by Gwynne Dyer
July 12th.
We left Glen Falls at 9 a.m. Near French Mountain we entered the Adirondacks. It is about this point that troops from the North would enter an open rolling country lying between Glen Falls and Albany.
Sutherland Brown, Special Reconnaissance
Sutherland Brown’s military strategy was not at fault: his purpose in planning to seize large parts of the northern United States by surprise at the very outbreak of war was to win time for reinforcements from Britain to reach Canada before U.S. troops could pour across the Canadian border and overwhelm us. A similar strategy had been applied, with successful results, in the War of 1812: small contingents of troops from Upper Canada had crossed the frontier as soon as the United States declared war and seized Detroit and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, thus slowing the main American invasion significantly. The problem lay only in Colonel Brown’s grasp of contemporary reality. The British could not have sent reinforcements to Canada even if his strategy had won them the necessary time—and in the 1920s Canada did not have one-tenth the number of trained troops that would have been required to carry out his plan.
What I want to accomplish, if I possibly can, is to have a well organised, snappy defence force that will be a credit to Canada without being too expensive.
Minister of Militia George Graham, 1922
The huge Canadian army of the First World War had been dissolved with great speed. The 350,000 Canadians who were overseas on November 11, 1918, were almost all home and out of uniform by mid-1919 (although not before impatient veterans had turned to violence in the holding camps in Britain; a riot at Kinmel Park in north Wales in March 1919 left five dead and twenty-seven injured). The fifteen militia divisions survived on paper, but with fewer than fifty thousand active members. Nobody was willing to tolerate the idea of conscription in peacetime, and the regular forces wound up with around five thousand men. Most of the numbered battalions of the Canadian Expeditionary Force and their hard-won traditions disappeared in the postwar reorganization of the armed forces, although a few were permitted to convert into militia regiments, with regimental names replacing their old numbers. Only two unique infantry units survived to join the Royal Canadian Regiment as permanent elements of Canada’s regular army: Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry and the 22nd Battalion, the only French-speaking battalion in the CEF, which had so distinguished itself that it was even allowed to retain its number, becoming the Royal 22ème Regiment (“Van Doos,” in English).
Such courtesies cost very little, but postwar Canadian governments were not willing to spend real money on the armed forces. The Canadian defence budget in 1922 was $12 million—just under a dollar and a half per Canadian—and it did not grow much until the late 1930s. Given the country’s remarkably secure strategic situation and the absence of identifiable enemies, this parsimony was not unreasonable. But it was rather demoralizing for the remaining regular soldiers.
When the three-inch mortar came into use … there were only three of them in the whole of Canada. Well, I was keen on mortars because I had just been at the Small Arms School and thought I knew something about it.
So we decided to make our own … and we had the company pioneer build a wooden mock-up of a three-inch mortar—quite illegally, we paid for it out of the company’s sports fund—and we had wooden bombs that we shoved down this black pipe and hoped for the best. At least we learned the drill.
Dan Spry (later General), junior officer, Royal Canadian Regiment
What would have been even more demoralizing for the soldiers, had they allowed themselves to dwell on it, was their sheer uselessness to the country that paid their wages. The only possible invader of Canada was still the United States, but the American threat was no longer very plausible politically. Moreover, by the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 London agreed to limit the Royal Navy to the same size as that of the United States, which meant that there was now absolutely no chance that Britain would ever again send troops west across the Atlantic to defend Canada against an American attack. Since Britain had large naval commitments elsewhere, henceforward it would always be inferior to the U.S. Navy in the Western Atlantic. London simply no longer had the ability to get troops west across the Atlantic against American opposition
However, Canada’s professional armed forces took no notice whatever of this new strategic reality. The foundation of Canadian military planning continued to be a militia force, which, on mobilization, would amount to eleven infantry divisions and four cavalry divisions (though they were now only planning on having 130,000 men available to man these divisions)—all for fighting the United States. And, according to the calculations of Colonel Brown’s Directorate of Military Operations and Intelligence, by the time the “flying columns” of Canadian militia that had been thrown across the American border in a controlled penetration of a few hundred miles had been forced to retreat to Canada’s own frontiers, British military operations should be well underway against America’s east coast, while Australian and Indian expeditionary forces would be on their way to attack California. The Americans would sure be sorry that they had picked a fight with the British empire.
The real Canadian militia, by contrast only succeeded in giving eight or nine days’ training to 38,000 men in 1923. The British reinforcements Brown was counting on would never be sent, and the Australian and Indian contingents were wholly imaginary. “I consider that the most difficult point in the Scheme is the fact that it is drawn up for forces which are to a certain extent non-existent,” the commander of Military District No. 4 (Montreal) observed drily.
Q. What inspired Sutherland Brown to think that way in the 1920s—I mean, a war with the United States?
Well, I don’t know. I think possibly there wasn’t any other war to think about. (laughter)
General E.L.M. Burns, commander of Canadian forces in Italy, 1944; commander of UN Emergency Force in Suez, 1956
General “Tommy” Burns served with Sutherland Brown in the 1920s, and his observation cuts very close to the bone. A professional military force needs enemies to justify its existence, and the First World War’s lasting institutional bequest to Canada was a full array of professional armed forces staffed by native-born regular officers who were paid, quite literally, to identify foreign threats to Canadian national security. The threats they identified would vary from time to time, as would the measures they advocated to deal with them, but they were unlikely ever to declare that there was no threat to Canada. Of course they found threats, whether from the United States or elsewhere, and of course they asked for money to maintain their own profession as a “deterrent” to those threats.
By 1925 the Royal Canadian Navy had only two small destroyers left, and the Royal Canadian Air Force numbered fewer than a thousand men. The Permanent Force of the army amounted to only 4,125 troops, and the militia organization was somewhat smaller than the one that had existed before the First World War. Nevertheless, the Canadian armed forces struggled on, devoting most of their energies to sheer institutional survival, in the hope that they would one day be needed again by their country. Or if not precisely by their own country, at least by Britain—and since they were entirely British-oriented in their training, equipment and strategic thinking, they had no doubt that any British war would be theirs as well. This had the additional attraction, from the soldiers’ point of view, that it allowed them to play a role in the biggest and most professionally interesting military league available: Europe. And the myth that was forged to justify the huge loss of Canadian lives in Europe in the First World War—the pretense that it had somehow been in defence of Canada—made the English Canadian population ready to believe the soldiers when they talked about European “threats” to Canadian security.
The old strategic and psychological equation of dependence on Britain to protect us from American invasion lasted just long enough to deliver us smoothly into our new obsession with playing a role in the European balance of power. Once Sutherland Brown left h
is post as Canada’s senior strategic planner, his Defence Scheme Number One rapidly fell into disrepute. In 1933 every military district in Canada was instructed to burn all documents connected with the plan (which would have caused severe embarrassment if they had somehow fallen into American hands). However, the alternative plans to send Canadian troops to fight in Europe again in case of war did not change.
Of all the members of the League, Canada was the first to … have torpedoed the organization, or to use another metaphor, to rob it of any teeth it had.
Senator W.A. Griesbach (Conservative, Alberta), Senate Debates, 1934
The descent into world war again at the end of the 1930s was premature in terms of the normal cycle: only twenty years had elapsed since the last one, rather than the more typical half century. The drastic shortening of the cycle was largely due to the way the First World War ended, but the failure of the League of Nations certainly did its part.
The Treaty of Versailles was a time bomb planted under the League of Nations. It heaped punishments on Germany—loss of territory, a large measure of compulsory disarmament, demilitarized zones, massive reparations and a “war guilt” clause that purported to justify the terms of the treaty by blaming the war exclusively on the Germans—punishments that were neither defensible in terms of justice nor (more important) sustainable over the long term. Britain and France were simply not capable of depriving Germany permanently of great-power status.
However loyally the League’s members upheld the principle of collective security—even if they did not take the escape route prepared for them by the Canadian “interpretation” of Article 10 in 1923—the League system was bound to come under severe pressure as a consequence of Germany’s resentment at its artificially subordinate status. If the great powers in the League did not move fast enough in removing what the Germans perceived as injustices (and they did not), then they were certain to face an eventual German challenge that could be stopped only by invoking Article 10 and resorting to military force. In fact, however, the challenge that effectively destroyed the collective security system came a little sooner than that, and not from Germany.
On October 2, 1935, Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, and an overwhelming majority of League members promptly declared Italy an aggressor. Mussolini’s crime was no worse than what every other great power had done in the late nineteenth century. Ethiopia was one of the last independent bits of Africa, and Italy, only lately arrived on the great-power scene, was belatedly seeking its share of the colonial spoils. But the international rules had been changed by the creation of the League in 1919, and Ethiopia was a member: either the rules had to be enforced or the organization was meaningless. Moreover, this was a crisis the League members could actually deal with. There was plenty of time to organize a response, since ten months elapsed between the first indication of Italy’s intention and the actual attack; the Ethiopians themselves were determined to fight; and Italy’s sea communications with Africa were highly vulnerable to the stronger British and French navies.
Within a week, the League began to consider economic sanctions against Italy: nobody was talking about military measures yet, but economic sanctions could easily be the first step along that road. And Canada, to everybody’s surprise, actually sought and got a seat on the committee that had to decide what those sanctions would be.
We went into the League, took benefits, must assume responsibilities, or get out, not try to hornswoggle ourselves out.
Prime Minister R.B. Bennett to Dr. O.D. Skelton, permanent undersecretary for external affairs, 1935
In 1935 Richard B. Bennett, a former Calgary lawyer “of large displacement” (as they used to say of ocean liners), had been prime minister of Canada for five years. Bombastic in public and autocratic with his colleagues, he was one of those rare Canadian politicians (Pierre Trudeau is the only other one to achieve prime-ministerial rank since) who followed their private convictions quite heedless of popular opinion. In Bennett’s case, his intellectual independence was buttressed by considerable wealth and excellent connections in Britain (after he retired from politics he moved to England and acquired a peerage through the help of influential friends), but his support for collective security was quite genuine.
This attitude brought him into permanent conflict with most senior members of his own External Affairs Department, and most notably with Dr. O.D. Skelton, the permanent undersecretary, a gaunt scholar who had had a brilliant academic career before being seduced into government by Mackenzie King ten years before. Skelton had originally supported the idea of the League but had concluded that this particular league was not going to succeed, and he had no confidence whatever in the ability of British diplomacy to avoid another war. So, in practice, Skelton was an isolationist, convinced that Canada at least might be spared the horrors of the next war if it kept out of overseas commitments.
Skelton did his best to talk Bennett out of having anything to do with League sanctions against Italy, but the prime minister simply wouldn’t hear of it. In one bitter discussion in September 1935 he called Skelton and his colleagues at External Affairs “welshers” because of their desire to evade Canada’s commitments under the League Covenant, and in October he heatedly overrode External’s attempt to have the Canadian delegation in Geneva abstain from the vote condemning Italy for aggression: “No one in Canada is going to deny Italy is guilty or object to our saying so. If they did, [I’m] not going to wriggle out of it if it meant I didn’t get one vote,” he shouted down the phone to Skelton. But Bennett was deliberately ignoring Skelton’s quite plausible reason for wanting Canada to abstain: in early October 1935 Canada was nearing the end of a long federal election campaign and Bennett was almost certain to lose that election to Mackenzie King—who would certainly not want to honour Canada’s commitments to the League.
Do honourable members think it is Canada’s role at Geneva to attempt to regulate a European war?
Mackenzie King to the House of Commons, 1935
That was precisely Canada’s role (and everybody else’s) under the League’s Covenant. Only collective security offered any hope of preventing another great war from occurring in Europe sooner or later—but it did involve running the risk of at least a small war to deter aggression. Canadians had paid a high price for their intervention in the last European war, and an isolationist policy was a tempting alternative. The Atlantic was a broad moat, and Canadians could still shelter behind it if they wished.
King instinctively distrusted the League of Nations, in large part because he saw avoiding overseas commitments as a stark political necessity for the Liberals. French Canadian opinion was virtually unanimous in its opposition to foreign military involvement of any kind (not a single French-language newspaper in Quebec supported Canadian participation in League action over Ethiopia).
He needed English Canadian votes too, and he was English Canadian himself. As early as 1923 he had declared: “If a great and clear call of duty comes [to fight by Britain’s side], Canada will respond, whether or not the United States responds, as she did in 1914.” King was unwilling to risk even the remotest chance of war for the right cause, the League. Yet he was ultimately willing to fight for the wrong one, British imperial interest, if he had to.
With King’s overwhelming election victory on October 14, 1935 (the Liberals won 173 seats out of 245), Canada’s man on the League sanctions committee at Geneva, Walter Riddell, was put in a very awkward position. Riddell had been Ottawa’s permanent representative at Geneva for ten years, and he saw the way things were going: everybody was afraid to ban the export of really vital commodities to Italy for fear of driving Mussolini into a corner and provoking a war. It was one of those situations, not uncommon in diplomacy, where each nation knew what its duty was, but hung back nervously for fear that other countries would not do their duty and it would find itself out front all alone. But mere wrist-slapping would not stop the Italian dictator, so Riddell decided Canada should take a lead.
By this time I had become thoroughly convinced that this was the last and best chance that the Member States would have of preventing a European collapse and another world war; that it was therefore imperative that the Member States should accept their obligations not only willingly but generously, as any losses they might suffer would be a mere bagatelle in comparison with the losses in the event of a break-up of the Collective System.
Walter Riddell, World Security by Conference
Riddell took a very big chance. He knew perfectly well that Mackenzie King, in full harmony with his old appointee, the isolationist Skelton, would forbid any Canadian initiative that might ultimately involve Canada in the application of military sanctions by the League. Yet he feared that if nobody took a strong line in Geneva, the principle of collective security would slide ignominiously into oblivion amid timid half measures and shabby compromises. So on November 2 he leapt in at the deep end: he formally proposed that League members ban the export of oil, coal, iron and steel to Italy, knowing full well that Mussolini was threatening to go to war with anybody who applied such pressure to Italy.
Riddell’s initiative put some spine into the hesitant members of the committee. On November 6 they unanimously recommended the full list of Riddell’s sanctions to all League members. If those sanctions had been applied, Italy would have had to stop its attack on Ethiopia or grind to a halt, since it produced no oil itself and had only about two months’ reserves. But meanwhile Riddell was having to play a double game, disguising the extent to which he had committed Canada in his telegrams back to Ottawa and pretending to misunderstand the instructions he was getting from there to do nothing conspicuous. It could not last, for newspapers around the world were calling the initiative that had galvanized the committee into action the “Canadian proposal.”