Rise to Greatness

by Conrad Black

  Paris was liberated on August 25, and the following day millions of Parisians lined the Champs-Élysées as Charles de Gaulle led a parade of French officialdom, whatever their political leanings in the previous four years, down the great boulevard. He began at once the propagation of the myths that France had never left the war and had participated importantly in its own liberation. The supreme Allied commander, General Eisenhower, rated the French Resistance as worth a division, but by August 25 he had over eighty divisions. Eisenhower had organized a continuous front from the Channel coast to Switzerland, after the southern invasion of Americans, British, and Free French forces landed near Marseilles and proceeded up the Rhône. McNaughton’s desire to hold the whole Canadian effort for the French campaign, rather than the less promising and important Italian sideshow, was militarily and politically sensible. Italy was a flank wound to Germany, a sore, where France was the main onslaught to win the war and the peace by securing France and Germany for the West. The First Canadian Army, under Field Marshal Montgomery’s command in the northern army group, had the mission of clearing territory along the coast, and it opened the important port of Antwerp to Allied shipping, and the Canadian Army advanced into the Netherlands, where German flooding of the dykes caused considerable inconvenience. It was a terribly difficult and very obstructed route of march.

  4. Year of Victory, 1944–1945

  In Quebec, everything was heating up to the provincial election. Duplessis was confined for much of 1942 to an oxygen tent as his drinking caught up to his diabetes. Premier Godbout visited him in hospital, as did Cardinal Villeneuve, and both urged upon him the merits of moderated drinking. He renounced drink completely and returned to active leadership of his party in February 1943. In the spring of 1944, Godbout announced the expropriation by Hydro-Quebec of the Montreal Light, Heat and Power Company. This had been the property of the late and long-serving president of the Royal Bank of Canada, Sir Herbert Holt. (The announcement of Holt’s death at a Montreal Royals baseball team game at Delorimier Stadium on September 21, 1941, brought a standing ovation.79)

  Bouchard retired as vice premier and as a member of the Quebec Legislative Assembly after nearly thirty years and was named first president of Hydro-Quebec in deference to his long championship of the cause of publicly owned power, and was named to the Senate. One of the leaders of Quebec’s outnumbered anti-clerical faction, he used his maiden speech in the Senate on June 21, 1944, to attack the parochialism and anti-English biases of the clergy. He lay about him with a vengeance of decades, accusing the clergy of portraying the English as “cloven-footed, horned” savages and of miseducating the youth of Quebec. He attacked the former apostolic visitor and a number of other notables, including Duplessis, who accused him of “treason,” as well as slander. His remarks were rather well-received by the English-speaking senators, but on June 23 he was fired by Godbout as president of Hydro-Quebec. Two days later, Villeneuve, speaking at a Eucharistic Congress in Bouchard’s city of Saint-Hyacinthe to seventy-five thousand people, said, “History has its rights. It was necessary to have a shadow in this splendid picture which your city offers of an admirable spiritual tradition beside which trickles, sometimes observably, sometimes latently, a current of anti-clericalism.” He considered “a solemn protest” as his “duty. Events demand it, you yourselves wish it.” He described Bouchard’s Senate speech as “a ghastly diatribe; unjust, injurious, ill-considered, unfounded, unintelligent and perfidious, [inspired by] corrosive fanaticism excusable only as the product of the grossest ignorance or of congenital madness.” He promised to assure that “the episcopate does not become confused with the movements that our insulter,” whom he did not name, “has so dishonestly attached to us, the better to hurl his venom.” Bouchard was philosophical and claimed a kinship with the cardinal because the fathers of both of them were hat-makers. It was an epochal and fiercely defined schism between Quebec’s greatest episcopal leader since Taschereau, if not Laval, and the greatest elected secularist in its history, until twenty-five years later.80

  This set the atmosphere for a wildly vituperative election campaign that was already underway when Godbout, with no time left to delay, dissolved the Assembly on June 28 for elections on August 8. The nationalist Bloc Populaire ran as the Pétainist party, even as the forces of liberation advanced from Normandy to Paris. The Liberals were the party that identified with the pro-British French, the traditional moderate Republicans; and Duplessis’s Union Nationale was more closely akin to the Gaullists, nationalistic and somewhat authoritarian but anti-fascist and unreservedly pro-Allied. The Bloc leader was the talented writer André Laurendeau, still only twenty-eight, supported by the seventy-six-year-old Henri Bourassa, who was slightly affronted by colourful federal Liberal MP Jean-François Pouliot calling him “an old fuddy-duddy on the verge of death.” Godbout endured more philosophically the prominent Bloc orator and lawyer Jean Martineau’s description of the premier as “an utter imbecile” to great applause from thirty thousand people in Montreal, where Bourassa and Laurendeau spoke after him. Godbout’s meetings were often disrupted, and even by Quebec standards the polemical flourishes were amusing. Godbout called the Bloc “a wretched band of separatists,” and said that “it is not when the national edifice is loaded with dynamite that one struts about, blazing torches in hand.” Duplessis asked the voters to “crucify the traitors … the marionettes and Charlie McCarthys who have sabotaged our liberties,” and referred to King frequently as a “little Hitler.”81 This was too much even for the Bloc, and did not make for agreeable reading in Laurier House. Duplessis gradually gained ground and made the centre in such a battle a position of comparative strength. Godbout pointed out that there was no conscription and that the war was being won and was a matter of pride. Duplessis agreed but claimed to have held the first referendum on conscription in 1939 and virtually took credit for forcing the federal government to eschew conscription. Both leaders vilified the Bloc as Nazis. Duplessis’s final message to his candidates claimed that “the life and survival of our people and our beloved province” was at stake and that Godbout had provided a government of Quebec “not by Quebec and for Quebec but … by Ottawa and for Ottawa.” In a phrase coined two generations before and popularized a generation later by the separatists, he said, “We have the right and the will to be masters in our own house” (maîtres chez nous).82 To the English, he preached tolerance and quoted approvingly from the social manifesto of the British Beveridge Report (the blueprint for the British Labour Party’s proposed health-care and enhanced welfare reform). Cardinal Villeneuve and the episcopate made it clear that either Godbout or Duplessis would be perfectly acceptable but that the Bloc were misguided hotheads; for Bourassa, the star of the Eucharistic Congress of 1910, it was a strange and complete turn. On August 8, by the narrowest of margins, Quebec voters rendered what would prove a fateful result: Duplessis’s Union Nationale won forty-eight constituencies to thirty-seven Liberal, four Bloc Populaire, and two others; and the Liberals narrowly won the popular vote, with 37 per cent, to 36 per cent Union Nationale, 15 per cent Bloc, and the rest scattered (Social Credit, Communist, CCF, and outright quacks). Duplessis won about 50 per cent of the French Quebec vote, to 30 per cent Liberal and 20 per cent Bloc. He and Godbout were eloquent and conciliatory on election night.

  The fears King had expressed in his diary about Duplessis were unfounded in patriotic terms. Duplessis welcomed Churchill and Roosevelt to the second Quebec Conference, and Churchill attended one of his cabinet meetings and spoke to the Legislative Assembly, where he was received with profound respect. Duplessis happily became head of the Victory Bond drive for Quebec and told the province that as attorney general he would enforce all federal laws designed to assist the war effort.

  Where matters would change decisively, if gradually, was that Duplessis would also insist on autonomy for Quebec and exercise of the full extent of the province’s concurrent fiscal and other powers under the British North America Act
. He was anti-separatist but would be the strongest advocate to date for Quebec’s jurisdictional prerogatives, and would unleash a force that would ultimately threaten the country as a federal state, not because that was his wish, but because the federal government was so slow to recognize the implications of the issues he raised.

  In an informal moment at the Tehran Conference, Roosevelt had warned Churchill that at the end of the war, which had followed hard on the depression, if he did not offer the British people more than continuation of the Empire and of effectively the same stratification of British society that had long obtained, there would be a danger of losing the postwar election despite his immense achievements as war leader. Roosevelt had already presented his G.I. Bill, the last version of the New Deal, that would be harvested after he died, by which returning servicemen would be entitled to a free year of higher education for every year served in the armed forces, and to low-interest loans to buy a farm or small business. King had inserted in the Throne Speech of the governor general, the Earl of Athlone, on January 27, 1944, that Canada’s postwar goals were collective security and general prosperity abroad, and social security and a reasonable general level of welfare at home, and in furtherance of this he presented his family allowance plan, which, after extensive debate and a good deal of grumbling about subsidization of Quebec’s high birth rate, was passed unanimously at the end of July.

  When Churchill and Roosevelt met at Quebec for the second time, from September 11 to 16, 1944, there was strategic agreement on everything, but Roosevelt felt obliged to agree to the demarcation of spheres of occupation in postwar Germany that the British and Russians proposed. This gave the three powers approximately equal shares of Germany, but left Berlin in the Soviet zone, with the city divided between all three powers and with three highway links from West Berlin to West Germany. The committee that devised the demarcation – the European Advisory Commission, chaired by the third-ranking figure in the British foreign office, Sir William Strang, and the American and Soviet ambassadors in London, John G. Winant and Feodor Gousev – was kept completely in the dark about the Polish-Soviet and Polish-German border changes agreed at Tehran, so the Soviet zone of Germany was largely in Poland. As eight to ten million Germans would move west on foot or in oxcarts ahead of the Red Army, these measures confirmed Germany, always ambiguous whether it was an eastward- or westward-facing country, as almost wholly in the camp of the West. This, the disposition of Germany, was the supreme determinant of who would win the war. The western position was shaping up very positively, where, four years before, Germany, Japan, and Italy were hostile to the democracies and the Soviet Union was loosely allied to Germany, which had conquered France, and in the interim the Soviet Union had borne the brunt of the struggle to subdue Germany.

  From August 1, for two months, and throughout the Quebec Conference, the Soviet Red Army, which had arrived in late July at the opposite side of the Vistula River from Warsaw, remained there while the Polish underground rose up in Warsaw to assault the Germans and assist the Soviet liberation of the city. Stalin, in one of his more noteworthy acts of cynicism, in a career built altogether on little else, waited passively while the Germans killed the Polish resisters and Roosevelt and Churchill bombarded him with requests to aid the Poles or at least to allow British and American aircraft to drop assistance to them and then land at Soviet airfields. Stalin allowed this only for one day. It was a chilling foretaste of the impending fate of Eastern Europe. The Warsaw Uprising took the lives of 30,000 Polish resisters, about 175,000 Varsovian civilians, inflicted nearly 30,000 casualties on the Nazis, and led to the expulsion of 700,000 people from the city, which was largely reduced to rubble and ashes.

  At Quebec, Roosevelt had his treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau, explain to the British his plan for the pastoralization of Germany. The whole idea was nonsense, of course, but the British liked the thought of the elimination of German industrial competition, and Roosevelt thought that next to atomic threats – if the new weapon, which would not be tested for another ten months, worked – a remilitarized Germany was the main card he had to play to persuade Stalin to evacuate Eastern Europe, as Germany and the United States were the only countries Stalin feared.

  At the end of the Quebec Conference, King took the occasion of addressing the Reform Club (Liberal Party militants) at the Château Frontenac and declared that the voluntary system was working in the armed forces. Angus L. Macdonald, the conscriptionist navy minister, “like an excitable schoolgirl had run to find Ralston to blurt the news about King’s wholly honest anti-conscription indiscretion.”83 Crerar, who had replaced McNaughton as Canadian Army commander, continued McNaughton’s policy that although the Canadian Army’s six divisions were taking their share of casualties as they advanced in Belgium and Italy, the voluntary system was functioning and conscription was unnecessary. However, Ralston, who was almost demented in his desire for conscription, returned from Europe in October and declared that while the current position was sustainable, senior military staff believed that conscripts would be necessary in a few months. Ralston had no sensitivity to his chief’s political problems, neither his noconscription pledge nor the concerns of Quebec, which was a third of the population and about 40 per cent of King’s electoral support. And fifty-five months into his mandate and with victory in Europe in sight, the prime minister was not going to put his government and party at risk. King, whose antennae for self-preservation were notoriously acute, after twenty-five years as Liberal leader, eighteen of them as prime minister, suspected that a larger conspiracy was about than that represented by the Nova Scotians Ralston, Macdonald, and Ilsley. He suspected them and Thomas Crerar of Alberta, and even Howe, men who opposed his family allowance as an undesirable move to the left, and others, of trying to stage a putsch. There were a number of strained interviews with Ralston and difficult cabinet meetings. King had McNaughton in the wings and still had Ralston’s resignation as defence minister in his desk drawer from two years before. At one point, King poked the senior ministers and asked them, each in the presence of it all, if they could form a government. None could, none was interested, and most were offended by the question. There were 120,000 soldiers available in Canada and nearly 50,000 draftees for home service, among whom overseas recruits could be found in adequate numbers. The Allies were almost at the Rhine: given the political complexities, the conscription debate made no sense except in emotional (or racist) terms.

  At the cabinet meeting on November 1, the issues were all aired again. Ralston confirmed his resignation. King had uttered paroxysms of admiration and comprehension of Ralston’s position for many weeks and now he said little for an hour, and then referred to Ralston’s resignation letter two years before, now confirmed, and said he had no choice but to accept it. Ralston slowly arose, said he would confirm his resignation in writing, shook hands with all the ministers, King last, and left the cabinet room.84 At eleven the next morning Ralston’s resignation and McNaughton’s replacement of him were announced. Ralston might have been able to split off enough Liberals to form a government with the Conservatives, but King could have forced a dissolution for a terribly divisive election. Ralston was inflexible, but never irresponsible or discreditably ambitious. Nothing moved until, on November 22, McNaughton informed King that the Army Council would resign if the Army in Europe did not receive reinforcements. King confided in St. Laurent who objected that Canada was not a Latin American banana republic subject to a putsch, and that they must “fight.” King asked, “With our bare hands?” His government could not survive such a drastic step. McNaughton had lost control of his fellow officers. There was no alternative but to send some of the draftees for home service. They would not be numerous and it would take months to get them to the front, which was moving east every day. (And two American divisions were being added to Eisenhower’s armies every week.)85

  On November 27, King opened what would be a confidence debate with one of the greatest orations of his career, last
ing three hours, announcing that sixteen thousand National Resources Mobilization Act (NRMA) volunteers would be sent overseas. The associate minister of national defence for air, Charles Gavan Power, who had taken the anti-conscription pledge with Lapointe, Cardin, and Dandurand in 1939, very quietly retired on November 22, in principle but without rancour or ulterior motive, and wishing only to keep faith with his pledge but not harm King or the government.

  The confidence vote came at about 1 a.m. on December 8, 1944, and the government won 143 to 73, with even 19 Quebec MPs voting to send the volunteers overseas. King returned home at almost 3 a.m. and massaged a lock of his mother’s hair in pious thanks at his deliverance.86 He had weathered the crisis and achieved what was even by his Houdini-like standards a breathtaking escape. Instead of siding with McNaughton over Ralston the year before, he had allowed Ralston, on behalf of the conscriptionists in Canada and the British Mediterraneanists, especially Brooke and Montgomery, to remove McNaughton, had bought a year of stability with Ralston, then invoked a two-year-old resignation letter (though updated) to dispose of him, and had stabilized a post-Ralston cabinet at once with the appointment of McNaughton to replace him. He had held the line for Quebec but had the country’s most famous general vouch for his anti-conscription policy to persuade English Canada. He had then voted to send overseas sixteen thousand NRMA personnel drafted for domestic service, to avoid an officers’ revolt, but he took his time actually sending them, without implying that there would be more, which appeased the conscriptionists without unduly frightening the anti-conscriptionists. King, though irritated, was unshaken when the traditionally Liberal district of Grey North was opened up for McNaughton in the by-election of February 5, 1945, only for McNaughton to be defeated, with 7,330 votes for the Progressive Conservative Party (as the Conservatives now styled themselves) to McNaughton’s 6,091 and 3,100 for the CCF. King blamed it on a rush of Toronto Tory spending, treachery by local Hepburn Liberals, bigotry by the Orange Lodge because Mrs. McNaughton was a Roman Catholic, and conscriptionist and francophobic irrationalism. The thought that he might have found a more suitable constituency never entered King’s mind, though he was frequently self-critical in matters not having to do with political judgment. He effectively ignored the result, as the House would be prorogued soon and a general election was imminent. The Conservatives had become the Progressive Conservatives after electing the Progressive premier of Manitoba, John Bracken, their leader, thus changing the name from National Government, which conspicuously failed to click in 1940. Bracken did not immediately seek a seat in the House.