by Conrad Black
Canada’s defence minister, Brooke Claxton, called for fifteen thousand volunteers to ensure sufficient forces to provide a brigade of five thousand men for Korea. There was much talk of conscription, but this was nonsense; there was no need to consider any such step. There were some nostalgic moments: some of the English-language media considered a brigade too little, and Pierre Laporte, who would go on to great and tragic fame in 1970, accused St. Laurent of deceiving the country and asked, “Are we to return to Mr. King’s lies?”5 (He had King to thank for the fact that he wasn’t conscripted, drilled, and packed off to France to face the Wehrmacht under the orders of an Orange Lodge sergeant from the backwoods of Presbyterian Ontario, as the majority of Canadians would have wished.)
As these debates continued in Canada, MacArthur quickly rolled up both coasts of North Korea and the United Nations and President Truman with his Joint Chiefs of Staff redefined the mission statement of his forces from protection of South Korea and resurrection of the thirty-eighth parallel to complete destruction of North Korean forces and the invasion of North Korea. UN forces crossed the thirty-eighth parallel in great strength going north on October 9, and MacArthur and Truman had their famous meeting at Wake Island on October 15, which was entirely convivial. MacArthur reported military intelligence estimates that there were 125,000 Red Chinese north of the Yalu River, the boundary between North Korea and China, and that the Soviets had about 1,000 military aircraft in Siberia, but he doubted that they would coordinate well or that the Russians would want anything to do with a direct showdown with the United States. The frequently invoked fear was that the Americans would “unleash” Chiang Kai-shek on a return to the mainland in the event of a Chinese-American duel in Korea. MacArthur confirmed at Wake Island that his mission now was to unite Korea and prepare it for countrywide elections. At that point, most of the Chinese forces that he had identified as being north of the Yalu had in fact infiltrated into North Korea. Canada had not dissented on the restatement of MacArthur’s instructions – all were united in seeking the end of the war by an outright victory over the communists in Korea.
On November 28, the Chinese went over to the attack with at least 150,000 soldiers that had already infiltrated well into the North and with perhaps 100,000 more across the Yalu, although MacArthur had, with Truman’s approval, blown the bridges across the river on the Korean side. MacArthur had been badly failed by U.S. military intelligence, which at that time had no ability to judge the dangers of guerrilla warfare, but he responded with recommendations of counter-escalation, particularly a blockade of China, the use of Chinese Nationalist forces in Korea, and the conventional bombing of China’s rudimentary industrial heartland in Manchuria. On November 30, Truman, in response to a press question, did not rule out use of atomic weapons. Most influential opinion – including Truman, Marshall, Eisenhower, Acheson, the Joint Chiefs (chaired by General Omar N. Bradley); younger foreign policy experts, including George Kennan, Charles Bohlen, and Paul Nitze; and all of America’s allies except South Korea and Nationalist China – favoured rolling back MacArthur’s mission to assuring South Korea at the thirty-eighth parallel. This was done, as there was a general fear that a war with China could be an endless morass that would play into Stalin’s hands. All agreed that atomic weapons were out of the question. The alternative view was held by many Republicans and Southern Democrats, including the leading Republican foreign policy expert John Foster Dulles and the rising young congressional star from California – just elected to the Senate over actress Helen Gahagan Douglas by 700,000 votes – Richard Nixon. Their view, and MacArthur’s, was that it was morally wrong and tactically hazardous to ask a conscript army to risk the lives of its soldiers for anything less than outright victory in the national interest. They all felt that at this point Red China was extremely vulnerable and could be taught a salutary cautionary lesson in its infancy, that Stalin would not lift a finger to assist Mao, and that what promised to be a terrible long-term nuisance of a Kimist communist regime in North Korea could be easily disposed of, if dealt with now.
The Chinese intervention revealed the extreme feebleness of the Western Alliance apart from the United States. Clement Attlee became so alarmed about Truman’s reference to atomic weapons that he bustled over to Washington to offer to negotiate with China the peaceful departure of the United States from Korea. Truman replied that he did not think it would come to such a choice but that he would prefer to be defeated militarily than to avail himself of such an offer. The truth was that the British were terrified of Chinese pressure on Hong Kong and of increased Chinese assistance to the communist guerrillas in Malaya. They were of no use as allies at all, apart from the high quality of their token forces in Korea, when they eventually got there. As the Canadian brigade would not start arriving until February 1951, and would never represent more than between 1 and 2 per cent of the United Nations forces in Korea, it was a bit nervy of Pearson and St. Laurent to make such energetic representations as they did to Truman, but he received them good-naturedly. Attlee came on to Ottawa after visiting Truman, and he and St. Laurent were generally in agreement. Their position was complicated by their desire to stay in lock-step with Nehru, now a very influential member of the Commonwealth leadership, who disapproved of the North Korean invasion of the South, but also disapproved of MacArthur’s advance into the North, which Attlee, St. Laurent, and Pearson had heartily endorsed but now abandoned in double-quick time once there was overt Chinese resistance to it.
MacArthur was right in most respects, and time would reveal the dangers of sending a conscript army to East Asia for an objective less than victory and not obviously required by the national interest. This was the weakness of the whole peacekeeping and international police action mode of activity. The communist enemy would approach it as total war, and any response less vigorous than that was unlikely to be successful, and peacekeeping and police actions aren’t really war and aren’t an effective reply to war. This was the first step in the often thankless task the Americans would assume of protecting the perimeter of the West, a service regarded with real enthusiasm only by those at the point where that perimeter was from time to time being probed or breached. People like Attlee and St. Laurent and Pearson were civilized and well-disposed and full of good intentions, and not without courage if they could be persuaded that courage was called for, but they were unsteady supporters when the adversary was of the nature and moral vacuity of Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, the Kims, and even some of their successors. As half-Canadian Dean Acheson put it, Canadian foreign policy officials were usually “arm-flapping moralists.”
Chou En-lai confirmed to Richard Nixon when he visited China in 1972 that Stalin would not have done anything to help China in Korea, and China could not have sustained for long the sort of counter-blow MacArthur favoured. It is as clear now as ever how much the world would have been spared if North Korea had been, in Churchill’s phrase about Bolshevism in 1917, “strangled in its cradle.” But MacArthur made his views public, which was not acceptable, and he left Truman little alternative than to remove him, though he need not have dismissed him as governor of Japan, where all agreed his performance had been brilliant. The effect was to end ingloriously the careers of both men, a distinguished president and a brilliant general, and their entourages with them, including General Marshall and Secretary Acheson. They were all at or near normal retirement age, but it should have ended more decorously. Truman, almost panicky for once, removed MacArthur at a press conference at 1 a.m. on April ii, 1951, and replaced him with Walker’s successor as field commander in Korea, former paratroop general Matthew B. Ridgway, who had already stabilized the front generally at the thirty-eighth parallel. (Walker had died in a road accident.) Here the fighting continued for over two years, until the new U.S. president, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, let it be known through diplomatic channels in India that if the Chinese did not become serious about negotiating a permanent ceasefire, he would use atomic weapons on them. Truman cou
ld have done this but chose not to. The tactic worked; South Korea survived and became an immense economic and political success story. But when MacArthur famously told Congress a few days after his dismissal, in one of the most memorable addresses ever delivered at the U.S. Capitol, that “in war there is no substitute for victory,” he spoke nothing but the truth, and the implications of it would haunt the United States for a long time. As Charles de Gaulle remarked at the time, MacArthur was “a general whose boldness was feared after full advantage had been taken of it.”6
As would long be its habit, the Canadian external affairs squirearchy, generally the followers of O.D. Skelton, affected to have been sober and sensible, constructive, mature, and vindicated in Korea, but in fact their haverings were innocuous and not overly relevant. The Canadian military contingent, as always, fought with distinction. A total of 29,000 Canadians served in the Korean War, including naval and air forces, and 516 died and 1,042 were wounded. The Korean War as a whole resulted in the deaths of 53,000 Americans, 170,000 South Korean military, and 750,000 South Korean civilians; and 300,000 North Korean military, 750,000 North Korean civilians, and 400,000 Chinese. The injured numbered 93,000 Americans and 680,000 South Koreans; and about 1,100,000 North Koreans and 500,000 Chinese. It was a nasty and bloody war (about 5 million casualties), and MacArthur, though there were some risks, would probably have ended it two years before it did end, at a saving of over a million lives and a million injuries (including the great majority of the Canadian casualties), and the world would have been spared the pestilential irritation of the Kimist totalitarians who have psychotically misgoverned the North Korean hermit state ever since.
2. The St. Laurent Regency, 1950–1953
The federal and provincial heads of government were back in conference on September 25, 1950, to discuss amending the Constitution. It was protracted and amicable, as further decades of these meetings – which Duplessis sarcastically called “circonférences,” because they went around in circles – would be: the Canadian penchant for endless good-faith negotiation. Much the same atmosphere would prevail when the premiers were back in December to hear federal proposals for a new tax-rental system, though with a 50 per cent greater payout to the provinces. St. Laurent had been a member of the Rowell-Sirois Commission, and his infatuation with the replacement of concurrent federal-provincial taxing by a completely federalized system with formula-based bloc payments to the provinces did not die soon or easily. Because, assumedly, St. Laurent himself was so bilingual and had mixed ascendants, he did not share the concern of the majority of Québécois that the funding sources for the institutions and bulwarks of French Quebec, especially education and social services and the administration of the law, particularly the civil law unique to Quebec, be kept in the hands of a majority-French government; that is, Quebec. This exchange of taxing rights for bloc payments from Ottawa was never going to fly in Quebec, and Adélard Godbout had only agreed to it in 1942 because there was a war raging, and Ernest Lapointe and Arthur Cardin and Charles Gavan Power, with King’s blessing, had put him across in the 1939 election. In this area, as in much of Quebec nationalistic questions, St. Laurent, unlike Lapointe and Wilfrid Laurier, had a cloth ear. Duplessis did not, but he was courteous and diplomatic at this meeting and to everyone’s astonishment raised no objection to a federal pension scheme.
St. Laurent attended a Commonwealth prime ministers’ meeting in London in January 1951, where the thorny matter of Kashmir was avoided in deference to Nehru, despite the ardent desire of the Pakistani prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, to discuss it. There was agreement on a basis of cooperation between the Commonwealth countries (still a manageable group of nine), and support was expressed for a peace treaty with Japan, the inevitable call for a negotiated peace in Korea, and increased economic cooperation, which in practice meant more aid for India and British exploration of economic solidarity with the Western Europeans. St. Laurent continued to France for a two-day state visit to Paris, where he was fêted by the president of the republic, Vincent Auriol, by Premier René Pleven, and by foreign minister Robert Schuman, three redoubtable journeymen of the Third and Fourth Republics. He laid a wreath at the Arc de Triomphe and attended a high mass celebrated by the cardinal-archbishop of Paris and primate of France at Notre Dame. St. Laurent did not enjoy these excursions as King had. He generally made a better impression, as a more elegant, better dressed, and more articulate and sociable man, entirely bilingual, and direct and never orotund in his remarks. King was eventually seen as a wily but enigmatic survivor but somewhat laboured conversationalist, where St. Laurent was a reserved but affable man, who was interestingly forthcoming in conversation, if rigorously moderate in his views. Both were quintessential Canadians, strong in their moderation but concealing a more complicated country than Canada was seen from afar to be.
It was agreed at the prime ministers’ meeting that not only were republics such as India acceptable in what was now simply the Commonwealth of Nations, and the British monarch was recognized as the “head of the Commonwealth,” the British sovereign would also be the monarch of whatever countries sought that arrangement. King George VI became king of “the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, of Canada, and of other realms and territories.” In 1952, Elizabeth II was proclaimed – and in 1953 was crowned – queen of the Kingdom of Canada. Dominion lapsed and John Macdonald’s ambition of eighty-five years before that Canada be a kingdom, which was deferred because of American republican and hegemonic sensibilities, was fulfilled.
On his return to Canada, St. Laurent prepared to proceed unilaterally on the St. Lawrence Seaway and reasoned that Canadian nationalism would be quite adequate to absorb the entire cost of the project, which would in any case redeem its cost in increased toll revenues and electric power sales. There was also much enthusiasm for a great power project on the South Saskatchewan River. There was a good deal of completely unnecessary talk yet of conscription for Korea, and the Social Credit leader, Solon Low, even moved such a bill, though only for home defence. Not even Colonel George Drew could chin himself on this, and it was voted down by all the other three parties. A Department of Defence Production was set up, and it was added to C.D. Howe’s other capacities.
In March 1951, a dispute arose in the cabinet about the right given to Britain in 1946 to buy Canadian wheat at below the world price, which it did, out of a $1.25 billion loan Canada had made Great Britain at the uneconomic rate of 2 per cent. James Gardiner, the minister of agriculture, had gone out on the limb of Commonwealth solidarity with Britain in explaining to farmers why Britain was paying below the market price for their wheat. In 1951, the British decided to leave $65 million of the available wheat unbought, and Gardiner proposed to bring pressure on the British to complete, but Howe, who was responsible for wheat sales, as he was for most other economic and commercial activities of the federal government, objected that it should be taken as business as usual but remembered the next time Britain wanted anything from Canada. St. Laurent agreed with Howe that there would be no pleading with Britain, but he agreed to let Gardiner go to Britain to try to explain to the British the unfairness of their action. Gardiner did so, without success, and then asked St. Laurent and Howe that the $65 million be paid rateably to farmers to compensate them for the reduced revenues they had received over the last five years. Howe objected, but St. Laurent agreed; it was the smart political move, and was a good object lesson to all of them on how much repayment any country could expect, even from its closest ally, which already owed it much, in tangible ex gratia goodwill.
The pension changes and legislation went through without demurral in Ottawa or the provinces. The Conservatives did succeed in baiting the somewhat domineering Howe into making some replies that did not play well in partisan debate in the country over the next few years. In a debate over the ratification of some trade agreements, veteran Conservative MP Howard Green said that he was not sure that the government would not do away with Commonweal
th preference entirely, “if it thought it could get away with it.” Howe retorted, “Who would stop us? Don’t take yourselves too seriously.” Green reminded Howe that he was “not yet the dictator of the country.” In July 1951, an Opposition MP was questioning administrative costs in the new Department of Defence Production, and Howe said that in an annual budget of more than one billion dollars, “three million dollars is not exorbitant.” This entered into the current lore of the country as “What’s a million?” a question Howe never publicly put. One of the Conservative orators who started bandying “What’s a million?” about was John Diefenbaker, of Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, who invoked it as he described a scene, derived entirely from his imagination, of Communist Chinese sailors on ships bought from Canadians by a Hong Kong financier but not entirely paid for and still Canadian-registered – something which did occur – singing “O Canada” (which Diefenbaker imagined), but, he asked, “What’s a million?”7, tying Howe’s supposed complacency about waste to anti-communist fervour. It became a tedious but occasionally amusing refrain, and Diefenbaker was a rather shameless employer of such techniques and would remain so through a turbulent career that would extend for almost another thirty years. St. Laurent doubled the defence budget in three years, to about two billion dollars in 1952, nearly half the federal budget, to assure that Canada pulled its weight in NATO and Korea.8
