his cause with Russia without the Japanese being forced to commit acts of aggression in the far and South Pacific that were certain to drag the United States into the war. Hitler was now sure to find himself fighting the Americans and Soviets as well as the British Commonwealth, unless he could knock Stalin out of the war promptly. Neither Churchill, who later lamented “the failure to strangle Bolshevism in its cradle” in 1919, nor Roosevelt had any political affection for Stalin (though they all found each other quite convivial personalities when they met), but both realized at once that if Hitler crushed the Russians it would take generations and an unimaginable military effort to dislodge him from control of Western and Central Europe. Roosevelt and Churchill both announced programs of assistance to the Soviet Union, and Roosevelt sent Hopkins to Moscow in July, where he met with Stalin and began the coordination of an immense program of assistance. The Russians fell back under the German onslaught and lost about one and a half million prisoners and about a million casualties in the first six weeks or so, but it did not become a disorganized retreat, and Stalin was able to replace practically any amount of attrition. Stalin was not a great or comfortable public speaker like Hitler, Churchill, and Roosevelt, but he set aside communist dogma, retrieved the Russian Orthodox Church leadership to call for the defence of Mother Russia, and took to the airwaves, a very rare occurrence, and told the Slavonic masses that Germans were “swarming over our country like a plague of grey-green slugs” and that “We will kill them, kill them all, and plough them under the sod.” It was total war on an unheard-of scale, and all conventions of war and of humane treatment of civilians were ignored. More than twenty-five million people would perish in circumstances of unspeakable barbarism on the Eastern Front.
On August 9, 1941, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt met for the first time in twenty-two years (Roosevelt had found Churchill obnoxious at their previous meeting, which, as has been mentioned, Churchill did not remember.) They came by ship to Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, Churchill and his military chiefs on the battleship Prince of Wales, just repaired from its bruising encounter with the powerful German battleship Bismarck (which blew the bridge off Prince of Wales and shut down two of its three main turrets, after which Bismarck was sent to the bottom by a variety of other British vessels), and Roosevelt with his military chiefs on the heavy cruiser Augusta. The relations between the two leaders developed very well, and Roosevelt wrote his cousin from shipboard that Churchill “reminds me of a British Mayor La Guardia.”35 The Americans were impressed with Churchill’s strength and determination, as they expected to be, but did not believe his war plan of relying on a naval embargo, aerial bombing, guerrilla resistance, and amphibious coastal harassments had any chance of bringing down Hitler’s Reich within a hundred years, or that Churchill believed it himself, only that he was trying to ensure that Americans didn’t become too fearful about entering the war. Hopkins came on board Churchill’s ship, having come back from Russia, and he gave a fairly upbeat account of his meeting with Stalin, who, he said, was composed and purposeful despite the fury of the German assault.
The British found the American account of relations with the Japanese quite informative and suddenly quite promising. Roosevelt declined to stop all oil shipments to Japan, as there was still the possibility of individual tanker-loads of oil under individual export permits. Churchill began agitating for a complete shutdown of all such exports, as he was prepared to advocate anything that got the United States into the war, no matter in which ocean or under what casus belli. Only when Roosevelt returned to Washington did he discover that his undersecretary of state for economic affairs, Dean Acheson, had taken it upon himself to deny all such applications, determining a “practice” in the absence of a policy.
There was one of the great photo opportunities of the war as the two leaders attended a divine service on the fan deck of the Prince of Wales with their service chiefs standing behind them. The news film depicted them and the splendid anchorage and sleek ships, and recorded the stirring hymns (“Onward, Christian Soldiers” and “For Those in Peril on the Sea”) and showed the crews of the two fleets cordially intermingled. (Roosevelt brought packages of fruit and cigarettes for all the British sailors, and the British opened their ships to give the American sailors the spirit issue, as liquor had been banned from American ships since the First World War, when Roosevelt was the assistant secretary of the navy, though he always waived the rule for himself and his official party, then and subsequently. The U.S. Navy did distribute alcohol generously for supposedly quasi-medical reasons.)
The leaders agreed on what became known as the Atlantic Charter, which renounced and opposed territorial changes other than by the authentic wish of the inhabitants; respected the right of all peoples to self-government (requiring a little fancy footwork over the British Empire); relaxed trade; and favoured freedom of movement, international cooperation, improved standards of living for the whole world, disarmament, collective security, and unspecified international organizations. It was a distant descendant of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, but it was a good manifesto, resonated well in the world, and was a jangling contrast with Nazi brutality, which it pledged to extinguish. It was another step forward for Britain and the Commonwealth to achieve such intimacy with the United States and give such form to the “common cause.” Roosevelt said that he would “make war without declaring it.” This was a heady turn for Churchill, who, fourteen months before, was receiving Roosevelt’s request, via Mackenzie King, to send his navy and merchant ships to America when Britain came under the hobnailed Nazi jackboot. It was a great propaganda victory, and Hitler forbade his propaganda minster, Joseph Goebbels, to publish the charter at all. With the Russian armies in the field contesting fiercely with the Germans, and such unity between the British and American leaders, and Britain now unassailable in its home islands, it was a remarkable leap forward for the British from the desperate solitude of the year before.
Mackenzie King was miffed not to be asked to the Atlantic Conference, and especially not to have been given any hint of the contents of the Atlantic Charter, which outlined war aims and was composed largely by the Americans, who were not even in the war, however tenuous their neutrality had become. King inflicted on Churchill an endless series of excuses for not coming to London, covering, said the young Charles Ritchie on Vincent Massey’s diplomatic staff in London, everything except a claim that “he is having the front parlour papered and is needed to choose the design.”36
The Atlantic Conference finally smoked King out, and he did go to London at the end of August 1941, travelling for the first time in his life on an airplane, which “he found exhilarating and spiritual.”37 The main point of the visit was for King to be adequately informed of war conditions, and specifically to be reassured, as he was, that there was no indication that Canadian conscription would be necessary. He could not leave these matters to his high commissioner, Vincent Massey, whom King despised as much as ever as a scheming and pretentious careerist, though he did like and respect his understudy, Lester B. Pearson. Churchill was advised by the new British high commissioner to Canada, Malcolm MacDonald (son of the former British prime minister), that King “admires Churchill enormously, but doesn’t like him very much.”38 Churchill turned on the charm and dazzled King, as he could easily do with his overpowering personality, and as Roosevelt had done with King for the last six years. Churchill publicly praised King, put him on the radio, had him to Chequers, his official country house, closeted himself with him for hours, and explained that he could not have him to the Atlantic Conference because he had to meet Roosevelt alone and that there would have been terrible jealousy on the part of the other Commonwealth leaders. King was mollified, and seduced. He visited t
he Canadian troops under General Andrew McNaughton, where he was lightly given the raspberry by some of the men, an incident that was rather cruelly overplayed by some in the Canadian press, a wounding experience for one so sensitive as King.
Following the Atlantic Conference, there were two transformative events during the balance of 1941. First was the steady stiffening of Soviet resistance as the German armies approached Moscow and Leningrad in a race with the oncoming winter. By mid-autumn, it was clear that this was a much different war to the one Germany had become accustomed to; it started out like Poland and France, but the scale of the territory and the manpower available to the Russians gave them, with the flow of supplies from the Western Allies, an ability to regroup. It became a very tense contest, made even more sanguinary by the heinous antics of the Gestapo in the occupied territories, where the Wehrmacht was initially well-received by Ukrainians and Belarusians unappreciative of the Russian communist efforts among them at the perfection of man since 1917. The second event was Roosevelt’s decision not just to confirm an absolute oil embargo on Japan, but also to withdraw his initial verbal proposal to the special Japanese envoy to Washington of a “modus operandi” in which both sides would step back and there would be a loosening of the embargo and a de-escalation of Japanese military activity in China and Indochina. Roosevelt concluded that there was a danger of Stalin making a separate peace with Hitler, as he had in 1939, and as Trotsky and Lenin had with Germany in 1918, if Stalin did not see a prospect of victory, and that to prevent it the United States would have to enter the war. By reimposing the embargo and withdrawing the modus operandi, Roosevelt made it inevitable that Japan would attack somewhere to the south, and troop movements by the Japanese away from Siberia confirmed that. Roosevelt gave Stalin this intelligence, and Stalin withdrew his twenty divisions in the Far East and transported them on special trains of the Trans-Siberian Railway for the final defence of Moscow and Leningrad. The course of human history changed in December 1941, as the German assault on Russia stalled and fell back, and the Japanese, surpassing even Kaiser Wilhelm II’s monumental blunder in 1917 of submarine warfare against American merchant shipping, attacked the United States.
It was hard to imagine that only eighteen months earlier Britain had seemed to hang by a thread. As Churchill wrote, “So, we had won after all! … After seventeen months of lonely fighting and nineteen months of my own responsibility in dire stress, we had won the war.” There would be hard fighting, but the “British Empire [he meant Commonwealth, but old habits die hard], the Soviet Union, and now the United States … were twice or even thrice the force of their antagonists.”39 Both Stalin and de Gaulle were of the same view. De Gaulle wrote, “Of course there are years of fighting ahead but the Germans are beaten.… The colossal war effort [that would be] mustered … rendered victory a certainty.”40 From Stalin’s perspective in the Kremlin, the Germans were receding, the Americans were coming fully into the war, and the door of the cage that had kept the Russian bear out of Central and Western Europe for centuries was opening.
Mackenzie King heard of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor while lying down for a nap at Kingsmere, and it was an “immense relief … to know that their attack had been upon the U.S. in the first instance, and that the opening shots were not between Japan and Great Britain.”41 Certainly, Roosevelt was entirely confident – though he was furious that the war and navy departments’ repeated warnings had not been heeded and that there were not torpedo nets around the battle fleet and air patrols out around Oahu in all daylight hours, and he disguised the extent of the damage, with two old battleships lost permanently and three out of action for many months. He was also pleased that for the first time in American history, his statesmanship and Japanese stupidity had produced unanimous American public support for the war effort.
In two addresses to Congress at the beginning and end of 1941, he had enunciated the principles that would guide American foreign policy, and Western security policy, for at least seventy years. In January, in his State of the Union message, Roosevelt said, “We must always be wary of those who with sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal preach the ‘ism’ of appeasement.” And in his war message of December 8, he said, “We will make very certain that this form of treachery never again endangers us.” Since then, the United States has not been an appeasement power and has retained the military force to deter direct aggression by any country.* It was not generally known at the time, but isolationism was also finished in the United States, at least for a long time. Roosevelt had learned all that he needed to from his cousin Theodore and from his Great War chief, Woodrow Wilson, and he would not allow the United States again to change the world and then abruptly retreat within itself, slamming a trapdoor behind it like a retiring cuckoo-bird, as it had a generation before after the First World War.
King had been shaken by the death of his undersecretary of external affairs, O.D. Skelton, in January, so soon after that of Norman Rogers, and even more by the laboriously recorded death of his dog, Pat, also in January, at the age of seventeen. On Pat’s last night, King held him and sang “Safe in the Arms of Jesus,” and described every detail of his declining hours in his diary. “He had bounded in one long leap across the chasm that men call death. My little friend, the truest friend I have had – or man ever had – had gone to be with … other loved ones. I had given messages of love to take father, mother, Bell, Max, Sir Wilfrid and Lady Laurier, Mr. and Mrs. Larkin and the grandparents.”42 But King received the grimmest news of the war on November 14, 1941, when he was informed that his closest colleague, Ernest Lapointe, was dying of pancreatic and lung cancer. He visited Lapointe the next day, and they discussed politics as normal, including a possible invitation to Quebec premier Godbout to join the federal government. King returned to see Lapointe in hospital on November 19 as he was on his way to the centennial observances for Sir Wilfrid at Saint-Lin, in the Laurentians. Lapointe asked King to secure Godbout as his successor, and to call Cardinal Villeneuve, thank him for his help, and ask the cardinal to pray for him. “He then turned to me and said we had been great associates, and reached out his hand toward mine. I said to him no man had ever had a truer friend. But for him, I would never have been prime minister, nor have been able to hold the office, as I had held it through the years. That there was never a deeper love between brothers than existed between us. That we had never had a difference all the years that we had been associated together, in thought and work alike.” They kissed each other on the cheek. King called the next day and they reminisced about visiting Sir Wilfrid’s grave together when their government was installed twenty years before, and King had said that Laurier “is right here with us.” That afternoon, King huddled with Godbout in the kitchen of Wilfrid Laurier’s house and dismissed Godbout’s concerns about his English. The next day, King was back at the hospital and said, “Ernest we will see each other again.” Lapointe replied, “There is nothing truer than that.” King held his hand, kissed him again, and withdrew. They were not to meet again, at least not in this world.43 Ernest Lapointe died on November 26, 1941, aged sixty-five. Cardinal Villeneuve presided over a mighty funeral in the Quebec City cathedral-basilica, and King, as he led the funeral cortège, which included almost every prominent public person in the country except the incarcerated Camillien Houde, as well as the senior diplomatic corps, thought, “How much one owes to be true to the people.”44
There was a good deal of discussion of the succession to Lapointe. Godbout was reluctant. Cardinal Villeneuve thought Godbout would be acceptable, and Arthur Cardin urged the distinguished fifty-nine-year-old lawyer Louis Stephen St. Laurent. Godbout lost King’s confidence when he urged that Télesphore-Damien Bouchard be brought into the government (he was a tempestuous man), but the telling argument was that the departure of Godbout might lead to a return by Duplessis, “a fatal thing if Duplessis ever again got hold of the government there,” wrote King.45 King telephoned St. Laurent at home as St. Laurent was sitting down
to a family dinner, and they met in Ottawa on December 5. St. Laurent said that the hope that he might modestly help in winning the war was the only reason he would consider public life on the verge of his sixtieth birthday. As King wrote in his diary, “He spoke of the subject of conscription incidentally as likely to arise when the U.S. went into the war; ‘if they conscripted their men for overseas, it might be necessary to do the same.’ ”46
Two days later, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, plunged the United States into a war which covered and bled the whole world. Two days after that, St. Laurent telephoned King to accept his invitation. Everyone he had consulted had approved, including Villeneuve and Godbout (who declined a fine opportunity to be the next prime minister of Canada to retain an excellent opportunity to be the next leader of the Opposition in Quebec). Ernest Lapointe had been a Quebec leader of almost peerless character and astuteness. He was worthy in every respect of the succession to Sir Wilfrid Laurier. That Mackenzie King managed to replace him in less than three weeks with a man of about equivalent stature was a providential development for Canada.
In January 1942, in the most disreputable form of imitation of poor examples of American public policy, twenty-seven thousand Japanese Canadians in British Columbia were subjected to seizure of their assets and forced removal to internment camps at least one hundred miles inland from the Pacific coast, with grating restrictions on movement and activities. It was an exceedingly shabby measure, and the war emergency and attendant fears (and wartime racism) do not justify the complete abandonment of due process. The trustee of alien assets, who was supposed to conserve and restore them, instead sold them in 1943 at knockdown prices. Some restitution was made shortly after the war, but not until Prime Minister Brian Mulroney in 1993 was the matter put to rights, with $21,000 for each surviving detainee, restoration of citizenship to anyone deprived of it, and $36 million for Japanese-Canadian institutions.
