Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014 (26 page)

One week after that, Italy entered the war on Germany’s side and invaded southern France. Just before France capitulated on June 16, a further British attempt to save their allies saw the First Canadian Division ordered to land near Brest in Brittany as part of the “Second British Expeditionary Force.” The intention was to reestablish a British military presence on French territory not yet occupied by the Germans, and keep the French government in the war.

For Escott Reid, it was still true that the war was essentially just one more round in the perennial great-power struggle, but that did not
mean that it made no difference who won. In the long run, there would have to be another attempt to abolish war as the main currency of international relations, for the level of destruction wrought by modern military technology was becoming unbearable. But first Hitler and his allies had to be stopped, and that now seemed to require Canada’s help.

With the fall of France, Canada became Britain’s largest remaining ally in the war—and the British were expecting an invasion during the summer. The Imperial General Staff calculated the odds as sixty-forty in favour of invasion, and the entire country was mobilized to repel it—but the British army had left most of its weapons behind on the Dunkirk beaches. The First Canadian Division was one of the few army units in England still equipped to fight (apart from its First Brigade), and the pressure on King to contribute more to the British war effort rose dramatically. Four Canadian destroyers were sent across the Atlantic to help hold the Channel, and the 2nd and 3rd Canadian Divisions were authorized for overseas service as soon as they could be made ready.

401 Squadron was one of the first RCAF fighter squadrons to be sent overseas. Like the many others that followed, its casualties were at first far higher than those of the Germans it was flying against, many of whom had previous combat experience in the Spanish Civil War, Poland and France. The “learning curve” for fighter pilots is quite short and steep: it took a pilot about ten missions to get good at the game, but a great many never got beyond the first or second mission. However, the total numbers of Canadian airmen lost were not large by the standards
of land warfare, and by the summer of 1940 King was in the welcome position of having the Canadian Expeditionary Force safe in England, where it was suffering no casualties, while a relative handful of Canadian fighter pilots showed that Canada was “doing its part” by fighting in the Battle of Britain.

When the Germans lost that battle and cancelled their hastily prepared plans for the invasion of England, that politically happy situation was perpetuated, for Britain had no immediate ability to carry the ground battle back to the continent. With the exception of the disastrous raid at Dieppe in August 1942, in which over nine hundred Canadians died, Canadian ground troops would not see battle in Europe for another three years. In fact, after the danger of a German cross-Channel invasion passed, something akin to the Phoney War returned to the west of Europe. Hitler turned east to the Balkans and then, in June 1941, invaded Russia. British and German ground troops were in contact only in North Africa (where there were no Canadian soldiers), so King shouldn’t have been under any pressure on the subject that worried him most: conscription. But he was.

The pro- and anti-conscriptionists were already staking out their positions within King’s cabinet. Some were even talking about a “Union” government, and King was particularly upset by a “desire to have Meighen brought into Government. Said I would not countenance anything of kind in regard to a man who had been responsible for Wartime Elections Act, and for conscription in the last war.”

The Conservative opposition demanded the same draconian measures that had just been introduced in Britain, which had given the government total control over the nation’s manpower, industry and resources in order to wage a total war. Conscription for military service was only a part of that package, but it was a part especially dear to the Tory opposition and the Liberal conscriptionists in Canada—and what they meant, of course, was conscription for service overseas to defend Britain. In fact, military manpower was just about the only defence requirement that
Britain wasn’t short of at the time, but that was irrelevant: the purpose of conscription was to make imperial patriots in Canada feel better.

King’s response was a brilliant example of diversionary tactics in politics: he began worrying aloud about “the possibility of an invasion of our shores. [If Britain falls], an effort will be made to seize this country as a prize of war. We have, therefore, changed to the stage where defence of this land becomes our most important duty. It will involve far-reaching measures.…”

King’s grasp of military strategy was erratic at best, but he probably never actually believed that the fall of Britain could lead to an invasion of Canada. It was strategic nonsense: the Atlantic is three thousand kilometres wide, and the Germans did not even have much by way of a surface navy. However, King certainly knew that conscription
for home defence only
would ease the English Canadian pressure on him to do more without angering French Canadians too much—so in June 1940 the new defence minister, Colonel J.L. Ralston, introduced the National Resources Mobilization Act (NRMA). Parliament passed it with scarcely a murmur of protest. As the marching song went:

The NRMA gave Ottawa total control over the property and services of Canadians for war purposes—with one exception. The government could conscript men into the army, but the conscripts were to serve only on Canadian soil or in Canadian waters—and technically, King was still not breaking his earlier promise: “Once again I wish to repeat my undertaking … that no measure for the conscription of men
for overseas service will be introduced by the present administration,” he told the House of Commons one month after the fall of France.

This halfway conscription bill was an elegant solution to a political problem. It helped King fend off the Tories and his critics within the Liberal party. On the whole, French Canadians recognized King’s strategy for what it was, and went along with it in the hope that it would keep English Canadian imperial patriots from escalating their demands. Recruiting for the regular army was still satisfactory: enough idealists, adventurers and unemployed were volunteering to fill the new units as quickly as equipment became available for them—and the NRMA conscripts would defend Canada if the Nazis invaded (or the Martians). But it wasn’t much fun for the “Zombies,” as they were called.

Few isolationists, French- or English-speaking, had worried much about who would win in 1939, since they anticipated a repetition of the long stalemate of the First World War. But most of them recognized that the Nazi regime in Germany was a profoundly evil phenomenon, and by
late 1940 it had, by clever military tactics and much good luck, reached a point where it looked as though it might succeed in establishing permanent domination over much of Europe. To a certain extent, that could affect practical North American interests—and to a far greater extent, it affected North American attitudes.

In the summer of 1940 the United States was still officially neutral, and a majority of the American public was still isolationist, but President Franklin D. Roosevelt was not. Both his political sympathies and his concern for the balance of power drove him to work patiently to bring the United States into the war on Britain’s side. From Roosevelt’s point of view, the fall of France and the subsequent rapid extension of German U-boat activities into the western Atlantic were useful pretexts for bringing his country a little closer to commitment to the war, but the mythical military threat to Canada that Mackenzie King had evoked was even better. If Canada faced attack, after all, he could invoke the Monroe Doctrine to come to its defence.

As early as 1938, in a speech at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Roosevelt had promised that the United States would “not stand idly by if domination of Canadian soil is threatened by any other empire.” Mackenzie King, recognizing the American strategic interest
in Canadian territory, had replied realistically: “We too have obligations as a good and friendly neighbour, and one of these is to see that … our country is made as immune from attack or possible invasion as we can reasonably be expected to make it.”

Now, in the summer of 1940, it could plausibly (though inaccurately) be argued that Canada could no longer fulfill that guarantee unaided. That gave Roosevelt an excuse to start negotiating directly with the British for U.S. air bases in Newfoundland, Bermuda and the British West Indies, and a deal was nearing completion for the supply of fifty over-age American destroyers to Britain. But it was still politically easier for Roosevelt to provide military support to the British empire through Canada, since that could be said to fall under the heading of continental defence.

It is strange that the man who became furious if he thought he was being pushed (he would have said “railroaded”) by the British, was so acquiescent when Roosevelt did the same thing. Probably it had a lot to do with the fact that King had spent a number of years in the United States and was more at ease with American manners than British. “Mackenzie” (whose old friends actually called him “Rex”) recognized Roosevelt’s power, but he was so charmed by the President’s easy informality that he didn’t always notice that the decision had already been made for him.