Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014
PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE CANADA
Copyright © 2014 Gwynne Dyer
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2014 by Random House Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, a Penguin Random House Company. Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Dyer, Gwynne, author
Canada in the great power game 1914-2014 / Gwynne Dyer.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-307-36168-4 eBook ISBN 978-0-307-36170-7
1. Canada—History, Military—20th century. 2. Canada—History, Military—21st century. 3. Canada—History—1914–. I. Title.
FC543.D94 2014 971.06 C2013-906411-7
Cover design by Andrew Roberts
Cover photo: © Cathal O’Riada
v3.1
To Tina—thanks for all the fish
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
CHAPTER 1 Just a Little Precedent
EXCURSION 1 The Alliance System
CHAPTER 2 A Long Way from Home
EXCURSION 2 The Steel Sleet and the Continuous Front
CHAPTER 3 The Great Crusade
EXCURSION 3 Breaking the Stalemate
CHAPTER 4 A Country Divided
EXCURSION 4 Would a German Victory Have Been Worse?
CHAPTER 5 The Fireproof House
EXCURSION 5 The Myth of Appeasement
CHAPTER 6 The “No-Ground-Troops” War, 1939–41
EXCURSION 6 Blitzkrieg
CHAPTER 7 The Real War, 1942–451
EXCURSION 8 What If We Had Not Fought Hitler?
CHAPTER 8 A Dreadful Mistake
EXCURSION 8 Why War Is Hard to Stop
CHAPTER 9 Alliances and Peacekeeping
EXCURSION 9 The Theory and Practice of Nuclear Deterrence
CHAPTER 10 The Space Between
EXCURSION 10 All Passion Spent
CHAPTER 11 Going with the Flow
Photo Inserts
Photo Permissions
About the Author
INTRODUCTION
THE LAST THING THE WORLD NEEDS NOW IS ANOTHER HUNDRED or five hundred histories of the First World War or some locally relevant aspect of it. But 2014 is the centenary of the war’s outbreak, and that cataclysmic event is still seen as the turning point where the old world ended and the modern world began, so the avalanche of books is inevitable. And here’s another one.
It is not only a history of the First World War, although I am shamelessly using the anniversary as a peg to hang the story on (and the book does actually deal with that war at some length). It is an attempt to make sense of our country’s century of involvement in big and little wars, all of them far from home and none of them threatening what strategists like to call our “vital interests.” Not just to recount the wars, but to account for them.
Tina Viljoen and I first tried to do this in a book and a television series called The Defence of Canada about twenty-five years ago. We argued that the alliances and overseas commitments that Canada had made in the course of the twentieth century were unnecessary for our security and often directly contrary to our interests, even if the politics of the time had probably made them inevitable. And we extended that criticism to include Canada’s then-current alliances and overseas military commitments.
It was an interesting experience but, with the Cold War still raging at the time, challenges to the prevailing mythology about why we keep sending troops overseas were most unwelcome to the authorities. The project did not end well.
The television series got very good numbers on its first airing, but for reasons that nobody wanted to talk about it never got its scheduled second run, even though the CBC had already paid for it. The publisher was enthusiastic about the book—so much so that when it came in much longer than we had planned, he decided to publish it in two volumes rather than cut the manuscript down. But when the first volume came out there was a concerted howl of rage from the Canadian military history establishment, who condemned it down to the last man. (They were all men at that time, of course.)
The first volume sold well, but the publication of the second volume was cancelled anyway. (Some of the later chapters of the first volume are having a second life in the earlier part of this book.) We didn’t know why, but since Tina and I had already been paid, we just moved on to other things. Only many years later was some of the mystery cleared up.
As big a world as it is, it’s astounding how paths cross. There he was, in the famous leather jacket, puffing on a smoke just outside the doors of the Calgary airport. I had a debt to pay. I walked up and introduced myself to Gwynne Dyer. I told him I owed him a debt, recounted the whole story, and thanked him for helping pay the mortgage and put my kids through university. Gwynne graciously accepted my thanks.
Allan Bonner
Allan Bonner is a former CBC journalist turned media adviser whom I had never heard of until the chance meeting in Calgary airport. He told me that he had been approached in 1987 by a film producer with a question. The Department of National Defence was determined to counter the strong perceptions that Dyer and Viljoen had created, so they wanted to do their own film. How could they get their own viewpoint on television?
I gave more discouraging words. Even if all networks played the DND rebuttal, there was no guarantee it would get the viewership or would have the staying power of Dyer’s film. I recommended a more traditional public affairs approach—a speakers’ bureau, media interviews, and men and women in Canadian uniforms engaging audiences at conferences, schools and universities. In passing, I asked who had commissioned the producer’s study. “Colonel Len Dent” was the response.
Bonner had gone to Ottawa to meet Dent, who turned out to be the director general of information at the Department of National Defence. A team of retired admirals and generals had been assembled at E.A.C. Amy & Sons Management Support Services in Ottawa (founded by retired Brigadier General Edward “Ned” Amy). The rot had apparently spread right into Canada’s armed forces, and this group would have the task of convincing serving officers of the value of Canada’s NATO commitments. But, as Bonner pointed out, they could also be put to work convincing the general public.
I was welcomed into this distinguished group and we toured the country setting military officers straight on Gwynne Dyer and his misguided notions. I had a great run for about 14 years, and all the while I was secretly grateful to Dyer for scaring the heck out of DND. I’d regularly see him commenting on TV.… I’d watch Gwynne and then look over to see if the phone would ring with another assignment.
Tina and I never realized the ideas in our film would frighten military officialdom so much, but the upper echelons’ determination to set things right does suggest that they found a ready audience in the public. The extreme official reaction also suggests how the second broadcast of the television series and the second volume of the book (the one dealing with everything after 1939, including the formation of Canada’s current alliances) might have come to be cancelled.
Now we’re well into the twenty-first century, and all that bad old history has gone away—or so most
people think: the centenary of the First World War has no lessons for us, so we’ll just do a national commemoration of Our Glorious Dead and move on to more relevant things. There are two things wrong with that approach. One is that being dead isn’t glorious. The other is that the system that produced those old wars and consumed all those lives isn’t dead at all. It has been under serious pressure for a long time now and it is in retreat, but it is still capable of tumbling us all into horror. It is right to remember the dead, even if the anguish of the time has dwindled to a distant regret, but it is also necessary to remember what really killed them.
The truth is that this country, a century ago, sent hundreds of thousands of its young citizens to another continent to kill and be killed by strangers who had no designs on Canada, in a war that posed no threat to this country. The reasons that our forebears gave themselves for doing this sound hollow now, but we did it again in 1939, and the reasons for doing that still sound plausible to most of us. And it has got to be a habit: there have been Canadian troops abroad in military (that is, not peacekeeping) roles for all but twenty years of the past century.
Because it has actually happened, it seems normal and natural that it should have happened, but in fact no other country in the Americas has done this, not even the United States. Since 1945 the Americans, as the world’s greatest power, have always had troops overseas, but before that they were much more reluctant to fight in other continents than we were. Canada was involved in both world wars from the start, a total of more than ten years; the United States was at war for only five of those years. In the First World War, the United States lost 116,000 dead; Canada lost 60,000, out of a population that was less than one-twelfth the size.
Faced with these bizarre statistics, the temptation is to lurch to one of two extreme positions. Either you can argue (and lots of people do) that this glorious sacrifice was necessary to preserve our freedom and that the disparity in numbers simply proves that our sacrifice was more glorious than that of the Americans. Or you can denounce Canada’s entire military history in modern times as a shamefully stupid blunder into which the naive Canadians were lured by cunning British and American imperialists and/or wicked capitalists. The defect in the former position is that the freedom of Canadians was never at risk, and the fault in the latter position is that it assumes that the people running Canada were as dumb as bricks.
They weren’t. They were intelligent, reasonably well-informed people who had to operate, as most politicians always do, within economic, political and legal constraints that they could bend a bit, perhaps, but could not ignore. They were far more reluctant to spend the lives of Canadian soldiers than posterity has admitted. As time passed, they also learned a great deal about the way the great-power game worked, which enabled them to be more effectively reluctant: only two-thirds as many Canadians were killed in the six years of the Second World War as in the four years of the First. And in the end, they acquired the experience and the insight to challenge the very basis of the great-power game, and to take a leading role in the attempt, still underway, to change the way the entire system works. In the course of a century we have been up and down the learning curve a couple of times—at the moment we’re a bit down—but it’s not a shameful record at all. We’re doing the best we can.
Two last things. There are a great many quotes in this book from named people, but with no further source given. In almost all cases, these are taken from one of the hundred-plus interviews that were conducted in the course of making the films and writing the book. And although Tina Viljoen’s name is not on this book for contractual reasons, a tremendous amount of the work that went into it is hers. Actually, we originally agreed to do it as an excuse to stay together.
CHAPTER 1
JUST A LITTLE PRECEDENT
To get to our position we had to wade across the Modder River, despite a current that reached nine miles an hour. It wouldn’t have been surprising if we had been dragged away; water up to our necks and even over their heads for some; but that was just the start. We had hardly got out of the water and clambered up the bank when we came under the enemy’s fire. The bullets came as thick as rain, I’m telling you; you should have seen it. A hundred yards farther on, around seven o’clock, the first Canadian was struck in the shoulder.
Captain J.E. Peltier (Montreal) (translated from French)
Around ten in the morning, the fire gets heavier; the Boers are dug in on a bend of the river, sheltered by natural trenches; others are up in the trees and fire on us unseen. Only our artillery can hit them. The bullets rain literally over our heads; there’s someone killed or wounded every minute.… At eleven our line advances four hundred yards; we’re now only twelve hundred yards from the enemy.…
It’s five o’clock and our gallant commander, Major Oscar Pelletier, orders F Company to double up to the first firing line. The company obeys. We can see death coming now, but we run forward like real soldiers. I had hardly gone twenty paces when a bullet struck my right shoulder and I saw the blood gush out of my wound.
Lieutenant Lucien Larue (died of his wound June 24, 1900) (translated from French)
IT WAS JUNE 18, 1900, AND IT WAS THE FIRST TIME THAT A CANADIAN military unit had ever gone into battle outside North America—in South Africa, of all places, 13,000 kilometres from home. The temperature did not drop below a hundred degrees Fahrenheit that day until late in the afternoon, and there was no way of getting water to the troops. There was no cover from the lethally accurate fire of the Boers’ Mauser rifles except tiny undulations in the terrain and the occasional anthill (and the Mauser bullets went right through the anthills without losing force). On this first day of battle the Canadian battalion lost eighty-three men killed and wounded—one-tenth of its total strength—and the Canadians were only able to withdraw from their exposed position after night had fallen. But what were they doing in South Africa in the first place?
The doctrine is new to me that under the British flag and under the Canadian flag, we should go and broaden people’s minds with dum-dum bullets.
Henri Bourassa, House of Commons, Debates, February 13, 1900
Even at the very end of the nineteenth century, the colonial wars that the British army fought from time to time put no serious strain on British manpower or resources. What preoccupied the British government was the growing possibility of a war with its European rivals—and even Britain’s thirty-seven million people might be inadequate to meet the demand for military manpower in that kind of war. The ten million people in the white dominions were an extra source of manpower that might be needed in the ultimate crisis, and they had to be accustomed to the idea beforehand. Britain asked Canada to send troops to the South African war because it needed to set a precedent—and the Canadian government, of course, tried to avoid setting that precedent.
We do not intend to accept any offer from volunteers. We do not want the men and the whole point of the offer would be lost unless it were endorsed by the Government of the Colony and applied to an organised body of the Colonial forces.
Joseph Chamberlain, British colonial secretary, to Lord Minto, governor general of Canada, October 4, 1899
[There was an attempt] to minimize the official appearance of Canada’s offer, and to give it as far as possible the character of a volunteer expedition with a small amount of Government assistance.
Lord Minto to Chamberlain, (Secret), October 20, 1899
The war in South Africa was caused by London’s decision to bring back under imperial control the Afrikaans-speaking Boers (farmers) who had escaped British rule by trekking inland from Cape Colony in the 1830s. The landlocked Boer republics of the Transvaal and Orange Free State might have been left alone, but then the world’s richest goldfields were discovered in the Rand district of the Transvaal in 1885, and English-speaking miners and speculators poured in. They soon constituted a majority of the local population, but these Uitlanders (foreigners) were denied the vote and heavily taxed by the Transvaal gover
nment. They petitioned Queen Victoria for help—and their plea for intervention was backed by powerful British interests eager to gain direct control of the wealth now pouring out of the Rand.
As war approached in 1899, Israel Tarte, Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s right-hand man in Quebec, asked in his newspaper, La Patrie, why French Canadians should be expected to fight the Boers, who were struggling to preserve “their independence, language and peculiar customs”: the analogy with French Canada’s own situation was painfully clear. But English Canada was burning with enthusiasm for the empire. On September 30, 1899, less than two weeks before the Boer War began, (militia) Colonel T. Denison, a prominent Toronto lawyer and founding member of the Imperial Federation League, told a special meeting of the Toronto Military Institute (in the presence of the provincial lieutenant-governor) why Canada should volunteer to fight in South Africa. It was not right to depend on Britain for defence without giving anything in return, Denison said—and besides, Canada could hardly expect to succeed in the dispute with the United States over the Alaska boundary “if we had not behind us the power of the empire.” So the Canadian government should send a military contingent to South Africa at once: “We have been children long enough, let us show the empire that we have grown to manhood.”
Lord Minto, the governor general, had only been in Canada a year, but he already knew too much about the country’s politics to imagine that it would be a simple task for Laurier’s government to send Canadian troops to South Africa. Moreover, Minto knew enough about South Africa to suspect that “money was playing a large part in the game,” and to believe that a war against the Boers, if it came, would be “the most iniquitous we had ever engaged in.”
The fact is, if we fight we fight for Rhodes, Beit & Co, and the speculators of the Rand, and it makes me sick. We shall win, and get all S. Africa, but how shall we have got it and what a nice heritage of bad feeling we shall have.…