Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014 (19 page)

Germany would have had its hands full getting its various new satellite states in the east up and running, and it might also have got involved in helping the Whites against the Reds in the Russian civil war (as Britain and France did in the real history). That, plus the prestige the German military would have enjoyed for saving the country from a catastrophic defeat, would have ensured a high degree of military influence in the German government for the first few years after the war, but such influence does not usually last in a democracy at peace. There is no particular reason to doubt that German politics would have undergone the same evolution towards greater inclusivity and transparency in
the few decades after a victory in the First World War that British politics did in the real history of 1918–50.

Neither is there any strong reason to believe that the defeated powers, Britain and France, would have descended into fascism and risked major war again to even the score, as Germany did in the real postwar history. They could easily have indulged in a witch hunt for those responsible for losing the war, but their loss would not have been nearly as traumatic as Germany’s was, and democratic traditions were older and stronger in Britain and France. As for Russia, whether it was the Whites or the Communists who finally won the civil war, Russia would probably have been a dictatorship for at least some decades, and as easily a fascist as a communist one. It would also almost certainly have drifted into a military confrontation with Germany, which would then have gone in search of allies elsewhere. Japan, at the other end of Russia, would have been an obvious candidate if it had not already been allied to Britain. But that is the sort of difficulty that diplomacy exists to overcome, and it’s not inconceivable that Britain, German and Japan could have ended up allied against a fascist or Communist Russia twenty years down the line.

The further you get down the timeline of this alternative history the more difficult it is to stay plausible, because the decision-points multiply and the probabilities get harder to calculate. That doesn’t matter, because the only point of this exercise was to see if the world in which Germany “won” the war would have been immersed in a dark night of tyranny. It would appear not. It would have been a complex, combative, often quite unlovely place, but at worst no worse than the world we inherited from the Allied victory in 1918. It might also have been a world in which the next world war was the customary fifty years or so away, not a mere twenty, as nobody had lost so badly that they would soon be back seeking vengeance. Of course, all this is true because we are not really talking about a decisive German victory of the sort that the Allies finally achieved later in 1918. There was never any possibility
of that sort of victory after the failure of the Schlieffen Plan in 1914, and probably not even then. We are talking about a no-score draw masquerading as a German victory, and that might have been a quite acceptable outcome. Although a no-score draw reached after the Christmas truce in 1914 would have been a much better outcome.

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OVEMBER 11, 1918, AS THE ARMISTICE FINALLY DESCENDED ON
the Western Front, a group of Canadian gunners were fighting for their lives in northern Russia. Having advanced over a hundred miles up the Dvina River from Archangel on the Arctic coast to the village of Tulgas, they were surprised from the rear by a force of six hundred Soviet infantry. The Bolsheviks (“Bolas,” as the Canadians called them) were seen only when they got within two hundred yards of the 67th Battery, and the artillerymen would have been overrun if their drivers and signallers had not managed to slow the attackers down with rifle fire until the gunners could get one of their 18-pounder guns out of its gun-pit, turn it around and fire a quick-bursting shrapnel shell straight into the charging Russians at seventy-five yards’ range. In those early days the intervention in Russia generally had a rather impromptu spirit about it.

The Allied intervention in northern Russia began in early 1918 with purely military motives. It was aimed at bringing Russia back into the war, which in practice meant trying to overthrow the Bolshevik regime that had signed a separate peace with the Germans. The Canadian soldiers who were sent to northern Russia in March 1918 as part of the “Syren Force,” a multinational concoction of British, French, Italian, American and Canadian units, were part of that effort, and nobody in Canada objected to it.

However, the decision to send five hundred Canadian reinforcements to Archangel, the capital city of northern Russia, in September 1918 and, in particular, the decision to dispatch four thousand Canadian troops to Vladivostok in the Russian Far East in October were different from the start. Ottawa was playing its own hand there, for its own political ends.

The major Canadian intervention in Russia began when the Germans were on the brink of defeat, and continued well after their surrender. Borden, a nationalist who had come more and more to see Canada as a “principal power” in the war rather than a mere British hanger-on, had observed how the great powers used their military forces to advance their national interests abroad, and was tempted into trying Canada’s hand at the game. So, on the assumption that the Bolsheviks would lose the Russian civil war and that the White Russian leaders would be duly grateful to those countries that had helped them win, Borden committed Canadian troops to Russia. He even arranged that a Canadian officer should command the entire five thousand–strong British empire contingent in Vladivostok, which was 80 percent Canadian (largely conscripts).

A considerable number of Canadian airmen also fought for the counter-revolutionary forces in southern Russia in 1918–19. The 47th Squadron, Royal Air Force, which provided air support for General Denikin’s White armies, was commanded by Major Raymond Collishaw, Canada’s second-highest-scoring ace, and fifty-three of the sixty-two pilots he chose for the squadron were Canadian. The intervention had now turned into an anti-Bolshevik crusade, but almost none of the airmen bothered their heads with political thoughts. They were there to improve their chances of gaining a permanent
commission in the postwar Royal Air Force or Canadian Air Force, or just to continue their love affair with the airplane. And they did have some splendid adventures.

Eventually, though, the intensely political character of what their troops were doing in the Soviet Union, and the fact that they had no business playing that sort of role in somebody else’s country, began to dawn on Canadians. As discontent with the Russian commitment grew at home and the likelihood of a Bolshevik victory in the civil war became clearer, Borden started to backpedal, and by April 1919 he was trying to get the Canadian troops home from Russia as quickly as possible. Not before time, because things were turning increasingly grim in Russia.

On July 7, 1919 there was a major mutiny in one of the new Russian regiments that had been created on the Archangel front: its British and Russian officers were murdered and most of the men went over to the Bolsheviks. Two weeks later all the Russians on the Onega sector of the
front mutinied simultaneously, thus isolating the foreign forces based on Archangel from those based on Murmansk. After that, it was just a question of getting the foreign forces out of Russia as quickly as possible, and the last Canadians left Murmansk in August.

The First World War was Canada’s education in the art of being a sovereign state, and it was a very good time to learn. There is only one way to become a sovereign state: by gaining recognition from the other states in the club and accepting the rules by which they run the international system. By the time Canada joined, however, it was already obvious that the club was becoming a lethal madhouse, and that the rules would have to be changed if the members were to survive.

Prime Minister Borden was in Europe continuously from November 1918 to May 1919. His main preoccupation was to ensure that the wartime recognition of Canada’s independent status within the empire, even in questions of defence and foreign policy, should be maintained in peacetime and accepted by the rest of the world as well. The first step was taken at the Imperial War Conference in December 1918: to decide on the form of imperial representation at the Paris Peace Conference. It was a subject about which Borden felt very strongly:

Borden, in cooperation with the prime ministers of the other Dominions, managed to get Britain’s agreement to separate representation for the Dominions at Paris (plus a place for Canada on the joint imperial delegation). But that was only half the struggle; there remained the task of extracting the same recognition of Canada’s new status from the other countries present. The main opposition came from the United States, whose secretary of state, Robert Lansing, was “somewhat arrogant and offensive and desired to know why Canada should be concerned with the settlement of European affairs.… Mr Lloyd George replied that [they] believed themselves to have the right because … Canada as well as Australia had lost more men than the United States in this war.” In the end Canada was permitted to sign the peace treaties in its own right (although its name was indented, as were those of the other Dominions, to reflect its continuing membership in the British empire).

There was a similar clash over the question of separate Canadian membership in the League of Nations, the new international body created by the Treaty of Versailles to keep the peace. Again the main opposition came from the United States, which affected to believe that the Dominions were not free to take an independent stand and that the whole issue was simply a British plot to get six votes (Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and India) instead of one. However, American objections were again overridden, and Canada became a founding member of the League. By the middle of 1919 Canada for all practical purposes had received international recognition as a sovereign state, but the achievement of sovereignty came as part of a package that was intended to abolish the most important single aspect of sovereignty: the independent right to make war.

“The psychological and moral conditions are ripe for a great change,” General Jan Smuts, soon to become the prime minister of South Africa, wrote in December 1918. “The moment has come for one of the great creative acts of history.… The tents have been struck, and the great caravan of humanity is again on the march.” But it was not really the “great caravan of humanity” who demanded the creation of the League of Nations. It was mainly people in government, who understood that the war had been an inevitable product of the international system and that the system itself now had to be changed. It had served the victors well enough in the past (and the losers had no vote on how the system was run), but by the time of the First World War, the price of victory in warfare between industrialized countries had begun to race far ahead of any conceivable benefits that victory might bring. A war that was, in its political dimension, scarcely distinguishable from the War of the Austrian Succession in the eighteenth century ended up killing not a couple of hundred thousand regular soldiers but eleven million ordinary citizens.