Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014 (21 page)

In the end, the crisis was defused and there was no war over Chanak. Lloyd George’s government fell, and Turkey regained its territory and its independence. At the Imperial Conference in London the following year, King was openly defiant. If the report of the conference committed the Dominions to the automatic support of British foreign and defence policies, he insisted, he would have to insert a special clause exempting Canada. So the conference closed with a statement that it was not an imperial cabinet but a conference of separate governments, each responsible to its own Parliament. Over the next few years King nailed down Canada’s separate and sovereign status by concluding the first foreign treaty that was not also signed by a British representative (the unromantic U.S.-Canadian Halibut Treaty of 1923), and by appointing Canada’s first diplomatic legations to foreign capitals (Washington, Paris and Tokyo) in 1927.

By the time the Statute of Westminster formally recognized the independence of all the dominions in 1931, Canada had already had it for years. In 1927, when Canada was elected to the Council of the League of Nations, Senator Raoul Dandurand, the Canadian delegate to Geneva, replied to American criticism that Canada was the puppet of Downing Street by declaring that Canada was “the spokesman of the North American continent’s ideals.” That was true enough, bearing in mind that the predominant North American ideal at the time was isolationism—for one of the first things King had done with Canada’s independence was to undermine the League.

Article 10 was the heart of the Covenant, committing all members not only to respect “the territorial integrity and existing political independence of all the members of the League,” but to defend each member’s rights by military force if necessary. That automatic obligation was exactly what King objected to, but he was more subtle than Borden, who had mounted a direct attack on the article and failed. Instead, the “Canadian resolution” appealed to every country’s secret desire for a private escape route from the general duty of maintaining the peace, by declaring that each member could decide independently whether it would take part in economic sanctions or offer troops to support any military action decided upon by the League.

After a year-long struggle, King’s “interpretation” was accepted, and Article 10 was effectively destroyed. Raoul Dandurand, one of King’s few really close associates, was brutally frank about the selfish rationale behind the Canadian resolution. Collective security was like fire insurance, he told the Assembly in 1924, and Canada should not be called upon to pay the heavy premium of military sanctions against a possible aggressor because Canadians faced little risk to their own property: “We live in a fireproof house, far from inflammable materials.”

This first attempt to reform the international system and break the cycle of world wars was probably doomed to fail in any event—almost as certainly as a child’s first attempt to ride a bicycle—but King’s wanton act of sabotage was a premature and unnecessary blow to the League. And it was supported by the Canadian opposition parties as well: wars, most Canadians believed, were caused by wicked governments in Europe, and it was possible for Canada to stay out of them thanks to its fortunate geography. But since no serious crises
came along to test the weakened machinery of the League for quite a while, it would be almost a decade before any Canadians began to worry about war again.

Colonel J. Sutherland (“Buster”) Brown, director of military operations and intelligence of the Canadian army from 1920 to 1927, was convinced, like his ancestors before him, that the main military threat facing Canada was an American invasion—and he had a plan for dealing with it. We should invade them first. If war with the United States seemed likely, his Defence Scheme Number One ordained that the Canadian army would launch pre-emptive attacks deep into the United States. Canadian forces from British Columbia would “advance into and occupy the strategic points including Spokane, Seattle and Portland.” Our troops from the Prairie provinces would “converge toward Fargo, North Dakota, and then continue a general advance in the direction of Minneapolis and St. Paul.” In the east, the Canadian army would cross the St. Lawrence and the Quebec border to occupy upper New England.

Sutherland Brown’s military strategy was not at fault: his purpose in planning to seize large parts of the northern United States by surprise at the very outbreak of war was to win time for reinforcements from Britain to reach Canada before U.S. troops could pour across the Canadian border and overwhelm us. A similar strategy had been applied, with successful results, in the War of 1812: small contingents of troops from Upper Canada had crossed the frontier as soon as the United States declared war and seized Detroit and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, thus slowing the main American invasion significantly. The problem lay only in Colonel Brown’s grasp of contemporary reality. The British could not have sent reinforcements to Canada even if his strategy had won them the necessary time—and in the 1920s Canada did not have one-tenth the number of trained troops that would have been required to carry out his plan.

The huge Canadian army of the First World War had been dissolved with great speed. The 350,000 Canadians who were overseas on November 11, 1918, were almost all home and out of uniform by mid-1919 (although not before impatient veterans had turned to violence in the holding camps in Britain; a riot at Kinmel Park in north Wales in March 1919 left five dead and twenty-seven injured). The fifteen militia
divisions survived on paper, but with fewer than fifty thousand active members. Nobody was willing to tolerate the idea of conscription in peacetime, and the regular forces wound up with around five thousand men. Most of the numbered battalions of the Canadian Expeditionary Force and their hard-won traditions disappeared in the postwar reorganization of the armed forces, although a few were permitted to convert into militia regiments, with regimental names replacing their old numbers. Only two unique infantry units survived to join the Royal Canadian Regiment as permanent elements of Canada’s regular army: Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry and the 22nd Battalion, the only French-speaking battalion in the CEF, which had so distinguished itself that it was even allowed to retain its number, becoming the Royal 22ème Regiment (“Van Doos,” in English).

Such courtesies cost very little, but postwar Canadian governments were not willing to spend real money on the armed forces. The Canadian defence budget in 1922 was $12 million—just under a dollar and a half per Canadian—and it did not grow much until the late 1930s. Given the country’s remarkably secure strategic situation and the absence of identifiable enemies, this parsimony was not unreasonable. But it was rather demoralizing for the remaining regular soldiers.

What would have been even more demoralizing for the soldiers, had they allowed themselves to dwell on it, was their sheer uselessness to the country that paid their wages. The only possible invader of Canada was still the United States, but the American threat was no longer very plausible politically. Moreover, by the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 London agreed to limit the Royal Navy to the same size as that of the United States, which meant that there was now absolutely no chance that Britain would ever again send troops west across the Atlantic to defend Canada against an American attack. Since Britain had large naval commitments elsewhere, henceforward it would always be inferior to the U.S. Navy in the Western Atlantic. London simply no longer had the ability to get troops west across the Atlantic against American opposition

However, Canada’s professional armed forces took no notice whatever of this new strategic reality. The foundation of Canadian military planning continued to be a militia force, which, on mobilization, would amount to eleven infantry divisions and four cavalry divisions (though they were now only planning on having 130,000 men available to man these divisions)—all for fighting the United States. And, according to the calculations of Colonel Brown’s Directorate of Military Operations and Intelligence, by the time the “flying columns” of Canadian militia that had been thrown across the American border in a controlled penetration of a few hundred miles had been forced to retreat to Canada’s own frontiers, British military operations should be well underway against America’s east coast, while Australian and Indian expeditionary forces would be on their way to attack California. The Americans would sure be sorry that they had picked a fight with the British empire.

The real Canadian militia, by contrast only succeeded in giving eight or nine days’ training to 38,000 men in 1923. The British reinforcements Brown was counting on would never be sent, and the Australian and Indian contingents were wholly imaginary. “I consider that the most difficult point in the Scheme is the fact that it is drawn up
for forces which are to a certain extent non-existent,” the commander of Military District No. 4 (Montreal) observed drily.

General “Tommy” Burns served with Sutherland Brown in the 1920s, and his observation cuts very close to the bone. A professional military force needs enemies to justify its existence, and the First World War’s lasting institutional bequest to Canada was a full array of professional armed forces staffed by native-born regular officers who were paid, quite literally, to identify foreign threats to Canadian national security. The threats they identified would vary from time to time, as would the measures they advocated to deal with them, but they were unlikely ever to declare that there was no threat to Canada.
Of course
they found threats, whether from the United States or elsewhere, and
of course
they asked for money to maintain their own profession as a “deterrent” to those threats.

By 1925 the Royal Canadian Navy had only two small destroyers left, and the Royal Canadian Air Force numbered fewer than a thousand men. The Permanent Force of the army amounted to only 4,125 troops, and the militia organization was somewhat smaller than the one that had existed before the First World War. Nevertheless, the Canadian armed forces struggled on, devoting most of their energies to sheer institutional survival, in the hope that they would one day be needed again by their country. Or if not precisely by their own country, at least by Britain—and since they were entirely British-oriented in their training, equipment and strategic thinking, they had no doubt that any British
war would be theirs as well. This had the additional attraction, from the soldiers’ point of view, that it allowed them to play a role in the biggest and most professionally interesting military league available: Europe. And the myth that was forged to justify the huge loss of Canadian lives in Europe in the First World War—the pretense that it had somehow been in defence of Canada—made the English Canadian population ready to believe the soldiers when they talked about European “threats” to Canadian security.