Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014 (33 page)

A
NOTHER
“
COUNTER-FACTUAL
”
SPECULATION
? Y
ES, BECAUSE
there’s no better way to examine whether the choices that were made were the only or the best ones. What would have happened if Britain and France had not extended the unconditional guarantee to Poland in March 1939 that subsequently triggered their declaration of war on Germany in September? After all, it was both rash and dishonest to promise to protect Poland when they had no conceivable means of getting military help to the Poles, and no intention of mounting an offensive against Germany’s western frontier to draw the Wehrmacht away from Poland. A little more thought, and perhaps a little more honesty, might have persuaded the British and French governments that they should not make a promise they couldn’t keep.

Without that Anglo-French guarantee, there probably wouldn’t have been a war in September 1939 at all. Knowing that no help was coming, the Poles would probably have given the Germans what they wanted—the city of Danzig, and a sovereign road and rail route across the “Polish Corridor” to connect East Prussia to the rest of Germany—and then they would have concluded an anti-Soviet alliance with
Germany. That was Hitler’s original plan for Poland, whose 35 million people would be useful in his planned anti-Soviet crusade. True, they were “racially inferior” Slavs according to Nazi ideology, but Hitler was prepared to be flexible on such matters, and official Poland, at least, shared his own anti-Semitism.

There would not have been a cynical and temporary Nazi-Soviet pact in this history either, for that was a direct response by both countries to the Anglo-French guarantee to Poland. There would certainly have been a war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union eventually, for Hitler saw Communism as a “Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy” and truly believed that the Soviet Union had to be destroyed. The war might have come a bit earlier than June 1941, when he invaded the Soviet Union in the real history, or it might even have come a bit later, but it would probably have unfolded in much the same way.

It’s very unlikely that Britain and France would have gone to war at that stage in the game to save the Communists, so the Russians would have been on their own. Hitler would have enjoyed a few more advantages in this counter-factual version of his attack on the Soviet Union, as Poland would have been his ally and the start line for the invasion would have been several hundred kilometres closer to Moscow. He would also have been spared the distraction of an unresolved war with Britain at his back—but he might have found the need to keep up his guard against a hostile Britain and an unconquered France even more burdensome.

Could Hitler have won his war in our alternative history? Probably not, for in the real history the outcome of the German-Soviet war, the greatest land battle in the history of the world, was not heavily influenced by events on other fronts of the Second World War. The Allied bombing offensive, for all its casualties, did not significantly reduce German industrial production before late 1944; nor did the Atlantic Wall tie up more German troops than, in the alternative history, would need to have been kept in the West to protect Germany from an Anglo-French declaration of war. Germany lost the war on the Eastern Front
because it was outnumbered two-to-one, outproduced by Soviet industry and decisively beaten on the battlefield, and those same factors would have led to a Soviet victory over Germany even if Britain and France had stayed out of the war.

Britain and France would have gone to war with Germany in the end, of course, because they would not have wanted victorious Soviet troops to occupy all of Germany up to the French border. Indeed, they would probably have attacked Germany around the time when the advancing Soviet army entered Poland: that is to say, at around the same time as the Allied landings in Normandy reopened the main ground war in the West with Germany in the real history. And the United States would almost certainly have been part of that anti-Nazi alliance.

Even by the rather flexible rules of writing counter-factual history, we are obliged to leave events beyond the specific area where we are making an alteration (no Anglo-French guarantee to Poland) unchanged. And in truth we may safely assume that Japan would have launched its campaign of conquest in South-East Asia and the Pacific around the time (late 1941 in the real history) when it looked as if Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union was going to succeed. That would have made Britain, France and the United States allies in the war against Japan, and they would no doubt have remained allies when the time came to enter the war against Germany. Their motive would have been to prevent an overwhelming Soviet dominance in the centre of Europe—but in practice, they would have been countering it by introducing an overwhelming American military presence into the west of the continent, because the United States was the only potential counterbalance available.

This alternative Second World War would still have ended, therefore, with American, British and French troops sharing a divided Germany with Soviet troops—and in all likelihood falling into serious disaccord quite quickly. No matter how you fiddled with the details of the history, you would still get a Communized Eastern Europe and a divided Germany out of this alternative scenario.

Some details would have been different, of course. The Jews of France and the Low Countries would have survived. So perhaps might the Italian Jews, for Mussolini might not have taken Italy all the way into a war with the Soviet Union, which offered him no territory or other advantages. Instead, he might have limited himself to sending “volunteers” to the Eastern Front as Spain’s fascist dictator, Francisco Franco, did—and perhaps stayed in power after Germany’s defeat as Franco did. But the details do not really matter, because the object of this exercise was simply to see how inevitable the outcome of the war was. And at the end of the exercise, it looks pretty inevitable.

This does not prove that Britain and France
should
have stayed out almost until the end of the war. We can moralize or strategize about that until the cows come home. But it does suggest that the war was really just another great-power struggle, driven by the same calculations as all the others. Even though it certainly didn’t feel that way to Sergeant Al Clavette, who fought in the Breskens Pocket with the Canadian Scottish Regiment.

T
HE FIRST ATTEMPT TO CREATE AN INSTITUTION THAT WOULD PREVENT
another great-power war, in 1919, was made in the same place, at the same time, by the same people who wrote the vengeful peace treaty that had virtually guaranteed exactly such a war. In 1945 the problem was different. The losers were punished even more severely than in 1919: their countries were occupied militarily for a decade, their wartime leaders were executed, some of their territory was handed over to their neighbours, and (in Germany’s case) a country was physically divided in two. But none of that was a great threat to future peace, because both Germany and Japan fell out of the ranks of the great powers after 1945. The real danger this time was that the victorious great powers would fall apart and become enemies, and everybody was aware of it. Especially the Canadians.

It was hard for Western governments to ignore the Soviet Union’s constant indulgence in the crudest invective, predicting inevitable conflict with the “imperialist states” and their eventual bloody demise. It created the impression that the Russians would attack if only they could. The Marxist-Leninist mode of thought, 1940s vintage—with its simple-minded Social-Darwinian belief in a final, inescapable world cataclysm from which “socialism,” the higher form of social organization,
would emerge victorious—has a lot to answer for. However, it is almost always a mistake to take the statements of ideological true-believers too literally. Most of them manage to find ways of incorporating a realistic assessment of the world within their ideology, and make decisions remarkably similar to those that would be made by a non-ideologue on the grounds of rational self-interest.

In April 1945, less than two weeks before Germany’s surrender, the four Allied great powers and fifty other nations came together in San
Francisco to draw up the charter for the new “United Nations Organization.” President Roosevelt had died, but not his vision of world peace enforced by continuing cooperation among the victorious great powers: the “four policemen,” as he called them (two sergeants and two constables, in practice, since the United States and the Soviet Union far outweighed Britain and China in power).

This cooperation would take place within the framework of the United Nations, which was actually a second attempt to make the League of Nations work, with somewhat tougher rules but the same basic concept of collective security. Everybody at San Francisco was determined that the enterprise should succeed this time, for there had never been a war as bad as the one just ending. Forty-five million people had been killed, and every traditional standard of civilized behaviour had been repeatedly violated. (Newsreels showing the horrors of the concentration camps were just being released.)

The Americans, who were acting as hosts, were disorganized. The War Memorial Opera House building was still being converted for the conference when the delegates arrived and nobody had been given office space. In his diary Charles Ritchie, a Canadian diplomat, mocked the theatricality of the plenary sessions.

The great powers were in constant disagreement at San Francisco, but the main problem for the Canadian diplomats was that they all cooperated in trying to exclude the lesser powers from the discussion. In their determination to avoid the paralysis that had destroyed the League, the great powers were concentrating most of the United Nations’ powers in the Security Council (of which they would be permanent members). And although Canada was almost a great military power itself in 1945—it had the fourth-largest armed forces among the victorious Allies—“almost” was not good enough for a seat on the board of directors.

Although Canada’s relative economic and military power in the world was greater in 1945 than it ever had been (or ever would be again), the country still lacked the instincts of a great power. However, it had lost its isolationist reflexes: Prime Minister Mackenzie King was only a
very reluctant convert to collective security, but the younger generation of Canadian politicians and diplomats who had matured in the war desperately wanted the United Nations to succeed. Lester Pearson, for example, was suggesting a two-hundred-thousand-man United Nations standing army to which Canada would contribute (exactly the sort of idea that made King nervous about Pearson). But the question of who would control the army was crucial.

If the United Nations actually ended up as the world’s policeman, then it would presumably have to enforce the rules of collective security against aggressors by armed force from time to time, and Canada might find itself being ordered by the great powers to contribute troops to impose Security Council decisions in which it had no voice. So the Canadians fought hard for better representation for all the middle and smaller powers, especially on the Security Council. Norman Robertson argued, “We are confident that no workable international system can be based on the concentration of influence and authority wholly in bodies composed of a few great powers to the exclusion of all the rest.”