Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014 (28 page)

In fact, C.D. Howe was rescued off Iceland after a short time in the water (although one of his party, Gordon Scott, was drowned). The Canadian delegation arrived in London to a hero’s welcome. In the talks that ensued over the next few weeks with the British ministries of supply and aircraft production, it turned out that what London now wanted above all was long-range bombers to carry the war to Germany. Canadians were not the only ones who were reluctant to get into a big ground war. But whichever strategy the Allies ultimately adopted against Germany, most of the troops and equipment would have to come across the Atlantic first.

By 1941, with the whole western coastline of Europe in German hands and longer-range submarines coming into service, the U-boat
war had spread west to within sight of the Canadian coast. It became necessary to give convoys continuous anti-submarine escort all the way across the Atlantic, and the British navy was already stretched to the limit. So the Canadian Navy was asked to establish the Newfoundland Escort Force, and in June 1941 Commodore L.W. Murray set up headquarters in St. John’s. At that point the Canadian Navy’s strength was about nineteen thousand men—of whom twelve thousand had been in for less than a year. What training they got tended to be done on the job—at sea.

By now the Canadian Navy was building up toward its eventual astonishing strength of six hundred ships. It remained predominantly a small-ship navy down to the end: corvettes were the classic Canadian warships of the Second World War. They were small, overcrowded ships with a wicked motion: they would “roll even on wet grass,” as the sailors put it. Every available space was crammed with equipment or weapons—not that they had much in the way of that either. Most of them, until quite late in the war, had no radar, only the most primitive versions of
ASDIC
(an early form of sonar), and no High-Frequency Direction-Finders (HF/DF) for radio-locating submarines that were shadowing the convoys. For attacking submerged submarines they had only depth charges: large drums of high explosive that were rolled off the ship’s stern and exploded at a pre-set depth.

If the submarines were attacking on the surface at night, as they often did, the corvettes could try to hit them with their single 4-inch gun—or resort to the ancient tactic of ramming. To try to avoid the German submarines the convoys regularly sailed very far north, and even in summer the North Atlantic weather was a constant enemy. The corvettes were perpetually wet inside and out—except when it froze, and their superstructure became encased in a thick sheath of ice whose weight would eventually capsize the ship if it were not continuously chipped off. Below deck the cramped crew quarters stank of diesel fumes, stale food, unwashed bodies and vomit. The crews had little
chance of survival if they were torpedoed in mid-Atlantic: for most of the year, thirty minutes in the frigid water was enough to kill a man.

The convoy battles were non-stop, for no sooner would a Canadian escort group hand over an eastbound convoy to the British navy somewhere in mid-Atlantic than it would pick up a westbound convoy for the trip home. The U-boats operated in packs, with one or more submarines trailing a convoy and radioing its position ahead to others, which would gather in its path. The British Admiralty was able to intercept and decipher some of the radio messages and reroute the convoys out of danger, but if the messages took too long to decode, the slaughter would begin.

Convoys made up of faster merchant ships could sometimes simply outrun the U-boats, but the slow convoys that sailed from Sydney, Nova Scotia, were a nightmare. One of the worst experiences for the Canadian Navy was convoy SC42 in September 1941. It was known that a group of U-boats were gathering at the southeastern tip of Greenland and ten other convoys, westbound and eastbound, were diverted to the south. But SC42 could not be rerouted as the escorts were short of fuel. The conditions were ideal for the U-boats: the heavy seas and gale-force winds had died down, and several of the aged freighters were leaving a trail of black smoke. The convoy was out of range of the air patrols that flew out of Newfoundland, and the escort consisted of only one destroyer, HMCS
Skeena
, and three corvettes.
Skeena
had no radar, no HF/DF and no experience of anti-submarine warfare.

Eight U-boats were lying in wait for the 64-ship convoy south of Greenland, and shortly after midnight on September 10 the first ship was sunk. The entire convoy then made an emergency forty-five-degree turn, but failed to shake the submarines, one of which passed right down through the middle of the convoy on the surface. By the time dawn arrived, the toll was seven ships sunk and an eighth badly damaged.

During the day another ship was torpedoed, and as night fell the wolf pack closed in again, sinking two ships almost at once. At that
point two more Canadian corvettes arrived on the scene
—Moose Jaw
and
Chambly
—and promptly got an
ASDIC
contact. Their depth charges forced the U-boat to the surface, and
Moose Jaw
rammed it. The U-boat’s captain abandoned ship by leaping from his conning tower onto the corvette’s deck, but the boarding party sent aboard by
Chambly
to retrieve
U-501
’s secret papers had to abandon the rapidly sinking submarine in a hurry, and one Canadian stoker was trapped inside and drowned.

It was the first confirmed “kill” ever achieved by the Royal Canadian Navy (after two years of war), but it hardly evened the score: before the night was over another five ships were lost, bringing the total to fifteen in two days. Before the hapless convoy reached its final destination, another ship was sunk: the casualty rate was 25 percent for the merchant ships on a single crossing. No organization could have withstood these sorts of losses for long, but SC42’s ordeal took place in the “Black Pit,” the mid-Atlantic gap where no land-based air cover was available. Few convoys took so bad a beating after continuous air cover across the Atlantic became available by long-range aircraft operating out of Britain, Iceland and Newfoundland.

Canada’s navy was the third-largest in the world by 1945, and it was fighting exactly the kind of capital-intensive war that both Mackenzie King and C.D. Howe felt most comfortable with. It allowed Canada to exploit and develop its industrial resources, and it would never kill so many people that the government would face political difficulties at home. In terms of sheer nervous strain and sustained physical misery, nobody had a harder war than the Royal Canadian Navy, but it only lost two thousand dead during the entire war.

I
T TOOK THE
G
ERMAN
W
EHRMACHT SIX WEEKS IN THE SPRING OF
1940 to conquer France and the Low Countries and drive the British army out of Europe. Germany’s total losses were 45,000 dead and missing and 110,000 wounded, fewer than in any one of twenty major battles of the First World War. Yet the Germans enjoyed no significant superiority over the French and British forces either in numbers or in equipment. How did they do it?

There was a brief period after the fall of France when
Blitzkrieg
(lightning war) was seen as an unstoppable, almost magical technique, but it was nothing of the sort. Military theorists in every great power were well aware of the techniques of surprise and rapid penetration that had achieved the breakthroughs of 1918, and in the two decades between the wars they had worked hard to refine them. If you could make everything mobile—tanks, of course, but also self-propelled artillery and infantry in armoured personnel carriers—then the breakthroughs would happen faster and go deeper. Provide lots of close air support from ground-attack aircraft that were in radio contact with the ground forces, and they would go faster still. Maybe fast enough that you could break right through into open country and collapse the enemy’s defences entirely.

The German theorists were not cleverer than the others; they were just better or luckier in getting their senior officers to listen to them. And even then, the German High Command might not have bet the farm on a flat-out blitzkrieg attack in 1940 if an earlier plan for a more conventional offensive that was virtually a replay of the Schlieffen Plan had not been captured by the Allies in January 1940. With that plan compromised, it was much easier for General Gerd von Manstein to sell a radical alternative proposal that was fully supported by his subordinate, General Heinz Guderian, the leading German expert on armoured warfare. By all means go ahead and send the bulk of the German army marching in a great sweeping curve west and then south through Holland and Belgium as the British and French expect, said Manstein, and the Allies will move their armies up into Belgium to meet it. But then the real attack will come as an armoured spearhead advancing straight west from Germany through the Ardennnes, hilly country that is not generally thought suitable for tanks. Move fast enough and you’ll come out into open country before the French can react and get anybody there to stop you—and then just keep going.

Guderian’s tanks took three days to get through the narrow, twisting roads of the Ardennes, using Stuka dive-bombers to crack any French resistance. After that it was practically a free run straight across northern France to the English Channel—and now the Germans were
behind
all the French and British troops that had advanced into Belgium. They might all have been captured, but Hitler let most of them get away at Dunkirk.

The French didn’t lose because they were demoralized. They became demoralized because they were losing badly, and simply could not react fast enough to this new blitzkrieg technique. But tactical innovation of this kind never remains a surprise for long, and the counter-move was obvious: make your defences even deeper. Many miles deep, with successive belts of trenches, minefields, bunkers, gun positions and tank traps to slow down the armoured spearheads and eventually wear them
away. And even if there is a breakthrough, you will have had time to get your reserves in place. You may have to retreat—the whole front may have to roll back dozens or even hundreds of miles—but the front will not collapse completely. And that was the problem, in a way.

Pure blitzkrieg only lasted about eighteen months. What the new technique actually did was to set the continuous front in motion. During the First World War, between the end of 1914 and the end of 1918, the Western Front barely moved fifty miles. There were just as many soldiers available in the Second World War, and even more firepower, so the continuous front was still a fact, but now it moved a lot. And as it did it would roll over towns and villages and crush them—in some cases not just once, but several times, back and forth. It was a war of attrition, but on an even larger scale. The Soviet Union, for example, built at least 100,000 tanks, 100,000 aircraft and 175,000 artillery pieces during the war, of which at least two-thirds were destroyed in the fighting. Twice as many soldiers were killed as in the First World War—and almost twice as many civilians were killed as soldiers. They were killed almost incidentally, as a by-product of the fighting. They didn’t have to go to the front; it came to them. Most countries in Europe from Germany eastward saw around 10 percent of their population killed.

It was really a very good war in which to avoid ground combat—and for most of the time, the English-speaking countries did.

“Y
OU BASTARDS ARE GOING WITH ME RIGHT TO THE TOP AND WE
’
LL
kill every one of those bloody Japs,” Sergeant Major John Robert Osborn told his sixty-five men, all that were left of ‘B’ Company, Winnipeg Grenadiers by December 19, 1941. They were the first Canadian soldiers to see ground combat in the war, and the people who sent them should have known they were doomed. It was clear that war was coming with Japan. It was clear that the British colony of Hong Kong could not be defended successfully. And there is a lingering suspicion that the Canadian troops were deliberately sent there to get killed.

When two Canadian battalions arrived in Hong Kong in November 1941, Mackenzie King gave a statement to the press saying that their dispatch had been necessary because “we regarded as a part of the defence of Canada and of freedom, any attack which might be made by the Japanese against British territory or forces in the Orient.” The inhabitants of Hong Kong might well prefer British imperial rule to Japanese imperial rule, but it was hardly “freedom” the Canadian troops were being sent to defend. They were there as sacrificial pawns in King’s rearguard action against British pressure for greater Canadian participation in the war and pro-conscription pressure from his own cabinet and armed forces