Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014

by Gwynne Dyer

  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.

  Shortly before two o’clock the ’phone rang, and the girl at the switchboard said it was the President of the United States who wished to speak to me. The President said: “Hello, is that you, Mackenzie?” … I replied: Yes. He then said: “I am going tomorrow night in my train to Ogdensburg. If you are free I would like to have you come and have dinner with me there. I would like to talk with you about the matter of the destroyers, and they [the British] are arranging to let us have bases on some of their Atlantic colonial possessions for our naval and air forces.

  “I gave an interview, this morning, to the press in which I said that I was in direct communication with Great Britain with regard to these matters in the Atlantic. That I was taking up with you direct the matter of mutual defence of our coasts on the Atlantic. I thought it was better to keep the two things distinct.… I have told the press that we will be meeting together. Are you free tomorrow night?”

  I said: Yes.

  “Mackenzie” King, August 16, 1940

  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.

  At Ogdensburg the two men talked about the destroyers and the bases, but the really significant development for Canada was not the promise that it would get half a dozen of the ancient American destroyers. It was the creation of the “Canada–United States Permanent Joint Board on Defence.” King fretted about the significance of the word “Permanent,” but Roosevelt felt the board should be designed not “to meet this particular situation alone but to help secure the continent for the future,” and King gave in. He also consented to joint military exercises, and to the movement of American troops through Canada. Ralston, the minister of defence, was delighted, and so was Skelton at External Affairs: Canada was finally “escaping from the embraces of mother England,” he said. Churchill noticed this too, and was “querulous” about the Permanent Joint Board. The dominion had found a new protector.

  Mackenzie King would later grow quite nervous about the closeness of Canada’s developing relationship with the United States, but at this point he gloried in his role as a vital intermediary between Churchill and Roosevelt.

  Right down through 1941, the war went splendidly well for Mackenzie King. The political situation at home had stabilized, and very few Canadians were getting hurt in the war. In fact, only the air force was taking significant casualties, and even that could be turned to political advantage.

  The main killing ground was over northern France and Belgium, where the British and Canadian air forces continually “harrassed the enemy” by bombing railway lines, bridges, airfields and other military targets. The raids had no real strategic purpose, since the British and Canadian armies were nowhere near ready for an attack on France at that time; they were mainly a morale-boosting activity to demonstrate that the fight wasn’t over. It was a very expensive way to accomplish very little.

  There was a raid and a fighter sweep in October or November of ’41 where seven of our aircraft were shot down out of nine that wound up in combat. It was over France. In other words two pilots came back and the rest were killed or prisoners of war, so that would be the equivalent of seventy percent of the squadron being disabled.

  Omer Lévesque

  Omer Lévesque survived that disaster, and a few weeks later his squadron got four confirmed kills, including the first Focke-Wulf 190 shot down in combat (which was downed by Lévesque himself). However, even good fighter pilots have short careers.

  One of the prime targets for the raids over France had been three large German warships, the Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Prinz Eugen, which had been tied up at Brest since May 1941, when the Bismarck was sunk in the North Atlantic. By the end of the year Hitler was insisting that they be moved north to Norway, from where they could attack the convoys to Russia—and to get there, they had to run the English Channel. On February 11, 1942 the three ships slipped out of Brest in the middle of the night, and by the time they were spotted by an RAF patrol at eleven the following morning they were already approaching the Straits of Dover. They had been given all the air cover that the Luftwaffe could spare:

  We went over the area, but we didn’t see the bombers we were supposed to escort. We just saw aircraft in absolute combat, and in the middle of it the German ships shooting at anything that came close. So there were aircraft from twenty feet above the water to about twelve hundred feet. I was leading a section, and while I was firing at a 109 I remember my number two just about sawed my wing off on my left side. I looked up and this propellor was just about touching my wing, and that took me off that 109 I was aiming for.…

  Then I got into real dogfights with 109s and 190s, until I was hit myself. I was too low to parachute.… There was smoke on the side of the aircraft, there were some ships shooting at me, and I settled over the water.…

  And I remember waking up under water thirty, forty feet, like a dark green bottle colour, and I remember my canopy had been back. I hadn’t closed it, because it would have entombed me. I had my hand on the canopy so it wouldn’t close on me. You could never open it under water, I’m pretty sure.…

  I saw little bubbles of air, and little bubbles of light—you know, when you go deep—and then I said I must be alive, I must be okay. I eventually got myself loose by grabbing the antenna of the Spitfire, and then swam to the surface. I couldn’t inflate my Mae West, but the kapok kept me just above the water, though each wave would go in my face. After about three-quarters of an hour of that I saw a net coming to pick me up.

  Then I really woke up, lying on a bed, bleeding and being bandaged. And pictures of Hitler and listening to Beethoven music, I’ll never forget that. I said I must be with the Germans, all right. But the Captain gave me some cognac. He didn’t ask me any questions. He knew what was going on.

  Lévesque, one kill short of being an ace, spent the rest of the war as a prisoner, but the feats of Canadian fighter pilots were heavily exploited by King’s government. Since Canada’s losses in the air would never raise the issue of conscription, it went down well even in French Canada.

  When Leo Robillard of Ottawa, who recently was decorated by the King, blew two planes in a day out of the sky over France, when Jean-Paul Sabourin took down three in as many hours in Libya, were they not destroying planes which might some day be attacking Canada—yes, even the city of Quebec? Auger, Morin, Lecavalier, Desloges, St. Pierre, they destroyed enemy planes in every part of Europe. For every bomber our men destroy away from here, there is that much less risk of one of them coming here.…
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br />   C.G. “Chubby” Power, minister of national defence for air, Quebec, 1942

  It wasn’t true, of course: it would be another decade before any “enemy” bomber had the range to reach Canada. But it sounded well—and meanwhile Canada got on with what it saw as its real contribution to the war effort: the production of weapons.

  Before the war we had a very high level of unemployment in Canada, and in Windsor particularly, and we used to say if there was a war we would find the money to provide work.… It took some months after 1939 for unemployment to be mitigated, but it wasn’t very long before the Ford Motor Company received contracts to build trucks and other military vehicles, and by the middle of 1940 we were experiencing almost full employment.

  Paul Martin, parliamentary assistant for labour, 1943

  At the outbreak of war, there was virtually no armaments manufacturing industry in Canada: the Inglis (washing machine) Company was producing Bren guns, but they made hardly enough to meet Canada’s needs, let alone Britain’s. For the first few months of the war the government floundered, uncertain of what the requirements would be, but on the day that the Germans invaded Norway C.D. Howe, a powerful Ontario Liberal, was appointed minister of munitions and supply. It was an inspired choice.

  Howe was one of my great ministers. He was … a most satisfactory man to work for, because his method was to say: “Okay, you’re my man. You go and do the job. If you fail, I’ll fire you; if you succeed, I’ll do what you say.”

  He didn’t have policies. He had men.… And it was a very effective way of getting things done. He wasn’t a man who had papers all over his desk. He just had people who came to see him and talked to him about the problems.

  Mitchell Sharp, Department of Finance, 1942–51

  Howe recruited a small cadre of brilliant and ruthless managers to create and run a Canadian war economy. They were the “dollar a year” men, who came to work for the government for free. (Well, sort of—their companies carried on paying their salaries.) “Howe’s boys” included men like R.A.C. Henry, an engineer who had been general manager of the Beauharnois Light, Heat and Power Company, E.P. Taylor, a financier from Toronto, and Henry Borden (nephew of Sir Robert Borden), a Toronto corporate lawyer. They nominally constituted a departmental executive committee—but in reality they were the wheeler-dealers who enabled Howe to work miracles. When C.D. Howe became minister of munitions and supply, Canada lacked almost everything: money, skills and tools. But demand was unlimited, thanks to the insatiable British and American requirements for weapons and raw materials, and credit to fuel the expansion was effectively unlimited too. In just two years, Canada’s gross national product grew by 47 percent: over 1,200,000 men and women were involved in industrial production for war by 1943, turning out everything from synthetic rubber to radar sets and binoculars.

  At the Malton aircraft factory north of Toronto (originally National Steel Car, until Howe took it over and reorganized it as Victory Aircraft), they built long-range Lancaster bombers:

  Q. When did you come to work here, Faye?

  I started in 1943.

  Q. How old were you then?

  I was 17.

  Q. What was it like there then?

  It was very nice. We had mostly female employees. We did have the odd disabled person, but they were very fine workers. We didn’t have a coffee break; we had canteens every second little corner. And we had a dance-hall at lunchtime upstairs.

  Q. Did you go dancing there at lunch-hour?

  Every lunchtime. I also had two sisters working here. I worked in the heat treatment and my sisters were “Rosie the riveters,” you know, and they were only about 5 feet tall and the guns were as big as they were. But the job I had, I’d get the [hot] rivets out of the bath and run them on the floor. I can tell you every corner of this building.

  Q. You’d actually run with the rivets?

  I would run, yeah. At seventeen you had a little more speed.

  Q. What were you paid in the war?

  Oh, I think I got about $53 a week—but that was big money in those days.

  Faye Denton (worked at Victory Aircraft, 1944–45)

  Canada was going to have to produce everything: trucks, tanks, rifles, ammunition, artillery, warships, bombs and aircraft. Everything was needed right now, and only the government had the resources to bulldoze its way through the obstacles. By the middle of 1940 Howe had brought Canadian industry firmly under government supervision. Factories produced what the government told them to, with raw materials that were controlled by the government (and often bought by special crown corporations), and, under the NRMA, labour was directed into critical areas by the government.

  We received a cable from England asking for information on the manufacture of hundreds of items of equipment. You see, they had lost everything at Dunkirk, and they wanted to know how much it would cost, and what the unit prices would be.… We met in Howe’s office … and here’s what he said: “We have no idea of the cost, but before the war is over everything will be needed, so let’s go ahead anyway. If we lose the war, nothing will matter. If we win the war, the cost will still have been of no consequence and will be forgotten.”

  Henry Borden

  Howe’s greatest difficulty, in fact, was in deciding what to produce, for the British requirements kept changing. Facing invasion in 1940, they had wanted the weapons to repel it, but by the following year they were starting to think in offensive terms, which required rather different weapons. Frustrated by second-hand information, Howe decided to sail to London to find out for himself, accompanied by three leading Canadian businessmen: Gordon Scott of Montreal, E.P. Taylor of Toronto and W.C. Woodward of Vancouver. “I pray he … will get through all right and return in safety,” King wrote in his diary—but on December 14, 1941, Angus Macdonald, the navy minister, called to say that Howe’s ship had been torpedoed. There was no further news.

  But December 1941 was when it became obvious to anyone with eyes to see that the Allies were bound to win the war. It should have been clear six months before, when Hitler invaded Russia, for in the end it was the Red Army that destroyed the German army: about 85 percent of German casualties were suffered on the Eastern Front. But that wasn’t yet obvious, for in late 1941 the Russians were still mounting a last desperate defence in front of Moscow, deep in the Soviet Union. But the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 brought the United States into the war on the Allied side, and after that it was settled: the Allies were bound to win. As for Mackenzie King, his strategy had been a brilliant success: Canada’s casualties in two and a half years of war had been under 5,000 dead—and almost none of them had been ground troops.

  I am far from despairing for his life, though I believe, if [he is] spared, it will be as a result of rescue at sea—a perfectly terrible experience … There is a certain irony in the situation in that Howe, himself, usually prefers to travel by plane and was taking this method to rest.

  Mackenzie King Record, December 14, 1941

  In fact, C.D. Howe was rescued off Iceland after a short time in the water (although one of his party, Gordon Scott, was drowned). The Canadian delegation arrived in London to a hero’s welcome. In the talks that ensued over the next few weeks with the British ministries of supply and aircraft production, it turned out that what London now wanted above all was long-range bombers to carry the war to Germany. Canadians were not the only ones who were reluctant to get into a big ground war. But whichever strategy the Allies ultimately adopted against Germany, most of the troops and equipment would have to come across the Atlantic first.

  By 1941, with the whole western coastline of Europe in German hands and longer-range submarines coming into service, the U-boat war had spread west to within sight of the Canadian coast. It became necessary to give convoys continuous anti-submarine escort all the way across the Atlantic, and the British navy was already stretched to the limit. So the Canadian Navy was asked to establish the Newfoundland Escort Force, and in June 19
41 Commodore L.W. Murray set up headquarters in St. John’s. At that point the Canadian Navy’s strength was about nineteen thousand men—of whom twelve thousand had been in for less than a year. What training they got tended to be done on the job—at sea.

  By now the Canadian Navy was building up toward its eventual astonishing strength of six hundred ships. It remained predominantly a small-ship navy down to the end: corvettes were the classic Canadian warships of the Second World War. They were small, overcrowded ships with a wicked motion: they would “roll even on wet grass,” as the sailors put it. Every available space was crammed with equipment or weapons—not that they had much in the way of that either. Most of them, until quite late in the war, had no radar, only the most primitive versions of ASDIC (an early form of sonar), and no High-Frequency Direction-Finders (HF/DF) for radio-locating submarines that were shadowing the convoys. For attacking submerged submarines they had only depth charges: large drums of high explosive that were rolled off the ship’s stern and exploded at a pre-set depth.

  If the submarines were attacking on the surface at night, as they often did, the corvettes could try to hit them with their single 4-inch gun—or resort to the ancient tactic of ramming. To try to avoid the German submarines the convoys regularly sailed very far north, and even in summer the North Atlantic weather was a constant enemy. The corvettes were perpetually wet inside and out—except when it froze, and their superstructure became encased in a thick sheath of ice whose weight would eventually capsize the ship if it were not continuously chipped off. Below deck the cramped crew quarters stank of diesel fumes, stale food, unwashed bodies and vomit. The crews had little chance of survival if they were torpedoed in mid-Atlantic: for most of the year, thirty minutes in the frigid water was enough to kill a man.