Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014 (23 page)

The attempt to build a new international system had collapsed, and the great powers went back to doing what they had centuries of experience at: building up their armies, giving away bits of other people’s territory to buy time or allies and preparing for the next world war. Canadians wondered what they would do when it came—and Mackenzie King, as usual, tried to face in both directions at once.

King wholeheartedly supported the British policy of appeasement. When Germany remilitarized the Rhineland in 1936, he showed not the slightest public inclination to do anything about it: “I believe that Canada’s first duty to the League and to the British Empire, with respect
to all the great issues that come to us, is, if possible, to keep this country united.” His cabinet raised the defence budget by 20 percent, but the rearmament program was not aimed at sending another large Canadian expeditionary force to Europe: “I think that is now wholly out of the question,” King noted in his diary.

King’s diplomatic statements deliberately left Canada’s intentions in case of war obscure, and even in his private dealings with the British government he went out of his way to avoid military cooperation that might imply automatic commitment. He never openly challenged the legal doctrine that Canada, as a member of the British empire, was automatically at war whenever Britain was at war, but in response to all attempts to pin him down, he took refuge in his favourite evasive tactic, saying “Parliament will decide” (as though Parliament would not do whatever he and his cabinet decided). Since he never said publicly what Canada would do if war came, there was no focus around which a destructive national debate could get started.

Two groups in Canada wanted nothing whatever to do with a European war. A large number of Canadian nationalists (including almost all French Canadians) thought solely in terms of Canada’s own interests, and were quite content to sit the war out on the sidelines since no vital Canadian interests were involved. There were also those, particularly in English Canadian intellectual circles, who believed that the coming war was simply further proof of the failure of the existing international system. The war would have to run its course, and afterward everybody would have to resume the effort to build some new international institution like the League to prevent future wars. But neither the rationalists nor the nationalists had the final say; King did, and he was infuriatingly reluctant to say anything definite.

For all his obfuscations, King was never really in any doubt that Canada would have to go in if war came. He thought it was a bad idea, and he was determined to go in only up to his ankles if he could get away with it, but he understood the nature of Canada at the time too well to imagine that his government could safely remain neutral. Although pro-British sentiments were much weaker in the English-speaking population as a whole than in 1914 (a generation had passed, and the cost of the First World War was graven in everybody’s mind), the instinctive British loyalty was still strong in the business and professional elite, and those were the people who mattered.

At their worst, they were the sort of people whom the Conservative opposition leader, Robert J. Manion, described to his son as “the usual crowd of old bachelors and childless parents.” They certainly had enough influence to destroy any government that stayed out of the war, but even they would not have been powerful enough on their own to make Canada’s entry into the Second World War inevitable. What gave their demands irresistible force was the almost unconscious sense of compulsion in ordinary English Canadians to take part in the war.

For most English Canadians, by 1939 the decisive motive was no longer a helpless tug of loyalty to Britain; at least, not a loyalty strong enough to die for her. It was more a sense of debt to their own past and to their dead of the First World War. English Canada is the only part of the western hemisphere where almost every little town and village has the kind of haunting war memorial that you find all over Europe, with a list of the dead that sometimes seems to outnumber those still living in the place.

The terrible sacrifice of the First World War—a third of all English Canadian males of military age had served overseas, and one in seven had actually been killed or wounded—was the very foundation of English Canada’s national identity, and to deny that Canada’s duty was to fight at England’s side in the wars of the great powers would have seemed somehow to devalue that sacrifice. The dead would not necessarily impose that duty on us for all time if they could speak, but that was the psychology of it. So to justify their past, English Canadians would feel that they must act in the same way the next time a European war came along: “Well, you see, we’d
have
to.”

The same was not true for French Canadians, however. French Canada’s attitude would
not
shift when the crisis arrived, for it had no comparable debt to the dead to pull its emotions around. There was never any doubt that French Canadians would fight to defend
Canada
, but the issue of conscription for service overseas was as explosive as ever—and unless that fear was laid to rest, French Canada would resist the war from the start, the country would split along “racial” lines, and King’s government, heavily dependent on Quebec support, would probably fall.

Happily for King, English Canadian politicians of all parties were much more conscious of the French Canadian loathing for conscription than they had been in 1917 (and could detect some nervousness about it among their own constituents). It was the opposition leader who took the initiative. In March 1939, when war in Europe had become almost certain, Manion declared that Conservative policy would be “no conscription of Canadians to fight outside our borders in any war.” King gratefully associated the government with this formula—and in the spring of 1939 he pulled one last rabbit out of his hat: the Royal Tour.

King George VI and Queen Elizabeth were the first reigning monarchs ever to visit Canada, and in two months they were seen personally by two and a half million Canadians—almost a quarter of the population. The purpose was transparently to revive pro-British sentiment in Canada and that sense of identification with Canada’s own past most strikingly displayed in the emotional scenes at the unveiling of the national war memorial in Ottawa. To a considerable extent it worked, even in French Canada. “By the smile of a Queen and the French words of a King, the English have conquered once more the cradle of New France,” Omer Héroux noted crossly in
Le Devoir
, and it was largely (if only temporarily) true.

As the “royal recruiting tour” proceeded westward, however, the size and enthusiasm of the crowds dropped off steeply: despite the deeply felt obligation to the dead, English Candians remembered what
the last war had done to their families with a depth of emotion that French Canadians could not share. Even in small-town Ontario, although the crowds came out to see the show, many of the people waving the flags felt a deep sense of unease.

In late August war in Europe became inevitable. The Soviet Union, having spent the preceding year in futile attempts to create a joint front with the British and the French to stop Hitler, signed a separate deal with Berlin. In the secret clauses, Hitler gave Stalin a free hand to reannex most of the former territories of the Russian empire that had been lost during the revolutionary turmoil of 1917–20 (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, parts of Finland and Romania, and the eastern third of Poland) in return for Soviet acquiescence in whatever Germany wished to do with the rest of Poland. The agreement neatly turned the tables on
the Anglo-French ambition to embroil the Russians in a war with Germany from which they could remain aloof; now it would be Britain and France, at least for a while, that would have to stand alone against Hitler (unless they welshed on their guarantee to Poland).

But even after the Nazi-Soviet pact was signed, Mackenzie King kept the British guessing about his government’s intentions. The British High Commissioner in Ottawa reported that Dr. Skelton, the undersecretary for external affairs, “like the Prime Minister, felt it unwise to go to war for countries which the United Kingdom could not support effectively. His view was that Poland could be destroyed or overrun in a fortnight, and that Hitler could then sit back and profess his unwillingness to fight the Western powers.” And that was exactly what happened.

For the Canadians who actually understood what was happening, especially in the department of external affairs, the choice was enormously difficult. They were honestly appalled at the nature of the fascist regimes, but they knew that the next great-power war would be simply a continuation of the last, and equally devoid of moral content. Most of them had once hoped that the League of Nations could change the dynamics of the international system enough to break this futile cycle of destruction, and almost all of them had now concluded that it had failed. Collective security would certainly have to be tried again eventually, for there seemed no other hope of breaking the cycle, but first there would be a terrible war.

None of them felt that it was Canada’s national duty to die in the last ditch to defend the established ranking of the European great powers—nor, indeed, that Canada’s military help was especially vital to Britain. The two sides in Europe seemed to be fairly evenly matched, and most people in 1939 expected the war to be a stalemate. But there was still the argument that Canada ought to participate in the war
just a little bit
in order to have a say in the design of the new international institutions whose creation would be the first task when the war ended. More important, there was the domestic political fact that Canada
would be less divided by a cautious and limited entry into the war than by staying out entirely. Lester Pearson, still a quarter-century away from the prime ministership, combined the sensibility of the doomed fighter pilot of 1918 with the cynicism of the disillusioned junior diplomat of 1938 in his attitude to the coming war, but his statement can probably stand as representative of the ambivalence felt by most of his colleagues, and by most Canadians who knew what was really going on.

One week before the war started, he wrote to King: “The first casualty of this war has been Canada’s claim to control over her own destinies. If war comes to Poland and we take part, that war came as a consequence of commitments made by the Government of Great Britain, about which we were not in one iota consulted, and about which we were not given the slightest inkling of information in advance.”

W
AR DID NOT COME OUT OF A CLEAR BLUE SKY IN 1939, AS IT HAD
seemed to in 1914. People saw it coming years in advance and were preparing for it. In 1933, the year Hitler came to power in Germany, the British foreign secretary, Sir John Simon, told the Cabinet that it must plan for two possibilities if the Nazi regime remained in power: either a preventive war by the French almost right away to strangle the regime in its cradle, or “the success of Hitler, followed … by a European war in four or five years time.”