by Gwynne Dyer
The convoy battles were non-stop, for no sooner would a Canadian escort group hand over an eastbound convoy to the British navy somewhere in mid-Atlantic than it would pick up a westbound convoy for the trip home. The U-boats operated in packs, with one or more submarines trailing a convoy and radioing its position ahead to others, which would gather in its path. The British Admiralty was able to intercept and decipher some of the radio messages and reroute the convoys out of danger, but if the messages took too long to decode, the slaughter would begin.
Convoys made up of faster merchant ships could sometimes simply outrun the U-boats, but the slow convoys that sailed from Sydney, Nova Scotia, were a nightmare. One of the worst experiences for the Canadian Navy was convoy SC42 in September 1941. It was known that a group of U-boats were gathering at the southeastern tip of Greenland and ten other convoys, westbound and eastbound, were diverted to the south. But SC42 could not be rerouted as the escorts were short of fuel. The conditions were ideal for the U-boats: the heavy seas and gale-force winds had died down, and several of the aged freighters were leaving a trail of black smoke. The convoy was out of range of the air patrols that flew out of Newfoundland, and the escort consisted of only one destroyer, HMCS Skeena, and three corvettes. Skeena had no radar, no HF/DF and no experience of anti-submarine warfare.
Eight U-boats were lying in wait for the 64-ship convoy south of Greenland, and shortly after midnight on September 10 the first ship was sunk. The entire convoy then made an emergency forty-five-degree turn, but failed to shake the submarines, one of which passed right down through the middle of the convoy on the surface. By the time dawn arrived, the toll was seven ships sunk and an eighth badly damaged.
During the day another ship was torpedoed, and as night fell the wolf pack closed in again, sinking two ships almost at once. At that point two more Canadian corvettes arrived on the scene—Moose Jaw and Chambly—and promptly got an ASDIC contact. Their depth charges forced the U-boat to the surface, and Moose Jaw rammed it. The U-boat’s captain abandoned ship by leaping from his conning tower onto the corvette’s deck, but the boarding party sent aboard by Chambly to retrieve U-501’s secret papers had to abandon the rapidly sinking submarine in a hurry, and one Canadian stoker was trapped inside and drowned.
It was the first confirmed “kill” ever achieved by the Royal Canadian Navy (after two years of war), but it hardly evened the score: before the night was over another five ships were lost, bringing the total to fifteen in two days. Before the hapless convoy reached its final destination, another ship was sunk: the casualty rate was 25 percent for the merchant ships on a single crossing. No organization could have withstood these sorts of losses for long, but SC42’s ordeal took place in the “Black Pit,” the mid-Atlantic gap where no land-based air cover was available. Few convoys took so bad a beating after continuous air cover across the Atlantic became available by long-range aircraft operating out of Britain, Iceland and Newfoundland.
Canada’s navy was the third-largest in the world by 1945, and it was fighting exactly the kind of capital-intensive war that both Mackenzie King and C.D. Howe felt most comfortable with. It allowed Canada to exploit and develop its industrial resources, and it would never kill so many people that the government would face political difficulties at home. In terms of sheer nervous strain and sustained physical misery, nobody had a harder war than the Royal Canadian Navy, but it only lost two thousand dead during the entire war.
EXCURSION 6
BLITZKRIEG
IT TOOK THE GERMAN WEHRMACHT SIX WEEKS IN THE SPRING OF 1940 to conquer France and the Low Countries and drive the British army out of Europe. Germany’s total losses were 45,000 dead and missing and 110,000 wounded, fewer than in any one of twenty major battles of the First World War. Yet the Germans enjoyed no significant superiority over the French and British forces either in numbers or in equipment. How did they do it?
There was a brief period after the fall of France when Blitzkrieg (lightning war) was seen as an unstoppable, almost magical technique, but it was nothing of the sort. Military theorists in every great power were well aware of the techniques of surprise and rapid penetration that had achieved the breakthroughs of 1918, and in the two decades between the wars they had worked hard to refine them. If you could make everything mobile—tanks, of course, but also self-propelled artillery and infantry in armoured personnel carriers—then the breakthroughs would happen faster and go deeper. Provide lots of close air support from ground-attack aircraft that were in radio contact with the ground forces, and they would go faster still. Maybe fast enough that you could break right through into open country and collapse the enemy’s defences entirely.
The German theorists were not cleverer than the others; they were just better or luckier in getting their senior officers to listen to them. And even then, the German High Command might not have bet the farm on a flat-out blitzkrieg attack in 1940 if an earlier plan for a more conventional offensive that was virtually a replay of the Schlieffen Plan had not been captured by the Allies in January 1940. With that plan compromised, it was much easier for General Gerd von Manstein to sell a radical alternative proposal that was fully supported by his subordinate, General Heinz Guderian, the leading German expert on armoured warfare. By all means go ahead and send the bulk of the German army marching in a great sweeping curve west and then south through Holland and Belgium as the British and French expect, said Manstein, and the Allies will move their armies up into Belgium to meet it. But then the real attack will come as an armoured spearhead advancing straight west from Germany through the Ardennnes, hilly country that is not generally thought suitable for tanks. Move fast enough and you’ll come out into open country before the French can react and get anybody there to stop you—and then just keep going.
Guderian’s tanks took three days to get through the narrow, twisting roads of the Ardennes, using Stuka dive-bombers to crack any French resistance. After that it was practically a free run straight across northern France to the English Channel—and now the Germans were behind all the French and British troops that had advanced into Belgium. They might all have been captured, but Hitler let most of them get away at Dunkirk.
The French didn’t lose because they were demoralized. They became demoralized because they were losing badly, and simply could not react fast enough to this new blitzkrieg technique. But tactical innovation of this kind never remains a surprise for long, and the counter-move was obvious: make your defences even deeper. Many miles deep, with successive belts of trenches, minefields, bunkers, gun positions and tank traps to slow down the armoured spearheads and eventually wear them away. And even if there is a breakthrough, you will have had time to get your reserves in place. You may have to retreat—the whole front may have to roll back dozens or even hundreds of miles—but the front will not collapse completely. And that was the problem, in a way.
Pure blitzkrieg only lasted about eighteen months. What the new technique actually did was to set the continuous front in motion. During the First World War, between the end of 1914 and the end of 1918, the Western Front barely moved fifty miles. There were just as many soldiers available in the Second World War, and even more firepower, so the continuous front was still a fact, but now it moved a lot. And as it did it would roll over towns and villages and crush them—in some cases not just once, but several times, back and forth. It was a war of attrition, but on an even larger scale. The Soviet Union, for example, built at least 100,000 tanks, 100,000 aircraft and 175,000 artillery pieces during the war, of which at least two-thirds were destroyed in the fighting. Twice as many soldiers were killed as in the First World War—and almost twice as many civilians were killed as soldiers. They were killed almost incidentally, as a by-product of the fighting. They didn’t have to go to the front; it came to them. Most countries in Europe from Germany eastward saw around 10 percent of their population killed.
It was really a very good war in which to avoid ground combat—and for most of the time, the Engl
ish-speaking countries did.
CHAPTER 7
THE REAL WAR, 1942–45
“YOU BASTARDS ARE GOING WITH ME RIGHT TO THE TOP AND WE’LL kill every one of those bloody Japs,” Sergeant Major John Robert Osborn told his sixty-five men, all that were left of ‘B’ Company, Winnipeg Grenadiers by December 19, 1941. They were the first Canadian soldiers to see ground combat in the war, and the people who sent them should have known they were doomed. It was clear that war was coming with Japan. It was clear that the British colony of Hong Kong could not be defended successfully. And there is a lingering suspicion that the Canadian troops were deliberately sent there to get killed.
When two Canadian battalions arrived in Hong Kong in November 1941, Mackenzie King gave a statement to the press saying that their dispatch had been necessary because “we regarded as a part of the defence of Canada and of freedom, any attack which might be made by the Japanese against British territory or forces in the Orient.” The inhabitants of Hong Kong might well prefer British imperial rule to Japanese imperial rule, but it was hardly “freedom” the Canadian troops were being sent to defend. They were there as sacrificial pawns in King’s rearguard action against British pressure for greater Canadian participation in the war and pro-conscription pressure from his own cabinet and armed forces
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.
Ralston brought forward a suggestion from the Defence officials that we should ask the British authorities to have our men put into action somewhere at once … even if it involved some being killed.… The fact that our men were not in action was causing very few to enlist.
Mackenzie King Record, May 20, 1941
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.
In the early morning of the 21st the Japs stormed the house using hand grenades and a small portable type of machine gun. The wounded men were literally murdered in cold blood. Our white flag was torn down and our interpreter was bayoneted and pinned to a door to die.
They tied us up together and made us march back down to the road. Eventually we were made to crawl in a ditch and we knew the end had arrived for us. We said goodbye to each other and the staff sergeant said a prayer for us. Then the noise started. It seemed to me that the rifles and revolvers used were placed at my ears, the noise was so great.
I was first to be hit. It got me in the left shoulder and sent me over on my face where I lay very quiet waiting and hoping that the next one would be a clean shot and have it finished. I heard the “death rattle” three times that day as my comrades died miserable deaths.
Canadian soldier (quoted in A Terrible Beauty)
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.
The Hong Kong business has been the most distressing thing next to conscription of the whole situation. The two have been so interwoven that each made the other a more difficult subject to deal with.
Mackenzie King Record, April 28, 1942
I’ve seen and done some things which have rather radically changed my outlook. After seeing a French soldier clubbed to death by German cops at Quimper, after starving in a gravel-pit at Montreuil-Bellay and getting blood poisoning through being made to put up barbed-wire entanglements without any gloves on, and after sawing my way out of St. Denis through a barred window-well, I’m afraid I’d find it pretty difficult to settle down to pushing a pen in an Ottawa office for the duration of the war.
Frank Pickersgill, October 1942
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.