by Gwynne Dyer
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 The French were ready to reoccupy the area militarily in 1936, and there is no doubt that Hitler would have withdrawn his troops if he had been challenged in that way, but British rearmament had barely begun.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.
He [Hitler] then astonished us by speaking with admiration of the British empire, of the necessity for its existence and of the civilisation that Britain had brought to the world.… He compared the British empire with the Catholic Church, saying they were both essential elements of stability in the world. He said that all he wanted from Britain was that she should acknowledge Germany’s position on the continent. The return of Germany’s lost colonies would be desirable but not essential, and he would even offer to support Britain with troops if she should be involved in any difficulties anywhere.
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.
CHAPTER 6
THE “NO-GROUND-TROOPS” WAR, 1939–41
The crisis is scheduled for about early September, very shortly before the one of last year. I suspect that it will be war this time. It has ceased to have any connection with democracy or any other ideological considerations and it’s just a naked question of interest. If I were English or French I’d feel like cutting Chamberlain’s throat, but as a Canadian I feel more like sneering cynically this season.
There aren’t any more issues that matter a damn in it, except incidentally. Not that we won’t be all dragged in too.…
Frank Pickersgill, Warsaw, July 27, 1939
FRANK PICKERSGILL 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.
I never dreamed that the day would come when … it should be my lot to be the one to lead this Dominion of Canada into a great war.
[…] The p
resent Government believe that conscription of men for overseas service will not be a necessary or an effective step. No such measure will be introduced by the present Administration. We have full faith in the readiness of Canadian men and women to put forth every effort in their power to preserve and to defend free institutions.…
Prime Minister Mackenzie King, September 8, 1939
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.
As the Paris Star reported on September 7, “Parisians greeted the British declaration of war on September 3 with gloomy quiet.” … Not only were there no celebrations, but also there were no official send-offs for volunteers—no band music, parades, speeches or crisp $10.00 bills.
Indeed, when the first high-school boy enlisted, there was no ceremony at the school, and a number of fellow-pupils expressed their lack of enthusiasm by saying things like, “He must be nuts,” and “He’ll be sorry.” He was killed while taking part in the Dieppe raid.…
Donald A. Smith, At the Forks of the Grand, vol. 2
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:
I was a bank clerk and I joined the Naval Reserve in Vancouver in ’37 as a midshipman … I was “called up” on the 31st of August ’39. I remember I was in the bank and a lieutenant by the name of Brock telephoned me (he became an admiral incidentally, Jeffry Brock). He said: “Campbell, come down immediately in uniform. There’s going to be a war on.”
So I locked my cash drawer, walked past the accountant, went to the Manager’s office and said: “Sir, there’s going to be a war on and I have to go.” And I’ve never been back to the bank other than to cash a cheque.
Craig Campbell
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.
However, in 1939 the U-boats could not sail more than five hundred miles west into the Atlantic, so the Canadian navy had no dealings with them yet. Canadian ships escorted the convoys only as far as St. John’s, Newfoundland: from there they were escorted by British battleships and armed merchant cruisers until they came within range of U-boat attack, at which point Royal Navy destroyers and flying boats took up the task of protecting them. And no other Canadian forces were anywhere near the enemy.
That was reassuring to French Canadians, as was King’s promise that the war would be a voluntary effort, but a large majority of French Canadians opposed Canada’s entry into the war anyway, and many suspected that King would not be able to maintain his anti-conscription guarantee indefinitely. So Premier Maurice Duplessis’s Union Nationale government in Quebec immediately called a provincial election, hoping to capitalize on French Canadians’ fears.
What Wilfrid Laurier, in opposition, could not do, King and Laporte, in power, have accomplished. In 1917 Laurier fought against conscription (in vain, but) in 1939 King, Lapointe, Cardin, Power and Dandurand save us from conscription.
Liberal newspaper advertisement, Quebec provincial election, October 1939
Touring Quebec along with the provincial Liberal leader, Adélard Godbout, the Quebec ministers in King’s cabinet—Ernest Lapointe, P.J.A. Cardin and “Chubby” Power—reassured Quebec voters that the Liberal government in Ottawa was the best possible defence against conscription. If Duplessis won the election in Quebec, they threatened, then all the federal cabinet ministers from Quebec would resign. Some people called it election by blackmail, and others warned that Quebec would eventually be betrayed anyway, but Godbout won an upset victory, taking 55 percent of the vote to a mere 36 percent for Duplessis’s Union Nationale. Imperialist English Canadian newspapers utterly misinterpreted the result and rejoiced at Quebec’s loyalty to Britain: Canada could now “fight the war to the finish.” But fighting the war to the finish was not King’s intention at all—and indeed, as O.J. Skelton had predicted, there was not much war to fight for the moment anyway. A bit in the air, and a bit at sea, and that was it. The most dangerous seas were around Britain, where the U-boats were operating within range of German land-based aircraft. That was where most of the Royal Canadian Navy’s pre-war destroyers were operating in the early days.
Most of the U-boats were manned by old-style naval officers. Many of them in the Navy were not Nazis at all—certainly not in the early days—and they were a pretty decent bunch.… It was rather a clean way to fight a war, in many ways, at sea, because … you can’t see who’s in the submarine, so there wasn’t anything very personal about it. But I did get very angry on one occasion.
Four great merchant ships carrying passengers were torpedoed in convoy in the space of about forty or fifty seconds. And curiously enough—an unusual thing to happen—all four broke their backs and fell into two halves. One half of one sank quite rapidly, so we had seven halves of ships floating around quite close to one another. And the lights were burning, so that you could see a cross-section of the ships: seven, eight, nine decks.
It was horrid to watch the passengers, who didn’t know any better, struggling out of their staterooms and pushing along the corridors towards a precipitous descent into the sea. Those behind not seeing what the trouble was and those in front wanting to push back, and they just tumbled over the edges by the hundreds.
Dawn eventually came, and we were being shadowed by aircraft all the time, of course, to keep
the U-boats in touch with the convoy. During rescue operations, when it was clearly evident that we were stopped in the water to do nothing but pick up boats full of people, we were machine-gunned—some harum-scarum young fellow out to take back a head-count or something to the Fuhrer, I don’t know. Well, after that night of horror, to have this happen the following day.… You can get pretty mad.
Lieutenant Jeffrey Brock (later admiral)
Having overrun Poland in three weeks, Germany made no move to attack the Western powers, and the period of the “Phoney War” began. The Second World War took a lot longer to get properly underway than the First because neither side was ready: Hitler’s rearmament plans had envisaged being fully prepared for war only in 1944, and the British and French were even further behind. The premature onset of the war was due to Hitler’s impatient gamble that he could get Poland without triggering a war with the Anglo-French alliance, and a belief in London and Paris that it would be better to fight now, before Germany’s acquisitions of further allies and territories in Eastern Europe added to the Reich’s strength. But neither side was ready for a real war on the Western Front, so through the winter of 1939–40 they just sat on the frontiers and mulled things over.
Nor was it really a world war yet in the winter of 1940: only three of the seven great powers were involved. If it went on long enough, however, it was almost bound to expand into a world war, because any war involving some of the great powers tends to drag in all the others eventually. And from Germany’s point of view—from that of all three Axis powers, Germany, Italy and Japan—a world war would be a very bad idea. The other four great powers (Britain, France, the Soviet Union and the United States, plus all their allies and dependencies) had an effective superiority in wealth and population of at least three-to-one over the Axis powers. There was, in fact, very little chance that the challengers could win a world war—so their only options were to achieve a quick win with their existing forces before the relative weight of resources began to tell, or to avoid war entirely. In Germany’s case, it was a bit late for that, but well into 1940 Hitler hoped that a change of government in London would make possible a negotiated peace that recognized Germany’s gains in Eastern Europe.