Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014 (29 page)

There was obviously no need for conscription in Canada in the winter of 1941–42, as there was no steady drain of army casualties that would require large-scale replacements. But army recruiting was slowing down because jobs were plentiful, wages were high and, with the army not yet involved in any fighting, volunteers who were eager to get into the war tended to avoid signing up. So some members of King’s own cabinet were urging him to get the army committed to combat somewhere—anywhere, in fact.

The pressures for conscription for overseas service were also mounting steadily in English Canada. Already in 1941
Saturday Night
magazine was writing: “There is among English-speaking Canadians a widespread feeling that the real motive of the French Canadian attitude toward conscription is the desire to improve the numerical strength of that element of the population, by avoiding its full proportionate share of the casualties.” Paranoia has never been a Quebec monopoly.

At the same time Arthur Meighen, regarded by King as his nemesis, became the leader of the Conservative Party in November 1941, and immediately declared himself in favour of compulsory selective service over the whole field of war. It soon became obvious that Meighen’s strategy was to try to engineer a “National” government along the lines of Borden’s Union government of 1917 (which had also been created largely by Meighen), by fostering a split in the Liberal Party over conscription. And Meighen was quite willing to appeal to the old Upper-Canadian desire to compel French Canadians to sacrifice to English
Canada’s gods: “A trembling servitude to a sinister tradition,” he proclaimed, “has gone far to benumb the striking power of Canada.”

King recognized the danger: if the pro-conscription movement gained much more steam, many English-speaking Liberals would come under irresistible pressure to conform, and the government’s majority might well drain away into a Meighen-led Union government. Except that it would have nothing to do with unity: it would split the country as badly as in 1917, and Canada might not survive a second round of that. Faced with this dual threat—from across the aisle and also from within his own cabinet—King took two radical decisions. The first was to send Canadian troops into combat somewhere, partly to encourage army recruiting (although whether it would actually have that effect was much to be doubted), and partly just to placate his own English Canadian ministers. The other, to fend off the challenge from Meighen’s Conservatives, was to steal their thunder by holding a plebiscite asking Canadians to release him from his promise not to send conscripts into combat abroad—without actually promising to send them. “Conscription if necessary, but not necessarily conscription,” as he later put it.

At just that time the British were seeking reinforcements for their Hong Kong garrison (where they would be sure to see fighting soon), so in October 1941 the Royal Rifles of Canada (a Quebec regiment) and the Winnipeg Grenadiers were sent to Hong Kong. The two Canadian battalions, about two thousand men, arrived in Hong Kong in November 1941, and three weeks later, on the morning after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese launched their attack. The Canadian soldiers (some of whom had been hastily drafted to the battalions to bring them up to strength) fought desperately, but eventually the garrison was split in two and pinned down in the peninsulas south and west of the island.

Three hundred Canadian troops were killed in the fighting, and another five hundred were wounded. Sergeant Major John Osborn won Canada’s first Victoria Cross of the Second World War; it was awarded posthumously. Those who survived to be taken prisoner probably had the worst war of all: 260 died in Japanese prison camps. In Canada a Royal Commission was appointed to investigate the Hong Kong tragedy, but nobody was ever found at fault. And all that can be said in King’s defence is that he had no idea the Japanese army was so good in battle, or so cruel in victory.

His strategy for dealing with the threat from Meighen and the Conservatives worked rather better. By January 1942 P.J.A. Cardin, now the senior Quebec minister, was persuaded that a plebiscite was better than a Union government under Meighen, although most Québécois felt very uneasy about the question: “Are you in favour of releasing the Government from any obligations arising out of any past commitments restricting the methods of raising men for military service?” A hastily
formed group, La Ligue pour la défense du Canada, campaigned for a “no” vote in Quebec on the grounds that nobody would ask to be released from commitments if they did not intend to break them, and Mackenzie King found himself opposing Henri Bourassa, most of the Catholic church and a variety of young French Canadian politicians like Jean Drapeau and Andre Laurendeau (and the then-unknown Pierre Elliott Trudeau).

Despite the mistrust his policy aroused among French Canadians, King was taking the only possible course that might avert conscription in fact. He just couldn’t say that out loud without alienating the English Canadian voters he was seeking to mollify. He was not actually promising to bring in conscription, but his apparent change of front on the principle of the thing completely took the wind out of Meighen’s sails.

The campaign was nevertheless emotional and occasionally violent in Montreal—the remnants of a pro-fascist group, Adrien Arcand’s Blackshirts, attacked Jewish shops on St. Lawrence Boulevard, and windows were broken and trams attacked after political meetings. The provincial Liberals tried to avoid the issue of conscription entirely: Premier Godbout’s position on the plebiscite was described as “noui” (neither
oui
nor
non
).

The results of the plebiscite in April 1942 almost exactly parallelled the outcome of the 1917 election. In Quebec four out of five people voted “no”; in English Canada four out of five people voted “yes.” Nevertheless, King was happy with the outcome. On the morning after the plebiscite, he told the Cabinet that “the Government appeared to be safe.” He was quite clear in his own mind that he had been fighting a delaying action on conscription from the start, and he had just won another year or two before a crisis on the issue really drove the country apart. He even took the time afterward to feel a little bit bad about Hong Kong.

Frank Pickersgill, the young Canadian who had felt like “sneering” at the war in 1939, was a different person by 1942. He was just a bit too slow in trying to get out of France when the Germans arrived in June 1940, and had been captured and interned as an enemy civilian. It wasn’t an awful existence, but he saw a good deal of brutality meted out to other people by his German jailers, and in March 1942 he broke out of the former barracks in Paris where he was being held. It was a classic movie scene, with a hacksaw and three blades smuggled into the prison in a loaf of bread, and then an escape made good by sawing through the bars on a window and dropping into the street below.

Pickersgill managed to make his way from Paris to Vichy France, the part of the country run by a collaborationist regime but free of German soldiers, and it took him another four months to make his way to neutral Portugal and from there to England. But he arrived in London a changed man. He was angry about what he had seen in France: “I’m feeling too belligerent to be happy 4,000 miles away from the Nazis,” he wrote to a
friend in Winnipeg. He was too sophisticated an observer to be taken in by the war propaganda about a crusade for freedom, but he may also have shared Escott Reid’s belief that the balance of power was now in danger of shifting seriously to Canada’s disadvantage. Finally (and perhaps decisively), he was swept up in the excitement of great events.

Frank Pickersgill’s brother Jack, Prime Minister King’s private secretary, telegraphed for him to come home, but he refused. On arrival in England, Pickersgill enlisted in the Canadian army, and immediately volunteered for service in the British “Special Operations Executive,” which controlled a network of undercover agents in France. “I’m afraid I’m in the war up to my neck,” he said. “There are certain jobs I can do better than others.” The wave broke in June 1943: Pickersgill was arrested almost immediately after he parachuted into France.

At the time when Frank Pickersgill finally got into the war, the Canadian army was still mostly sitting in England or at home. Only a few thousand Canadian soldiers had seen any fighting, and only for a few days, in the disaster at Hong Kong in early 1942 and on the Dieppe raid in August of the same year. But the Royal Canadian Air Force was in battle every day, and by now most of its pilots were flying bombers over Germany.

Beginning in 1942 the British committed themselves fully to a campaign of mass bomber raids whose purpose was to destroy the German economy. It was known as “strategic” bombing, and it was the quintessential weapon of total war. If a country’s industrial strength was now the main source of its military strength, then it was also the logical target of a war-winning strategy. Both the British and American air forces had believed in this strategy for many years, and Canadian airmen (insofar as they dabbled in strategic doctrine) followed suit. Initially, the idea was to hit factories, railway yards and the like: civilians would obviously be killed in the process, but they were not the primary target. However, the bombers had to fly at night in order to have any chance of survival at all, and analysis of photographs eventually showed that most bombs were not falling within miles of their targets.