Canadians were at least broadly aware that many Americans did understand where their country’s interest lay, as was shown not just by public statements but by the more significant fact that several thousand American men went to Canada to enlist in the Canadian army or to train for service in the Royal Flying Corps.[6] But they found it difficult to understand Wilson’s refusal to offer even moral support to the Allies and were angered by the frequent criticisms of Britain made by his irrepressible Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan. And they could not help observing that, while American politicians took the high moral ground of refusing to be dragged into a European conflict, they had no objection to profiting from the war by selling supplies to both sides.
The fact that the United States was benefiting financially from its neutrality became a bone of contention very early in the war, especially in view of the fact that Canada had been struggling with a serious economic downturn since 1912. Borden complained angrily to the British about the fact that they and the French were placing large orders for military equipment in the United States while “the people of Canada” were “making sacrifices hitherto undreamed of to support [the] Empire in this war. A very painful and even bitter feeling is being aroused throughout the Dominion. Men are going without bread in Canada while those across the line are receiving good wages for work that could be done as efficiently and as cheaply in this country.”[7]
Coincidentally, a major military contract did go to Canada but only because of political difficulties in the United States. In November 1914, the Admiralty contracted the Electric Boat Company in Groton, Connecticut, to build twenty submarines. Although the U.S. government vetoed the deal because it violated American neutrality, it did allow the company—in a secret deal with the British government about which the Canadian government was neither consulted nor informed—to ship the components to the Canadian Vickers shipyard in Montreal to be assembled, thereby violating not only its own neutrality but Canadian laws as well. This created more than 2,000 jobs and led to further contracts for Canadian Vickers assembling submarine components for the Italian and Russian navies.
Meanwhile, the Canadian government worked closely with the British government in its effort to persuade influential Americans that the United States should enter the war. Early in 1917, Borden sent Rev. Charles Gordon, the prominent clergyman and author (using the pseudonym Ralph Connor)—and a returned army chaplain—on a speaking tour of the United States. Gordon was reluctant to go because he was disgusted by both U.S. neutrality and the fact that American financiers and industrialists were making millions of dollars out of the war. He did go, however, and George Doran, the New York publisher, who was originally Canadian, organized his tour.
Gordon travelled to several cities in the United States, explaining why Canada was at war and describing the Canadian war effort. He pointedly recounted the sacrifices being made and frankly told Americans how Canadians were unable “to understand the attitude of the American people, our friends and neighbors, largely of the same racial stock and holding the same ethical and religious ideals in regard to the rights of our common humanity.”[8]
He also met with President Wilson and later claimed to have bluntly told him that Canadians despised “the American people who hold the same religious faith, who cherish the same Christian ideals, [but] stand on the side lines unmoved and watch our men die for these ideals.” Wilson allegedly assured Gordon that he did support the Allied cause and that his “main purpose” in recent months had been “to unite my people behind me.”[9] It was true, and when Wilson declared war on Germany in April 1917 during his tour, Gordon later recalled that he “was conscious of an overwhelming tide of emotion. The final issue of the war was already decided.”[10]
It wasn’t long after the U.S. entered the war that there was talk of Canada establishing some kind of representation in Washington, because of the substantial economic relationship between the two countries and the exigencies of the war. Canada’s industrial war effort was being directed by the Imperial Munitions Board (IMB), the British agency responsible for all war contracts in Canada. By 1917, more than 600 factories in Canada, employing some 250,000 workers, were producing almost 100,000 shells per day, supplying between a quarter and a third of all the ammunition used by British artillery and more than half the shrapnel. IMB contracts also involved the production of airplanes and ships. By the war’s end, the IMB and its predecessor, Sam Hughes’s Shell Committee, had spent $1.25 billion producing 65 million shells, 49 million cartridge cases, 30 million fuses, 35 million primers, 112 million pounds of explosives, 2,900 airplanes, 88 ships, and other assorted supplies.[11]
This remarkable industrial enterprise was largely dependent on materials imported from the United States, however, so the IMB had an office in Washington, but by early 1918 Borden was convinced that the Canadian government should be represented there as well. While traveling to Georgia for a winter holiday, he met with President Wilson, declaring afterward that the Americans had agreed “that the resources of the two countries should be pooled in the most effective co-operation and that the boundary line had little or no significance in considering or dealing with these vital questions.”[12] As significant as this declaration was, what is really interesting is that Borden, who had fought an election campaign warning Canadians that closer economic ties with the United States would lead to annexation, now welcomed those closer ties because circumstances had changed.
As a result, he appointed Lloyd Harris, a prominent Canadian manufacturer serving on the IMB board, to head the Canadian War Mission in Washington. Although attached to the British embassy, the Mission was authorized to deal directly with the U.S. government. This was a practical step, not a conscious effort to advance Canadian autonomy, because it would redirect to the Mission the huge volume of communications that the British embassy received that concerned only Canadian-American issues.
The Canadian War Mission’s task was to support IMB efforts to secure U.S. contracts and to collaborate with the newly established U.S. War Industries Board to coordinate the production of war materiel. This was critically important because Canada had a very large balance-of-payments deficit with the United States that was expected to reach $500 million in the next fiscal year. American manufacturers were resisting using Canadian facilities, but with President Wilson’s support, William McAdoo, the Treasury Secretary, and Bernard Baruch, chairman of the War Industries Board, took action, and U.S. firms almost immediately began issuing contracts to Canadian companies to produce munitions. When the U.S. government restricted steel exports, not realizing the major impact this would have on Canadian munitions production because Canada imported steel from the United States, hurried and forceful consultations took place to make an exception for exports to Canada. Three months later, Harris was able to report to Borden that contracts worth $100 million had already been secured and more were expected. Stacey describes the American response to Borden’s request for economic assistance as “the most striking example of Canadian-American co-operation” during the war.[13]
Because the demands of the war forced all governments to intervene in the management of their economies to a degree unthinkable before 1914, Canadian and American bureaucrats actually worked together to some extent. W. D. Hanna, Canada’s Food Controller, met with Herbert Hoover, head of the U.S. Food Administration, and Canada’s Imperial Munitions Board signed an agreement with the U.S. Ordnance Department to coordinate the production of artillery shells. Not much actually came of these agreements, however, before the war ended somewhat unexpectedly in 1918.
There was also minor but significant military cooperation between the two countries. As will be discussed elsewhere, the Royal Canadian Navy and the U.S. Navy worked together to protect merchant vessels from submarine attacks in Atlantic coastal waters. As well, the Royal Flying Corps and Royal Naval Air Service, both of which were recruiting and training men in Canada, assisted the U.S. Signal Corps with the training of thousands of Americ
an pilots and air crew.
The Canadian and American armies also collaborated in training Polish Americans to serve in a Polish army formed by the French government in June 1917. Canada provided a training camp and staff at Niagara-on-the-Lake, a small town in south-western Ontario close to the border. When the number of volunteers grew to the point that it could not handle them all, the U.S. Army took some of them at its base at Fort Niagara. Eventually, 20,720 officers and men trained in the two facilities served in Europe.[14]
If American participation in the war brought the two countries closer together, the continuing anti-British attitudes of some prominent Americans continued to cause offense as well. At the annual 4th of July parade in New York in 1918, for example, William Randolph Hearst, whose newspapers were notoriously anti-British, refused to stand and remove his hat when a contingent of Canadian troops marched past. And when William Jennings Bryan, who had opposed America’s entry into the war, gave a speech in Toronto later that year, he was greeted by angry veterans who disrupted the meeting and demanded that the “pro-German” politician go home. Bryan’s weak protest that the United States had raised an army of 1.5 million men was met with ridicule. Even Borden acerbically noted that to equal Canada’s contribution on a per capita basis the United States would have to send 5.5 million men to Europe, a comment made publicly by former President Theodore Roosevelt as well.[15]
Perhaps inevitably, American participation in the war soon led to widespread boasting by American politicians and media that the United States was winning the war for the Allies. In a sense it was true, of course, because the British and French were near exhaustion by 1917, and the American contribution, although relatively minor, was critical because it tipped the balance, and if the war had dragged on any longer, that contribution would have become larger.
Still, in view of the appalling cost of the war to Canadians, not to mention the British and French, the American attitude was insensitive, and unfortunately enduring. Keenleyside claimed in 1929 that Canadians were still offended—ten years later—by the fact that for three hard years “America counted her profits while Canada buried her dead.”[16] Canadians were also offended by the fact that after the war was won the United States negotiated a separate treaty with Germany “which retained . . . all the benefits conferred by the Treaty of Versailles, and denied all the obligations undertaken by signatories of the general treaty.”[17]
Canadian resentment of their perceived attitudes of Americans reflected, of course, an incomplete understanding of the United States, which they tended to believe was an essentially Anglo-Saxon offshoot of Britain, like Canada, or at least English Canada. But the United States had changed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the immigration of millions of Irish Catholics, Germans, and East Europeans. Not only were most of these people unsympathetic or indifferent to Britain, some of their leaders actually waged a propaganda campaign against Britain, which Canadians tended to believe represented the general view of Americans.[18] Even if these views represented only a minority viewpoint, it was nonetheless a significant minority which no American politician could realistically afford to ignore.
Every year, on the first Saturday in December, a very large Christmas tree is illuminated on the Boston Common. It is a festive occasion and marks the beginning of the Christmas season in that city. Many people may not know that that tree is a Christmas gift from the people of Nova Scotia and has a direct connection with the First World War.
At 9:05 a.m. on December 6, 1917, two ships collided in the harbor at Halifax, Nova Scotia. This might not have been an event of very great significance, but one of the ships, the French Mont Blanc, was carrying a full cargo of high explosives, benzol and monochlorobenzol. Just after entering the harbor that morning, it was struck by the Imo, a Belgian relief ship that had just returned from Europe and was en route to New York to pick up another cargo.
Because it had to make way for an American ship entering the harbor, the Imo moved to the left, then veered further to the left to avoid a tugboat pulling two barges. This placed it on the wrong side of the channel, and it drove right into the Mont Blanc. The resulting explosion destroyed the entire north end of Halifax and did widespread damage beyond that, killing more than 2,000 people, injuring another 6,000, and leaving 9,000 people homeless in a city of 60,000. It was the largest man-made explosion in history until the atomic bombs were dropped in 1945.
As military and civic officials scrambled to understand and cope with this extraordinary crisis, Lieutenant Colonel (Dr.) Frederick McKelvey Bell, Assistant Director of Medical Services for Military District 6 (Halifax), quickly took charge of medical operations in the shattered city. Bell had served overseas for more than two years before being posted to Halifax, so he had extensive first-hand experience with battlefield wounds and conditions, experience that was now unexpectedly relevant on the home front. Remarkably, he told a newspaper reporter that he “had never seen anything on the battlefront equal to the scenes of destruction that he witnessed in Halifax today.”[19]
Prime Minister Borden, himself a Nova Scotian, happened to be in Halifax that day as part of his travels during the federal election campaign then taking place. Luckily, his private rail car was not damaged, although the rail-yard in which it was sitting certainly was. After he made a quick tour of the devastated city and met with civic officials, the government swung into action, bringing in troops to help clear the streets and search for survivors, and mobilizing relief supplies.
Within minutes, a call went out to other towns, initially in Nova Scotia, then beyond to the neighboring province of New Brunswick, seeking emergency assistance. Doctors and nurses were critically needed, of course, as well as temporary housing and food relief for the survivors. Over the course of the day, telegrams were sent as far as Ottawa, Montreal, Boston, and New York. One even went to Havana, which forwarded it to Washington, which in turn passed it along to the American Red Cross. The Red Cross was already aware of the situation, however, because it had received a telegram from its representative in the Department of Military Relief, who happened to be in Halifax that day, and it had already alerted its local offices along the eastern seaboard.
In Boston, James Phelan, a banker, heard about the explosion from a message circulated by a Halifax banker. He immediately contacted Henry B. Endicott, a prominent shoe manufacturer who was also chairman of the Massachusetts Committee on Public Safety. Together, they went to see Governor Samuel McCall, who immediately sent a telegram to Halifax Mayor Peter Martin promising that Massachusetts was “ready to go the limit in rendering every assistance you may be in need of.”[20] This was the beginning of an extraordinary story.
The Committee met that afternoon and, even though McCall had received no response from Halifax—because the telegraph lines were down—it decided to organize a private train to take doctors, nurses, and supplies to Halifax. The Boston & Maine Railroad offered a train, and McCall appointed Abraham C. Ratshesky, a Boston businessman and state senator, Commissioner-in-Charge of the Halifax Relief Expedition. The Committee then called a public meeting, which took place at Faneuil Hall, to launch a fund-raising campaign and raised $100,000 on the first day.
Meanwhile, the USS Tacoma was fifty-two miles out to sea, returning home after having escorted a convoy to Europe. It was not bound for Halifax, but Captain Powers Symington changed course when he spotted the huge black cloud on the horizon. The Tacoma was quickly followed by a nearby troop transport vessel returning home from France, the USS Von Steuben, whose Captain Stanford Moses had also spotted the cloud and made the same decision. Curiously, just six weeks earlier, on October 24, the Von Steuben had very nearly collided at the Philadelphia naval yard with a Japanese ship loaded with high explosives, and on November 9 it had actually collided with the USS Agamemnon while en route to France.[21]
When the two ships arrived at Halifax, they found that the USS Old Colony, a coastal passenger vessel that happened to be in Halifax harbor but w
as undamaged, was being converted into a hospital ship. The Old Colony had just been purchased by the U.S. Navy and was en route to Britain to be transferred to the Royal Navy, but had stopped at Halifax for engine repairs. The Tacoma transferred its medical officers and staff to the Old Colony, and equipment was also transferred from the USS Morrill,[22] an American Coast Guard cutter that also happened to be in port, to set up operating rooms. The Tacoma also provided 250 men to patrol the streets of Halifax.
It didn’t take long for news of the disaster to reach the troops in Europe, some of whom—especially those in the 25th Battalion—were from Halifax and had not been home or seen their families for more than two years. When the explosion occurred, the 25th was in the trenches facing Lens. One can only imagine the alarm caused by the news, which was limited by the fact that communications with Halifax were cut off for days. Even in normal circumstances, it took ten days or more for overseas soldiers to get a reply to a letter sent home. Now, beyond knowing that hundreds of people had been killed and injured, the Haligonians in the trenches had no idea if their families had survived or were well.
The army made every effort to obtain reliable information for them, and most men remained on duty. Some, of course, eventually learned that their families were safe, but others had family and close relatives killed or badly injured. A few men were allowed to return home on compassionate leave, after which they were either discharged or reassigned as instructors at Camp Aldershot, Nova Scotia.
Back in Boston, the local branch of the American Red Cross organized a relief expedition headed by Dr. William Edwards Ladd, a prominent physician and surgeon, who took thirty doctors and fifty nurses, as well as supplies, to Halifax. At the same time, Colonel William A. Brooks provided thirteen medical professionals from the Massachusetts State Guard, and Harvard University sent a complete hospital unit. Ratshesky travelled with them on the special train, as did John Moors, who had been appointed director of the Halifax Relief Unit by the American Red Cross because he had extensive experience with disaster relief.
Canada's Great War, 1914-1918 Page 22