Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014

by Gwynne Dyer

  This grew out of the mental juggling act by which the founders of NATO had reconciled it with their earlier commitment to collective security, but by 1950 it had gone a step further. When Prime Minister St. Laurent announced on August 4 that Canada would raise a “special force” of troops for UN service in Korea, he told the public that they would also be available for “carrying out Canada’s obligations … under the North Atlantic Pact.” The distinction between NATO and the United Nations had vanished utterly.

  This was precisely the result Dean Acheson had intended: his primary purpose in getting the NATO allies to send troops to Korea was to make them rearm in Europe, and it worked wonderfully well. In Ottawa, Lieutenant-General Guy Simonds, the Chief of the General Staff, was more than half convinced by the interpretation, popular in U.S. military circles, that the attack in Korea was a feint by a monolithic “world Communist conspiracy” to draw Western troops off into Asia before the Russians launched the main onslaught in Europe. And so Canada agreed to send troops not just to Korea but also to Europe, and commenced a wholesale rearmament programme. Nor, it turned out, was there any difficulty in raising the extra troops that were needed, even though the urgency of getting a brigade to Korea meant that the government was looking for trained men.

  When it was suggested, after the outbreak of the war, that Canada should send a brigade to Korea and a brigade to Western Europe, I remember having a talk about it with Charles Foulkes, who was then Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, and Charles said to me, “You know, the politicians think it would be difficult to recruit enough men to form two brigades. I told them there would be no difficulty at all. It’s now four years since the end of the war and there are plenty of men who’ve now decided after four years that they’ve had enough of their wives and children. They’d jump at a chance to enlist.”

  Escott Reid, External Affairs, 1941–62

  By August 26, 1950 eight thousand experienced men, regular soldiers or veterans of the Second World War, had volunteered. The Korean War never appealed strongly to Canadian patriotism or idealism, but it did not require more manpower than was available in that limited reservoir of “natural soldiers” which exists in every country. In these circumstances it is not surprising that Quebec provided its full 30 percent share of the force. But for a time, it looked as if they would all get there too late for the war.

  When Canada first agreed to send forces to Korea, the Americans and their South Korean protégés were barely clinging to the bottom of the peninsula around Pusan, and nine-tenths of South Korea had been occupied. But on September 15, 1950 General MacArthur opened his counter-offensive with an amphibious assault on Inchon, the port for Seoul. By September 27 Seoul itself had been recaptured and most of the North Korean army destroyed. South Korea was liberated, and the pre-war situation could have been re-established without much further bloodshed.

  I used to quarrel quite frequently with General MacArthur out in the Far East because of his determination to go and dip his feet in the Yalu River [on the border between North Korea and China], in my view quite unnecessarily. At one stage of the war we had reached a position just north of the 38th Parallel—a defensible position on land.

  We had accomplished what we had set out to do: that is, to send the North Koreans back where they came from, and to rescue the South Koreans. We should have stopped there. Indeed, that is where we are stopped today. But that only came after we had embarked upon further ventures, going further and further north.

  Rear Admiral Jeffry Brock, commander of Canadian Destroyers Far East, 1950–51

  With the North Korean army in ruins, the United States could not resist a little expansionism of its own. As U.S. ambassador Austin put it at the United Nations: “A living social, political and spiritual monument to the achievement of the first enforcement of the United Nations peacekeeping function must be erected.” Freely translated, that meant that the United States got the UN General Assembly to agree, on October 7, to the conquest of North Korea and the unification of the country under the American-backed regime in the South.

  The Canadian government, having failed to persuade the Americans to stop at the 38th Parallel, tried to get their consent to what Pearson ironically called “the inevitable Canadian compromise.” Meeting with the American ambassador to the United Nations in New York the night before the crucial General Assembly meeting, he suggested that the United Nations should give the North Koreans a period of grace, three or four days, in which to agree to a ceasefire and armistice negotiations before the UN forces crossed the old border. If it did prove necessary to cross the 38th Parallel, then the UN troops should at least go no farther north than the narrow “neck” of the peninsula between the 39th and 40th parallels, far enough away from the Chinese border that Peking would not feel threatened. Senator Austin agreed to put forward these proposals himself the following morning—or so Pearson was led to believe.

  When the meeting opened, to my amazement and disgust, the United States representative got up and, in effect, asked support for an immediate pursuit of the North Koreans beyond the 38th Parallel and for their destruction—for a follow-through to the Chinese boundary, if necessary, to destroy the aggressor.

  “Mike”: Memoirs, vol. 2

  The UN forces plunged north across the 38th Parallel the following day on a “Home-by-Christmas” offensive, while General MacArthur sent his air forces ranging all the way north to the Chinese border along the Yalu River. His ground forces were still almost entirely American, but a few of his pilots were Canadian airmen attached to American squadrons. Omer Lévesque, shot down over France in 1941 with four kills to his credit, became an ace while serving as an exchange officer with the U.S. Air Force in Korea.

  We went 250 miles through enemy territory and flew along the Yalu River, and the [Chinese MiG-15s] would come up when they felt like it. You could see the sand kicked up from the air-base right below you, and yet you weren’t supposed to go across, and most of the time we would stay well south of that [line].…

  This time they were already there waiting for us in the sun, high above us, about three to five thousand feet. The lead aircraft was attacked so I shouted for [the others] to break. And then I started following that MiG down, that’s how I got closer in to him and fired.… I think I must have hit his hydraulics or something, and then the aircraft started spiralling to the right. I followed it right down to pretty close [to the ground] and he crashed. It took me everything to pull out.…

  Squadron Leader Omer Lévesque, RCAF

  As American troops approached the Yalu River, the nervous Chinese government, only one year in power after a long civil war against an American-backed opponent, sent a steady stream of warnings through the Indian ambassador in Peking, K.M. Panikkar, that it would intervene in the war if the Americans came too close to the frontier. American diplomats at the United Nations flippantly remarked, “Pannikar is panicking.” Ottawa, however, had serious doubts about the advisability of trying to establish a U.S.-supported government by military force on the borders of Manchuria, China’s major industrial area.

  China proved to be as willing to admit such a plan for Korea as the United States might have been if UN forces, mostly Chinese, had been about to arrange for a people’s democracy in Mexico.

  Escott Reid, The Conscience of the Diplomat

  The American dream of reuniting Korea by force lasted less than two months. At the end of October 1950, as American and South Korean forces closed up to the Chinese frontier, the first Chinese units were reported across the Yalu—and in late November the roof fell in. Two hundred thousand Chinese “volunteers” struck the UN front, and the American forces, desperately trying to avoid being cut off, began a rapid retreat back down the peninsula: the “Big Bug-out,” as the G.I.s called it.

  Had we been wise enough we would have learned some very important lessons from the Chinese, the most important being that they required no air cover, no tanks, no sea power. They just put a handful of ric
e in one pocket and a handful of bullets in the other, and they marched straight forward knocking off the enemy ahead of them.…

  They gave us a damn good thrashing with just really sticks and stones and the courage to go and win. And all our tanks and our air power and our sea power, and the Coca-Cola machines and the typewriters and the barbers’ chairs that we landed at Inchon and had to take off a few months later, were of no help whatsoever.

  Rear Admiral Jeffry Brock

  As the UN forces retreated south through the endless Korean hills in bitter winter weather, stumbling into ambush after ambush, anxiety grew among America’s allies that Washington would try to turn the tables by sharply escalating the war, either by attacking China directly, or by using nuclear weapons, or both. Britain’s prime minister, Clement Attlee, consulted with the Canadian government and then flew to Washington for talks with Truman. He got an American promise to confine operations to the Korean theatre itself—but in return for American restraint in Asia, both Canada and Britain promised to beef up NATO’S defences in Europe (just as Acheson had intended).

  By the time the first Canadian ground troops actually entered the line in Korea later that month, the front was forty miles south of Seoul, which was once again in enemy hands. The war of rapid movement was over, and the UN forces (which eventually included contingents from seventeen countries, but were always at least 90 percent American) were gradually clawing their way back up to the 38th Parallel in fighting marked by extraordinarily lavish artillery fire and bombing. But General MacArthur was growing increasingly restive under the constraints placed on him by President Truman, and was demanding that the Chinese be forced to the negotiating table by the aerial bombardment and naval blockade of China itself. By February 1951 he had also prepared a plan to block all further Chinese access to Korea by sowing a “defensive field of radioactive wastes” that would make the south bank of the Yalu impassable, to be followed by large airborne and amphibious landings at the upper end of both coasts of North Korea, perhaps using Nationalist Chinese troops from Taiwan to supplement his own forces. MacArthur’s idea was to close a “gigantic trap” on all the Chinese and North Korean troops in the peninsula, and he was prepared to risk almost anything to win his local war.

  But that was not the point of the exercise for the U.S. government, which despite its momentary enthusiasm for reuniting Korea the previous autumn was really concerned mainly with building up NATO’S strength in Europe. It was ironic, therefore, that in the incident that finally got MacArthur fired—a letter to the minority leader in the House of Representatives that was read into the Congressional Record on April 5, 1951—the general got it so precisely backward. The Truman administration, MacArthur insisted in the letter, failed to realize that “here in Asia is where the Communist conspirators have elected to make their play for global conquest.… Here we fight Europe’s wars with arms while the diplomats there still fight it with words.… If we lose this war to Communism in Asia the fall of Europe is inevitable; win it and Europe most probably would avoid war and still preserve freedom.… There is no substitute for victory.”

  I fired him because he wouldn’t respect the authority of the President.… I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that’s not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail.

  Harry S. Truman, Plain Speaking

  President Truman and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington also believed in the Communist conspiracy, but they believed that Korea was probably a feint to distract attention from Europe. Moreover, the war had now served its purpose in terms of galvanizing the American public and America’s allies into accepting large-scale rearmament programmes. With the front line now back around the 38th Parallel, armistice talks began in July 1951. They lasted for fully two years, while bitter, futile trench battles took a steady toll of men all up and down the line. It was in these two years that the Canadian troops took the bulk of their casualties—but Korea was a half-forgotten war by then, and nobody at home much cared.

  I had an order in my unit that we don’t walk at night. At last light you get into your slit trench, your foxhole, whatever, you don’t walk. Anything that walks is enemy.

  There was quite an attack put in by the Chinese on Hill 355. Americans held it, and it was on Thanksgiving Day that year, they were knocked off it. So the Americans were pulling out and coming back through my lines, and finally the Brigade Commander, John Rockingham, wanted me to pull out. I said, “I can’t pull out. I’ve got to stay in until first light.” And we were all right, but we had Chinese penetrating all over our lines, some killed ten and fifteen yards away from me. Of course, I was safe; I was very well protected by my people. The next morning we stuck out like a sore finger on battle maps, you know, but we did stick to it.

  General Jacques Dextrase, Royal 22e Régiment

  At one point the Vancouver Sun ran the same Korean War story on its front page for three days running, then gleefully announced that not a single reader had noticed this fact.

  Blair Fraser, Search for Identity

  The Korean armistice was finally signed in July 1953, after President Truman had been succeeded by General Eisenhower and the new secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, began to drop not very subtle hints that the United States was considering the use of nuclear weapons. The ceasefire line closely parallelled the pre-war border. The first United Nations attempt at enforcing the concept of collective security came to an end, leaving the concept itself discredited in many people’s minds. But in terms of turning NATO from a paper pact into a real military alliance, the Korean War unquestionably did the job very well. Three hundred and twelve Canadians were killed in combat in Korea, a few score more than in the Boer War, and it cost only about $200 million. But like the Boer War, it fundamentally changed Canada’s attitude toward international affairs.

  I think a lot of Canadians took quite a lot of pride in what was done in Korea, and having sent troops to a country much further away than Europe, and a place that we much less understood, it was a lot easier to send our troops and our air force into Europe.… It was a great achievement, and I don’t think we would have done either of those things if we hadn’t had a French-speaking prime minister.

  Jack Pickersgill, secretary to Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent, 1948–52

  St. Laurent was able to do what Sir Wilfrid Laurier could not: take a united Canada into foreign wars that really had nothing to do with the defence of Canada itself. The difference was that now there were only two empires left in the world, and in the fifties anti-Communism came as naturally to French Canadians (for whom Communism was the enemy of the Catholic Church) as to English Canadians. Between 1950 and 1953 Canadian defence budgets doubled, and then doubled again. Our armed forces tripled in size, and Canada sent ten thousand troops to Europe. What’s more, we sent them there, for the first time, in peacetime.

  There was no acceptance of the idea that [Canadian troops would be in Europe] permanently.… First of all we hoped that NATO itself, as a military alliance, would be temporary until you could get back to a universal system. Secondly, we were doing this because our European allies were still flat on their backs, but as soon as they were able to take the load then we withdraw.

  I think there was this continuing assumption. I know Mr. Pearson always had this view that we wouldn’t have to keep these troops there all the time.

  John Holmes, External Affairs, 1943–60

  When the Canadian troops arrived in Europe in late 1951, to a rousing welcome speech by the new Supreme Allied Commander Europe, General Dwight D. Eisenhower (who had been brought back to fill his wartime role again in a deliberately symbolic act), there was indeed no intention in Ottawa to create a permanent presence of Canadian armed forces in Europe. As time passed, however, the European allies who had been “flat on their backs” grew to be as rich and industrially powerful as the North American allies whose troops were allegedly there to defend t
hem—and vastly wealthier than the Soviets and Eastern Europeans from whom they were allegedly being defended. Yet the Canadian troops stayed there for forty-two years. Some of the American troops are still there today. Why?

  Why, to be precise, did 300 million Western Europeans need the help of 265 million North Americans to hold off 280 million Soviets (who, after the Sino-Soviet split of the 1960s, also had a billion angry Chinese at their backs)? The answer is that they didn’t need them. They were happy to have the help, since it meant that Western Europe had to take less responsibility for its own defence, but the Western Europeans were perfectly capable of looking after themselves militarily by the mid-1950s at the latest. There were no Soviet hordes and, as historian A.J.P. Taylor pointed out in 1951, there was no huge and unprecedented lurch in the balance of power among the European countries after the Second World War. Rather there was a reversion to a familiar and quite manageable pattern: “The one new thing between 1917 and 1941, which made it a freak period, was that Russia ceased to count as a Great Power [because of the revolution and its aftermath]; now the situation is more normal and more old-fashioned.”

  Russia has been a major factor in the European balance of power for centuries: it was only the suddenness of its reappearance in 1945, after a quarter-century’s absence, that caused a level of panic sufficient to make the Western Europeans seek American help in peacetime. But the help was not free: that sort of arrangement is always a bargain with costs and advantages for both sides. By assuming the ultimate responsibility for the defence of Western Europe, the United States acquired the role and responsibilities of a “superpower,” the position of “leader of the Free World,” and various other titles, responsibilities and benefits, which, although mostly intangible, were very dear to a wide variety of people and interests in the U.S. government and society. And although the original NATO defence arrangements were not intended to be permanent, they lasted for over four decades because the continued U.S. military commitment allowed the Western Europeans to avoid the scale of military effort they might otherwise have had to put forth to balance Soviet power.