Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014 (24 page)

British foreign policy in the next six years bore the name of “appeasement,” which has subsequently become just about the worst label you can put on a foreign policy. Winston Churchill once defined an appeaser as “one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last,” and appeasement has subsequently become a one-word argument hurled at anybody who wants to delay an immediate resort to military force. But Churchill was never one to waste fairness on his political rivals. The truth is that British governments of the 1930s, while aware that there would probably be a war against Germany in the end, consciously saw appeasement as a two-way bet. If conceding to Germany various rights and pieces of territory that it had been forced to relinquish in the Treaty of Versailles was enough to
satiate Hitler and turn him into a supporter of the international status quo, then appeasement would have avoided a dreadful and unnecessary war. In the far likelier case that it would ultimately take a war to stop Hitler, appeasement would at least buy time for Britain to rearm so as to have a better chance of winning that war.

Britain’s preparedness for another European war in 1933 was little more advanced than Canada’s. It maintained just enough forces to control its world-spanning empire, but nothing more. This policy was justified by the so-called Ten-Year Rule, first adopted in 1919, which instructed the British armed forces to draft their budget proposals “on the assumption that the British Empire would not be engaged in any great war during the next ten years.” In 1919 that was a reasonable assumption, but the Ten-Year Rule was renewed every year until 1932. As a result, British defence expenditure shrank from £766 million in 1919–20 to £102 million in 1932. So the British government simply dared not contemplate fighting another war with Germany until it had time to rearm—and it pressed France (which was better prepared to fight) not to use force against Hitler yet either.

This was particularly the case in 1936, when Hitler marched his soldiers back into the Rhineland, along the French border. The Rhineland had been demilitarized by the Treaty of Versailles precisely because the absence of the German army would leave one of Germany’s most important industrial areas, the Ruhr, wide open to French occupation. The French were ready to reoccupy the area militarily in 1936, and there is no doubt that Hitler would have withdrawn his troops if he had been challenged in that way, but British rearmament had barely begun. Besides, from the perspective of a generation in Britain who had already concluded that the Versailles Treaty was extremely unfair to the Germans, it just didn’t feel appropriate to deny Germany the right to control a key part of its own territory. So the two-way bet continued: let the Germans recover what really should be theirs, but rearm in case Hitler doesn’t intend to stop there. And the British
government was not filled with false hope: it strongly suspected that Hitler meant to keep going. As the Cabinet minutes after the Rhineland episode put it: “Our principal aim … at the present time was to play for time and for peace. There was some reason to suppose that Germany did not wish to make war on us
now
. Time was vital to the completion of our defensive security.”

The “appeasers” in London therefore increased British defence spending from 15 percent of the government’s total expenditure in 1935 to 21 percent in 1936, 26 percent in 1937, 38 percent in 1938, and a whopping 48 percent in 1939. They went on re-arming even though Hitler did not move again for two years after the re-occupation of the Rhineland. By the time the war came in 1939, the British army, though smaller than the Reichswehr, was far more mechanized. The Royal Air Force (which had only biplane fighters two years before) had new Hurricanes and Spitfires, and chains of radar stations had been built to give Britain’s air defences early warning. Britain’s first four-engine heavy bomber flew in 1939, in fulfilment of a Royal Air Force requirement issued in 1936. They did not waste their time.

In Canada, Mackenzie King enthusiastically supported the policy of appeasement, and he also followed Britain’s lead in raising Canadian defence spending, which quadrupled from a paltry $14 million in 1933, the year Hitler took power, to $64 million in 1939. However, most of the extra money went to the navy and the air force, whose personnel respectively doubled and tripled in numbers in 1935–39. The army, by contrast, did not grow at all: it stayed around four thousand men right until 1939. King knew there would probably be a war, and that Canada would have to fight at Britain’s side, but he had no intention of sending a Canadian army overseas again. All his spending was devoted to the defence of Canada—whether it needed to be defended or not.

Which begs the question: Why did Canada (or even Britain)
have
to fight Germany? Hitler’s expressed goals were all about the recovery of German-populated territories in the east that had been severed from
Germany by the Versailles Treaty. His longer-term intention was to attack and destroy the Soviet Union and Bolshevism. (He saw the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as a Jewish-controlled plot against “civilization.”) In support of that latter goal, he also clearly had an interest in extending his control, either diplomatically or militarily, over much of Eastern Europe. In early 1939 he even offered Poland a military alliance, clearly directed against their common enemy, the Soviet Union, if only the Poles would return the “Free City of Danzig” (95 percent German in population) and allow the construction of a German-controlled road and railway across the Polish Corridor to join up the two parts of Germany. Poland might have agreed to a German alliance, too, if Britain and France had not issued their unconditional guarantee of Polish sovereignty at just that moment.

Hitler never expressed any interest in expanding westward. Indeed, as a veteran of the First World War who had spent four years in the trenches, he had a horror of seeing Germany end up in another two-front war. As for the notion that Hitler was dreaming of “world conquest,” that is as ridiculous an accusation as it was when Kaiser Wilhelm II was accused of the same thing by Allied propaganda in the First World War. Germany was no bigger than it had been last time around, and Britain’s naval supremacy still denied the German navy any safe access to the sea. Hitler was an ambitious and ruthless man, but there is no evidence whatever that he indulged in such fantasies. Indeed, he was quite explicit about the need to preserve the British empire.

In his book
The Other Side of the Hill
, based on postwar interviews with German commanders, British strategist Sir Basil Liddell Hart includes a conversation that Hitler had with General Gerd von Rundstedt and two of his staff just after the trapped British army had been successfully evacuated from the port of Dunkirk in 1940. Hitler had ordered Rundstedt’s tanks to stop, allowing the British troops to escape, and the general wanted to know why.

The problem with Germany was not that it wanted to conquer Britain; Hitler’s ambitions lay in the east. But if he were to achieve them all, then Germany would be by far the strongest power in Europe. That, more than the fate of small countries in Eastern Europe or the wickedness of Hitler’s regime, was the main reason that Britain was preparing to fight the Führer. It was the old great-power game again, and the rise of Germany made war inevitable.

F
RANK
P
ICKERSGILL WAS TWENTY-FOUR IN 1939, AND HIS VIEWS
were not unusual for well-educated young English Canadians (though he was more privileged than most). Brought up in Winnipeg, he had degrees in history and classics from the University of Manitoba and the University of Toronto, and he had arrived in Europe in 1938 for a year of travel and study before heading home to Canada. Prospects were
bright for him there because his elder brother, Jack, had become the private secretary to Prime Minister Mackenzie King. But Frank stayed in France, supported by money from his brother and the occasional piece of freelance journalism. He was fascinated but appalled by what was happening, and he couldn’t drag himself away.

Finally, the war upon which “parliament would decide” had come—but in practical political terms, Mackenzie King had no choice but to take the country in. For years his main effort had gone into ensuring that if war came, Canada would at least enter it united, and at the special session of Parliament in September 1939, his patient strategy was rewarded with almost complete success: only J.S. Woodsworth, the leader of the socialist CCF party, resisted participation to the bitter end.

The foundation of King’s strategy was his promise that no compulsion would be used to enlist men for overseas service. It was, in effect, a promise that no French Canadian would have to fight in the war unless he really wanted to—and on the basis of that guarantee, King and his Quebec lieutenant, Ernest Lapointe, convinced the Quebec members to accept the declaration of war. Two Quebec MPs, Liguori Lacombe and Wilfrid Lacroix, wanted an amendment explicitly stating that Canada should not become actively involved in war overseas, but only Woodsworth supported them. Most Quebec Liberals were ruled by
their fear that divisions within the Liberal party would lead either to a Conservative government or to a coalition between Conservatives and rebel Liberals like the configuration that had imposed conscription in 1917, and in the end even Lacombe and Lacroix dropped their amendment: English Canada’s emotions could not be ignored entirely.

This was very much an act of faith in King on the part of most French Canadians, who had a stereotyped image of English Canadians as gullible “blockheads” with an instinctive British loyalty that they were incapable of resisting. But in fact the mood of English Canadians in 1939 was very different from that of 1914.

Even among the shrinking majority of English speakers who were of British descent, there was a good deal of isolationist sentiment to serve as a brake on the pro-British enthusiasms of the English Canadian establishment. It was the very subdued mood of places like Paris, Ontario, that gave King reason to hope that his strategy of waging only a limited war might succeed—and there were still enough Canadians eager to volunteer for the war that commitments on a limited scale could probably be met without conscription. The Royal Canadian Naval Volunteer Reserve divisions across the country were a case in point:

The Royal Canadian Navy was long on enthusiasm but short of just about everything else. In 1939 there were only seven destroyers in the RCN, and although a large construction program was started immediately, no new Canadian ships would be completed in at least a year. Fishing boats were requisitioned, and a secret scheme was set up to buy yachts on the American market and convert them into naval patrol boats. Halifax was the scene of colossal confusion as the dockyard was transformed into a more or less modern naval base. Hundreds of ships were marshalled there to sail under escort to Britain, for convoy rules were imposed at once. On September 3 a U-boat sank the passenger liner
Athenia
, causing the first Canadian war casualties, and by the end of September forty ships had been sunk approaching Britain.