Rise to Greatness

by Conrad Black

  Even his great mentor Roosevelt, though he knew Canada fairly well, did not understand exactly what King was facing; he wrote on April 27, congratulating King on winning the referendum and telling him not to be too concerned about the reticence of his French-speaking compatriots. He reminisced that there had once been a good many French-speaking people in New England but that they had been assimilated eventually. He wrote that he would soon be speaking to “our planning people” about the excessive concentrations in certain cities of people of Italian, German, and Jewish origins. It was odd that he missed the Irish and the Poles and the African Americans, and he was certainly not disparaging any of these groups, but the thought that he considered he might have the authority to influence demographic flows on the basis of ethnic origin is disturbing.50 It also shows that despite his familiarity with Canada as a cottager, a neighbouring governor, and for nine years as president, he had no notion of the official equality of two founding nations and official languages. King repeated in his diary of June 11 his belief in the role of “the Liberal Party as against extremes of Toryism and immature radicalism.”51

  Angus Lewis Macdonald, once and future premier of Nova Scotia, navy minister (minister of national defence for naval services), thought King “a twister and a wobbler.”52 Of course, he was, but that was precisely what conditions required. On June 11, Cardin gave a monumental ex tempore parliamentary address. He was the greatest of all Quebec Liberal orators, and there were many brilliant speakers in the federal and provincial Liberal parties (and powerful speakers among the opponents too, led by Duplessis and Houde). Cardin spoke with great eloquence of the absolute virtue of the Allied cause, enumerated the concessions he and Lapointe had made to reconcile the perspectives of French and English Canadians, but he could not accept the revocation of the guaranties against conscription, which he considered a “betrayal” of Quebec. It was a great speech, the more so because it avoided blowing up the bridges with King and St. Laurent, and the prime minister “sought to lead the applause where he referred to his own and Lapointe’s part in campaigns.”53 St. Laurent gave a comprehensive and outstanding reply on June 16 that established him at once, in what was almost a maiden speech on a vital subject, as a fully worthy successor to Laurier and Lapointe. He spoke compellingly for the special interest of French Canada, while expressing his readiness “to deploy whatever effort and sacrifice might ultimately prove necessary to Canada’s contribution to victory over the universal enemies of civilization as all Canadians construe and cherish it.” King credited him with a “service to the Government, to his province, and to the country which is beyond words.”54 Bill 80 was adopted on July 7, by a majority of 104, which meant that Liberals alone carried the measure by 30; King had warned his colleagues before the vote that if the government required opposition votes to prevail, he would resign. The excruciating exchange of minutiae with Ralston over his resignation, which was eventually tendered in writing, continued, but the resignation was neither forced nor accepted by King. Journalist and historian Bruce Hutchison claims that if Ralston had insisted on resigning, Macdonald, Ilsley, and Howe would have gone too and brought down the government.55 Though it was certainly tense, it is not clear from King’s diaries that matters were that precarious. Final reading was carried on July 23 by 96 votes, though only two French Quebec private members spoke for the bill, and forty-five Quebec Liberals, led by Cardin, voted against. The House rose on August 1. There was no move to introduce conscription for overseas service. Like the pilot of a bullet-riddled aircraft with sputtering engines and pieces of the fuselage falling off, King had brought the country through three years of war.

  Ralston had imperiled the country. John Diefenbaker, when he finally got into government nearly fifteen years later, had no more understanding of the rights of the French than did Ralston in 1942 to 1944. The generals weren’t demanding conscription, and the English-Canadian politicians, Liberal and Conservative, were blasé about the consequences for the country. But the French were a founding race too, and if the English were going to use their demographic superiority to impose their conception of the war on the French, breaking the promise of the government all Canada had reelected in 1940, there was no point to Confederation for Quebec. And there would be no party to uphold their rights, despite the federal government’s support of the anti-conscription stance of Lapointe, Cardin, Charles Gavan Power, Raoul Dandurand, Godbout, and Bouchard in 1939. The principle of the double majority had been established by Baldwin and LaFontaine and reinforced and effectively institutionalized by John A. Macdonald and Cartier. On an issue so fundamental as conscription for overseas service, both founding societies would have to approve. Conscription can only be imposed where a majority favour it, and if a majority of the French opposed, the imposition of an English overall majority would destroy the nature of the country. Borden did not understand, but Laurier saved the country by accepting electoral defeat in order to preserve productive dissent, and King was acceptable because he was an English Canadian who followed Laurier, coming back to Canada from the cozy comforts of the Rockefellers to sacrifice himself in personal electoral defeat in 1917 for Sir Wilfrid in opposition to conscription. By the narrowest margin, and by dint of his extraordinary genius at political manoeuvre, King kept the country functioning in the Second World War. Confederation had only survived the world wars because of the Liberals under Laurier and King. If the Liberals had stampeded in 1942, there would have been no federal party Quebec could live with.

  A federal by-election in Outremont, a prosperous section of Montreal, on November 30, 1942, became a virtual second plebiscite in miniature on government war policy. The deputy defence minister, General Léo Richer LaFlèche, whom King was going to name minister of war services, ran as the Liberal candidate in a normally safe constituency, and the nationalists ran the energetic young lawyer and future mayor of Montreal Jean Drapeau against him. There was a great deal of fiery oratory, and many stars in the firmament of Quebec public life campaigned for Drapeau, including André Laurendeau, Daniel Johnson, and Pierre Trudeau (who rode around on a motorcycle wearing a German army helmet). LaFlèche was supported by the Liberals, federal and provincial, the Conservatives, and, explicitly, by Cardinal Villeneuve himself. Drapeau’s campaign manager, Marc Carrière, made a Camillien Houde–like statement that he was ignoring his registration notice under the mobilization legislation, and was led away to detention on November 20 by two Mounties and replaced by, of all people, the Jew-baiting labour agitator and former monk Michel Chartrand. LaFlèche could hardly fail to win with such massive support, and he did, by 12,000 to 7,000, but there was a good deal of political tinder around.

  King was given “fresh heart and hope” in October when Mitchell Hepburn resigned as premier of Ontario. At year-end, he congratulated himself on the departure from Canada of Bennett, from public life of Meighen, and from Queen’s Park, in Ontario, of Hepburn.56

  * * *

  The war proceeded well in 1942, though, as was inevitable, the Japanese offensive in the Pacific made great strides for several months. General Douglas MacArthur conducted a very skilful retreat in the Bataan Peninsula in the Philippines and defeated the Japanese invaders in January, causing them to pause to regroup and bring in reinforcements for a whole month. Roosevelt eventually ordered MacArthur out of the Philippines, as he wished to retain him as theatre commander for the southern and western Pacific. The remaining garrison of 11,500 finally surrendered the rocky island of Corregidor in Manila Bay in May, a very respectable fight, unlike the utter debacle of the British in Malaya and Singapore, where numerically inferior Japanese forces achieved the abject surrender on February 15 of sixty-four thousand British troops at what had been billed as the impregnable fortress of Singapore.

  On April 18, the Japanese were dumbfounded when Tokyo and several other cities were lightly bombed by sixteen B-25 bombers launched from the aircraft carrier Hornet. The planes went on to land in China. This was the famous raid of Colonel Doolittl
e, a little like Churchill’s cheeky bomber raids on Berlin in August 1940.

  On May 4, U.S. carrier forces, which had been absent from Pearl Harbor when it was attacked, more than held their own with the Japanese at the Battle of the Coral Sea, and a month later the United States won one of the decisive naval battles of world history at Midway, sinking four Japanese aircraft carriers to the loss of only one of its own. MacArthur had taken up his command of the Southwest Pacific at Darwin, Australia, and began by jettisoning the Australian plan of defending the country in its vast and barren heart. He announced that the defence of Australia would be conducted in New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. Skirmishing shortly began there that led to an American and Allied naval victory in the Battle of the Solomon Islands and to the prolonged and decisive struggle for the jungle island of Guadalcanal, which continued through the summer and autumn of 1942.

  In Africa, a new British high command prepared a defence in depth west of Cairo, after the thirty-three-thousand-man garrison of the fortress of Tobruk ignominiously surrendered, again to numerically inferior investing forces, of Erwin Rommel, on June 21, 1942, as Churchill was sitting in Roosevelt’s office explaining to him and the U.S. Army chief of staff, General George C. Marshall, that Tobruk would certainly be held. Roosevelt handed on the message that came in without comment, except to ask, “What can we do to help?” He and Marshall sent three hundred tanks on fast ships around the Cape, and they made a difference.57 The new British Eighth Army commander, General Bernard L. Montgomery, prepared a massive counterstroke to fall in November.

  The strategic disagreements between the British and Americans over objectives in Europe continued apace, and finally it was agreed between Churchill and Roosevelt to conduct Anglo-American landings in Morocco and Algeria and take those territories away from the Vichy regime; try to force Germany to invade the part of France that was still unoccupied; put a rod on the neutralist backs of Franco and Salazar; destabilize Mussolini; land in Rommel’s rear to coordinate with Montgomery’s counterattack in Egypt; and facilitate increased quantities of supplies to the Soviet Union through the Mediterranean. Churchill went to Moscow on August 12 for, as he called it, “the raw task” of telling Stalin that there would be no landings in Western Europe in 1942. Stalin claimed to be taking ten thousand casualties a day fighting the Germans, who were proceeding to the southeast in pursuit of the Caucasian oilfields and had arrived at the Volga at Stalingrad. He asked scornfully of Churchill: “Why are you so afraid of the Germans? Armies have to be blooded in battle.” The two leaders had a stormy session at times, but it ended in a rather jovial drinking bout and the mission was a considerable diplomatic triumph for Churchill, given the legendary prickliness and brusqueness of his host.58

  On August 19, a miniature cross-Channel amphibious invasion of France occurred at Dieppe, carried out by five thousand Canadians. It was a disaster, for which Canada had the British, and particularly the special operations director, Admiral Louis Mountbatten, to thank. Close to 3,700 men were killed, wounded, or captured, a 74 per cent casualty level, and nothing useful was achieved, though an Anglo-Canadian myth was then propagated that the raid had been invaluable in planning a real invasion and that much was learned about landing-craft design and German defence techniques. It is as likely that the British were using Canadians to illustrate the validity of Churchill and his senior military staff’s fear of becoming heavily engaged with proverbially war-adept Germans in the blood-soaked region of northeastern France where nearly a million Commonwealth troops had died in the last war.

  In September and October 1942, the German Sixth Army and the Soviet defenders were locked in deadly struggle in and around Stalingrad. The Germans poured fifteen divisions right into the rubble of the city. It became the greatest land battle in the history of the world, surpassing even Verdun. By November, there were two million men engaged, perhaps 60 per cent of them Russians. There were twenty-five thousand artillery pieces and about two thousand aircraft about evenly divided, and fifteen hundred tanks, about nine hundred of them Russian. Ultimately, the battle took the lives of a million people, with another million wounded, a majority of the casualties among the Russian defenders. As the Germans committed more resources to the remains of the city, the Russians built the flanks, which were protected by Germany’s Romanian allies, and a giant pincers was prepared.

  Everything came to a head in November 1942. On November 4, Montgomery launched his great attack on Rommel at El Alamein and had pushed the Germans and Italians out of Egypt by November 12. At the other end of North Africa, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, former understudy to General MacArthur in the Philippines, commanded the Operation Torch landings at Casablanca, Oran, and Algiers, and the Vichy forces quickly came over to the Allies. And Germany invaded unoccupied France as the Allies had hoped, bringing the feeble and dishonourable pretence of any sovereignty residing in Pétain and Laval to a suitably inglorious end.* Most of what was left of the French fleet scuttled itself at Toulon on November 27, in what de Gaulle accurately described as “the most pitiful and sterile suicide imaginable.”60 The Americans decisively won the naval battle of Guadalcanal on November 12 to 15 and began a great two-year push to the northwest back toward the Philippines under MacArthur, and westward across the Central Pacific under Admiral Chester W. Nimitz. And on November 19, the long-prepared Russian pincers was triggered at Stalingrad, where the trap snapped shut on the German flanks and Hitler would not hear of a breakout retreat. Over three hundred thousand Axis soldiers were doomed, as were the Afrika Korps and the Japanese assault forces against Australia in Guadalcanal. The tide had turned decisively, just a year after Pearl Harbor.

  3. Years of Liberation, 1943–1944

  Canada did its part and did it well, but it was a country of 11.5 million people, a third of whom did not wish to participate actively in the war. Canada provided about 2 per cent of the forty million armed servicemen represented by the Big Three: Roosevelt and Stalin as commanders-in-chief in their countries, and Churchill as principal first minister of the chief of state of the Commonwealth. The 3,700 Canadian casualties and prisoners at Dieppe may be compared with the disposable manpower involved, and the toleration of casualties implied, in the Soviet casualty level of 1.2 million at Stalingrad, the 15,000 mainly British casualties at El Alamein (of their 200,000 men engaged, against 30,000 Axis casualties out of 110,000 engaged), and the 15,000 American casualties at Guadalcanal (of 60,000 of their men, against 32,000 casualties out of 40,000 Japanese trying to seize and hold that island). There was no excuse for the Canadians to have been used as cannon fodder in the nonsensical Dieppe operation, where their courage was disserved by British strategic errors. But this, and the loss of nearly 2,000 men at Hong Kong, were Canada’s two main sources of casualties in 1942, and King was right when he tried to reason with Ralston and Macdonald that they should stop their absurd fuming over the status of Quebec, which could break up the country – the only threat to the existence of Canada there was, even at the high tide of the greatest war in history – and focus on using Canada’s own forces more effectively. Obviously, the British could not be relied upon exclusively to deploy them. The performance of Montgomery and the theatre commander, Sir Harold Alexander, at El Alamein, though they had heavy advantages in numbers and supplies, largely redeemed the disasters in Singapore and Tobruk, but the British services were uneven: the Royal Air Force was superb, as good as any, even the German; the Royal Navy, though not infallible, discharged its immense task very bravely and effectively; but the British Army had some serious lapses.

  On the naval front, as Roosevelt’s immense armaments program proceeded, the U.S. Navy achieved astonishing proportions: at the end of the war, thirty fleet carriers, seventy escort aircraft carriers, and twenty-five battleships. When Nimitz’s entire Pacific Fleet sailed in the last months of the war (when the Atlantic Fleet had largely been transferred to the Pacific), it took 400,000 men to sea and moved in a formation 200 miles square. By then, the German
s had sunk the Russian navy, the Americans had sunk the Japanese navy, the British had sunk the German navy and sunk or accepted the surrender of the Italian navy, and the French navy had been largely sunk by its erstwhile British ally or scuttled. The Royal Navy made good its considerable losses and was still the largest navy in the Atlantic and Mediterranean. Angus L. Macdonald (whose slogan in his sixteen years as premier of Nova Scotia was “All’s well with Angus L.”) resented and despised King and was grumpy throughout the war, but as navy minister he built the Royal Canadian Navy from 11 ships and 3,000 men in 1940 to 400 ships and 96,000 men in 1945. While a specialist anti-submarine force, it was exceptionally efficient and indispensable to Allied victory, and, at the end, the third navy in the world in effective size.

  The Royal Canadian Air Force, which had been founded from Canadian units of the RAF in 1924, grew between 1939 and 1945 from about 7,000 people and 29 front-line aircraft to 215,000 (including 15,000 women) and about 1,250 aircraft, and was the fourth Allied air force, after only the Big Three (though, as in other areas, the gap was considerable; the U.S. Army Air Force had 125,000 aircraft of all types). The Canadian Army, at 500,000, was also the third largest of the Western Allies in 1944, though there were only about 140,000 trigger-pullers. Training and supplying and administering these forces required more manpower than the fighting they did.