Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014 (25 page)

However, in 1939 the U-boats could not sail more than five hundred miles west into the Atlantic, so the Canadian navy had no dealings with them yet. Canadian ships escorted the convoys only as far as St. John’s, Newfoundland: from there they were escorted by British battleships and armed merchant cruisers until they came within range of U-boat attack, at which point Royal Navy destroyers and flying boats took up the task of protecting them. And no other Canadian forces were anywhere near the enemy.

That was reassuring to French Canadians, as was King’s promise that the war would be a voluntary effort, but a large majority of French Canadians opposed Canada’s entry into the war anyway, and many suspected that King would not be able to maintain his anti-conscription guarantee indefinitely. So Premier Maurice Duplessis’s Union Nationale government in Quebec immediately called a provincial election, hoping to capitalize on French Canadians’ fears.

Touring Quebec along with the provincial Liberal leader, Adélard Godbout, the Quebec ministers in King’s cabinet—Ernest Lapointe, P.J.A. Cardin and “Chubby” Power—reassured Quebec voters that the Liberal government in Ottawa was the best possible defence against conscription. If Duplessis won the election in Quebec, they threatened, then all the federal cabinet ministers from Quebec would resign. Some people called it election by blackmail, and others warned that Quebec would eventually be betrayed anyway, but Godbout won an upset victory, taking 55 percent of the vote to a mere 36 percent for Duplessis’s Union Nationale. Imperialist English Canadian newspapers utterly misinterpreted the result and rejoiced at Quebec’s loyalty to Britain: Canada could now “fight the war to the finish.” But fighting the war to the finish was not King’s intention at all—and indeed, as O.J. Skelton had predicted, there was not much war to fight for the moment anyway. A bit in the air, and a bit at sea, and that was it. The most dangerous seas were around Britain, where the U-boats were operating within range of German land-based aircraft.
That was where most of the Royal Canadian Navy’s pre-war destroyers were operating in the early days.

Having overrun Poland in three weeks, Germany made no move to attack the Western powers, and the period of the “Phoney War” began. The Second World War took a lot longer to get properly underway than the First because neither side was ready: Hitler’s rearmament plans had envisaged being fully prepared for war only in 1944, and the British and French were even further behind. The premature onset of the war was due to Hitler’s impatient gamble that he could get Poland without triggering a war with the Anglo-French alliance, and a belief in London and Paris that it would be better to fight now, before Germany’s acquisitions of further allies and territories in Eastern Europe added to the Reich’s strength. But neither side was ready for a real war on the Western Front, so through the winter of 1939–40 they just sat on the frontiers and mulled things over.

Nor was it really a world war yet in the winter of 1940: only three of the seven great powers were involved. If it went on long enough, however, it was almost bound to expand into a world war, because any war involving some of the great powers tends to drag in all the others eventually. And from Germany’s point of view—from that of all three Axis powers, Germany, Italy and Japan—a world war would be a very bad idea. The other four great powers (Britain, France, the Soviet Union and the United States, plus all their allies and dependencies) had an effective superiority in wealth and population of at least three-to-one over the Axis powers. There was, in fact, very little chance that the challengers could win a world war—so their only options were to achieve a quick win with their existing forces before the relative weight of resources began to tell, or to avoid war entirely. In Germany’s case, it was a bit late for that, but well into 1940 Hitler hoped that a change of government in London would make possible a negotiated peace that recognized Germany’s gains in Eastern Europe.

The “Phoney War” suited Mackenzie King right down to the ground. He agreed to send one army division across the Atlantic, to satisfy the English Canadian feeling that there should be at least some Canadian troops in Europe, but he didn’t want to see them in combat—and even King’s generals weren’t thinking of the kind of mass army that Canada had sent to Europe in the First World War. In fact, if King could have got away with it, he would have sent no troops to Europe at all—and just too late to be of any use to him, the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, asked for Canada’s help in a huge military training scheme that might have given him an excuse to keep Canadian troops at home.

The Commonwealth Air Training Plan was a proposal for tens of thousands of Canadian, Australian, New Zealand and British airmen to be trained in Canada, where the skies were safe and there was lots of space. The plan was to set up sixty-seven training schools in Canada for pilots and other aircrew, all administered by the RCAF. The flood of trainees began to arrive almost immediately.

This was exactly the kind of war King wanted to fight: one waged almost exclusively on the home front, with no casualties. In his speech announcing the Commonwealth Air Training Plan on December 17, 1939, he stressed that this was also the approach the British themselves favoured: “The United Kingdom Government … feels that … the Air Training Scheme would provide for more effective assistance towards ultimate victory than any other form of military cooperation which Canada can give.”

King had gone to some trouble to get the British to agree to this wording, but he couldn’t really conceal the fact that this was not all the British government expected from Canada. There were, moreover, plenty of influential English Canadians who expected more commitment to the war from their government. On the day of King’s speech, the first Canadian troops landed in Britain—and a month later the Ontario Legislature passed a resolution condemning the federal government’s half-hearted war effort. King was worried that his Ontario critics would call a provincial election and use the campaign to demand a “National” (coalition) government in Ottawa, so he decided to pre-empt them by holding a federal election first.

It caught everybody off guard, and the Liberal victory in the March 1940 election was massive (181 out of a total of 245 seats). King’s strategy of avoiding a major role in a shooting war was still working, but it
depended heavily on the fact that there wasn’t much shooting going on. Hitler could not afford to wait too long before attacking, however, for his enemies’ resources were greater than his own: Germany’s strategic position would deteriorate as time went on.

Contrary to expectation, the real fighting began not on the German-French border but in Northern Europe, where the neutrals were picked off one by one. The Soviet Union went first, in the winter of 1940, annexing the three Baltic republics and seizing a large amount of Finland’s territory (in accord with the treaty it had signed with Nazi Germany the previous fall). The next target was Norway, which was important because most of the iron ore that Germany imported from Sweden was taken by train to the Norwegian coast and thence by ship to Germany. The British moved first, in April, mining Norway’s coastal waters in violation of its neutrality—just in time to catch the German ships that arrived off the coast the following day carrying an invasion force.

The Norwegians fought back and appealed to Winston Churchill (who had just replaced Chamberlain as prime minister) for help. Churchill agreed, but noted: “The whole of Northern Norway was covered with snow to depths which none of our soldiers had ever seen, felt or imagined. There were neither snowshoes nor skis—still less skiers. We must do our best. Thus began this ramshackle campaign.” In fact, the only troops in Britain who had seen such conditions were the Canadians, but they never made it to Norway. Thirteen hundred troops from the Edmonton Regiment and Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry were sent to Scotland en route to Trondheim, but the Germans had driven the British forces out of northern Norway before the Canadians embarked. The following month, British and Canadian troops completed the subjugation of the North by occupying Iceland (allegedly to pre-empt a German invasion, but that was not actually a strategic possibility). Only Sweden’s neutrality was still unviolated. Then, with scarcely a pause, the focus of the war shifted south.

Pickersgill’s own opinions were a trifle more sophisticated than those of his French soldier friend, but not much: “The war is one between rival systems of oppression—the only thing in favor of the Allies is that the Anglo-Franco-American system of oppression is less odious in its results than the Italo-Russo-German one.” But they were both driven to such crude formulas by their perfectly understandable conviction that none of what was happening made sense in terms of the interests of those whose lives were being disrupted by it—not even the Germans. It would be tempting to argue that these attitudes, which were widespread throughout the Allied countries, had a lot to do with the sudden collapse of France when the Germans attacked in May 1940—but actually, the collapse was military, not moral.

The German attack on France and the Low Countries cut through the Allied defences with dismaying speed, but not because the latter were unwilling to fight. Although the British and French were as strong numerically as the Germans—they even had more tanks—the Allies simply had no answer to the new
Blitzkrieg
tactics the Germans were using. Soon the British army in France was isolated near the Channel coast and in danger of being cut off from it. As part of a desperate plan to keep a toehold on the continent, the Canadian troops in Britain were ordered to embark at Dover to sail across and hold the Channel
ports—but their commander, General Andy MacNaughton, made a personal reconnaissance of the shambles near Dunkirk and decided that they could accomplish nothing useful there. The order was cancelled, and one week later, at the end of May, 338,000 British, French and Belgian troops had to be evacuated from Dunkirk.