Rise to Greatness

by Conrad Black

  Canada’s economic growth naturally rose in tandem with its military capability. The country’s gross national product rose between 1939 and 1945 from $5.6 billion to $11.9 billion; and household income rose from $731 to almost $1,000. These trends moved sharply higher through most of the postwar twentieth century. C.D. Howe took over as a virtual dictator of the economy as minister of munitions and supply, as was established by the National Resources Mobilization Act, and he exercised his role with what was universally conceded to be extreme efficiency and competence. There was no British or American example to follow, as Britain was not a resource economy and the United States was, at first, a peacetime economy. By 1944, more than $1.5 billion had been invested in war production, which could be (and was), after hostilities had ceased, converted to peacetime industrial production. “An entire new series of industries, from tanks and ships to optical glass and from artificial rubber to radar equipment, came into being.”61 The country’s industrial production more than doubled in five years. Canada provided most of the uranium for the atomic project, and almost all the nickel for the Allies. Electric power production increased by 50 per cent, largely to enable an immense increase of output in the aluminum industry to build aircraft. Canada produced a third of the Allies’ aluminum, three-quarters of its asbestos, and large quantities of base metals. It was the fourth industrial economy in the war-smashed world in 1945, and, as it utilized just a third of its production for its own needs, Canada was surpassed only by the United States as the world’s greatest exporter of munitions and equipment. Its war plants produced more than $10 billion of goods.

  Farm income increased by 40 per cent in response to official encouragement of mixed farming, coarser grains, and livestock. Canada never rationed meat during the war, which made it a popular stop for American vacationers and international missions. There were wage and price controls that were observed more faithfully than they normally would be in deference to the international war emergency, and unemployment of work-eligible people evaporated completely. High taxes could be justified both to wage the war and to fight demand-inflation. But although there were huge revenue increases, borrowing for the war was about $12 billion. British investment in Canada was repatriated, over $1 billion, to pay for British imports from Canada, supplemented first by a $700 million loan, and then by an outright gift to Britain in 1942 of $1 billion for acquisition of Canadian exports. Canada effectively conducted its own Lend-Lease program, advancing $1.8 billion of goods and loans for the acquisition of Canadian goods to Britain and other Allies directly. In the end, Canada advanced $4 billion of aid in this way, a remarkable sum that tracks well to the $48.2 billion net Lend-Lease advances of the United States.

  Canada’s entire war production of over $20 billion also tracked that of the United States. Churchill had been right when he recalled, on the day of Pearl Harbor, a comment of Sir Edward Grey from the previous world war that the United States was “like a gigantic boiler. Once the fire is lighted under it, there is no limit to the power it can generate.”62 On January 6, 1942, Roosevelt had received one of the greatest ovations he had ever had from Congress when he told it that in 1943 the United States would produce the astounding totals of 125,000 aircraft, 10 million tons of shipping, and 75,000 tanks, and added, “These figures will give the Japanese and the Nazis a little idea of just what they accomplished in the attack at Pearl Harbor.” Hitler, when advised of these production goals, said, “They can in no way be accurate.”63 All the goals were exceeded, and while it was only to scale, Canada replicated the achievement, and had, out of a population of 11.5 million, over one million volunteers in the armed forces, compared to 13 million members of the armed forces of the United States (in a population of 130 million), technically draftees, though millions had volunteered. Canada had become an important ally, as well as a brave one.

  A special concern was the Battle of the Atlantic, conducted by the German submarine forces, which at times threatened to strangle the British. It first became gravely serious in 1941, when losses of merchant shipping peaked, at 687,000 tons, in April of that year. This was reduced to 121,000 in July, a tolerable rate, by assigning more destroyers to convoys, by extending the American sea and air patrol zones, and by adding more and longer-range patrol aircraft from Newfoundland and Iceland. In Britain, there were constant problems of allocation of airplanes between Bomber Command and Coastal Command, and of escort ships between convoys and other tasks. The crisis flared again in 1942, as the United States was not immediately as aware of the danger. The rate at which ships were lost fluctuated according to the state of British decryption of German naval codes and the level of cover and convoy protection, and to the number and increasing sophistication of German submarines. In the end, in early 1943, the Allies closed the “air gap” with adapted Liberator bombers that provided air cover for the entire crossing of the merchant convoys, and with the success of the combined destroyer, frigate, and corvette building programs of the British, Canadians, and Americans to protect them. Canada had two hundred of these anti-submarine vessels and played a key role in this battle, which in the course of the war caused the sinking of 3,500 Allied merchant vessels and 175 warships, with the loss of 73,000 sailors, while the Germans lost 783 submarines and 30,000 sailors.

  The war proceeded through the early months of 1943 as it had ended 1942, with the Germans in retreat in Russia and Africa, and the Americans rolling the Japanese back in New Guinea and the Central Pacific islands. It was to be a year of conferences. Roosevelt had had some intimates to a private screening of the about-to-be very famous film Casablanca, starring two of the strongest supporters of Hollywood for Roosevelt, Humphrey Bogart and Claude Raines, as well as Ingrid Bergman and others. The collection of scoundrels and sharpers in French North Africa caused Roosevelt to say that he was about to attend a conference in Casablanca with Churchill and the French, and he thought that the film was quite lifelike in its portrayal of some of those among whom he was about to venture. For a time, the Anglo-Americans had been negotiating with the French factions led by Admiral Jean-François Darlan, Pétain’s former premier; General Henri Giraud, a traditional French Republican soldier; and General de Gaulle. Churchill’s chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Alan Brooke, summed it up: “Darlan has high intelligence but no integrity; Giraud has high integrity but low intelligence; de Gaulle has high integrity and intelligence but an impossible and dictatorial personality.”64 The lives of the British and Americans were made simpler by the assassination of Darlan by a French monarchist (ninety-four years after the overthrow of the last non-Bonaparte monarch), and Churchill and Roosevelt soon realized that Giraud could not possibly be represented as having the stature to lead France.

  The Casablanca conference confirmed that when the Germans were flung out of Africa completely, invasions of Sicily and Italy would follow, but that the Italian campaign would not prevent or defer a cross-Channel invasion of France, which would be launched in May 1944. This did not convince Roosevelt and General Marshall however, and with good reason, that the British could be relied upon to stick to that timetable, given their extreme misgivings about fighting the Germans in northern France and Flanders. The conference was from January 14 to 24, and Churchill commented on the rather unspontaneous photograph taken of him with Roosevelt, Giraud, and de Gaulle (whom Churchill threatened to stop supporting financially unless he attended the conference, as de Gaulle objected to being convened by foreigners on what he considered to be French soil): “The picture of this event cannot be viewed, even in the setting of these tragic times, without a laugh.”65 At Casablanca, it was also publicly announced by Roosevelt that the conferees would require the “unconditional surrender” of their enemies, a statement motivated in part by criticism for the dalliance with the slippery Darlan. The British claimed for a time that they had had no notice of this, but it was not the truth. It was also claimed that this position prolonged the war, but the treatment of Italy later in 1943 showed that there could be
conditions for surrender if the existing regimes were replaced with less objectionable leaders, a clear incitement to assassination and rebellion, not an unreasonable war aim, and almost a successful one in Germany in 1944.

  The German Sixth Army of 300,000 men, terribly afflicted by combat, hunger, and the elements, surrendered at Stalingrad on February 2, 1943. It was now clear that Germany could not win in Russia. For no obvious reason, but having convinced himself that he was forestalling an invasion of Italy and propping up Mussolini, Hitler kept pouring first-rate troops into Tunisia, where they could not possibly survive against the Anglo-Americans under Eisenhower and Alexander, and Montgomery and George Patton. After heavy casualties for three more months, the German and Italian army in Tunisia surrendered to the Allies on May 13, another 250,000 Axis troops bagged by the Allies, a total combined loss of casualties and prisoners in Stalingrad and Tunisia of 750,000 Axis soldiers, mainly German.

  There was still no conscription for overseas service in Canada, and there had been no numerically significant Canadian losses since Dieppe, where 3,700, while tragic and needless in that case, wasn’t a backbreaker for an army of 500,000. Canadian troops joined with Americans to clear the Japanese out of a couple of the Aleutian Islands in mid-year, but found the Japanese had abandoned the island assigned to Canada, where the NRMA soldiers (conscripted under the National Resources Mobilization Act) in the Aleutians then had a vigorous debate with the Finance Department about whether they could be taxed on their paltry pay packets from Canada while in the United States.

  There was another immense conference of the senior Anglo-American command at Williamsburg, Virginia, from May 12 to 25, 1943. It was a radically different command structure than in the Great War. Then, Russia had been much less important, and had collapsed in 1917; the Americans had entered the war late; and the main front was in France, where the French had the largest army, and they commanded. Canada was part of the British group, and the British stressed cooperation with the dominions. Now, the British and Americans provided the great majority of the forces in Western and Southern Europe; the Russians ran the Eastern Front; and the Americans determined the Pacific War, except for Burma, which was a British gig. The Americans were sending troops to Europe until they should have a majority of forces in the theatre, at which point they would be able to force the landings on northern France on the reluctant British. There was not much for Canada to do but await the call to Italy and France. The war would be won by whichever force, the Western Allies or the Russians, occupied Germany, France, and Italy, it being assumed that Japan would be in the American column, come what may. There was a discussion about China at Williamsburg, as Roosevelt was convinced that both China and India were starting into a cyclical upturn to become great powers again. The American commander in China, General Joseph Stilwell, described the president of China, Chiang Kai-shek, to general agreement, as “a vacillating, tricky, undependable old scoundrel who never keeps his word.”66

  In another of the greatest battles in world history, the Germans tried and failed to launch a third Russian summer offensive at Kursk from July 4 to August 23. It was the third consecutive military disaster for Hitler, after Stalingrad and Tunisia. Hitler, unusually, followed the obvious course and delayed for six weeks, bringing in new tanks, while the Russians built defences back 250 kilometres, ten times the width of the Maginot Line. The Germans attacked with 800,000 men, 3,000 tanks, 10,000 artillery pieces, and 2,000 aircraft, against 1.9 million Russians with 5,000 tanks, 25,000 artillery pieces, and 3,000 aircraft. The Russians repulsed the attack, stopped the German offensive, and went on the offensive themselves, but the Germans inflicted 1.04 million Russian casualties while taking 257,000 themselves, and knocked out 8,000 tanks and 3,600 aircraft while losing 1,040 tanks and 840 aircraft themselves. They were remarkably adept, natural warriors. As de Gaulle said when he toured the Stalingrad battlefield the following year, “The Germans on the Volga, magnificent! What a great people.”

  The British, Americans, and Canadians invaded Sicily on July 10, 1943, in the greatest amphibious operation in history to that time. Eisenhower was the theatre commander, Alexander the operational commander, and Montgomery and Patton the battlefield army commanders. The Allies landed 160,000 men, including one Canadian infantry division and a tank brigade, with 600 tanks, to meet 40,000 Germans and 230,000 Italians. The British, desperate to keep pace with the Americans, refused to refer to the Canadians in their offical communique, in order to pretend that Canadian forces were effectively British. King urgently telephoned Roosevelt to secure publicity for Canada, and he was happy to comply and ordered Eisenhower to refer generously to the Canadian contingent, which he did.67 The fall of Messina to Patton on August 17 ended resistance on the island. The Allies had taken 22,000 casualties to 10,000 German and about 30,000 Italian, plus 100,000 Italian prisoners, as the Mussolini regime disintegrated. On July 25, King Victor Emmanuel III dismissed Mussolini after twenty-one years of smarting under his dictatorship and named Marshal Pietro Badoglio, a slippery political operator of the Darlan variety, as prime minister. Badoglio, having long been a fascist grandee, ordered the dissolution of the Fascist Party, and he began at once to negotiate a change of sides to the Allies in the war.

  The first Quebec Conference took place at that city between August 11 and 24, 1943, between Churchill and Roosevelt and their military chiefs. There survives a rather irritating correspondence about whether to invite King to the conference. Churchill professed to be the conference host, as the Citadel in Quebec is the summer residence of the governor general of Canada, which he claimed, wrongly, to be British property, and he invited Roosevelt to stay with him there. Roosevelt went through his usual refrain about King being a great “friend,” almost invariably a kiss of death in his parlance, but said he worried about the impact on Brazil, Mexico, and China of including King, as if the Latin American countries were making a fraction of the contribution to the war effort Canada was, or as if China – though suffering huge casualties and rather ineffectually absorbing large numbers of Japanese troops – was as important to the defeat of Germany as Canada was, and as if Quebec were not in Canada. Churchill waffled on about the impact of inviting Canada on the other Commonwealth countries. The fact is, neither Churchill nor Roosevelt could enter Canada if King did not choose to admit them at the border, and that such an exchange took place at all indicates that King should have given Canadian views more national definition in discussions with them. De Gaulle would not have allowed them to enter his country unless he was the host. That would not be appropriate, but Canada was the third Western Ally and should not have had to endure one minute of uncertainty on this score. Eventually, it was agreed that Canada would attend the plenary meetings and King would officially be the host, but the principal discussions would be in smaller Anglo-American groups, especially between the two leaders. King accepted this as protective to his dignity and presentation of his role to his countrymen, factors more important to him than actually participating in making urgent decisions. It is easy to criticize King, who was very deferential to Churchill and Roosevelt, and it would not have been appropriate or acceptable to most Canadians to be as obstreperous an ally as de Gaulle was, but King could certainly have pushed matters a lot further with the senior Allies if he had possessed a fraction of the capacity to rouse and stir his countrymen as Churchill and Roosevelt (and de Gaulle even clandestinely) possessed.

  The conference confirmed the Trident Conference formula that the Italian landings would take place but would not delay the cross-Channel landings. The operation would be code named Overlord. Matters of force levels between the two campaigns, and a third one in southern France, would be determined later, on a basis of professional soldierly evaluation. As at Casablanca, the Americans didn’t believe their balky British allies but were recording the agreements until they had the greater military strength in Europe and could force the issue. The Americans, now that the Battle of the Atlantic had been won, would be sen
ding huge numbers of invasion forces for Operation Overlord to Britain. General Marshall emphasized that President Roosevelt understood the urgency of the Western Allies taking Berlin. The eccentric British guerrilla leader General Orde Wingate was introduced by Churchill and quickly became the Americans’ favourite British general because of his swashbuckling combativity. The presentational highlight in Quebec was Admiral Louis Mountbatten – cousin of King Edward VIII and King George VI and a Churchill protégé and architect of the Dieppe debacle, whom Churchill had just appointed Burma theatre commander – showing his plan for stationary aircraft carriers made of specially treated blocks of ice. He demonstrated this by firing a revolver at untreated and treated ice blocks. The untreated block of ice was reduced to shards and chips, but his bullet ricocheted off the treated block, and it was fortuitous that it did not strike any of the conferees. Junior officers outside were afraid that disputes between the senior service chiefs had reached the point of exchange of gunfire. (Roosevelt and Churchill were not present.)

  Roosevelt went on to Ottawa and spoke to 150,000 people on Parliament Hill (half the population of the capital area). He referred to King as “that wise and good and gallant gentleman … My old friend, your course and mine have run so closely and affectionately during these many long years, that this meeting adds another link to the chain.” As Bruce Hutchinson commented, “Roosevelt was more popular in Canada than King could ever be: his praise was valuable to a politician who, at the moment, needed all the help he could get.”68